From: Abraham Moses Genen (futurist@frontiernet.net)
Date: Tue Jun 24 1997 - 18:13:39 MDT
----------
From: John K Clark <johnkc@well.com>
To: extropians@lucifer.com
Subject: Anarcho Capitalism
Date: Tuesday, June 24, 1997 11:27 AM
On Mon, 23 Jun 1997 Hagbard Celine <hagbard@ix.netcom.com> Wrote in part:
>Where there exists a law, there must exist coercion, otherwise
what
>is its point? And where there exists coercion, there exists
something
>doing the coercing.
Dear Hagbard and other fellow Extropians,
At the unfortunate risk of being disagreable I have to state that in the
real world coercion has very little to do with drafting and enacting
legislation.
Legislation is, in the first instance, not usually written by politicians.
Legislative drafting is a learned professional skill that many law schools
do not teach. Those of us who write legislation as our livelihood
frequently do so in response to a social problem or need. Very often the
social problems or needs that we attempt to resolve legislatively are
brought to our attention by the effected groups.
On other occasions those of us who have studied sociology and/or psychology
in addition to Public Administration, Public Policy and Law will do our own
research and apply our findings to legislation.
Obviously, drafting and enacting legislation is no the sum total of all
things. The act of effective implimentation must also be considered. Where
on occasion coercion does take place, it is usually at the bureaucratic
level in attemping to induce compliance from those whose job it is to
enforce the statutes or regulations that they had no part in creating and
were usually not consulted about.
At this point we are dealing with a management problem that is only
slightly related to Extropian philosophy, and appears to be the antithesis
of a dialogue on Anarcho Capitalism.
I'll leave this tangent alone for the time being, unless someone else wants
to pick it up and run with it.
Enjoy,
A.M. Genen
If you and I are in a conflict with each other and even if we both agree
that
we don't want the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter and we want
somebody
else, it doesn't matter, we're stuck with those bozos.
>Anyone who signs the contract (we can call them "citizens")
Then I am not a citizen of any country, of course you will say that my
heart
is beating and that is my implicit signature.
PPA's are not euphemisms for states because PPA's do not claim powers that
individuals do not have. There are only 3 ways to get somebody to do
something
you want, love, trade, or force. I like to encourage the first two and keep
force to a minimum. Everybody agrees that force is justified in self
defense
but government claims far more rights than that, more than any sane
individual
or corporation would dream of. If government needs money they take it, if I
object to them stealing my property they will use force to get their booty,
as much force as they need to, up to and including a bullet in my brain.
They will NOT take "no" for an answer. If government needs labor to fight a
war or be on a jury they feel justified in enslaving me until the task is
accomplished. They'll make me an offer I can't refuse because I know that
if
I do armed men will come to my house and drag me away. I don't think
government should not have more rights than individuals, but then of
course,
it wouldn't be a government.
>are also allowed to live in a certain geographical area
You can join a PPA and live in any geographical area you want.
>Anarchy in the traditional sense is an absence of government.
Exactly, it is not the absence of law.
>Just look at the world prior to WWI. Treat each country as an
>individual person.
Treat horse manure as ice cream and you could have strawberries and ice
cream,
if you had some strawberries.
>The history of international relations until WWI is a study in
>anarchy. Accordingly, the history of humanity is the history of
war
>between nations in an anarchic system.
If there were no nations there would be no war between nations.
>While I see that it is anarchic, in some sense, to have all people
>contracting singly with all others in order to protect themselves,
>how can this be desirable? You can't make a contract with every
>single person you come into contact with.
Don't be foolish, nobody is saying make a separate contract with everybody
on
earth, you just sign up with a PPA of your choice. The PPA makes contracts
with other PPA's about what laws to follow and how arbitration is to be
handled. You won't have total freedom of choice about what laws you want to
live by and who you want to judge you, but you'd have a lot more choice
than
you have now.
>What about fraud, duress, or unconscionability?
Yes, those are problems unique to Anarchy, fraud and duress and
unconscionability are impossible today.
>It is similarly inane to attempt to treat each specifically. There
>must some things that are just "understood" as common to all and
>decent for all.
Obviously. If it was possible for law to be completely spelled out like a
theorem in Geometry then there would be no need for courts or arbitrators,
but it isn't so there is.
>I point to the only example I can of true anarchy -- the world at
>any point before WWI.
What about the Internet?
>the profit-motive is the final arbiter. In this situation, what
does
>one measure one's profit in? Not dollars or francs or rubles,
because
>a currency would require a large group contract which would
"govern"
>its value.
"Money" is just something that is easy to transport, fungible, and a large
number of people think is valuable. Exactly the same thing would be true in
a
world of Anarchy, except you would not be forced to use only the currency
of
the nation you were living in. If somebody tried to tax you by inflation,
a great favorite among politicians today, you could just switch to a
currency
that was more stable.
>What happens when a party declares his rubles to be worth more
>than the contract stipulates? Send a PPA after him?
I have no idea what that means.
>So then a weapons race among PPA's? Small tactical nukes built
from
>the Anarchist's Cookbook?
Today we don't have small tactical nukes, we have huge multi-megaton
doomsday
H- bombs.
>I foresee a very convoluted, and profitable weapons industry
I don't know what you mean by "convoluted" but yes, I expect it would be
about
as profitable as the industry is now.
>not exactly world peace, and a waste of valuable resources which
>might be used for more transhuman pursuits.
It's true, a world without crime or war where everyone lived together in
peace love and happiness would be better than anything I described, so
would
a world where the tooth fairy was real.
>But in the U.S. republic, there's nothing one idiot can do in four
>years that the next idiot can't undo in four years.
It takes far less than 4 years to kill you dead as a door nail. Only about
25
years ago the U.S. republic forced millions of its citizens to leave their
home and fight and often die in a idiotic war 12 thousand miles away that
they didn't believe in.
John K Clark
johnkc@well.com
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