Re: Incremental Progress (was: Private Property and Capitalism)
Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Thu, 17 Oct 96 11:30:42 PDT
GBurch1@aol.com writes:
>>I focus on increasing the scope of freedom of contract by
>>indentifying first the weakest arguments for limiting such freedom,
>>and hoping to damage them enough to topple the limits which rest only on
>>those arguments. And to make my counter-arguments stick as well as
>>possible, I am formalizing them. See my papers on democratic failure
>>and product bans.
>
>This certainly has promise and I'll search for these papers at your web site,
>The problem I see is that the regimes of law with which I'm familiar
>place explicit boundaries on the realm of contract with concepts such a "void
>for illegality" and the like. Attacking these boundaries head-on will surely
>mobilize the survival instincts of the state, won't it?
Any approach to getting full freedom must at some point do this. But
why would my approach do this any earlier than an other approach? I
attack first the intellectually-strongest defenses of government,
which are very different from the most widely used defenses, so I stay
in an academic corner for a while. Mass public action I think would
be most likely to mobilize those instincts.
Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/