tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post2794180240005012453..comments2024-03-28T00:15:06.567-07:00Comments on LiberaLaw: Does Using Force Convert a Legal Regime in a Stateless Society into a State?Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-81529252358228317012010-10-08T08:43:56.092-07:002010-10-08T08:43:56.092-07:00Thanks a lot, quasibill. The piece in this form wa...Thanks a lot, quasibill. The piece in this form was prompted by a claim made by an anti-anarchist to the effect that, because force would sometimes be used to vindicate rights in a putatively stateless society, the entity vindicating the rights would be morally indistinguishable from a state, with the obvious (intended) implication that moral objections to the state don't amount to much.<br /><br />I reworked this into a tighter and more carefully argued article which is currently sitting on a journal reviewer's desktop. If you have any interest in the article, email me at gchartie@lasierra.edu and I'll be glad to pass it along.Gary Chartierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-75857977007926996692010-10-08T08:35:03.082-07:002010-10-08T08:35:03.082-07:00Gary,
I haven't had a chance to read this thr...Gary,<br /><br />I haven't had a chance to read this through in a deliberate manner, but I'm going to have to second Kevin's first comment.<br /><br />Wow.<br /><br />That'll teach me for not checking up on your blog for months.<br /><br />And I'm guessing by my late entry that this might not even be seen, but the discussion in the comments is almost as good as the essay itself. I'll put my quick two cents in: it seems to me that the question is somewhat semantics, in that one's definition of state will probably control the outcome. But I think it's a bit of a tempest in a teapot for anarchists - we get so wrapped up in being "anti-state" that sometimes we lose sight of what it is that we're really against.quasibillnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-41006706382676740562010-06-25T14:48:42.924-07:002010-06-25T14:48:42.924-07:00Interesting. Growth in size certainly matters. And...Interesting. Growth in size certainly matters. And see the whole discussion between Caplan et al. and Cowen et al. about whether defense provision should be seen as a network industry, in which multiple separate firms would come to behave like a single large one.<br /><br />I guess I think that being a law-maker depends not just on size but also on the willingness to use the capacity for violence to make law and to impose it on the unwilling. As long as secession is permitted and force isn’t used to exclude other sources of law from the market, it seems as if an entity still hasn’t become a state.Gary Chartierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-48177102080868582032010-06-24T20:44:05.258-07:002010-06-24T20:44:05.258-07:00I think the threshold might have something to do w...I think the threshold might have something to do with some particular actor becoming big enough to become a law-maker rather than a law-taker. Nozick might be a source of some insight on the mechanism by which this would take place, but I'm kind of rusty on him.<br /><br />Any ideas?Kevin Carsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-31744754704835005102010-06-24T06:12:06.695-07:002010-06-24T06:12:06.695-07:00I think you're right that, even if there are m...I think you're right that, even if there are multiple overlapping sources of law in the same region, there will be obvious economic and social pressures that will minimize the differences between the standards they apply and so reduce the effects of exit, at least in many cases (this will perhaps be less true when two very different religious or cultural groups occupy the same space).<br /><br />When do you think the relevant line (or perhaps better, the relevant fuzzy border) would be crossed? That is, when would an institution or a set of institutions in a supposedly stateless society become states in the way Callahan seems, too quickly, to suppose they always would be?Gary Chartierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-67388995375753643562010-06-23T14:17:29.729-07:002010-06-23T14:17:29.729-07:00Well, for me the main question is how consensual t...Well, for me the main question is how consensual the situation is and how much genuine right of exit in regard to a set of general comity arrangements covering an entire geographical area, or regulating the dealings between a particular property rights regime and an "outlaw." <br /><br />This is not to say that a geographic or territorially-based consensus on the default rules is "statelike," any more than an ape is "doglike" because it has warm blood and body hair. Rather, to the extent that a set of uniform and final rules is necessary for any functioning society, whether or not it has a state, statist and stateless societies simply have certain sine qua non features of societies in common.<br /><br />Obviously, if there are disputes between individuals, each dispute must be resolved in the end by some set of rules, regardless of how many disagreeing individuals there are.Kevin Carsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-23654478642505484272010-06-23T06:58:09.779-07:002010-06-23T06:58:09.779-07:00Thanks, Kevin, for the kind words—and even more fo...Thanks, Kevin, for the kind words—and even more for the thoughtful engagement.<br /><br />I think you're right that, when, say, a Lockean regime and a Geoist regime figure out how to get along, the decision to do so—to create a formal or informal choice-of-law agreement or something similar—is going to be based in large part on the desire to enjoy peace and to avoid conflict, though I can certainly imagine people also judging that those in another community have opted for a different, but equally legitimate, scheme of property rights. Nothing in my approach would require agreements about mediation, etc., to be based on any sort of moral consensus.<br /><br />I guess I'm assuming that different regimes wouldn't see each other as state-like because a participant in a given regime would be free to exit—to secede. A regime that didn't allow for secession would be an outlaw regime and certainly draw the attention of the Tucker/Hess/Rothbard/etc. brigade. And preventing exit would, in any case, be costly and a source of bad blood.<br /><br />Obviously, this is easiest when the regime in question is non-territorial (say, Catholic canon law). But opting out of the mutualized institutions of what was once a city or county or small state ought to be doable as well. As long as exit is possible, I think there would be general agreement that a regime hadn't become a state-in-disguise.<br /><br />What's your instinct?Gary Chartierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-90519386001892634252010-06-22T22:53:57.851-07:002010-06-22T22:53:57.851-07:00I meant to throw in the analogy, re epistemologica...I meant to throw in the analogy, re epistemological uncertainty in resolving moral claims of competing property systems, of religious denominations in a state with some constitutional ban on establishment of religion. The ban on establishment of religion is based, not on the a priori judgment that such questions are unknowable in principle, but that they are not knowable by any standard sufficient to convince a sufficient number of people to prevent bloodshed in the event some religion established based on some particular knowledge claims. Hence the state must proceed from a position of skepticism regarding their knowability, or *as if* they were unknowable, for the sake of civil peace.Kevin Carsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-27473125827034471352010-06-22T22:47:21.936-07:002010-06-22T22:47:21.936-07:00Although it's taken me a while to give this es...Although it's taken me a while to give this essay the attention it deserves, I have to say it's positively magisterial. This would have deserved, at the very least, inclusion in the Stringham anthology because it sums up the logical alternatives about as concisely and thoroughly as anything I've ever seen.<br /><br />Your basic insight, that dispute resolutions between members of a single regime, or between different regimes with a meta-arrangement, are voluntary and hence unstatelike, is central.<br /><br />The conflict between your possibilities i and ii in Sect. IV-A pretty much sums up the matter in contention between me and Roderick Long in the MPE symposium issue of JLS. <br /><br />Regarding the constaints on what a just property rights regime could be like, under possibility ii, it's interesting that the major property systems in land all presuppose some form of labor-homesteading, occupancy and use, alteration, etc., as the only legitimate basis for initial appropriation. The furthest outlier is Georgism, which is willing to take existing titles at face value in return for taxing site rent as a way to simulate a moral distribution.<br /><br />If the existence of provisions for extinction of title in cases of abandonment is treated as an area of commonality, and constructive abandonment by long disuse is taken as a more extreme form of this common principle, then there's also a case to be made for Bill Orton's treatment of various property rights regimes as falling on a continuum based on "stickiness."<br /><br />My biggest sticking point is with your argument for the consensual nature of meta-agreements between differing property rights regimes in a polycentric legal order. I confess to some epistemological skepticism as to how the common prerequisites for a moral property rights regime are to be ascertained, who is to do the ascertaining, and what basis for appeal there is to common moral principles when there is fundamental moral disagreement between two regimes over whether a particular one is moral. Even if there is some objective set of constraints on which property rights systems count as moral, if there is widespread epistemological uncertainty or contention over what those constraints are and which systems meet them, we're in the same existential predicament as we'd be in a social civil war between regimes based on differing Possibility i assertions, or if contending claims of morality for property rights regimes were unresolvable.<br /><br />Given the incidence of breakdowns between different systems that result in something like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, how is any particular property rights regime to be justified as unstatelike from the perspective of members of a differing regime that sees it as illegitimate?<br /><br />In practice, whether any particular difference in features between property rights regimes constitutes a basic issue of moral legitimacy will be resolved based on the balance of subjective impressions of those involved. Absent a widespread social consensus on the basic prerequisites for a just property system, which strikes me as being as questionable in likelihood as widespread consensus on Rothbard's libertarian law code, the modus vivendi between contending systems is quite likely to result -- via an invisible hand mechanism -- from the balance of de facto power between them. The Lockean community will refrain from enforcing its members' property claims in the Ingalls-Tucker and Georgist communities (and vice versa), not because of any moral consensus between the communities that all three regimes meet some minimum standard of morality, but because it is prohibitively costly to do so.<br /><br />And under those circumstances, what is the basis for arguing that the communities should not be seen by each other as statelike?Kevin Carsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com