Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

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It's a good question. I guess freedom comes from things like "limited government" and "pluralism", not directly from democracy, and maybe those things are more important than actually letting the people rule themselves -- for an individual person, the notion of their vote being a meaningful voice in a democratic government is kind of a fantasy anyway. But there's not really any better guarantees of freedom under any other system.

The whole "let's have lots of micro-states with easy exit" condition proposed by these advocates here sounds borderline quasi-plausible, IF somehow you could get that going to begin with (not bloody likely)... but even from a purely economic perspective, the transaction costs in choosing a new place to live and moving there are very high, so one would suspect this layout would lead to inefficient results. (and that's economic efficiency, which includes your overall well-being.) And who enforces that you get to up and leave whenever you want, anyway? The other micro-states, using WAR?

I do wonder whether by 'freedom' some people mean 'absolute personal freedom' rather than the greatest freedom for the greatest number.

Now it is true that a right of absolute personal freedom is incompatible with democracy, but it is also incompatible with pretty much all other forms of political structure, not to mention most physical laws, the existence of birth and death, and everyone else's right of absolute personal freedom.

Also, about the 'easy exit' conditions, I do wonder who is going to tell the royals to stick to the conditions if they decide to ban folk from leaving a particular state.

How about no states? I just subscribe to the protection agency I like, no need to move, nobody claiming arbitrary sovereignty over a whole geographic area. This is a less common type of legal system than whatever flavor of statism but societies like this existed and maintained civil order for centuries.

But doesn't any such successful agency become a state in its own right?

No, a state is a territorial monopoly. There might be some local/state/federal hierarchy, but whatever place you live in everyone has the same "stack". There's studies that show police in monopoly systems wait and respond to crime much more often than actively patrolling and preventing crime.

A polycentric legal order would have people living in one area who might subscribe to any number of different private security and arbitration firms.

But how would they enforce the laws you subscribe to without having people with guns in your general vicinity willing to do violence on your behalf, and what's the value if you're not interacting with people who subscribe to the same?

Perhaps you could say their different agencies come to some sort of an agreement in regards to disputes or conflicts between the laws subscribed to by different people. But where such agreements exist they would be made for the mutual benefit of the corporations and not necessarily their customers. To me the end result still looks a lot like a state, just one in which cartels stand in for governments.

You need a Deliverator for that, they weren't invented yet.

The micro state idea is problematic. Most modern examples are effectively parasites on the surrounding nations. Singapore and Lichtenstein do tax evasion and money laundering for a living. They also skim talented people off other countries.

The big problem with the micro state idea is military power. Much of the stability apparent in the modern world is really down to the military might of regional powers. Leaving libertarian fantasy land of peacefully trading small states, what seems more probable and historically accurate is feuding for supremacy by any means.

Despite all the computer oriented techno wankery around here, the biggest value of the continental United States is still the Mississippi watershed. Anyone who controls it will be a world power. You can't realistically break it up into stable micro states.

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