Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Liberty

  • Libertarians and the Law

    By PieInTheSky

    One way of looking at things would be that there are two spheres for each person: the individual – where one acts according to subjective preference – and the common – where the individual ones meet and sometimes come in conflict. Freedom to swing your fist, my nose, etc.

    In each human society, such a conflict must be handled.  Conflicts in the common sphere are generally covered by, as Bastiat said, The Law. The Law in this case is not legislation but a subset of morality, and it usually exists absent of a specific government, religion, or whatever. Libertarianism, and the final form – anarchy – are still human societies and as such they have The Law.

    As a self-proclaimed libertarian, I believe in free people acting voluntarily to reach whatever their goals may be. I believe in a free market, in goods and services, and whatever people make and need. This all goes without saying, really. But of course, problems arise and one cannot be completely free in a densely populated world.

    So what about justice, in the sense of implementing The Law? This is not really product, in the sense that is not produced, distributed, traded, stockpiled, and whatnot. You cannot go short on justice because you expect a weak justice harvest. It is a service, but one unlike any others. The free market, for it to be free, must be free from aggression. And this is where justice comes in. As such, it can be viewed as outside the market, due to everything in the market depending on it.

    It can be viewed as just another component of the market, as it does cost resources in administering it. It usually has the characteristics of what economists call a public good, as in non-excludable and non-rivalrous.  Justice should be available to all, and giving justice to A does not reduce justice for B. Philosophically, application of the law is the one service in a society that should not depend on wealth, status, or any other characteristic of an individual. As such, it is unlike other services.

    Law which is not enforced is merely a bunch of suggestions, so each society needs a way to administer and enforce it – this is the goal of justice. Society – despite what many keep claiming – is not government, but in the case of justice, it is usually a government prerogative. Voluntaryists (what is it with politics and weird spelling?) and/or anarchists say this can be done better outside of government, all others see it as a core function of government, some as the only core function of government. But all flavours of political ideology accept rules and their enforcement, the how differs.

    Any political view that sees a place for a government, from minarchists to socialists, sees justice as a main function of government, up to the only legitimate function.

    The justice as the sole role of government can be seen in, for example, Kritarchy which can be interpreted simplistically as rule by judges. The origin of the word is in ancient Israel before the rise of kings, but modern versions are found, for example, in the Xeer system of Somalia. (You know the one, Somalia anarchy ROADZ or other such things randomly screamed at libertarians, although the areas of Somalia ruled by Xeer seem to do better than the ones ruled by government).

    Kritarchy is a legal and political system associated with structures of polycentric or stateless traditional societies, based on customary rather than statutory law, and it is very often close to notions of natural law. Medieval Iceland is another example. To be honest, I do not see these societies as stateless. But this depends on the definition of state. Governance in one form or other always existed: clan leaders, tribal leaders, warriors, shamans, elders, whatever. But there has always been authority where there have been humans. And this authority was generally accepted and imposed. So when does this become a state? And when anarchy? Or is anarchy just extreme decentralization? People will live in communities, and those communities will have rules. I simply do not see an ancap world in which each has his piece of property defended by private security and private courts of justice. There would be at least HOAs and such.

    The question is how is justice best delivered? Can there be a market for it, separate from or identical to the one for everything else? I don’t see it that way, not as a pure market solution, but something else.

    Justice should be accepted and enforced. After it is pronounced, it is not voluntary any more. The nature of the courts aside, the ruling must stand. Pending appeal, of course, and if you happen to live in Italy, 7 years of trials later maybe there is a resolution. The only voluntary thing may be choice of courts. If the decision is not respected, the offending party must be somehow coerced, by imprisonment or being socially ostracized or something else.

    Enforcing the law can be the purview of the courts, or of different organisations, more or less independent. Enforcement may have a market structure more readily. See bounty hunters for a quick example.

    Whatever views on delivering justice, for me it is clear that the current system is broken, irrespective of the country involved. Some, as always, more than others. Justice should be a cornerstone of society, as such it must be fixed. Most likely a society with better rules and system of justice will require less ruling and enforcement, as people will more likely respect the law. A good society is one that generates little crime, not one that punishes effectively, and those two things are not always the same.

    So what are the options? The way I see it, at least: government courts run by taxes or fees, private courts run like a regular business, Kritarchy style system of traditional courts. In Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, if I remember correctly, parties in conflict simply agreed on a citizen, usually well respected by the community, to decide, and agreed to respect whatever he decided.There are disadvantages and advantages to, well, anything. In general, reality is only trade-offs.

    Government has the advantage of a special legitimacy in the eyes of many people, which brings enough enforcement power. What it also brings is too much power, bureaucracy, politics in everything, lobbying, excessive legislation and overreach, and often a lack of accountability. It does not depend directly on money from the involved people, but money is always present in one form or another.

    If a victim is dead or helpless and cannot pursue justice, justice can still be met, as government has agents for that express purpose, and this may not be the case in fully private circumstances. On the flip side, when a strong government commits an injustice, there is little redress for the wronged. Of course, many things influence government justice negatively: bribes, corruption, and politics to name a few.

    Justice and Liberty never looked so good

    Private courts of justice can end up more decentralized, with the risk of less uniformity and predictability. Their legitimacy will be lower and their enforcing power potentially more limited, with good and bad consequences. They must be to a point agreed upon by involved parties, someone must pay, and there must be some agreements between different private courts. Accusations of special interest might be stronger than with government, not really justifiably so, but nonetheless…

    Citizens, ad-hoc courts, or juries have a chance to be less controversial and more acceptable than private courts. Get a few people of good standing who are invested in their community and have a ruling. Of course this would not be without controversy – nothing is really – and many will question their motives, integrity and capability – not being professional judges.

    There can also be a hybrid system of private lower courts – this is often the case with mediation- and government as appeal courts.

    My personal favourite form of justice is trial by battle, let the gods decide.

    Justice in the end must be, well… just, lawful, universally applied, predictable, and generally accepted by the society. A system of justice like the asshole who is president of Philippines supports is not something to strive for.

    Do I have a conclusion? No, this is mostly musing and thinking out loud, as I am a little on the fence about it. So, justice, how do you like yours?

  • Wednesday Afternoon Links

    Good Odin’s day, fair commenters. I bring you the freshest of links pulled from the sea and slapped down–still wriggling–on your monitors.

    American flights might not cost an arm and a leg, but they’d be more comfortable with fewer appendages

    As if American flights weren’t bad enough already.

    Taiwan moved up six spots on the World Press Freedom Index to #45! Oh, wait. It’s just because everyone else got worse this year, not because they actually improved. For reference the US is #43 (full list here). North Korea is unsurprisingly dead last.

    If he pulls this off I’ll eat my hat.

    Nissan outfitting its cars with tinfoil hats. Protect your phones from prying spooks, buy Nissan. TW: Autoplay video because CNN.

  • Space Law

    Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

    Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

    Of all the great adventures that humanity can embark on in the near future, none has captured the popular imagination quite like space exploration. Since before the time that humanity launched the first artificial satellite, we have dreamed of what it might be like to set foot on other worlds. Where dreams lead, however, the bureaucrats are sure to be lurching close behind. Passing judgment and crafting policy has long been the pleasure of the professional statist. In man’s adventure into space, such a creature was given a rare gift: A virgin field, unframed by any law save those of nature. Before even the first V-1 was launched, there were those who contemplated both exploration and policy.  Theodore von Kármán, one of the founders of Aerojet, an early rocket company, had this to say in 1942, just after the incorporation of the company, “Now, Andy, we will make the rockets – you must make the corporation and obtain the money. Later on you will have to see that we behave well in outer space…After all, we are the scientists but you are the lawyer, and you must tell us how to behave ourselves according to law and to safeguard our innocence.[i]” There were, at that time, no laws on the books to describe allowable action, inactions, and responsibilities that would accompany space flight. But in the next two decades, such a field would develop.  Andrew Haley would be one of the main crafters of space law[ii], even coining a term for it, ‘metalaw.’

    The laws that would be crafted were largely a creation of their time when the UN was paralyzed between cold warriors. As such, they are imbued with a certain neutrality and compromise. The most famous and overarching of these regulatory documents was the 1967 ‘Outer Space Treaty.’ This treaty laid down some basic conventions which are still honored today, such as Article V forbidding the placement of WMD’s in orbit, on the Moon, or in any sort of stationary platform or satellite. There are gaps, though; the treaty mentions WMD’s but not conventional weapons, so in theory, orbital bombardment is still allowed. Another gap in the treaty, one that is becoming increasingly relevant, is the use of resources in space. At the time the treaty was written, the idea of commercial entities who could perform their own launches or exploit resources was inconceivable. Now there are at least eighteen competing commercial space companies. That’s only counting ones working on launch vehicles. There are many other companies that specialize in other areas and more being created every day. That would come as a grand surprise to the many bureaucrats who were stuck in a binary view of policy, who could never imagine advances beyond what they saw before them. Even more pressing today: the treaty does not allow any nation to claim territory in space. The moon, asteroids, and all other stellar bodies are seen as communally owned and for the benefit of all mankind[iii].  That might come as news to the several space mining companies that are looking to exploit the potential trillions of dollars of precious metal and rare earth elements that are locked in the numerous asteroids in the solar system[iv].

    Indeed, as much the way that regulators were unable to predict the rise of disruptive technology online or in new media, they were equally unable to foresee the rise of a whole industry based around the idea of exploiting the resources present in the solar system and beyond. In attempting to placate the powers of the time, they left no room for innovators to build on the fantastic possibilities of space exploration. This has meant that those who wish to dream of riches from beyond the world must go to antiquated documents written in a time before we had even set foot on the moon. Even when the push against regulation comes, one must also wonder how hard the early pioneers of space exploitation will try to close the door behind them in order to throttle competition. In a truly free market, companies would not have to go hat in hand to the national regulators to get launch permission, then comb the international laws looking for a loophole to exploit in their quest for mineral exploitation. Rather, it would only be a matter of capital investment and an entrepreneurial spirit that would lead the way. Of course, as the race for asteroid wealth increases pace it is certain that some enterprising person will find a way around the laws, even if it means approaching their state looking for succor to reach around international regulations.

    Space is big, but governments currently control the sky that separates us from heavenly riches. There will undoubtedly come a time when the exploitation of space resources becomes a common practice. It is important for the allies of economic liberty to push for the reforms needed to open up a truly free market, so when that success comes, it will be that much harder for the bureaucrats to take the credit for the success that their laws would have nearly strangled in the crib.

    ________________________________________________
    [i] Andrew G. Haley (1963) Space Law and Government, page xii, Appleton-Century-Crofts
    [ii] Daniel Lang and Brendan Gill (December 29, 1956) The Talk of the Town, “Metalaw”, The New Yorker, p. 19
    [iii] Jennifer Frakes, (2003) The Common Heritage of Mankind Principle and the Deep Seabed, Outer Space, and Antarctica: Will Developed and Developing Nations Reach a Compromise? Wisconsin International Law Journal, 21, at 409
    [iv] Webster, Ian “Asterank” Asterank

  • Ritual. Uniformity. Ceremony. Sacrifice. Brotherhood.

    By: Anon Anon

    A group of grown men stand around in an otherwise empty schoolhouse.  Out in public, you wouldn’t be able to spot them as cohorts.  They rarely wear their uniforms out in public, and they come from every walk of life.  Some have dirty hands and torn dungarees.  Some have meticulous spectacles and Italian loafers.  In here, standing under a trifecta of flags, standing in the anonymity of their uniforms, this paramilitary squad happily show off enough pins, dangly medals, and patches to make a third world dictator lift an eyebrow.

    Once everything is in place, the youth squad is led in.  The boys have their own uniforms.  They are a little bit different from the men’s.  But a little bit the same, too.  The men stand ready when the youth come in.  Patriarchal traditions are passed on best when men present a united front, and these men look prepared and competent.  

    Ritual.  Uniformity.  Ceremony.  Sacrifice.  Brotherhood.

    These are ideas that have always motivated boys, sometimes to gleeful bloodshed.  Knowing this, these are the ideas that these men use to mold the minds of the youth.  The ceremony starts.  The rituals begin.  A flag is saluted, allegiance is pledged, prayers are invoked, oaths are repeated.  Next, a new round of indecipherable pins are given to select youth who have shown sufficient vigor.  The youth are split by age and led apart.  Small cliques are easier to control than large groups.

    What authoritarian Hellhole is this?  A Hitler Youth rally?  A Southeast Asian secret police meeting? Some African boy-army training?  No, this is America.  Trump’s America.  And it is happening right under your noses.

    It’s your local Cub Scouts.  Please buy popcorn.

    Today, I am one of those men.  A few decades ago, I was one of those boys.  Somewhere in between I picked up Heinlein, filed my first income tax return, and decided I was going to teach myself economics by reading the stilted English of a few peculiar Austrian authors.

    How’s that for some cognitive dissonance?  Paramilitarist on the streets, libertarian between the sheets.  I was raised Catholic, so I know how to hold two mutually exclusive ideas in my head at the same time.

    But really, there isn’t any dissonance.  Scouting as a youth was good for me.  Scouting was something I chose to do.  When I said the pledge every week, it was because I chose to.  When I humped a backpack through a downpour with my best friends, it was because I chose to.  When I connected with the other scouts and made a community, it was because I chose to.  When I had a personal crisis and leaned on my Scoutmasters, the way any boy should lean on his father, it’s because I chose to.  

    And those Scoutmasters made a choice to be the man in my life when I needed it.  The father that Mother Nature gave me wasn’t good for much more than introducing me to occult rock and teaching me the value of cynicism.  A boy should have more than that out of a father.  Fortunately, I had a very peculiar volunteer community that gave me what I needed.

    Then I went to college and grad school.  I focused on me, not a community.  That’s OK.  That’s what college is for.  My engineering classes hammered home some libertarian facts – bridges fall if you design them wrong and no one can argue them back up.  An A really is an A.  At the same time, my autodidactic education was directed more to some classic libertarian past times.  I read Rothbard and Hayek and Smith and Rand.  I made friends with progressives for the first time.  I learned that I wasn’t really a political conservative after all.  I started voting strategically in local elections and writing in “Fuck You” for national elections.  I rolled my eyes at the pledge and stayed silent when they played the National Anthem at hockey games.

    I thought I was an individualist.  I knew how to shoot and do laundry and cook and all those things Heinlein said to do except that bit about the sonnet.  Sure, most of those skills I learned in scouting.  But that was behind me.  It was a ghost of a memory that only rattled a few chains when I used those skills.  I had a small handful of good, deep, solid friendships with people who didn’t agree with me on anything political.  I was my own man, living in the city but apart from any real community.  I knew I was standing on my own beliefs and I didn’t need anyone with me.  I was a libertarian.  I was a lone wolf.

    What a jackass.

    After school, I moved to a new city, took up a new job, and got to know a few people.  A very few people.  I mostly lived my life alone with just my wife and later a cat and two small humans.  I spent all my time in my apartment or in the office.  I didn’t spend much time with anyone else.  I barely knew anyone I didn’t work with.  Which is OK, because I’m an individualist, I told myself.  Over, and over, and over again.  I almost believed it.

    A few years go by, the oldest kid comes home from his government school with a blue and gold flier.  “I wanna do this,” he says.  Three years later, and I’m running the kid’s Cub Scout Pack.  I struggled for all of seven minutes trying to decide if putting on the uniform, saying a pledge, and reciting an oath would constitute turning my back on everything I have come to believe.  

    No, you jackass.

    Seems like *someone* has an unfair advantage here…

    You are a big hairless ape and God made you to function in a community.  Didn’t you say you read your Hayek and Smith?  And really, this is the ideal libertarian community.  There’s no government thug making me say the pledge.  There’s no qualified immunity that attaches when I put on my uniform.  There’s a couple dozen families that set aside two or three hours every week to come together to form a community.  Arts, crafts, and watered-down juice mix are also often involved.

    We say our oath because we want to.  And it is an oath to ourselves, not to some outside authority figure that lords over us by an accident of birth.  We say a pledge to a flag of an imperfect country that, warts and all, is still the greatest engine for freedom devised by man.  We don’t pledge to land or a nobility.  We have a law, and the only enforcement mechanism is our reputation with our peers.  We work together to make a wooden cars and to make a community and to make our youth better men some day.

    For me, that’s as libertarian as it gets.  Forget the lone wolf crap.

  • Liberty de Facto, Liberty de Jure: Freedom Helped by Corruption

    If a law is broken in a forest, and there’s no cop around to see it, was it really broken? But what if the cop sees it, but you slip him some cash to go away?

    Question: are the words freedom and liberty synonymous? I will probably use them interchangeably but that may be wrong. Anyway… The post at hand.

    Romania, as other countries like it, has many things in insufficient supply. Scarcity, after all, is the norm. One of the things not lacking, however, is legislation. We have a bunch of that and it’s mostly stupid. Well, that is harsh, but at the very least contradictory, unclear, or just plain, well… dumb. What else is abundant is corruption and government incompetence. These might as well be national sports like Oina (similar to baseball, but better). So the default MO of many people is simply ignoring the laws they don’t like. One can say the law is irrelevant without enforcement, as rules become but suggestions. But is it really irrelevant, or is there something deeper going on there?

    Freedom!

    Does corruption or government incompetence in fact aid freedom? Can you be free in practice – de facto – but not de jure – in the eyes of the law? Well yes… and no. Yes, as in for many this may be true, no as in not for all and it is a bad way of going about things.

    As long as bad laws exist, if agents of the state decide to fuck with you, they can. You run into someone with a chip-on-shoulder situation, or the occasional example must be set, or fine/arrest quotas must be met. Police and prosecutors in many countries have the occasional urge to look good in the press by showing how the fight lawlessness, get results, and the like. This does not affect most of us. But what if you are the one in a thousand or million who gets the dubious honour of being the example set?

    Remember a case a while ago where a bunch of guys in the US were visited by the cops for posting reviews on an escort site? Lizzie NB reported upon it. Well, many people probably used escort forums throughout the country without much issue – until a dozen or so unlucky bastards had the cops come to their door.

    Corruption can help freedom a lot if you are well connected or well off enough to afford the cost of bribes. But if you are not, no freedom for you. And if one is connected enough, it can go beyond the understanding of freedom in a libertarian sense and go towards a freedom from consequence even if your actions violate others’ rights and liberty. Getting away with rape and murder is not really liberty.

    In Romania, outside the big cities, things are controlled by the political machine of some party or other, led by “local barons.” It is not an exaggerated term; they control everything and nothing moves in their area without their say so. If you have a good job in Bucharest, corruption can aid your freedom. If you live in Teleorman County, the situation is different. Although, if you don’t want to start a business, make money, and you pay deference to the High Lord, you are pretty much left alone to your own devices. If subsistence agriculture and moonshine is the life for you, great.

    As an anecdote,  as a high school and university student in Romania, one of the freedoms I perceived at the time – a more innocent period where I cared nothing of politics, philosophy, ethics, law, and other things that burden the human mind – was that the internet was cheap, fast, and torrents were abundant. The government and your friendly neighbourhood ISP gave not one damn of copyright, so we could literally pirate everything – movies, books, music, software. Now, I do not want to go in discussions of IP, copyright, the ethics of internet piracy. Suffice to say is that if you were a broke Romanian student, you would have done the same. Look into yourselves; you know it to be so. But the perceived freedom of the mighty bittorrent is not so important any more as one becomes older and wiser. Or at the very least older.

    Being outside the law carries risks beyond dealing with agents of the state, for which you cannot seek redress, by being exposed to underworld violence, shoddy products, unreliable contracts, and much more. The problem in countries like fair Romania is that sometimes laws are bad enough that there is little choice but trying to avoid them.

    Romania is a country with fairly low freedom in principle but somewhat higher in practice. Taxes and economic regulations are quite firmly on the high side of how these things go. But they are also routinely ignored. The so called underground economy thrives. You pay many a tradesman under the table. You can buy many things without paying the VAT.

    Romania has high taxes, and they are inconsistently applied. Being able to avoid high taxes is not the precisely same as not being highly taxed. The end result may be similar on some level, but you are breaking the laws, are liable for punishment, and doing things under the table leaves little recourse if something goes wrong.

    Many rent property or work jobs without any proper forms – with the risks implied in not having a contract or some sort of clear deal. High taxation discourages this. So you have some added freedom if you don’t making a contract, but you lose the benefits of the contract.

    Prostitution and any and all drugs are illegal, with little chance of decriminalization any time soon. The subject is not even being talked about. But you can access all the illegal drugs and/or escorts you wish (at least of the female variety, no idea of other genders). But you do all this while breaking laws and risking punishment. You can easily buy drugs in Romania, but often they are bad merchandise from shady dealers and there’s nothing to do about it if you get screwed. So yes, there is some added freedom, but not in the real sense of buying quality weed from a trusted merchant in the open.

    ILLEGAL!

    Prostitution is quite abundant, with plenty of good choices at reasonable prices (not to advertise, mind you), but with all the implied risks from being in the underworld, many dangers for clients, more for escorts. And the cops are sometimes worse than the pimps for the safety of a woman in the trade.

    Liberty in hiding just isn’t the same, constantly looking over your shoulder, jumping barriers that should not be there. Maybe it is better than nothing, but less than ideal. De facto liberty can be fickle, undependable, erratic, and inconsistent. It may give you a false sense of security, believing things will not change. But you never know when the inspector you bribed changes his mind or is replaced by another. Maybe you will bribe that one as well, maybe not. Maybe you will be picked as an example for the press of cracking down on offenders.

    Another point is what is the long term effect? Can people learn to like liberty and want it in the open, or does being able to avoid laws reduce the incentive to actually go through the process of changing the laws? Will people want more liberty or become complacent with what they have? But enough with the questions.

    The internet in recent times allows some more avoiding of consequences of being outside the law. One example is the previously mentioned prostitution forums. They can help clients identify bad service and escorts identify violent customers. In can help escorts escape pimps, get better work, etc. It is, of course, just a small band-aid on a large wound, but it may help some a little. But long term, no matter how much internet, cryptocurrency and whatever, it is not substitute for a small government respecting liberty. It is just what we got.

    So … liberty… how do you like yours?