I took the liberty of going back a few pages. When I was arguing for aiming for equality between the sexes, even if that means differing treatment, you said:

> "It's not "ridiculous" to point out that you are arguing for the use of aggressive force to achieve ends that are illogical and impossible, that you are completely unable to defend without self-contradiction, and that amount to nothing more than an abuse and *unequality* of arbitrary power."

Right? Now you argued:

> "The Devil's in the detail."

As in, the line is somewhere, but you can't say for sure where. Which is what I was saying when you attacked my policy idea as "illogical and impossible" because I couldn't tell you precisely where the line was.

In short, you have a losing argument by your own standards - you are advocating arbitrary aggression to intervene where someone, somewhere sees the threat of non-consensual sex.

The idea of privatising law enforcement is interesting, but again could go HORRIBLY wrong. Especially because the judgment you get would depend entirely on which court you happened to go to. For a fair system there are a number of requirements:

1) Consistency
2) Independence
3) A fair appeal/review system

I can see a lot of issues with the system you are proposing. In Australia, our judges are given life tenure and a guaranteed salary, meaning that there are no incentives for them to give judgments other than what they think is just.

Also, we have several levels of appeal and the courts all work from each other's decisions so that there is some measure of consistency. Again, it's not perfect, but the system you are proposing would surely lead to decisions being influenced by other factors, such as profits and pressure groups. Also, the different systems would be competing for more customers, meaning that their success or failure would be measured by how they appealed to the people who go to court. Surely the more _appealing_ court would be the one that gives you an easier judgment or the one that pays more compensation etc.

The difference between your difficulties and mine are that you have no objection *in principle* to the use of coercion to bully people into getting what one wants. I oppose it consistently in principle, the problem being that in some cases it’s difficult or impossible to know *in practice* whether or not there was in fact consent or coercion.

* * *

The idea of freely competing justice services runs so contrary to such a centuries-old norm, into which we are born and indoctrinated, that it can be hard to get one’s head around it. For example the 3 virtues of a law enforcement system that you mention are virtues of a *state monopoly* system. So long as the parties have voluntarily chosen the procedure, and impose no costs on third parties, there is no virtue in other procedures being imposed from outside; and indeed no way of *knowing* that any extraneous values are fairer than the other values the parties are trying to achieve.

(Besides, the state justice system is obviously not “independent” of the biggest aggressor – the state. And there can be no “fairness” in Caesar appealing to Caesar. And neither legislative nor judicial law-making is consistent – they routinely contradict their own prior decisions.)

There are successful examples of private security services all around us. The starting point is to recognize that police and justice services are kinds of security services. Examples with police are competing private security firms. Examples with investigation/forensic services are competing insurance firms.

We see examples of competing “courts”, and jurisprudence, in commercial law, where parties to a contract nominate an adjudicator in case of dispute. The arbitrators or “judges” are usually respected experts in their field. Different judges may, and do, judge the same set of facts differently and by adhering to their own precedents, thus produce and offer on the market different competing systems of jurisprudence. The more respected judges are more in demand, and the rules they formulate tend to be adopted more generally, as being better at resolving disputes, i.e. fairer.

Why do the parties do this?

Because it is quicker, fairer and much cheaper than the dilatory, expensive and highly unsatisfactory government monopoly courts.

What prevents this from becoming the general pattern is that the government courts actively squelch it, surprise surprise. The monopoly courts override contracts agreeing to make the adjudicators’ decisions binding, thus in effect banning their competition!

It may be said that what prevents such a market in jurisprudence from degenerating into chaos is the over-arching protection of the state. But this assumes what is in issue; and the sovereign states are, as between themselves, in the same state of “anarchy” that they say is non-viable for sovereign individuals.

We would expect a monopoly agency that can unilaterally charge what “prices” it wants, and unilaterally define what “services” to provide, to
a) constantly increase what it charges
b) constantly re-define what justifies its intervention so as to increase its own power
c) constantly provoke disputes which it intervenes in to settle in its own favour.
And this is what we do in fact see with the state.

An expropriating property protector is a contradiction in terms, as is a defender with an open-ended licence for aggression. We would expect from such an agency a state of perpetual war. And that’s what we see with the modern democratic states – who also replaced the old monarchical limited war, with modern total war. We would expect them to be launching property violations on an unprecedented scale, and to be constantly talking up new division and disharmony. And that’s exactly what we do see.

We would expect such an agency to produce results less and less satisfactory from the “consumers’” point of view, and to be run more and more to further the interests of those running it. And that’s exactly what we do see.

Thus it is probably untrue that democratic states minimize aggression, property violations and injustice in the community – they aggravate them.

Anyway, nice to have a civil discussion instead of the ad hominem bunfight that too often passes for debate in here. Just out of curiosity are you a lawyer?

Alright, just got to reading that treatise you linked to, so now I feel like I know where you're coming from more - although I was really surprised at how poorly reasoned it mostly was. It provided very little evidence for most of its claims and seemed to just assume that the reader would agree with every assertion, many of which were extremely dubious.

>"The difference between your difficulties and mine are that you have no objection *in principle* to the use of coercion to bully people into getting what one wants. I oppose it consistently in principle, the problem being that in some cases it’s difficult or impossible to know *in practice* whether or not there was in fact consent or coercion. "

No, you agree with me that in certain cases, it is ok to use coercion to prevent a greater crime - for instance, coercion is justifiable to prevent rape, whatever you define "rape" to be. The problem with your reasoning is that you presume this is not coercion, somehow things you agree with are an exception.

WRT commercial law, you're overlooking the fact that if a ruling is unjust, the parties can always appeal to the courts - there is a check mechanism. Individual arbitrators cannot stray from the actual law and if they do, courts can overrule them.

Saying that, I see a lot of validity to what you're proposing - in Commercial law. I think that it would be beneficial to allow companies to be bound by looser or tighter sets of regulations based on cost vs safety provided. However, law enforcement is a completely different issue - whoever is enforcing the law must necessarily have more power than whoever is not, otherwise the law is not *enforced* per se. You can't honestly expect to have an "opt-in" criminal law system - it would mean that those who opted-out would be able to commit crimes with impunity.

Here's my central issue with the treatise you linked to: it's poor understanding of economics. It dismissed that humanity is only aggressive as there is proof that humanity can be logical. What it overlooked is the whole idea of _incentives_. Humans act aggressively partly by nature, but also where there is an incentive to do so - similar for restraint. A government that is scrutinised enough and is accountable to "the people", in that they can be voted-out by a majority, will be less likely to be self-serving as a result. That's the key factor that is being overlooked in this absolute libertarianism.

There is no practical reason why Angus Houston couldn't just take over the country if he disagreed with the government - but we know that he never will. In most other countries, he would - there are constantly such military coups occurring and most of the world is run by military governments. The reason he actually can't is that the military wouldn't follow him, because they don't trust in him enough. The unique history of Western Europe, particularly Britain and France, has resulted in a system and a society with so many checks on power that no single person or group can take all of it - not even the ones who technically hold it.

Of course I am opposed in principle to "might is right", however we have to recognise that it *is* right in practise - the mightiest will necessarily be able to impose their will on the less mighty, so will be "right" for all intents and purposes. I argue that the best system is one that distributes might as far as possible, whilst implementing checks and balances on said might. Our institutions all work incredibly intricately to keep each other in check, some of which (i.e. the media) are not state-run at all. A democracy places power in the hands of the majority, the system you propose would practically place power in the hands of whatever stronger minority is able to gain more power than the majority. That is why I am opposed to it.

(And yes, it has been a nice discussion and I am actually a law student - and to come clean, I'm the author of the original article, which is why I as following the debate so far in the first place...)