On Sun, 17 Dec 2000, Jim Choate wrote: <Lots of stuff, which I'm snipping...>
I have long felt that we could comfortably shrink government if open markets were established to help settle such conflicts.
Open markets don't settle conflicts, they barter goods.
And most conflicts are over goods, if you think about them that way. The tree is property, which encroaches into the volume near a neighbor's house. Conflict arises because it was never spelled out in the first place who owned that volume. If it had been, the choices are simpler and less ambiguous: get out of it, buy it, sell it, or charge rent on it. The factory is property, which encroaches into air quality. Conflicts arise because it was never spelled out in the first place who owned the right to what quality of air. The factory owner shouldn't be looking at legislation, per se; instead he should have to buy pollution rights on the local market, competing against other factory owners for the relatively small amount of contamination people have agreed to sell. Et cetera. All of this assumes that there is some means of transfer pricing stuff, some means of enforcing contracts, and a defined, extensive, set of property rights.
That's if you're civic minded, I suppose.
You suppose? So even you're not sure if it will work or not? Is that correct?
Total anarchy? Hell no, it won't work. Whatever gave you the idea that I thought it would? What I've been talking about is minimal government. The interesting question, to me, is what is the SMALLEST amount of government interference required to build a functional society? I believe that sufficient government to enforce property rights and freely entered contracts is absolutely required. That is not a total anarchy, and I do not want to live in a total anarchy. It is however, a minimum possible government -- and looks a lot like what most so-called 'anarchists' mean when they're talking about anarchy. I also believe that this "minimum possible government" would not in general build as successful a society as a government that appropriated enough power to make sure that education were available to everybody, and that there was a communication and transportation infrastructure that everybody could use, and which ruthlessly busted monopolies (whether on goods or on labor) into small competing fragments.
Why would an anarchist accept 3rd party arbitration?
To avoid death.
How is this any different than 'government'?
It's different because it's chosen. If the guy doesn't want to go to an arbitrator, he can choose to go to war with his neighbor, and run the risk of getting killed, either by his neighbor or by his neighbors' friend or family. In a society with laws and courts, you generally don't have a choice about that.
If the arbitration doesn't conform to some sort of principle and standards then it's arbitrary and nobody with half a click of a clue will agree to arbitration with no principles or standards available. Anarchy was meant to prevent just this sort of situation.
Huh? Anarchy *is* the absence of standards(laws) as far as I know. Arbitration or dispute settlement of some kind has to happen regardless of whether there are standards. So, in an anarchy, dispute settlement has to happen in an unprincipled way because there are no standards available. Anarchy doesn't prevent this; it directly causes it! Your point about only idiots going voluntarily into an arbitration not bound by laws is valid, of course, but A, the alternative is probably a shooting war that they are trying to avoid, and B, if we are talking about people who have apparently chosen to live in a society where laws are unavailable, they're probably not too bright anyway.
And what happens if one or more of the parties, excluding the arbiter, decide that neither want to comply? How does the arbiter enforce it?
The arbiter probably doesn't. If they don't want to comply, they just start shooting. But see the earlier point about a desire to avoid death. That's why they'd have come to an arbiter in the first place. Failure to abide by the decision would subtantially increase risk of getting killed. Being in violation of an arbitration would probably substantially increase your risk of going unavenged if you got killed, too, while increasing the risk of a vengeance killing against you in the event that you won the shooting war. Bear