Is it possible that the An-Cap ideal of competing security agencies and courts could devolve into competing warlords? This seems to be the case in Somalia and most of Afghanistan. On an individual level, I might want to hire the security agency that would take my side, right or wrong.
It's more about practical conditions and who can have a stronghold on power. If no single entity can, the dissolution into "competing warlords" will happen even if the average IQ of a nation is 150.
The state “make[s] all sorts of laws that are not in fact necessary for maintaining social order.” But some of these laws may be necessary for achieving other objectives that are good enough to outweigh their negative consequences. Even if not, the conclusion is that one has no obligation to obey *some* of the state’s laws, not that the state is totally illegitimate. The “millions of law-violations every year” that have been occurring have not completely undermined social order, but many of them may have weakened social order enough to make them wrong. (Perhaps few laws are strictly *necessary* for maintaining social order, but a law’s *positively contributing* to maintaining social order will be enough to legitimize it, unless it has some very bad side-effects. Social order/disorder is not white/black, but a matter of degree.)
People keep changing the subject. The question is not about the cost/benefit calculation, unless you think everyone (including me) is justified in using coercion to do things that satisfy a cost/benefit analysis.
The question is where does the state get the unique legitimacy and authority it claims? Why does the argument that justifies this not also justify Microsoft or the Catholic Church or Antifa or the Proud boys in doing the exact same thing? How does “and only the state is justified in doing this” get tacked on to the conclusion?
Do you meet many people who think there is some kind of a 'duty' to obey laws? For example, i know a number of people who are fine with stealing, as long as the victim is someone rich and uncharismatic like (the shareholders of) a big profitable corporation. Even more are five with 'victimless crimes' like using banned drugs. On the other hand, i don't think I've ever met anyone who thinks you have to obey all laws all the time.
Really? Believing in obeying laws just because they are laws is an extremely normal opinion. Even in situations where the law is bad, most people think that those laws should be changed or abolished by the justice system, rather than broken by individuals.
The duty to obey law is based on pre-existing duties, whatever they may be, plus the assumption that laws generally support such moral principles. This made more sense when the law was mostly common law, and not arbitrary legislation from a sovereign or legislature.
Huemer's deal is about when/whether you have a duty to obey bad laws, just because the legislature says so. I suppose someone might argue that there is still a duty to obey the law, but why?
I agree with your critique, but I don’t think your proposed solution works either—I don’t know the proper terminology offhand, but there are evidently monopolistic tendencies/negative feedback loops inherent in fully unregulated capitalism which renders non(or minimally)-coercive states based on this temporary at best. Even among a benignly-intentioned collection of private companies, collective force can still be exercised by “Moloch,” to use Scott Alexander’s anthropomorphism.
The answer to the final question is implicit in the beginning of the essay. A government does things that private individuals are not entitled to do and it is taken for granted that it is entitled to do them. A private rights enforcement agency is viewed and treated as having the same rights as a private individual. For details see Chapter 52 of _The Machinery of Freedom_: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
This is probably one of the last questions you should ask (not saying it shouldn't be asked). Otherwise, nothing would get done. Imagine asking this to a promoter of a liberal constitutional representative democracy before the American Revolution. Or imagine saying this to any scientist or engineer.
The best thing to do is to look at similar conditions for ancap, see if it performs well, look at why it performs well, and think about if the reason for it performing well would apply more to the ancap system.
See if e.g. private security, private arbitration, HOAs, and insurance companies would provide services that government, and if it they do it better.
Have you had any thoughts about how your thoughts about political authority might transition to your thoughts about parental authority? I know these are different relationships, but it does seem strange nonetheless that parents--just in virtue of being biologically connected to their children in the appropriate way--can effectively dictate all matters of a child’s life with few exceptions.
An infant is incapable of acting as a moral agent. Someone must fulfill their obligations on their behalf and take responsibility for them. So in that case, parental authority seems like an uncontroversial practical thing. Of course, the situation changes as the infant matures, and it hardly seems to make sense that they should still have the same evaluations and moral status at the age of 17 years, 11 months, and 28 days.
A responsible parent will involve a child in decisions that they are capable of dealing with. The state doesn’t want to micromanage this (except in cases of abuse), one of their rare wise decisions. If we assume parents are not abusive, there seems to be no problem. If we assume they are abusive, there seems to rarely be a reasonable and satisfactory solution, and a danger of making matters worse.
The question is not whether infants need parental authorities--you're right, that's obvious. But live questions are: who gets to play this role and why? What is the scope of this authority? And do children have duties to obey their parents? Anarchists like A. John Simmons deny this last question.
Unless children are full moral agents, they have no duties. So I agree with Simmons. But this says nothing about parental authority, which has more to do with how third parties interact with the child - under the parents' supervision. We don't think of a dog or a coma patient as violating a duty, no matter what they do or don’t do. Raising children has aspects both of teaching/coaching and (in the extreme) constraining. It is not about the duties of children. It is about teach8ng them to be adults, at which point they will have duties.
As to why parents get assigned this authority, it becomes clearer when we reframe it as, when should this authority be taken from them? If some other person wants to replace the parents as guardian of a child, they would need to show that the parents were abusive and that the transfer would plausibly be in the child's interest. This is not an easy standard to satisfy.
This boils down to, in normal circumstances, the parents care about the infant more than other people, and so are motivated to do what is in the child's interest. While there are exceptions, and we need to be able to deal with such exceptions, there seems to be no plausible alternative for what should be the default case.
But that is not Simmons’ argument. He thinks children can have moral agency, yet they do not have duties to obey their parents.
You also mention teaching children, and moral education has lots to do with parental authority: what are parents permitted to teach? Whose job is it to teach them?
And sure, I agree abuse counts a threshold to move children, but there are child-centered arguments to the effect that being the best available parent is the only reason some gets to raise a child.
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at, anyway.
Maybe my imagination is too limited, but I have trouble thinking of a serious alternative to parental authority.
What is at stake in a discussion of parental authority? What are the alternatives? Should the state raise children? Some religious organization? All the alternatives I can think of seem obviously worse.
The interesting issues for me are: what counts as abuse, who should be given custody when it is denied to parents, what mechanism should we use to decide when a child has made the transition to adult? There is an interesting gray area when a child is in transition to adult. We want them to get to exercise judgement, but maybe not let them suffer severe consequences for making a mistake.
If a parent thinks that a child has acted or been treated improperly, but the child disagrees, we have a conflict. It isn’t obvious how to resolve it. “Teenager” is a fairly recent historical category, and we seem not to have adjusted yet, at least legally. Perhaps this all gets dealt with reasonably well at an informal level.
Again, the issue is not about constructing an alternative to parental authority. The issue is how we think of parental authority: how do we get it and what is its scope?
Here’s a very real-world reason why it matters: most parents are very bad at raising their children, and there are plenty of willing others who would do a much better job at raising them. Courts nowadays effectively require no screenings at all for potential parents even if it’s well known the parents have serious drug addictions, abusive histories, and several prior termination of their parental rights. So why do courts do this? And what would be a good alternative way of distributing parental rights? Should they be distributed only for child-centered reasons? Or should parental interests factor in too, even if biological parents would provide the child a suboptimal upbringing?
There is a decently sized body of literature addressing these questions, so I think that’s decent evidence the problems are philosophically interesting and not obviously answered.
Of Michael Huemer's two questions at the end, are either of them really a dichotomy?
"Coerciveness vs. voluntariness": aren't the voluntary contracts underpinned eventually by an enforcement agency, by coercion?
"Monopoly vs. competition": hasn't Michael's arbitration between arbitrators argument, aswell as several commentators (eg. Mike, Nick) here on warlords (and a tendency of capitalism) suggested that competition should or even does collapse into monopoly?
Bizarrely, Antarctica dominates a section of this article. A casual search on migrants suggests there are perhaps 280m migrants, or 3.5% of the world's population, and yet Antarctica manages a population of just 0.0013m to 0.0051m depending on the season. Of these, almost all of them appear to be research scientists. Far from it being an An-Cap haven for the likes of Ayn Rand, it's one for government-grant-seeking moochers.
The "breaking laws/becoming a philosophy professor" analogy is cute but flawed. The point is that many laws are there to stop behaviours that would be widespread if those laws were not in place. If there were no law against theft, theft would be so commonplace that property rights would collapse (something that you of all people should care deeply about). Conversely, most people have no desire to become philosophy professors, so we don't need a law to prevent people doing it.
The discussion is about the authority and legitimacy or the state's coercive powers. This is separate from questions of law.
If there were no law against theft, people would spend more resources on providing their own security. It is not clear whether theft would increase or decrease in that case. It would depend on other factors.
For instance, if it was illegal to defend your property, that obviously would lead to more theft. Actually, at that point it would no longer make sense to call it theft, since owning something would be meaningless, and there would be no difference between taking possession of something with or without someone else's consent.
Ownership was not invented by a sovereign or a legislature passing legislation. Common law developed from customs and precedents people used in resolving their disputes. In that sense, the law is not a product of the state, but a province they have colonized, and has an independent justification. It depends primarily on people having consistent expectations about how they are supposed to treat each other. If they have that, they have law, whether that is the product of custom or a legislature or some other mechanism.
Laws focus expectations consistently so that people can interact with minimal disputes and conflicts. That has the effect of prohibiting some behaviors, which we may internalize as these being bad.
So the justification for law is separate from the argument about state authority and legitimacy.
I think you forgot to mention the most obvious reason for a coercive state, at least for an economist, exploiting positive and mitigating negative externalities. If the benefit of me doing X has a cost on you that I do not internalize (i.e., pollution) then I should pay a tax for doing X (called a Pigovian tax).
Now, you can say: the private parties can bargain among each other (i.e., you can pay me not to do X whenever the cost to you of me doing X exceeds my benefit), which is the Coase theorem. However, it is well-known that for the Coase theorem to apply transaction costs must be low enough, which is a special case (i.e., free-rider issues among many contacting parties, financial frictions and so on).
The above argument does not establish that the current state intervenes enough or should intervene more, but only that there is a scope for intervention in some limited circumstances that has nothing to do (I think) with some of the other reasons you discussed.
1. The state is not necessary to address externalities in many cases. For example, you could be found liable in a private court for polluting the river that runs through my property.
2. The state's existence and fundamental operation itself creates a (very large) negative externality.
3. In practice, the state often asserts the existence of an externality where none exists, or offers a bad estimate of the size of the externality, and in any case gives a terrible "solution" to the externality which might make things worse, not better.
4. Still, if the government only concerned itself with externalities, it might not be so bad. But in practice, no government seems to be able to constrain itself in this way.
The question is not whether some people might see a benefit in the existence and operation of the state, but what gives them authority and legitimacy. Can anyone who provides positive externalities or public goods use coercion legitimately? No. What makes the state special? Externalities do not distinguish the state from other organizations or even individuals.
And why would provision of positive externalities obligate anyone to obey? And again, why in one case, but not others?
The problem with consequentialist justifications is that we don’t all have to evaluate consequences the same way. I might expect the outcome to be different than you do, and even when we expect the same result, we may not welcome it equally. When we all really do expect the same outcome and value it in a similar way, consequentialist arguments win. Otherwise, they are empty rhetoric. But then persuasion and consent would work just as well. When is a majority justified in coercing a minority?
Isn’t the version of contractarianism that is refuted here refuted not by the falseness of its principles, but due to the fact that its principles are nowhere genuinely implemented? If social arrangements actually did require the consent of the governed, so that “I do not consent” had some significance, things might resemble the ancap ideal. But somehow most who endorse contractarianism try to use it to defend the status quo. Narveson is an exception, I think.
Many persons find the idea of basing authority on genuine consent absurd. Its advocates would probably admit it is somewhat speculative. Even good ideas can be implemented badly. But instead of dismissing such ideas, why not allow some space for small scale experimentation? The charter city idea is a baby step in this direction. Maybe Prospera will give us some relevant data.
Social technology seems unusual among technologies in that the entrenched interests that have to most to lose from beneficial innovations are in charge of making them, or at least acting as gatekeepers. It is tempting to think that most social progress happens in spite of the efforts of politicians and bureaucrats who claim to seek the public good. This forces us to decide whether we accept the public servant idea of the state, or opt for a model more in line with public choice theory. How do we open a space for innovation?
Right, if everyone really did agree, then there *would* be political authority. But note also that the state doesn't have the right to forcibly prohibit anyone else from providing competing services (i.e., offering the same services the state is offering, for a fee). Once you take that into account, it's hard to see how one could feasibly have genuine authority for a monopolistic state. Charter cities are *closer* to having legitimate governments, but still not there.
Yes, that is a contradiction. What I am saying is, if we took the fundamental principle (consent) of contractarianism seriously, it would rule out coercive monopolies. This in spite of the fact that it’s advocates seem to use motivated and fallacious reasoning in attempting to justify the status quo.
“Charter cities are *closer* to having legitimate governments, but still not there.”
What is the problem? They are not able to fully shield participants from the states they deal with, that is an issue. And it is not a small issue. But other than that, wouldn’t it depend on how they are implemented?
Is it possible that the An-Cap ideal of competing security agencies and courts could devolve into competing warlords? This seems to be the case in Somalia and most of Afghanistan. On an individual level, I might want to hire the security agency that would take my side, right or wrong.
Not only possible, but what has happened time and again when states (or other sources of "monopoly of violence") dissolve.
It is certainly a concern. But it is a concern with the state, as well. They are called military coups.
The dissolution of societies into competing warlords or military coups is mediated by the average G-factor or IQ of the nation.
It's more about practical conditions and who can have a stronghold on power. If no single entity can, the dissolution into "competing warlords" will happen even if the average IQ of a nation is 150.
The state “make[s] all sorts of laws that are not in fact necessary for maintaining social order.” But some of these laws may be necessary for achieving other objectives that are good enough to outweigh their negative consequences. Even if not, the conclusion is that one has no obligation to obey *some* of the state’s laws, not that the state is totally illegitimate. The “millions of law-violations every year” that have been occurring have not completely undermined social order, but many of them may have weakened social order enough to make them wrong. (Perhaps few laws are strictly *necessary* for maintaining social order, but a law’s *positively contributing* to maintaining social order will be enough to legitimize it, unless it has some very bad side-effects. Social order/disorder is not white/black, but a matter of degree.)
People keep changing the subject. The question is not about the cost/benefit calculation, unless you think everyone (including me) is justified in using coercion to do things that satisfy a cost/benefit analysis.
The question is where does the state get the unique legitimacy and authority it claims? Why does the argument that justifies this not also justify Microsoft or the Catholic Church or Antifa or the Proud boys in doing the exact same thing? How does “and only the state is justified in doing this” get tacked on to the conclusion?
Do you meet many people who think there is some kind of a 'duty' to obey laws? For example, i know a number of people who are fine with stealing, as long as the victim is someone rich and uncharismatic like (the shareholders of) a big profitable corporation. Even more are five with 'victimless crimes' like using banned drugs. On the other hand, i don't think I've ever met anyone who thinks you have to obey all laws all the time.
Really? Believing in obeying laws just because they are laws is an extremely normal opinion. Even in situations where the law is bad, most people think that those laws should be changed or abolished by the justice system, rather than broken by individuals.
I didn’t say it was abnormal. I said it doesn’t make sense.
The duty to obey law is based on pre-existing duties, whatever they may be, plus the assumption that laws generally support such moral principles. This made more sense when the law was mostly common law, and not arbitrary legislation from a sovereign or legislature.
Huemer's deal is about when/whether you have a duty to obey bad laws, just because the legislature says so. I suppose someone might argue that there is still a duty to obey the law, but why?
I agree with your critique, but I don’t think your proposed solution works either—I don’t know the proper terminology offhand, but there are evidently monopolistic tendencies/negative feedback loops inherent in fully unregulated capitalism which renders non(or minimally)-coercive states based on this temporary at best. Even among a benignly-intentioned collection of private companies, collective force can still be exercised by “Moloch,” to use Scott Alexander’s anthropomorphism.
Sort of like a state?
Yeah, that was the word I was blanking on lol
The answer to the final question is implicit in the beginning of the essay. A government does things that private individuals are not entitled to do and it is taken for granted that it is entitled to do them. A private rights enforcement agency is viewed and treated as having the same rights as a private individual. For details see Chapter 52 of _The Machinery of Freedom_: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Yeah that sounds great but does it actually work in practice? Can you name a few an-cap states that have worked well, either current or in history?
This is probably one of the last questions you should ask (not saying it shouldn't be asked). Otherwise, nothing would get done. Imagine asking this to a promoter of a liberal constitutional representative democracy before the American Revolution. Or imagine saying this to any scientist or engineer.
The best thing to do is to look at similar conditions for ancap, see if it performs well, look at why it performs well, and think about if the reason for it performing well would apply more to the ancap system.
See if e.g. private security, private arbitration, HOAs, and insurance companies would provide services that government, and if it they do it better.
Try International Relations (or the Global System) as the real world of An-Cap, it's both Anarchical and Capitalist.
Have you had any thoughts about how your thoughts about political authority might transition to your thoughts about parental authority? I know these are different relationships, but it does seem strange nonetheless that parents--just in virtue of being biologically connected to their children in the appropriate way--can effectively dictate all matters of a child’s life with few exceptions.
An infant is incapable of acting as a moral agent. Someone must fulfill their obligations on their behalf and take responsibility for them. So in that case, parental authority seems like an uncontroversial practical thing. Of course, the situation changes as the infant matures, and it hardly seems to make sense that they should still have the same evaluations and moral status at the age of 17 years, 11 months, and 28 days.
A responsible parent will involve a child in decisions that they are capable of dealing with. The state doesn’t want to micromanage this (except in cases of abuse), one of their rare wise decisions. If we assume parents are not abusive, there seems to be no problem. If we assume they are abusive, there seems to rarely be a reasonable and satisfactory solution, and a danger of making matters worse.
The question is not whether infants need parental authorities--you're right, that's obvious. But live questions are: who gets to play this role and why? What is the scope of this authority? And do children have duties to obey their parents? Anarchists like A. John Simmons deny this last question.
Unless children are full moral agents, they have no duties. So I agree with Simmons. But this says nothing about parental authority, which has more to do with how third parties interact with the child - under the parents' supervision. We don't think of a dog or a coma patient as violating a duty, no matter what they do or don’t do. Raising children has aspects both of teaching/coaching and (in the extreme) constraining. It is not about the duties of children. It is about teach8ng them to be adults, at which point they will have duties.
As to why parents get assigned this authority, it becomes clearer when we reframe it as, when should this authority be taken from them? If some other person wants to replace the parents as guardian of a child, they would need to show that the parents were abusive and that the transfer would plausibly be in the child's interest. This is not an easy standard to satisfy.
This boils down to, in normal circumstances, the parents care about the infant more than other people, and so are motivated to do what is in the child's interest. While there are exceptions, and we need to be able to deal with such exceptions, there seems to be no plausible alternative for what should be the default case.
But that is not Simmons’ argument. He thinks children can have moral agency, yet they do not have duties to obey their parents.
You also mention teaching children, and moral education has lots to do with parental authority: what are parents permitted to teach? Whose job is it to teach them?
And sure, I agree abuse counts a threshold to move children, but there are child-centered arguments to the effect that being the best available parent is the only reason some gets to raise a child.
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at, anyway.
What I am trying to get at is parental authority.
Maybe my imagination is too limited, but I have trouble thinking of a serious alternative to parental authority.
What is at stake in a discussion of parental authority? What are the alternatives? Should the state raise children? Some religious organization? All the alternatives I can think of seem obviously worse.
The interesting issues for me are: what counts as abuse, who should be given custody when it is denied to parents, what mechanism should we use to decide when a child has made the transition to adult? There is an interesting gray area when a child is in transition to adult. We want them to get to exercise judgement, but maybe not let them suffer severe consequences for making a mistake.
If a parent thinks that a child has acted or been treated improperly, but the child disagrees, we have a conflict. It isn’t obvious how to resolve it. “Teenager” is a fairly recent historical category, and we seem not to have adjusted yet, at least legally. Perhaps this all gets dealt with reasonably well at an informal level.
Again, the issue is not about constructing an alternative to parental authority. The issue is how we think of parental authority: how do we get it and what is its scope?
Here’s a very real-world reason why it matters: most parents are very bad at raising their children, and there are plenty of willing others who would do a much better job at raising them. Courts nowadays effectively require no screenings at all for potential parents even if it’s well known the parents have serious drug addictions, abusive histories, and several prior termination of their parental rights. So why do courts do this? And what would be a good alternative way of distributing parental rights? Should they be distributed only for child-centered reasons? Or should parental interests factor in too, even if biological parents would provide the child a suboptimal upbringing?
There is a decently sized body of literature addressing these questions, so I think that’s decent evidence the problems are philosophically interesting and not obviously answered.
Lots of thoughts here, whoops
Of Michael Huemer's two questions at the end, are either of them really a dichotomy?
"Coerciveness vs. voluntariness": aren't the voluntary contracts underpinned eventually by an enforcement agency, by coercion?
"Monopoly vs. competition": hasn't Michael's arbitration between arbitrators argument, aswell as several commentators (eg. Mike, Nick) here on warlords (and a tendency of capitalism) suggested that competition should or even does collapse into monopoly?
Bizarrely, Antarctica dominates a section of this article. A casual search on migrants suggests there are perhaps 280m migrants, or 3.5% of the world's population, and yet Antarctica manages a population of just 0.0013m to 0.0051m depending on the season. Of these, almost all of them appear to be research scientists. Far from it being an An-Cap haven for the likes of Ayn Rand, it's one for government-grant-seeking moochers.
The "breaking laws/becoming a philosophy professor" analogy is cute but flawed. The point is that many laws are there to stop behaviours that would be widespread if those laws were not in place. If there were no law against theft, theft would be so commonplace that property rights would collapse (something that you of all people should care deeply about). Conversely, most people have no desire to become philosophy professors, so we don't need a law to prevent people doing it.
The discussion is about the authority and legitimacy or the state's coercive powers. This is separate from questions of law.
If there were no law against theft, people would spend more resources on providing their own security. It is not clear whether theft would increase or decrease in that case. It would depend on other factors.
For instance, if it was illegal to defend your property, that obviously would lead to more theft. Actually, at that point it would no longer make sense to call it theft, since owning something would be meaningless, and there would be no difference between taking possession of something with or without someone else's consent.
Ownership was not invented by a sovereign or a legislature passing legislation. Common law developed from customs and precedents people used in resolving their disputes. In that sense, the law is not a product of the state, but a province they have colonized, and has an independent justification. It depends primarily on people having consistent expectations about how they are supposed to treat each other. If they have that, they have law, whether that is the product of custom or a legislature or some other mechanism.
Laws focus expectations consistently so that people can interact with minimal disputes and conflicts. That has the effect of prohibiting some behaviors, which we may internalize as these being bad.
So the justification for law is separate from the argument about state authority and legitimacy.
I think you forgot to mention the most obvious reason for a coercive state, at least for an economist, exploiting positive and mitigating negative externalities. If the benefit of me doing X has a cost on you that I do not internalize (i.e., pollution) then I should pay a tax for doing X (called a Pigovian tax).
Now, you can say: the private parties can bargain among each other (i.e., you can pay me not to do X whenever the cost to you of me doing X exceeds my benefit), which is the Coase theorem. However, it is well-known that for the Coase theorem to apply transaction costs must be low enough, which is a special case (i.e., free-rider issues among many contacting parties, financial frictions and so on).
The above argument does not establish that the current state intervenes enough or should intervene more, but only that there is a scope for intervention in some limited circumstances that has nothing to do (I think) with some of the other reasons you discussed.
Tell me why I am wrong?
Here are a few reasons why I think you are wrong:
1. The state is not necessary to address externalities in many cases. For example, you could be found liable in a private court for polluting the river that runs through my property.
2. The state's existence and fundamental operation itself creates a (very large) negative externality.
3. In practice, the state often asserts the existence of an externality where none exists, or offers a bad estimate of the size of the externality, and in any case gives a terrible "solution" to the externality which might make things worse, not better.
4. Still, if the government only concerned itself with externalities, it might not be so bad. But in practice, no government seems to be able to constrain itself in this way.
Sards gave good reasons.
But also…
The question is not whether some people might see a benefit in the existence and operation of the state, but what gives them authority and legitimacy. Can anyone who provides positive externalities or public goods use coercion legitimately? No. What makes the state special? Externalities do not distinguish the state from other organizations or even individuals.
And why would provision of positive externalities obligate anyone to obey? And again, why in one case, but not others?
The problem with consequentialist justifications is that we don’t all have to evaluate consequences the same way. I might expect the outcome to be different than you do, and even when we expect the same result, we may not welcome it equally. When we all really do expect the same outcome and value it in a similar way, consequentialist arguments win. Otherwise, they are empty rhetoric. But then persuasion and consent would work just as well. When is a majority justified in coercing a minority?
Isn’t the version of contractarianism that is refuted here refuted not by the falseness of its principles, but due to the fact that its principles are nowhere genuinely implemented? If social arrangements actually did require the consent of the governed, so that “I do not consent” had some significance, things might resemble the ancap ideal. But somehow most who endorse contractarianism try to use it to defend the status quo. Narveson is an exception, I think.
Many persons find the idea of basing authority on genuine consent absurd. Its advocates would probably admit it is somewhat speculative. Even good ideas can be implemented badly. But instead of dismissing such ideas, why not allow some space for small scale experimentation? The charter city idea is a baby step in this direction. Maybe Prospera will give us some relevant data.
Social technology seems unusual among technologies in that the entrenched interests that have to most to lose from beneficial innovations are in charge of making them, or at least acting as gatekeepers. It is tempting to think that most social progress happens in spite of the efforts of politicians and bureaucrats who claim to seek the public good. This forces us to decide whether we accept the public servant idea of the state, or opt for a model more in line with public choice theory. How do we open a space for innovation?
Right, if everyone really did agree, then there *would* be political authority. But note also that the state doesn't have the right to forcibly prohibit anyone else from providing competing services (i.e., offering the same services the state is offering, for a fee). Once you take that into account, it's hard to see how one could feasibly have genuine authority for a monopolistic state. Charter cities are *closer* to having legitimate governments, but still not there.
“ genuine authority for a monopolistic state. “
Yes, that is a contradiction. What I am saying is, if we took the fundamental principle (consent) of contractarianism seriously, it would rule out coercive monopolies. This in spite of the fact that it’s advocates seem to use motivated and fallacious reasoning in attempting to justify the status quo.
“Charter cities are *closer* to having legitimate governments, but still not there.”
What is the problem? They are not able to fully shield participants from the states they deal with, that is an issue. And it is not a small issue. But other than that, wouldn’t it depend on how they are implemented?