Would contracts be simpler in Libertopia?

[furt]

@Nava

I think they might actually be more complicated.

I’ve had contracts in several countries; IME the more “socialist” the country, the simpler the contracts. In Spain you can write a rental contract about this big:

Bollocks. In the US, I had a lease agreement that was about 100 words long. It was legal and legally enforceable.

[Fear_Itself]

@Little_Nemo

How would I be able to rent an apartment without some agreement on how much the rent will be next month?

If your tenant does not pay what you demand, padlock the door and sell his personal effects. If he trespasses, shoot him and hang his corpse on a gibbet as a warning to future tenants.

[UltraVires]

@msmith537

Well, the story sounds like bullshit. But it’s kind of like a lease. You can go ahead and start striking out parts of the lease, but the landlord might tell you he would simply rather rent to someone else.

Right, but isn’t that what Libertaria is all about?

If I’m going to rent a place to you, and I’ve got a 400 page lease with a clause that says I get to hit you in the head with a golf club every week, then you can tear it up, walk away, and tell me to go to hell.

There are plenty of other places to rent and you don’t have to put up with my draconian conditions.

If I am selling a one-of-a-kind rare document about a piece of history that you are just dying to have, there is no competition. I am in the driver’s seat, so I can put in some crazy stuff and you might go for it because you want what I have so badly.

That being said, I don’t see how Libertaria would make these contracts shorter. That is one drawback of runaway free markets is that businesses could collude and insert these provisions.

[Tom_Tildrum]

@Nava

I think they might actually be more complicated.

I’ve had contracts in several countries; IME the more “socialist” the country, the simpler the contracts. In Spain you can write a rental contract about this big:

Mr John Doe (from now, “the renter”), with ID#12345678,
and Ms Jane Deer (from now, “the owner”), with ID#34567890, owner of Apartment 3, 13 Oak Street, 12345 Village,
agree that the aforementioned property will be rented to the renter for an amount of XYZ €/month, payable monthly before the 5th day of the month via e-transfer to account
12 3456 78 901234567890, starting on the 1st of January, 2009,
under the conditions laid in the General Rental Law, with no special conditions.
Signed
The Owner… The Renter …

In less “socialist” countries, the specific document has to be a lot more detailed, simply because it’s not possible to use a non-existing law as your reference.

All this accomplishes is to move the several pages of boilerplate provisions from a document that’s in front of both parties to a book that may or may not be accessible to either one. It doesn’t make the contract simpler.

[Tyrrell_McAllister]

@Tom_Tildrum

All this accomplishes is to move the several pages of boilerplate provisions from a document that’s in front of both parties to a book that may or may not be accessible to either one. It doesn’t make the contract simpler.

But wouldn’t you agree that in any state, libertarian or otherwise, the text of all laws should be easily accessible to everyone (e.g., over the Internet)? In other words, the accessibility of legal text is a separate issue from what contracts would be like under more or less libertarian regimes.

Of course, you are right that a contract that incorporates a law is not, strictly speaking, simpler. And you are right that it makes the text of the contract more dispersed, which might add some inconvenience. Nonetheless, I think that the process of dealing with contracts in general is simpler when more of the interaction is dictated by law. The greater simplicity would not be a feature of an individual contract. Rather, the simplicity would arise from the uniformity between contracts. A single text would govern all your bilateral agreements regarding the subject of the law. This uniformity brings a certain simplicity. Whether that offsets the disadvantages (e.g., inflexibility) in any particular case, I don’t know.

[MichaelQReilly]

I think the main reason contract law is so complex has nothing to do with the governmental philosophy of the country and everything to do with the fact that it has evolved to deal with frequent problems that people encounter with contracts.

[BrainGlutton]

@MichaelQReilly

I think the main reason contract law is so complex has nothing to do with the governmental philosophy of the country and everything to do with the fact that it has evolved to deal with frequent problems that people encounter with contracts.

Bingo.

Also: Contracts are complex. Contract law is actually a fairly simple field as fields of law go.