Hacker News Reader

Comment by praxeologist | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com