Private Courts

[Minsk]

Come to think of it -- for all the talk about rating people on their willingness to obey contracts, I have never actually found a site that did it on a national/international scale (other than, say, E-Bay, which is very limited in scope). Have I just not found it, or do I need to start thinking up a business plan for a system to track the willingness of people to obey contractual agreements (regardless and independent of local laws)?

[Jason Rand]

Matt,
When you get a chance to read the article I linked to, you will find answers to some of those questions.

[tracysaboe]

Private courts? In anarchy, you're at the mercy of whoever has the most money and the most anger

Nope. Because you also have a say in which court you go too.

Tracy

[tracysaboe]

I dugg it

http://digg.com/political_opinion/Justice_That_Unites_Free_Market_Law

Tracy

[Malsem]

If the legal system were actually fair and just, wouldn't attorney representation be federally funded and free to the public?  In that case, everyone would be afforded "equal" representation.  Otherwise, money and even reputation determine the outcome.

Manmade laws replace the implementation of the fundamental law of natural selection.  Therefore, not only are we subject to the influence of our made-up life-support-system (money), but we also hamper our evolution by way of opposing the natural order.

Any way you slice it, I don't want a bigger piece of the pie; I want cake.  The answers aren't in the future, they're in the past.

-M

[Kat Kanning]

Why should I be forced, at gunpoint, to pay for your legal fees?

[Malsem]

Heck, why should any of us be forced to do anything?  What it comes down to is choice.  If you choose to live within the system, then you must abide by the system.  If you choose not to live in the system, then you are living a life of duress within a system you don't support.

However, it must be determined what, exactly, the goal of life is.  If you don't want to live in the system because you don't like the government, and you wish to start your own government, then it is a life based upon personal interpretation.  All these things, politics, religion, class-structure, reputations are based upon interpretations both personal and as perceived by others.  As long as things are based upon a subjective perspective, there will always be segregations, factions, classes, wars, and a general mess.  So forming a new government is not a solution for the long term as much as it's only a shift of power, another segregation destined for disagreement and opposition because it cannot work for everyone.

There needs to be a common thread of reality.  This world, this society, is a dream-world, created by the human mind.  It is a world of living for excessive wants instead of living for need.

So, by the logic of the "system," if you choose to live in the system, and you would have a "fair" and "just"--which, again, is subjective--system of representation, then why shouldn't you pay for everyone else's legal fees, including your own?

-M

[Minsk]

Heck, why should any of us be forced to do anything?  What it comes down to is choice.  If you choose to live within the system, then you must abide by the system.  If you choose not to live in the system, then you are living a life of duress within a system you don't support.

Yup, which is why being able to ignore everyone else's systems is so important.

So, by the logic of the "system," if you choose to live in the system, and you would have a "fair" and "just"--which, again, is subjective--system of representation, then why shouldn't you pay for everyone else's legal fees, including your own?

Contributing to pay everyone else's legal fees might well be "fair" and "just", for some definitions thereof. And, indeed, if that is what people want out of the world they will hire a private organization that does just that... like, say, an insurance company. I know my house insurance provides me with legal funds under a fair variety of circumstances.

Do you mind if I swing by your house later to demand money for the unemployed and the Iraq war? Understand that if you don't pay up, there is a neighborhood gang that will kidnap you and sell your property while they hold you captive. If you have a problem with this, then sending someone around to demand my money for legal aid is distinctly unfair.

Apply the same morality to a tax collector, or cop, that would be applied to any other human if they did the same thing. I personally feel that assault, kidnapping and theft are a tad more serious than ensuring that everyone can walk into the wasteful beurocracy that is modern courts with the same quantity of money...

(And take a wild guess at why the court system is so slow and expensive; it is not because people can choose between lots of different systems that compete on a equal footing.)

[Malsem]

Exactly.

In the old ways, if I went out and worked my butt off to find a deer, for example, and bring it home to my people, they would have food, tools, clothing, and it would be what we have.

But now, when I go out and work my butt off, it's not for my family.  A huge portion automatically gets taken by the government, yet I don't support the system.

So it's like I just collected a deer for my family, but then someone comes out of nowhere on horseback and decides to take a quarter of the animal for "taxes."  What kind of crap is that?  I don't see any government agents busting their humps with me while I work.  Why am I forced to fund wars and development and destruction?  How is that right or just?

-M

[David]

Mistakes, also known as The School of Hard Knocks, are the chief reason anyone does anything.  People need to learn to take responsibility for their own future. 
If you get screwed once, okay, figure out ways to not get screwed again.  I only go to auto machanics who work with Triple A.  Why?  Because Triple A provides arbitration in the event of a dispute.  And the reality is, disputes and disagreements happen.
So if someone gets screwed once or twice, chances are a business persons reputation will become very important.  And a little pre planning will become a routine for anyone who doesn't want to get screwed.  The same is true of the arbitration agencies.  Find one thats sizable, and reputable, then use them and any agreements they have with merchants that you do business with. 

After a while, standards will be developed, primarily because good ideas are meant to be copied.  The eventual outcome is something like a more efficient, less political version of what we have today.  I don't know for sure, I'm not a prophet, but it is usually hard to re invent the wheel.  So what works will be done, and repeated. 

[Malsem]

I believe that fear is the primary motivator for why anybody does anything.  It comes in varying forms and degrees, though: we fear our mortality, so we fight aging, diseases, and things we don't understand, like nature; we fear not being liked; we fear not making enough money to survive; we fear being humiliated; we fear being alone; and the list goes on.

Mistakes are made, and that is fine.  Until the mistakes affect more than ourselves.  Our society keeps trying to "solve problems," and "progress with technology," and "control the environment," and we create more problems in every "solution" to a single issue.  Now the mistakes are affecting a large scale of fellow inhabitants, and we are not taking responsibility.

Any system, any paradigm created by human concepts is doomed to have opposition and probably war.  All of our modern thinking is based upon interpretations.  Political systems, religious doctrines, and economic status are invented concepts, dreamworld concepts brought into physical existence.  But if we all stop this careering boulder and focus on reality and how we are part of it, then we have a solid foundation of belief pertaining to our survival and the survival of all things.  Not to do so is facing imminent demise.  We can go on changing hats for so long, and it doesn't really eliminate the fact that you're still covering your head.

-M

[David]

Malsem, you are right about fear.  I believe peoples fear of what others might do is the priciple reason the state is so strong.  The desire to control others.  In the battle for security and liberty, security will always win, usually at the expence of liberty. 

The only way I can think to combate the fear is to prove there is nothing to be afraid of.  This means actually living it.  When people see by example, they can decide weather or not it works.  People respect fairness in others, politeness, and are comfortable around trusted people.  This is how you build the private functions to replace the state.  It's one thing to say, "This man, he's a judge, you can trust him."  It's a whole different thing to have a trusted friend or family member say, "John Doe is a person of integrity.  How do I know? Well about 4 years ago, one of my venders and I had a billing dispute, and we decided to go to Joe." 

Why hasn't this happened?  Primarily because of the general fear of 'vigilantism' and the legal persecution. 
We  know that when there has been periods of history when persecution has been lax, that private case law has developed.  The desire to solve disputes, primarily to prevent bloodshed, is historical, and a normal human trait.  What we now know as common law was developed from case law. 
A college professor named I think Craig Benson wrote of something called Law Merchant.  It was a private legal system developed parrallel to common law that dealt with inter nation disputes between merchants.  It lasted longer in private form than common law for two reasons; inter-nation law at the time was almost impossible to enforce at the point of a gun, reward works better, and the second reason was that it was more responsive to the needs of the merchants who did not have a vested interest in a bitter dispute with a potentially good customer or vender, in other words private justice worked better. 
Also private justice isn't free. 

I actually consider private justice and security to be top priorities for the liberty movement.  It is not good enough to simply protest gov't.  There must be an alternative to it, now, not in some near future. 
The evil first strike force of gov't has to end, but there must be something to pick up for some of the important things that gov't actually does. 

[Dave Ridley]

woa....that bit about fasting in front of a perpetrator's house sounds pretty powerful

[eques]

Manmade laws replace the implementation of the fundamental law of natural selection.  Therefore, not only are we subject to the influence of our made-up life-support-system (money), but we also hamper our evolution by way of opposing the natural order.

Be careful when making claims or analogies like this.

Evolution is not goal-oriented.  Whatever your beliefs may be, when you're speaking strictly about the theory of evolution, there is a specific denial of design.

Manmade laws no more replace or alter the law of natural selection any more than they replace or alter the law of gravity.  There may be cases in which manmade law offers different criteria to natural selection about which genes get passed from generation to generation, but genetics is not the whole of evolution--not by a long shot.

Furthermore, we can no more hamper our evolution any more than we can enhance it.  That is to say, we don't know which path evolution will take, and there's virtually no guarantee that, if the tape were run again, that we would emerge a second time.  Furthermore, we have virtually no way of knowing what an "enhancement" would be, nor the trade-offs any such enhancement would incur.

Something important to keep in mind regarding evolution is that evolution does not have goals.  Speaking strictly from the standpoint of a theory, it was not the goal of evolution to produce humanity any more than it was the goal of evolution to make the dinosaurs extinct.

Evolution produces emergent phenomena.  Occasionally, a component may be less efficient than if somebody were to sit down and design it from scratch, but one of the drawbacks of evolution is that redesign is very expensive--if something works well enough, that's what sticks.

I think this is very important to keep in mind with regards to manmade law.  For millenia, manmade law has worked "well enough."  That is to say, making a change--a redesign--is very expensive, and it will only take hold if the benefits outweigh the costs.  Furthermore, we may not be able to dictate all of the aspects of the new design.  However, the evolution of thoughts and ideas moves much faster than biological evolution, so we may very well see a redesign in our lifetimes, if not the beginnings of such a thing.

I heartily encourage you to read some books by Richard Dawkins on evolution, especially The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and others.  He has a unique insight into the theory of evolution and will hopefully give you a greater understanding of the terms you used.

Now I just need to figure out how to be less verbose.

[Sweet Mercury]

Please don't turn this into another minarchist-anarchist debate! For us anarchists it is a good idea. The minarchists might be willing to admit that it is a good supplement to state courts. See: no harm done. Even the minarchists will admit that a case only has to go before a state court if an agreement before a private court failed. They might even agree that a private settlement should be tried in any case before an appeal to a state court. And in that case, the state courts will naturally become almost obsolete. And that "almost" doesn't do much harm.

It is a good system, when compared to our corrupt, bloated, money funneling machine we call a government/court system, it's better. However, this doesn't fit the description of a "private" court system the way I have understood it. Its more of a public court system, but limited in scope—in other words, the court's authorty was generally confined to the area over which it presided. This seems consistant with a sub culture that hasn't fully embraced the "information age." Are there several private courts within an area that compete for customers?

Plus, how is this cohersion free? There aren't goon squads who kick down doors and threaten the criminals, but there is communal cohersion—the threat of being looked down on by the community, which only works when a community is as close knit as these seemed to be, and when the moral standards are relatively homogenous.

Private courts? In anarchy, you're at the mercy of whoever has the most money and the most anger

You're right, private courts are just CHAOS!
They could never exist.

This example is specious. True, Judge Judy is a private court, one in which the parties participate consent to abide by her decision, and they sign a contract—which is ultimately enforcable by the public court system if on party fails to uphold their end of the agreement.