The best way to respond to you is by the use of examples now, since you've just told me what the basic conception of 'libertarian law' is. The reason that I choose to go with road safety rather than with road construction, is because I know that roads are constructed by private companies in accordance with the centralised specifications and codes laid down by the state, and the state is a the customer that is contracting that work.
The state is an amalgamation of ruling class interests, and road safety is such a basic thing that pretty much every state in every epoch of every ideology, uses the exact same argument to justify itself on that issue, and I have yet to come across anyone that can withstand it once they've been shown it. I first realised the power of this argument when I realised the police in the UK, and police in the
DPRK, both used the exact same argument for their own existence as traffic police. When I realised that, I realised that I had just found a universally applicable 'statist' argument.
The argument is that contrary to 'libertarian law', enforcing road safety actually
demands and requires the initiation of
force in order for it to be effective.
You say:
taxizen wrote:Law is very simple and its jurisdiction is universal: rightful owners are owed restitution for the harm they suffer from those that were the cause of it. Law has nothing to say until harm or loss occurs.
This would end in disaster. You claim that policy would come to the rescue. My question then is by what policy you would be able to deal with the following imminent threats:
- The driver of an LGV or HGV is texting on his phone while driving on a dual carriageway.
- A person driving a lorry has transitioned from one jurisdiction into another jurisdiction simply by turning off onto another road. He may or may not be breaking a policy in one or both jurisdictions, but before anyone can check, he's turned off onto another private road with different policies.
- A 24 year old male in libertopia takes a pint of lager and drinks it, smokes some weed which is perfectly legal in libertopia, and fearlessly gets into his car and drives onto a B-road at 0300 in the morning. Because alcohol and cannabis interact in a special way, the 24 year old has boundless confidence, elements of basic driving competence, but actually lacks one crucial ability. The ability to do 'tracking'. This means that on the first bend he encounters, he will drift over the centre-line. If no one can legally remove him and his car from the road for any 'victimless offence' involved in all this, it means that everyone has to wait for him to have a head-on collision with someone else on a corner in the dark, in order for action to be taken.
- A company cutting corners on van maintenance is operating a van that has brakes that may be failing, but in libertopia different jurisdictions have different standards which create confusion, and no one is there to scan number plates to grab people who haven't had an MOT anymore, so that dangerous van can essentially drive and drive until it actually has an accident.
- A 37 year old male paedophile on cocaine driving without a licence or insurance in an old Vauxhall Astra, is spotted crossing from a roundabout into a residential area during the summer holidays when children are out playing at 1100. Of course, no one can actually see this information about him, because those things are not visible with the naked eye. All you can see is what he looks like, the fact that the car is an old Astra, and that the man is not wearing his seatbelt. In a 'statist' environment, particularly states like the UK, and Japan, they follow a profiling concept of 'one thing leads to another'. That is to say, someone who fits the profile of a suspicious person - male, on the road at 1100, turning into a residential area, driving too slow, driving a non-respectable car - and is breaking a law by not wearing a seatbelt, may be a person worth pulling over. Because once you get their car door open and take them on the seatbelt issue and run their details, you might find out all the other stuff that you couldn't see at first. Police actually do that as a tactic for catching people. But in libertopia, none of that happens, and this suspect goes on his way unimpeded and unsearched, to do something bad to someone, somewhere, and cause untold grief and suffering.
- A man is spotted hopping on one leg and growling at 2300 on a side road in an out of the way town with very few residents. He is actually a crazy person on bath salts and PCP. In libertopia, he bounces along on his way without being stopped by anyone, because no-one can aggress against him until he finally aggresses against someone else.
- Someone approaches a roundabout in a car and completely fails to negotiate the roundabout. They end up with their car in the centre of the roundabout. Since the person has caused no damage to anything other than their own car, there is no punishment whatsoever for this madness?
- A 20 year old male driving a car that his friend lent to him, a car which he is not insured to drive, drives the wrong way up a dual carriageway against oncoming traffic for 500 metres before turning into side road because he thought it would be cool and daring to make that kind of shortcut rather going up the correct side and then looping back as normal. No one was hurt. Normally, in a 'statist' society, that is a 'victimless crime' which quite rightfully results in a points penalty and a fine if caught, along with a search of the car, additional background checked, court proceedings, and maybe even a driving ban and car seizure. But in libertopia no one can do a damned thing about it, and that guy will run along and possibly do it again some other time until his luck runs out and he kills somebody's child.
I mean, I don't even have to follow this sort of stuff up with an argument. These examples are like arguments
in and of themselves.
taxizen wrote:1. The state is not a rightful owner of the roads, therefore its policy is not rightfully enforceable.
Well, this the 'moral argument', but we obviously have very different morals. From my perspective, I know that 75% of road fatalities are caused by males between ages 18 and 25, or something close to that. The thing I am most interested in when it comes to roads, is not letting these people kill themselves and others.
It is such a simple request, to not be killed during the mundane act of travelling from one place to another place. It really is a simple request, and it's one that seems to inherently require the initiation of force.
taxizen wrote:2. The state has no incentive to please or provide value for money to the users of the roads as it obtains funding through force rather than contract.
The state has every incentive to run the road safety services that it runs, because economic interests run the state, and it is not in the rational best interest of the economic interests that control the state, to have transportation - a vital element of commerce - be like some kind of Russian roulette game.
The state is also a centralised body with a monopoly on a force and a mandate to pre-emptively charge people for committing offences
before anything bad even happens. That makes the state as a concept, the absolute best tool for this kind of problem.
- By skinster
- By Potemkin
- By FiveofSwords