Re: Why Devolution? (mayoral race)
Daniel C. Burton (dan@antispam.autobahn.org)
9 Feb 1998 08:54:33 GMT
Kevin Dempsey Peterson <peterson@ocf.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in article
<Pine.SOL.3.96.980208195554.9573C-100000@apocalypse>...
> >The
> >government should not go claiming large unused tracts of land or other
> >resources. It should leave those up to individual claims, because when
> >resources are controlled privately, they're managed in ways that
maximize
> >their value. When they're controlled by government, they aren't.
>
> But that leads to high transaction costs. My thesis is that people can
> delegate certain decisions to a central agency (the government) so that
> I don't have to negociate with the owner of each business whether I can
> walk on the sidwalk that happens to fall on his property.
Somebody else could own the entire sidewalk, and business owners could
negotiate with them for the right of their customers to use it. They could
pay a fee for the right of passage as well as reasonable upkeep. Or all
the business owners could enter a contract which says they will manage a
block of sidewalk through a business owner's association.
The same holds for roads, where free market arguments especially hold true.
Private owners could charge for actual wear and tear on the roads,
especially on highways, where you have the opportunity to stop people at
on- and off-ramps. This would be much better than funding them through a
gas tax, which ignores the fact that each car is more destructive to the
road at rush hour than at 3 AM.
"Privatize the streets" once sounded like a bit of libertarian insanity,
but now there are plenty of private tollways popping up as government
highway systems deteriorate.
> Inefficiency isn't a valid argument against the legitimacy of
> government. It is more economically efficient for me to sell the
> picture that is hanging on my wall, but I choose not to. This doesn't
> demonstrate that I don't have a legitimate right to determine what's
> done with the picture.
If you're acting rationally and you have some reason to not want to sell
the picture, it's my definition of economic efficiency for you not to sell
it. You've decided it's somehow worth more to you to keep it on the wall.
Maximizing worth from a subjective perspective is what economic
efficiency's about.
Whether or not you act rationally all the time, it is definitely the most
efficient thing posible to give you the right to make these decisions. It
is not the most efficient alternative to give government this authority.
So if practical consideration could play at all in determining the
legitimacy of government, this would be a clear-cut criterion. Economic
efficiency would limit the legitimacy of government without detracting from
the legitimacy of any of your rights.
> This isn't very clear. Sorry. What I'm saying is that you don't have
> the inherent right to leave a community without cost.
I think you're losing sight of my original argument, which is that we
should advocate free-market policies on the local level. If you don't have
an inherant right to leave a community without cost, this is a pretty good
argument for why the community should present the best situation possible,
namely a free market. If it's legitimate for there to be obstacles to
moving (which it's almost absurd to try to remove anyway), then people are
to some extend "locked into" the local level, and we have a responsibility
to provide freedom on that level now, without telling them that they can
just go someplace else.
> >Besides, my real community isn't the people who happen to live in a 3
mile
> >radius of me. It's a far-flung group of people around the Bay Area with
> >similar interests and goals as me, and most of them are anarchists of
some
> >sort or another. We may not be geographically contiguous, but why does
> >that mean we should be denied self-government?
>
> Not sure:
>
> 1. The right to govern is associated with real property.
I think I showed that this is self-contradictory and that if you fix it up
to mean what you wanted it to, it's exactly the same as #3.
> 2. A community can be any group, but we don't have teh mechanisms to
> handle non-geographic groupings right now.
Try the Free Nation Foundation's virtual canton constitution with
government jurisdictions based on voluntary choice, not geography.
Of course, that's pretty close to anarchy. If there were enough virtual
cantons, I would just choose one that's as close to anarchy as possible.
> 3. I'm wrong and the community has no right to govern. Of course, this
> implies that there is *no* basis for government, only voluntary
> agreements.
>
> 4. There are more possibilities I don't see.
Most of the traditional minarchist positions have been in this category.
John Locke throught that property rights were not absolute, but they could
only be abridged for the purpose of protecting them more generally and
assuring their uniformity. This is where he claimed government got its
legitimacy.
Of course, he specifically starts his arguments with a state of anarchy,
and in his framework, if anarchy really protected property better than
government, there would be no reason it had any legitimacy. This is what
most anarcho-capitalists assert is true and this is philosophically where
they come from.
A lot of them are very utilitarian. Utilitiarianism IS a moral position,
namely that whatever maximizes utility, in the sum, is right. This does
lead to a moral basis for the legitimacy or illegitimacy of government.
Being totally practical with no morals is not the same thing as
utilitarianism. That would be a completely subjective and egoistic
perspective that only considered you, not society in a sum. This, of
course, could not lead to an objective measure of whether a government was
legitimate or not.
What a lot of libertarians refer to as moral and practical arguments are
really just two different kinds of morality based on different values. One
is very concerned with rules, and the other is more concerned with
outcomes. Ultimately, I think, there is no one single value that is more
important than all others -- to analyze reality accurately we need a
variety of considerations.
Whether governments respect individual rights or not is important, but I
couldn't advocate it if it meant everyone would starve. Luckily it
doesn't.
I value both individual sovereignty and the good of society, as well as my
own selfish desires to some degree, and I think this is a healthy approach.
I have many other lesser values as well.