Re: Anarcho-Capitalism Stability

Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Mon, 24 Feb 1997 13:51:17 -0800 (PST)


T0Morrow@aol.com writes:
>I'm unwilling to claim that noone can whup the "national" defense problem.

Nor am I. But neither am I willing to claim that someone will whup it.

>2) Among the probable social technologies for internalizing the benefits of
>"national" defense in a polycentric legal order, I would count social
>sanctions, with voluntary donations to defense efficiently tracked and tied
>to a variety of services. See, eg, the United Way's devices. ...
>Better to advocate jurisdiction based on express consent and let
>entrepreneurs take a crack at such problems as national defense and
>cross-jurisdictional conflicts.

I'm not sure how much experimentation I'd put up with, especially
regarding an approach like this that I have strong doubts about. The
downside to a failed experiment could be pretty drastic.

>Another appealling device, especially to large legal systems paying
>for defense: Peace. (Permit me, if you will, a "duh.")

If there are substantial scale economies which can preserve large legal
systems even if they pay far more than their fair share of defense
costs, then likely they will pay most of the bill. But with such
scale economies its not clear just how much legal diversity we'd have.

Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/