ISO is an interesting case but not exactly what I mean -- another common mistake might be to think of organisations like the AMA in the States as being exemplary of the concepts I'm describing. The AMA is a detestable organisation that is almost single-handedly responsible for the state of the American healthcare system, having laboured for decades to boost the incomes of doctors outside of where they would be in a free market for healthcare services, using the state as a mechanism of both enforcement and funding guaranty.
Of course, I'm not quite done with questions.
Each of these questions would require pages of discussion to adequately address, and in some cases someone far more eloquent than myself, but I'll try.
One thing though: Do you think that all possible questions were asked and answered before the Declaration of Independence was issued? Perfection is a Utopian myth; the sort of thing that socialists promise. As C.N. Parkinson wrote, "Perfection is only acheived by institutions on the verge of collapse."
Do you foresee criminal law enforcement going the same route? Private police forces?
I have varied thoughts on this. Insurance companies would make excellent providers of police services, since aside from the victims of crime they are the only entities that have a vested interest in the protection of property. There are other possibilities of course. There is in fact nothing to say that a police force cannot be privately funded and contractually obligated to maintain the same philosophic premise that they don't now but are supposed to: to protect and serve the public, that a voluntary monopoly on the initiation of coercive force is granted to the police as an exception to societal norms in order to empower them to enforce the laws. Imagine a police force concerned with actual crime;
i.e. stuff with victims. Concerned with that and nothing else. No roadblocks, no speed traps, no "security detail" bullshît when a pretentious jagoff from upstate is visiting town, no backup for feds storming the house of some guy who failed to file form 501(b) etc. etc. etc. Who says this can't be affordably funded and reliably and honestly managed from within the community?
Organised ostracism. Prisons are an idiotic waste.
Private justices and criminal courts?
Why not? If there are no made-up crimes, like dodging taxes, or using a substance on yourself in your own home by choice, or failure to file form 501(b), the concept of criminal enforcement becomes much simpler.
How would laws be written? Who writes them?
What laws? Who needs them? Do you not murder people because it's against the law?
Who enforces individual v. individual civil settlements?
Binding arbitration exists already. Most individual v. individual settlements would not exist in the sort of world in which I'd care to live, because people would not be able to sue each other for every little thing. Naturally, there are no Utopias in real life, but frankly I'm not moved at the idea of being unable to sue you whenever I get the urge.
And who enforces them now? I can't begin to tell you the number of times I've been sued. I finally had a brainstorm and just stopped answering them a couple of years ago. I've got tens of thousands of dollars in judgements against me from assorted ex-wives, ex-partners, and assorted disgruntled nitwits. Never paid a dime on any of them and never will -- and since my epiphany on the matter don't even have the headaches and hassles of having to screw around with court and such. On the other hand, I have never in my life reneged on a contractual obligation into which I voluntarily entered, and would be ashamed to do so even if it was just a little thing.
Does English common law simply remain the standard? If so, how do you maintain it?
It might. Who knows? As far as maintainance goes, ECL has been around for ages, and the ability to modify it has always been extant. So how has it been maintained to date? Because for the most part, it works. (This plays to Hayek's "social evolution" concept discussed previously.)
Further, and maybe most importantly, how long do you think such a system could realistically last?
I dunno. Ten years? A trillion years? Is it material? This is a somewhat pointless and circular question -- naturally you need a long-term plan but the longer term you get the more vague that plan has to be, because there is simply no predicting the future, try as you might.
History has shown that hierarchies establish themselves at every turn ... while a de facto hierarchy exists under laissez faire, it is not necessarily a protected hierarchy and is therefore vulnerable to overthrow, if even on small scales initially. What would prevent the rise of new nation states, ultimately?
Nothing at all. Even if we are in fact in the "twilight of the nation-state" (I dont know which one of us used that term first but I
love it!) it is simply silly to suspect that one day soon all the governments of the world will simply close up shop and have history's biggest yard sale.
Also: although people tend to think of countries as being countries throughout history, there are of course vast, major differences between the modern concept of the nation-state and previous incarnations through the ages. Perhaps rather than nothing at all, something new will evolve out of what we have now.
Consider citizenship. This is on the surface the most natural thing in the world; everyone's a citizen of somewhere. Records of trials regarding citizenship go at least as far back as ancient Rome. Yet the modern conception of citizenship evolved from the Chivalric Code, not out of any sense that "this land is special" or "we all agree that we're French and France starts over by that tree and stops just past that stream." It was a loyalty oath that was passed on to one's family. The voluntary part of that -- taking the oath in the first place -- still exists in the form of "renouncing" one's citizenship, and in some ways this is even an improvement given that renouncing a Chivalric Oath was simply not done in the good old days. However, try renouncing your Canadian citizenship without having first applied for it somewhere else. The basic mindset is that one
must be a citizen of
somewhere, regardless of whether or not one wishes to be, and thus the Chivalric Code and its modern descendent in citizenship bear virtually no semblance at all to ancient conceptions of the same idea, despite the fact that the modern and ancient are treated as if they were no different from one another.
Who knows what citizenship will evolve into next? Or any other aspect of nationality? Maybe millions or billions of people, maybe everybody but myself, like it perfectly well the way it is. Far be it from me to attempt to impose change on others. That's the sort of thing others do to me, not vice versa.
Phaedrus
