Personally, I’m an old-fashioned Hubert Humphrey liberal… But our friend Libertarian is doing a very poor job of representing his own philosophy, and I feel it a challenge, and perhaps a duty, to do it better.
Libertopia is a lovely place. That’s because the vast majority of the populace are educated, wise, sensible, and subscribe to the philosophy of enlightened self interest.
Libertaria is a less pleasant land, in my opinion…
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Not compelled – that violates the axioms – but recompensed. The witness might still refuse to testify, but, if he’s paid for his time, why wouldn’t he?
No, my idea was that people would buy trial insurance, which would pay for witnesses to come to testify for you. It would pay the witness for his lost wages, travel costs, etc., and thus give him an incentive (or remove a disincentive) to testify.
(I tried to cut and paste your other post into this post, but it didn’t work… So… See my next post…)
In Libertopia, the dock owner understands. He, himself, might be in the same situation some day. So long as you leave a note with your name and address, and pay the costs at some time, he is happy.
Your “invasion” of his rights is coercive, but so is the storm, and the good Libertopian is able to generalize. Your willingness to repay the costs is what is relevant. It’s sort of like a retroactive contract, based on good faith.
That’s the difference between Libertopia and Libertaria. In the latter, he can charge you whatever grotesque price for your sanctuary. This is because he is exercising a short-term self-interest, without generalizing.
One of the things I have noticed, over the years, is that some libertarians are able to generalize, and some are not.
Do you know how Crassus came to be the richest man in Rome? He had a private fire department. If your house was on fire, he would show up. He wouldn’t put out the fire. Oh, no. He would negotiate with you. He would offer to buy your house for one tenth of the house’s real value.
What are you going to say? No? Let it burn? You lose everything. Of course you are going to agree. So Crassus put out the fire, and now owns a house (slightly damaged.)
Where is the coercion?
Shared risk is the rebuttal to the libertarian fantasy.
I want to point out that the above is the answer that is consistent with the noncoercion principle, and it is the opposite of how Lib says Libertaria would handle the situation. According to Lib, the trespasser or his agents gets to determine whether what you used was force and whether it was excessive, which clearly violates the noncoercion principle and produces absurdities which I’ve pointed out
Also, this is as good a point as any to point out that amongst libertarians, the concept of multiple private law things is far from universal, and when you start moving from just private police (pretty common, they could be said to exist today) to complete legal systems for hire like Lib advocates, you begin to find that only a small minority (alibet a vocal one) support the idea.
Why do I bring it up? It’s very, very easy to solve some of these problems if you use a more traditional government that claims jurisdiction over some swath of land. For libertarians that don’t buy into the ‘individual secession’ or anarcho-capitalist ideas, the answer to some of these questions turns into ‘your local government decides what force is excessive in that area’ or ‘after X months of gestation, the fetus is considered a person’.
Is the government in this case perfectly non-coercive? No, because it doesn’t allow you to opt out without moving. However, the proponents of some form of perfectly non-coercive government (like Libertarian) consistently have gross contradictions in how they say this government would operate and engage in absurd doublespeak/redefinition when they want to use coercion (look at Lib’s responses on child support or drunk driving in this thread).
There are numerous reasons. Perhaps the witness is busy with his own business; for example, if I’ve got a vacation to Las Vegas planned for next week, I’m not going to cancel it to testify at some contract dispute for people I barely know, even if they’re going to pay me a day’s wages to testify (shift the compensation and what I’m doing to match). Perhaps the defense lawyer has promised to pay him double what the prosecutors offer if he doesn’t testify (kind of a flaw in the system there), or maybe he values his time at a higher rate than the person paying for the witness wants. And, of course, recompensation is not guaranteed, since the person who wants testimony only has limited funds - which is kind of a problem if the case is about party A stealing party B’s funds.
Libertarian: Thank you very much for answering my question. As I said in my previous post, I know you answered the question before, but for one reason or another, I did not grasp the full answer previously. I would appreciate it if you helped me out with this query relating to your answer, however:
You said:
Does that mean that the parents of a child can be co-erced by the state to pay for as many abitrations as the child wishes to bring against their parents?
I am also curious as to who would seek (and pay for) arbitration in the following example that we discussed, if you could not be found or the parents of the child could not be determined:
I am also curious, if you have the time to answer, whether Libertaria allows price-fixing, and if not, why an entrepreneur would be encouraged not to engage in it, while entrepreneurs in an “authoritarian” world do.
Note: before asking this, I conducted a search on libertaria AND “price fixing” for “all open forums” and for “any date”. I got no matches. If there are threads that have discussed this, would you please be able to direct me to the relevant threads and posts?
To which I would say: any system that depends to any significant degree on the good faith or farsightedness of the people living under it is doomed to fail. Just think of how many assholes you run into on a daily basis.
Crassus was even more evil than that, actually. Most of the time, the fire would be set by his own henchmen. How else did you expect him to show up so fast, pre-fire engine?
My biggest complaint with libertarianism, both at the conferences and today, deals directly with this kind of conflict of interest. Crassus eventually became emperor, largely as a result of his great wealth. So, say you live in Libertaria and you have a complaint against the activities of a modern-day Crassus. So you go to complain to the authorities–only to find the same Crassus is in control. You appeal to the courts, only to find that the laws are interpreted by the private, paid agents of Crassus. Looks like you’re stuck. Well, Crassus doesn’t mind. He’s got your cash and your money, and is now more powerful as a result.
Libertarianism gives you freedom, I’ll grant that. But it also gives strongmen the freedom to rule absolutely.
You don t have to go all the way back to Crassus for an example of the problems with competing private fire brigades; hasn t anyone seen Gangs of New York? To quote from the book that inspired the movie (nonfiction, written in 1928): “When the fire alarm sounded, (the gangster/fireman) grabbed an empty barrel from a grocery store and hurried with it to the fireplug nearest the burning building. There he turned the barrel over the plug and sat on it, and defended it valorously against the assaults of rival firemen…Frequently the fight for fire plugs was so fierce that (the firemen) had no time to extinguish the flames.” And while nobody actually became emperor, Boss Tweed, who more or less owned Manhattan politics for thirty-some years, got his start as leader of one of the “privatized” fire companies.
Grin! But the point is even more profound: the system isn’t going to fail because of a tiny minority (?) of assholes. It fails because of the ordinary disputes and debates that arise among good and honest people.
If you’ve ever had the joy of spending a few days in the gallery at Small Claims Court, you will have seen an unending parade of good people – and that’s the key: ordinary, good, decent people – who have differences that can only be resolved by coercion.
Did the Vet kill Mrs. Jone’s little tabby cat, or did he do all he possibly could to save it? Did Mr. Smith build his fence two feet onto Mr. Valenzuela’s property? Do you call this a paint-job? Gravel from your truck broke my windshield. In your review, you called my play “Trash…”
…Your child wandered onto my land and ruined my bear traps…
