From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Tue Mar 23 1999 - 08:24:50 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> What methods do states use to restrain the initiation of force by
> the state, and what backs them up if those methods fail? I can think
> of only two such means: jury nullification and armed rebellion (I do
> not include elections or recall, because they are more likely to
> support the majority's use of violence than to restrain it). Do you
> think "complex market mechanisms" are less stable or in some other
> way inferior to those methods?
Writers of constitutions restrain state power by apportioning it among
different entities with competing interests. Ideally, one hopes that on any
given question the strength of the agencies with a vested interest in
restraint will be greater than that of those in favor of expansion. This
can be a tricky design problem, but it is of a level of complexity that can
readily be addressed by careful thought.
Early attempts to design this sort of government have been moderately
successful. For instance, the U.S. government, arguable the first serious
attempt in history at creating a stable limited government, operated largely
as expected for several generations. It eventually succumbed to the
problems of special interest lobbying and gradual expansion with which we
are so famliar, but it has been a rather gradual process. It is also worth
noting that this transformation is largely the result of popular desires -
the Federal Government grew into its present form largely because the people
wanted it to.
Now, we could certainly build a much better system based on the experience
of the last two centuries. We can see now that the government should be
much smaller to start with, and that there must be some active mechanism for
pruning back outdated laws and obsolete programs. We can see that stronger
mechanisms are needed to fight 'constitutional creep', but we can also
readily see ways of designing such mechanisms. IMO, it would now be
feasible to design a limited government that could operate for several
centuries without serious erosion - and if immortality and other
transhumanist technologies can give us a population that understands how
governments evolve, that could easily stretch to millennia. Since I expect
to see strong SI long before then, I don't see long-term stability as a
problem we really need to be worried about.
There are two reasons why I don't really trust market mechanisms to achieve
the same goal. The first is simply that they are untried in this arena. We
can see from experience that the market is capable of optimizing economic
activities, but the same is not true of the use of force. In fact, what
data I can see (from cases like modern-day Russia) would seem to indicate
that there are perverse incentives at work whenever the use of force becomes
an option. If there is no one who can police my actions, it is often in my
best interests to act like a criminal. It is not at all clear that it is
possible to create a stable population of independent entities that will
police each other.
The second problem is transaction costs. Every scheme I have seen for
privately produced law results in a massive proliferation of complexity.
The individual contracts with a PPA, the PPAs contract with each other, the
PPAs negotiate meta-contracts covering contract enforcement, and on and on
and on. When you combine this approach with an absolutist view of
individual responsibility (which is usually the case), you end up with a
society where you need to read and understand a thousand pages of legalese
to buy a pack of chewing gum. Either everyone spends all their time reading
legal documents, or no one ever knows what laws are going to apply to a
given situation. This might be a viable society for transhumans, but you
and I would have some serious problems.
Finally, I don't really see a need to try something as exotic as
anarcho-capitalism. I can readily see how to set up a government whose only
really objectionable activity as a small compulsory tax bill. Since I'd be
paying the same money to a PPA in an anarchist society, I don't see that
there is much to be gained by trying the experiment.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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