> > > You know Lee, here is a point I have never been satisfied with in the
> > > Libertarian or free market approach. How is privately produced law
> > > enforcable?
> >
> > With guns, just like regular law. How else?
>
> um... I supoose you are being sarcastic. Unless you are talking about some
> kind of paid gun for hire mafia or gangbanger hit squad.
No, I'm being as plain as I can be. Isn't that what "enforce" means?
Isn't that exactly what a "government" is, a generally-agreed-upon
gun-for-hire? Private protection systems will be no different--the
only difference is that there will be a market of competing ones
instead of a single monopoly. If you wrong me, the agency I've hired
to protect me will want to earn that fee by seizing you physically
and extracting whatever punishment its policies call for. The agency
/you've/ hired will want to prevent this, and the two will likely
negotiate a contract between themselves about how to settle the
dispute (which will probably involve arbitration by a private judge).
But the end result is just the same as it is with a monopoly
government--eventually, whoever is judged wrong is seized physically
by armed agents and fined or jailed or whatever (in a private/civil
system, fines and property seziures will be more common than jail time
because it is more economically efficient).
This is all really basic stuff that's covered well by Friedman and
others, so I won't elaborate more.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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