Thus, de Puydt's idea simply needs expansion into the courts - laissez faire is good for economics, politics, and justice. One knee-jerk objection to competing courts is the fear that they would be likely to battle it out when disputes between clients occur. Friedman showed how it would be irrational to do so, since such violence would be expensive, and would likely lose customers to more reasonable competitors. We can actually see in practice the ample incentive to negotiate and make prior arrangements, ironically from existing states. After all, states are in an anarchistic relationship with each other, but they don't generally go to war when a citizen has a dispute with a foreigner. Instead, conventions such as jurisdiction and extradition have been extensively worked out. There is one more area, heretofore overlooked, that such laissez faire is applicable - property systems. Among some anarchists it is too often assumed that different property systems are inherently incompatible - that sticky property and communal property are such opposites that they cannot possibly coexist. Not so! This is easy to see if you simply look around and notice that communal and sticky property coexist here and now, even in current statist society. Sidewalks, roads, public areas, and easements exist side by side with homes, shops, and private parking lots. There is no logical reason whatsoever that property types could not be recorded on deeds (or at least commonly known by the neighbors) and acknowledged and upheld by courts. Land owned by a farm commune or machinery owned by a factory syndicate could no more be legally sold by an unauthorized individual than any similar sticky property. If the people living in a watershed have a geoist society and claim ownership of the aquifers and streams, then there's no reason that a fair unbiased court wouldn't uphold their claim against an unscrupulous person who tried to squat or sell their communal property or claim absentee ownership. There may be issues concerning vaguely-defined or overly extensive collectives, however. If a resource is deemed "owned by everyone," i.e. the whole world, there could be problems in determining legitimate use and disposition. Furthermore, there is the issue of legitimate alienation from "everyone." Yet even here the legal issues are surmountable; in time and with proper precedent, no doubt conventions would be worked out. Perhaps some representative subset of "everyone" would be deemed proxy owners for such issues. In fact and in practice, this is exactly what happens - so-called "public resources" tend to be de-facto property of some group which claims to represent the public. And perhaps it is reasonable to expect that fuzzily defined or overly large collectives have extra costs in asserting property claims. |
Against Authority | page 41 |
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