^^^ Sorry for the gap fellas. It took me a few minutes to write this.
Big A.D. said:
Well, you could say the same thing about law and order too. If you were to do a Cost-Benefit analysis on the police service, you'd probably find that it isn't economical to have them enforce the law in a large part of the country because the population density of cities creates efficiencies in the provision of services.
On that basis, we should probably let anything west of the Great Dividing Range revert to lawless badlands and only expect civilised society to exist in coastal cities.
Based on your previous posts, I think you are highly knowledgeable about telecommunications (far, far more than I am).
However, yet again you are simply falling victim to the dogma surrounding what we have grown up with and that we all think is normal. I have no doubt that our current policing and judicial system does not provide the best value for money (note this is not saying that they don't do a good job - I have a lot of respect for our current system, but I can still believe that it is not the best use of resources and there are improvements that can be made).
In the absence of religious, genocidal or political wars (which are a significantly different thing) Mad Max style lawless badlands is a myth. The vast majority of people do not want to run around smashing stuff up arbitrarily (if they did we would need a significantly larger police force right now). If we did leave the west to its own devices they would probably be better off with better justice systems. There has been a lot of good research that shows that in the absence of any Government mandated policing and judicial system people will naturally devise their own emergent, self-ordering arrangements. Taking the Hollywood "Wild West" as an example, it turns out it wasn't ever the lawless place we have been led to believe:
Anderson and Hill - The not so wild said:
Key points:
The West during this time often is perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life. Our research indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved. These agencies often did not qualify as governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on "keeping order." They soon discovered that "warfare" was a costly way of resolving disputes and lower cost methods of settlement (arbitration, courts, etc.) resulted. In summary, this paper argues that a characterization of the American West as chaotic would appear to be incorrect.
The way farmers deal with each other, typically without recourse to the courts in the first instance, has been extensively analysed by economists and legal practitioners. A particularly well known study was conducted by Robert C Ellickson in 1991. In Order Without Law: How Neighbours Settle Disputes, Ellickson provides a detailed account of how farmers establish and manage property rights with virtually no formal legal actions. Ellickson's analysis is based on observations of cattle farmers in California but most farmers in Australia will endorse the conclusions drawn by Ellickson. The approach described by Ellickson can be categorised as follows:
Norms, not legal rules, are the basic sources of entitlements;
most farming businesses are 'consciously committed to an overarching norm of cooperation among neighbours'. Irrespective of the law which highly favours cattle owners in open ranges ' they believe that an owner of livestock is responsible for the acts of his animals'.
Incomplete enforcement: ie, a 'live-and-let-live' philosophy;
landholders recognise that everyone causes and experiences spillovers and need to manage them. As long as the costs incurred to prevent and manage them are roughly equivalent between landholders the ledger is square.
Mental accounting of inter-neighbour debts;
when one neighbour is causing more spillovers than his/her neighbours, neighbours will take note of the trespasses and settle the account at a later date.
The control of deviants; through a hierarchy of influences from peer pressure to intervention by local authorities.
Us anarcho-capitalists do actually have a fully-fleshed out moral philosophy which flows through every aspect of how societies work (or should work) and the best way for ordering societies. It may be insightful if you spend some time researching, you will probably be surprised at how much of what you think is normal is consistent and how much of what you think is normal is actually inconsistent and arbitrary. The basic tenet is simply "it is wrong to commit fraud, force or violence against another person or their property". This is such a simple, self-evident but very far-reaching statement that people have spent their whole careers researching its implications.
