--> libertarian institutions, no political box

From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 16:06:13 MDT


--> Anders Sandberg

> > Realistically and IMHO I don't think we'll ever see a
> libertarian society.
> > Don't think there has ever been a time when a libertarian
> society worked,
> > and don't know of any successful libertarian county presently.
>
> This will likely bring up a long thread. I have the impression that the
> classical example discussed by David Friedman would be medieval Iceland.
> It is also interesting to look at the current Somali rebound. Both
> examples have plenty of problems as examples (population densities, clan
> structures, previous systems and their remaining side-effects). Lots of
> food for debate and analysis.

It occurs to me that I could subcontract much of my posting to Anders; he
does a far better job *and* uses coherent sentences. Big step up, that :)

> That people often are selfish is not the main problem here, since
> rational selfish actors can form non-coercive societies. The problem is
> the lack of rationality, which causes people to choose suboptimal
> selfish solutions ("greed"), and to some extent irrational behavior
> causing people to pursue inconsistent subgoals that disrupt their
> supergoals. One approach would be to find ways to diminish these
> factors, which is likely hard but can be quite transhumanistically
> rewarding, another would be to study what institutions and rule-sets can
> buffer such factors with a minimum of coercion.
>
> Libertarians (and many others) think they have models of such
> institutions, which are then usually what is being debated. But it might
> be interesting to step outside the political box and see what categories
> of institutions would be able to handle such issues (preferably without
> assuming specific technologies or human mindsets) and then analyse how
> such institutions could be fitted together into social systems, as well
> as which could be started now or be created out of the material of our
> current institutions.

This is an excellent idea for a thread, and would be a welcome change from
most of the libertarian slugfests. Rather than throwing up hands in despair
and starting work on that virtuality, large concrete float or booster, we
should take a moment to be smart and figure something out.

Everyone should go read the readable iceland thing:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long1.html

And then post ideas. Legal systems, security, markets, consumer awareness,
space exploration, and anything else that's currently sitting under a
governmental monoculture is fair game. I'll get back to this tomorrow, since
I'm posting waaaay too much today.

Reason
http://www.exratio.com/



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