Comment by oleganza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oleganza | Hacker News Reader

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Insurance.

If you buy a house in a district, you may or may not buy an insurance against neighbour's misbehaviour. But the first condition of the insurance is that you respect your neighbours yourself according some existing arrangements (specified in your insurance). Now if anyone is too loud when not appropriate, or drunk as hell, or peeing on your lawn, the insurance company will:

1. Pay you a compensation.

2. Make investigation.

3. Penalize the neighbour by raising his insurance fees (or via his insurer as they'd have some mutual agreements) or demanding a compensation from him. If he does not pay, his insurance is simply cancelled without cops and jails.

4. For ugly cases when neighbour is misbehaving too much (killing pets, breaking windows etc.), insurance company may have also agreements with water supplier's, wifi supplier's etc insurance companies that supplier cuts water/wifi/etc until the guy pays a compensation. Again, without cops, laws, police.

And if the guy goes to journalists and alternative insurer to whom he'll prove he wasn't that bad, just someone is exaggerating, then that insurer will make a good PR case and steal customers from abusive insurers. Or highlight the whole neighbourhood as a weird place to be or something.

The main point is, it's all done without guns and jails. This way every party has voice and can communicate their position any time they want to anyone. And insurers would have to strike a good balance between protecting customers and pissing them off. Like any non-monopoly business is doing already anywhere in the world.

So in one district it could be 100% okay to smoke and get drunk, while in another people would prefer less loud activities. The idea of a regional law just does allow this to happen.

You're proposing giving insurance companies the power to switch off my power, water and internet when they feel like it? Sounds like an excellent opportunity to abuse power.

First, laws, guns and police are much more excellent opportunities to abuse power and already attract all sorts of sadists and psychopaths.

Second, there is no "giving power" anywhere in the voluntary agreements. Your water will be turned off only if your water supplier thinks it's more profitable to please some insured customers than not piss you off. If they turn your water off unreasonably, they risk losing clients.

Policemen and congressmen do not have to please any customers and never suffer economical consequences if they don't. This attracts psychos of all sorts in the realm of brutal state power.

> If they turn your water off unreasonably, they risk losing clients

No, they risk getting sued. If my water company decided one day to turn off my water based on some bullshit claim of one of my neighbours, I would sue the shit out of them.

There are such things as contracts and consumer protection laws you know.

As a disclaimer, I live in Romania, Europe and what you're describing wouldn't be possible here. But it's funny how we've got less problems with drugs, even though Europe on the whole is more relaxed about drug usage than you are. More than 50% of incarcerations in your federal prisons are for drug offences and you've got the highest incarceration rates of all countries. To me that's a sign that you've been fixing the symptoms, rather than the real disease, making it worse in the process.

And really, I don't think that placing such power in your insurance companies would do any good. In theory abuse would be prevented by competition. In practice however, monopolies / oligopolies happen and insurance companies are primarily focused on minimizing risk, so you'd better have a good story when going from one insurer to the next.

I'm from Russia and live in France. I don't care about drugs, I care about people not bullying each other over unproved made-up values and ideals.

When I talk about insurance, I talk about voluntary agreements. About giving as much "power" to insurance company as you want. If they suddenly begin carrying guns and threatening people instead of having peaceful arrangements, customers will go away and all the funding for weapons will quickly end (or they won't, it's their choice). Also keep in mind that any enterprise needs savers who will invest their hard-earned money. They wouldn't like to gamble with a risk of losing all their money and customers by doing something people wouldn't like. Like shooting, killing, spying.

If you say that your ideal is being able to "sue" someone, what you are really saying is that you wish to use unilateral violent power to be directed on someone you disagree with. Now you have a problem. Because you won't be able to control that power. You'd either have to become part of that power (and fight hard with other such ruthless guys), or stay away from it and watch it being used upon you too whether you like it or not. Courts, police and politicians are not enterprise: they didn't have voluntarily invested private money that feeds them. They first take the money from every person by force, then decide what they want to do with it. This makes the whole motivational structure reversed and inherently abusive.

So fuck that shit. As I mentioned many times again on HN, pro-government or pro-law rhetoric is no different from religious bullshit that one group of people uses on another group of people at the expense of someone else.

"Without religion and church there's no morality" => "without government we'll have anarchic chaos"

"You must trust pope because he's set here by God" => "You must trust mr. president because there is society that elected him"

"If god does not exist, who created everything?" => "Without government how would we build roads and fly to the moon?"

"The Bible says what's good and what's bad" => "The constitution defines our rights."

"If you are against religion, you are against morality" => "If you are against government, you are against society".

Isn't this just a protection racket? The water company will turn off your water supply if a richer group asks for it. That sounds like a nightmare.

Stop for a second and think why would abstract "richer group" ask for it and how would abstract "poorer group" prevent this from happening?

E.g. if the "richer group" got rich not via favors from monopoly of violence, but from efficiently servicing "poorer group", why would they risk massive boycotts and end of well-running business for a short-term benefit? Imagine if Amazon suddenly decides to print books using blood of cute little kittens because it's slightly more profitable. Would they think twice whether customers would be eager to buy those books?

Or you'd prefer a mythically benevolent all-powerful organization with guns, nukes and tons of paperwork that will create an appearance of "protection of piece and order" which you will never be able to control or affect?

This has nothing to do with preferences. The world is full of rich groups and governments that got there thorough favors and exercise of power if not violence.

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