"A system of competing private enforcement bodies and private legislators with market incentives to attract the residency and business of the poor is not obviously worse."
Under the current system, a poor defendant or poor business owner has almost no exit option. He can't shop for a fairer court or a cheaper enforcement regime, because the state holds a geographic monopoly and the costs of leaving (moving, lost work, family ties) fall hardest on people with the fewest resources to absorb them. A market of competing legal and enforcement providers flips that incentive. Attracting low income residents and businesses becomes a source of revenue and growth in a way it never is for a monopolist with a captive population. That's not a guarantee of good outcomes for the poor, but it is something. It's a kind of discipline the current system never has to face, because it never has to compete for anyone's business.
I kept the piece itself from going further into what a full private legal order would look like, since that's a much bigger argument than this piece was trying to make. For readers who want to go deeper, two books cover the ground from opposite directions.
David Friedman's case in “The Machinery of Freedom” is economic theory before it's moral philosophy, which is part of why I'd send people there first. He treats law and protection the way you'd treat any other good: something markets can produce and improve through competition rather than monopoly. Most of the book works through mechanics rather than philosophy, how rival protection agencies operating in the same territory would need some way to resolve disputes between their respective clients, how agencies might pre-negotiate to honor each other's arbitration rulings the way competing insurers already do, and how even something like national defense could in principle be funded voluntarily. He never asks you to accept anarchism as a moral starting point, but he asks you to follow the incentives.
Bruce Benson’s book, “The Enterprise of Law,” takes the opposite route. Instead of building the case from theory, he goes looking for evidence that decentralized legal orders have actually existed and worked. His strongest material covers medieval merchant law, where international traders developed and enforced their own contract rules across borders with no sovereign behind them, and Iceland's centuries as a functioning stateless society governed by competing legal specialists. He also traces English common law further back than most people assume, arguing it grew out of custom and private dispute resolution before the state ever claimed it as its own. Where Friedman asks you to imagine the system working, Benson tries to show you it already has.
Both would add a lot of layers to the initial moral and philosophical arguments I am trying to make with my focus on exclusion as remedy.
"A system of competing private enforcement bodies and private legislators with market incentives to attract the residency and business of the poor is not obviously worse."
Please elaborate.
Happy to elaborate :)
Under the current system, a poor defendant or poor business owner has almost no exit option. He can't shop for a fairer court or a cheaper enforcement regime, because the state holds a geographic monopoly and the costs of leaving (moving, lost work, family ties) fall hardest on people with the fewest resources to absorb them. A market of competing legal and enforcement providers flips that incentive. Attracting low income residents and businesses becomes a source of revenue and growth in a way it never is for a monopolist with a captive population. That's not a guarantee of good outcomes for the poor, but it is something. It's a kind of discipline the current system never has to face, because it never has to compete for anyone's business.
I kept the piece itself from going further into what a full private legal order would look like, since that's a much bigger argument than this piece was trying to make. For readers who want to go deeper, two books cover the ground from opposite directions.
David Friedman's case in “The Machinery of Freedom” is economic theory before it's moral philosophy, which is part of why I'd send people there first. He treats law and protection the way you'd treat any other good: something markets can produce and improve through competition rather than monopoly. Most of the book works through mechanics rather than philosophy, how rival protection agencies operating in the same territory would need some way to resolve disputes between their respective clients, how agencies might pre-negotiate to honor each other's arbitration rulings the way competing insurers already do, and how even something like national defense could in principle be funded voluntarily. He never asks you to accept anarchism as a moral starting point, but he asks you to follow the incentives.
Bruce Benson’s book, “The Enterprise of Law,” takes the opposite route. Instead of building the case from theory, he goes looking for evidence that decentralized legal orders have actually existed and worked. His strongest material covers medieval merchant law, where international traders developed and enforced their own contract rules across borders with no sovereign behind them, and Iceland's centuries as a functioning stateless society governed by competing legal specialists. He also traces English common law further back than most people assume, arguing it grew out of custom and private dispute resolution before the state ever claimed it as its own. Where Friedman asks you to imagine the system working, Benson tries to show you it already has.
Both would add a lot of layers to the initial moral and philosophical arguments I am trying to make with my focus on exclusion as remedy.