RE: An Original Parable about Voluntaryism
Hello. Here are the parts of your story, early on, that I think there's a problem with:
Now it just so happened that a man named Ben lived on the river halfway between the two cities. In fact, the river ran right through the center of his property.
One day, he decided he'd leverage his ownership of the river to make a little cash
So he built a wall across the river, and put one little gate in the middle.
The implication is that the protagonist would face no legal repercussions for building the gate. That assumption is not warranted.
This article from FEE is instructive. Here's one of the relevant paragraphs:
The other doctrine, which prevails in most western states, is called the appropriation doctrine. According to it, water rights may be acquired by either riparian or nonriparian landowners on a “first-come, first-served” basis. The first to make “beneficial” use of water acquires the right thereto, and in case of water shortage the rights acquired later in time have to give way first. This is not a system of pro rata distribution but a system of priorities in which prior (in time) water rights are entitled to be fully satisfied before subordinate rights can claim any water at all. These appropriation rights are rights to use certain amounts of water during specific periods of time for certain purposes. The holder of the right cannot ordinarily change the use without losing the right and cannot sell the water to someone else to use for any other purpose at any other place. The continuance of the right is dependent on exercise of it. Failure to use the water for a period of time results in forfeiture of the right.
Here's Murray Rothbard talking on the subject.
It is immediately clear that the route to justice lies along the appropriation rather than the riparian path.
Rothbard was an advocate of the appropriation doctrine. So at least to the extent that the hypothetical ancaps are Rothbardians in this respect, it seems likely that this approach to water ownership and use would be the one used on the island.
Under this doctrine, the barge operators have already homesteaded the right to use the river for their operations
Ben, by setting up his gate, is interfering with the exercise of that right. He should expect a legal challenge to his actions.
Perhaps the real moral of the story is that if you think of a scenario that seems like a difficulty for a voluntaryist order, it's a good idea spend a little extra effort to search for solutions that thinkers in this tradition have already proposed.
This is all so new to me, I have to ask - how do legal challenges work in anarchism? It seems to me that where you have laws and methods of enforcing them you have a de facto government.
Hi @spetey. I understand this isn't easy to intuit. But thankfully law and its enforcement doesn't require a state. State, in this context means (something like) a territorial monopoly on the right to initiate violence and ultimate decision making authority. The best works I've seen talking about the provision of (polycentric) law under stateless conditions are David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom - I made an illustrated summary video here:
And Micheal Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority is great too.
Faced with the alternative of 133 pages, I opted for the video after all! It was quite fascinating and gave me a much better glimpse into how anarchists think it might be a better system, thank you. I was especially intrigued by the idea of, in effect, doing price discovery on my legal values: "I am firmly opposed to all torture, but I guess I could go with the Rights Enforcement Agency (REA) that tends to contract with arbitration courts that allow torture to death, if it saves me $7,566 a year ... but not if it saved me only $7,528!"
I still have major hesitations, though perhaps those too have answers. I'll sketch them here in order from least to most worrisome. Maybe I'll try to make a separate post on them.
Anyway I have more to think about, thank you. Though I still think anarchism would be even worse than the imperfect system we have now, I have a better idea of why some think otherwise.
Thanks for the link! I hope to watch someday (though I'd generally rather read than watch a video, myself). Meanwhile I have to wonder how these laws are enforceable if there's no threat of punishment (backed by an ability to follow through that does seem to imply violence if necessary) behind them.
There are threats of violence against would-be property rights violators. There's a free PDF version of a previous edition of TMOF here: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Do not underestimate the effects of ostracizism: if Mises and Friedman boycotted the logs that Ben sells until the gate issue is resolved and also told people they will have reservations about trading with people who use Ben's logs, Ben's life becomes increasingly hard to manage while tolling the river because he will lose business and acceptance in the town. Also the concept of DROs or dispute resolution organizations is one that is just recently beginning to be explored.