Is there any historical precedent for anything like this actually working?
Potential victims of crimes can shop around for the legal system that they prefer, and those who intend to commit crimes can do the same. Generally this "shopping around" cannot be done retroactively; there are a few exceptions to this however.
The way that you pick the one that you wish to be associated with is to change your physical location. This has traditionally been an intuitive system (so intuitive that many people experience difficulty when trying to imagine alternatives) however it does not necessarily work well when there is no geographic relationship between victims and perpetrators.
Think about how exciting that would be! I, for one, look forward to this possible Mad Max-style libertarian future... I mean who doesn't like improvised body armor with lots of spikes and things?
Most people believe that monopolies are not economically efficient for producing "ordinary" goods and services, but for some reason they don't believe the same is true for laws and law enforcement. I don't see much of a difference. Certainly the production of laws and law enforcement is not an easier task than the production of food.
These three things regulate the space between households. The government, however defined, must monopolize them because otherwise you give tremendous power to the hands of private corporations. At least with a government there are political constraints that there are not with a corporation.
However the argument over monopoly I don't think comes down to this. I haven't yet met a libertarian who thought that murder should be legal absent a contract to the contrary, nor have I yet met one that thought that big business should be able to control all roads and exclude whoever they want from travelling. If you would argue these things, I suppose you'd be the first at least that I have met.
The disagreement I think is actually a disagreement that hasn't really been brought to in much of the Libertarian community. The problem with monopolies are scale and power problems and these are the same problems with government in the US today as well. We want to prevent monopolies by decentralizing power in the marketplace. The desire I think is to do the same in government space. So the argument is over a decentralized government model vs a heavily centralized government model.
I think if folks came to realize that that is exactly what is desired, it would be easier for Distributsts and Libertarians to make common cause. After all, does it really matter whether a city is formally private or public sector? What does matter is that government power is distributed and that it is held most strongly where it is closest to the people.
I'm not sure if that's rhetorical or not, but I'll respond. I call myself a libertarian, but as has been discussed elsewhere, lately, that's a pretty broad umbrella -- what I've found in lieu of libertarianism is Constitutionalism, and that despite its flaws, as a system of governance, the Constitution does a pretty good job of setting up exactly what you described - a distributed power system where it is held most strongly closest to the people.
That said, it is decidedly not what we have now. (What I believe are) Abuses of the Interstate Commerce Clause, the General Commerce clause, etc., have set up a VERY top-heavy government, where we're in an odd situation that simultaneously allows for states to legalize marijuana while the federal government simultaneously considers them felons.
Moreover, I think that the real reason we haven't seen any real challenges there is because the federal government has backed off on prosecutions, and I (alert, conspiracy theory) personally believe that it's not in the interest of justice that they don't prosecute, but because the wrong prosecution could lead to the massive outflux of power from the federal government if the Interstate Commerce Clause is returned to its originalist meaning.
Totally agreed.
> ...personally believe that it's not in the interest of justice that they don't prosecute, but because the wrong prosecution could lead to the massive outflux of power from the federal government if the Interstate Commerce Clause is returned to its originalist meaning.
It's more than that. Before the two states fully legalized the basic status quo was that the average state prosecuted more marijuana possession crimes than the Feds did. The Feds are in an awkward position of really wanting to do something but simply being in no position, practically speaking, to fill the hole in power these two states left. They keep drafting policies that allow them to prosecute whoever they want while claiming to respect the state. But the problem is that they can't do enough to make a difference. To an extent there might be a backlash it would come at effectively no gains for their position.
BTW, I am a Distributist, which bears some surface similarity to some parts of Libertarianism (and I think the more moderate Libertarians end up reinventing a large chunk of Distributism in the quest for working solutions).
Distributism and Libertarianism have some important similarities regarding a desire for a weak state, with power held close to the people but they are very different in some basic ways. For example, the definitions of things like freedom and self-ownership are so far apart they don't really reconcile very well with Libertarian thought.
(Freedom may be thought of as the right to control how one works and thus a positive freedom, instead of freedom from restraint or even freedom of contract. That also means that micromanagement is almost universally seen in Distributist circles as evil whether it is by a private or public sector authority. Self-ownership: we own our deeds and reputation and hence ourselves vs. a general principle of individual autonomy.)
The other likely area of disagreement is when it comes to encouraging widespread ownership of property. Distributists see this as a legitimate role of government because property == power. I haven't yet seen a Libertarian espouse that such is a legitimate goal of government.
Another is food, which most people agree is more efficiently produced by a competitive market than by central planning.
> The government, however defined, must monopolize them because otherwise you give tremendous power to the hands of private corporations. At least with a government there are political constraints that there are not with a corporation.
And yet, what I'm saying is precisely that private enterprises would lead to a better society not just for me, but for the vast majority of people as judged by their own personal subjective preferences. That includes most people who oppose by suggestions.
> I haven't yet met a libertarian who thought that murder should be legal absent a contract to the contrary
I haven't yet met a person who thought that. So why exactly do we need government to "make murder illegal"?
> nor have I yet met one that thought that big business should be able to control all roads and exclude whoever they want from travelling.
Depends what you mean by this. I personally believe that if you own a road, you should be able to exclude others from using it. A polycentric legal system, like any other system, would lead to a convention or set of conventions for what constitutes "property rights" that is economically efficient.
> So the argument is over a decentralized government model vs a heavily centralized government model.
This obviously comes down to your definition of "government." In the broadest dictionary sense of the word, yes, it could refer simply to any mechanism that arranges the affairs of a group of people. When I use it, I intend to imply that I am talking about states, namely nation states and the subdivisions thereof. Lots of anti-state libertarians have offered detailed definitions of what constitutes government in this context. Murray Rothbard defined the state as an organization that claims monopoly legal authority over a region and funds itself at least partially through (compulsory) taxation. I prefer David Friedman's more enlightening definition. He defines a state or government as an organization which most individuals in a region exempt from their normal perception of personal "rights." If a random person attempts to forcefully take money from you, chances are you will fight to resist, or at least consider it a wrongdoing, and most of the rest of society would be on your side (assuming the evidence is conclusive). But when government forcefully takes money from you, you probably won't be very upset, and probably won't resist even if you are upset. And the majority of society will not consider this a misjustice.
> After all, does it really matter whether a city is formally private or public sector?
I think it does, because the "private sector" (assuming you mean a competitive market) will be more economically efficient.
That seems like a rather extraordinary claim with no supporting evidence other than maybe a brief period of time in Iceland.
If nothing else, those things are different from other products and services in that the demand is particularly inelastic and is tied up with human emotions in a way that doesn't really fit the naive "rational actor" model.
Being things that people want that other people produce is evidence that something can be considered a product. The extraordinary claim is that there isn't anything at all special about something that nearly every civilization has treated in a special way.
Whether that does or does not have anything to do with libertarianism, you can decide.
Perhaps the most famous examples of legal systems exceeding traditional spatial and temporal bounds can be found in the aftermath of WWII. Adolf Eichmann for example was kidnapped in Argentina by Mossad agents and smuggled out of the country. This could be considered, in effect, a violation of of the Argentinian legal system's monopoly on law and order within the borders of Argentina.
Does that have anything to do with libertarianism? I don't know; I don't really care. It's just an interesting example of monopolies on laws and law enforcement not being hard and fast. History is full of such examples.
Not a libertarian here, but one example regarding this might be medieval Iceland where such shopping around was encouraged and even the basis of the system, as was taking things into one's own hands and perpetrating blood feuds.
Interestingly the difference between "murder" and "manslaughter" in Iceland had nothing to do with intent but rather that if you killed someone that was manslaughter, but if you failed to report it to the family of the victim properly in a timely manner, or you tried to hide the fact, then it was murder (and a far, far more serious crime).
But then I suspect there's a reason why at that time, Iceland didn't have cities.
To fill the gap left by a non-functioning police department, neighborhoods have started banding together to hire private security firms. This (of course) isn't a direct correlation, but from the numerous friends I have in the Detroit area, the difference is pretty stark. They feel safe, the 'police' forces are smaller and more dedicated and, perhaps the biggest difference, the private security firms actually "respect us as customers, instead of treating us like cattle in the way of whatever grand mission they're on" (copied and pasted from an email with a friend).
I've read a number of articles on the subject, but while I can't find any of the ones I meant to reference, I did find this one, which I just skimmed through, and it's pretty neat all around:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/44725/this-is-what-budget-...
This video is a good introduction to the ideas presented in the book http://youtu.be/jTYkdEU_B4o
I would point you back to Aristotle's "Politics" actually where he comes up with a theory of government as follows (heavily paraphrasing):
1. Men and women come together to form the social basis of society, namely the procreative household. This is the vehicle by which culture is passed on, and it is the economic center of the society (pre-industrialization at least). Consequently the procreative household is the engine of both culture and society, and the goal of the economy is to nourish the household.
2. Households come together and address their common problems by forming organizations to do this. This is the basis of the polis.
(As an aside, Aristotle was not particularly hostile to same-sex sexual relationships, but saw marriage purely as a heterosexual institution due to the cross-generational imperatives. Also he had a very naive view of how gender power relationships actually worked in Greece.)
Now, viewed from this perspective (and it is pretty much the total basis for all pre-industrial society everywhere), you have government being a union of married child-raising households (since adoption is a replacement for procreation where that is not possible). Law then exists to address the common problems between households, both in terms of violent crime and contract issues, but also shared commons and infrastructure.
Now, this is very different to 20th and 21st century America and Europe. Government is not a union of isolated individuals, but if mini-state/businesses in the form of households. This sense of government formally passed from the US with the passage of the 19th Amendment but had been falling apart for a few decades prior under pressures from industrialization, and vestiges continue to be suppressed even today (one example is the argument over same-sex marriage, but another is the general hostility towards self-employment at the hands of Congress).
A government which is a union of households, which respects near-total autonomy of the household is far weaker than a government which subjects the household to scrutiny by CPS, undermines retiring with the kids with social security, requiring most kids to go to public schools, and so forth because the union-of-households government cannot interfere to form culture.
There are common problems that exist in a domain that a government must address. There is a social imperative to government. The real question is over the scope and nature of that government. Is government to be a social contract of individuals (but it's really a super-intrusive form of adherence contract since the individual can't really individually negotiate it)? Or is it a more limited institution in the service of households, not individuals?
I think when you look at it, that's the real choice (i.e. between a Lockean/Humean government and an Aristotelian one), not between a government and anarchy. People always invent government.
Thanks to government, my landlord can't kick me out without due notice, big guys with weapons can't "protect" me for a fee, and I can travel for free wherever I want on well-maintained roads without paying arbitrary fees.
If your point is that agriculture made most people worse off than their hunter-gatherer predecessors, I probably agree, but that choice is long past.
There are, practically speaking, no ungoverned areas. The ungoverned areas are either unsurvivable due to circumstances unrelated to the existence of governments (like the oceans and Antarctica), and the otherwise survivable areas that briefly don't have governments (like Somalia) are undesirable due not to a lack of government, but because of events which caused both undesirability and lack of government (like poverty or armed ethnic conflict). Of course, plenty of people have argued that Somalia actually improved during its period of "anarchy."
Of course, this line of argument is pretty silly. You could, following this same logic, ask where someone would like to move where murder does not occur. Again, the only places where murder does not occur are not survivable by humans, or are undesirable for other reasons (like living in an abandoned missile silo, or in solitary confinement). Yet I would still claim that a society without murder would be a good thing.
> Thanks to government, my landlord can't kick me out without due notice
Why would a polycentric legal system not be able to provide a system where landlords can't kick tenants out without due notice?
> big guys with weapons can't "protect" me for a fee
That's not true. If you have enough money, big guys with guns can and will absolutely protect you. In fact, a lot of armed security and even what we could call "law enforcement" is done by privately contracted firms, because public police forces are ridiculously inefficient and ineffective. The same goes for arbitration and courts.
> and I can travel for free wherever I want on well-maintained roads without paying arbitrary fees.
Firstly, you do pay arbitrary fees for the roads you drive on, or at least the roads in your tax jurisdiction. In fact, the average person pays a lot more than what is economically efficient, because road funds inordinately subsidize industries like the freight industry. A usage fee is a far more economically efficient way to fund roads, and even government roads which also collect usage tolls tend to be a lot more well maintained. Secondly, the "who will build the roads" criticism of libertarianism is so exhausted that it has become a running joke for many libertarians. I can discuss it more if you like, or point you to several "libertarian FAQs" that should address most of your road- and infrastructure-related concerns.
In short, as far as how people actually live, it is far less governed and far more Aristotelian than the US is. A few observations:
1. The poor have better nutrition in most of Indonesia than in most of the US. They also have, due to fewer formal protections on squatting, more secure housing since the only reason to tear down squatters' homes is actually building something new.
2. Police corruption protects the poor. if you are driving a car and strike a motorcyclist, that's a much bigger deal than hitting another car. Similarly evicting squatters from one's land so you can build something else requires paying off the cops fairly heavily.
3. That is not to say the poor have it easy here. Access to clean drinking water that is long-term safe after boiling is not common. But hey, given West Virginia, I suppose it's hard to complain.
4. Self-employment is the norm. 70% of the population is self-employed. Also income inequality is significantly better than in the US.
5. Indonesian material culture, even for the poor, is relatively luxurious by American standards (aside from things like big screen tv's). There are a lot fewer mass-produced goods and a lot more hand-made things. There's also a hands-on labor culture here which is very, very different from the big machine automation culture of the US.
6. Actual traffic laws in practice amount to "drive safely" and instead of banning this practice or that practice (texting etc), the rule is that police corruption protects the victim.
7. Police corruption is not without limits. If a police officer accepts a bribe in an unacceptable area (allowing illegal logging, for example), the officer will be prosecuted and likely jailed. There's a very hard line between corruption that everyone expects and indeed relies on for the regulation of society and corruption that is unacceptable and prosecuted.
But a big part of this is that Indonesia has a decentralized government to an extent that Americans would have trouble understanding. For example, metropolitan area of Jogjakarta is like a province or state, except that the treaty that brought the city into Indonesia specified that the Sultan would retain the hereditary position of Governor. So nobody gets to vote for the head of the executive branch of Jogjakarta DKI. Instead they have the Sultan who is well-loved by all there and has a very good reputation throughout Indonesia.
Was the soviet union good? millions dead, censorship of other ideas, huge leaps forward in quality of life on some axis, killed more nazis than the allied forces, forced the usa to get to space -> which meant some of the technology people living in the ex-soviet union exists now, it's existence encouraged the granting of worker rights/higher pay through fear of similar upheaval.
EDIT: sorry for the Latinate words, but the meodsetla calls.
But Iceland was a country of laws and they solved a lot of problems based on such a distributed executive in ways we might find funny today.
For example consider search and seizure law. The law didn't focus on who you couldn't search but rather who you had to search. My recollection of the Gragas was that the rules were that you had limits on the size of the search team and you had to search consecutive estates (i.e. no picking on who you thought was guilty, but you had to search every estate between the two you thought were likely perpetrators). This meant, effectively that you had better narrow it down before starting.
Now there were other interesting crimes. Failing to baptize a baby within the time mentioned by law was nearly the equivalent of murder and certainly the equivalent of infanticide..... (As was, if I remember right, eating horse meat.)
One data point, in a homogenous and relatively isolated region does not a grand idea make.
Well, in some locations you might be able to buy 'protection' from a number of different organised crime groups. While it's not exactly a historic precedent, the Millet system also had some similiarities.
Sure there are universal human rights, but that's still new and many countries don't honor them: minorities are often denied basic human rights, some countries still have the death penalty, etc.