Just Chillin Posted February 29, 2016 Posted February 29, 2016 Hello fellow AnCaps; I recently had a discussion with a friend about a voluntary society and this person was very concerned about the difference between DROs and a state. Specifically, he was questioning me about the difference between having to pay a fine to a government for violating a law and having to pay increased rates to a DRO for violating a DRO law. Of course the difference is that failing to comply with the government means that the last resort of enforcement is the initiation of physical force, whereas the DRO may revoke their side of the contract and refuse to do further business with the individual, excluding him from social and economic life. This person was very perplexed at the thought of being economically ostracized, claiming that it was much more fascistic than the government's punishment of physical force. When I pushed on the moral question of force and pointed out the gun in the room, he claimed that I was paranoid and crazy and proposing an even more "forceful" society than what we have now. Did I go wrong anywhere? If I did, please explain. And, if not, how do you guys deal with people who respond in this fashion? Thanks!
Kevin Beal Posted February 29, 2016 Posted February 29, 2016 DRO's may very well be scarier than the state. How scared someone is of something doesn't make it immoral or worse than a state. That's a specious non-argument. They may even use force, if people's contracts allow for it. Why not? The point is that there is competition and it is a far more preventative, insurance-type model – not that it is nicer. If nice is what people want, then that's the DRO people will pick. The point is the customer decides what is of most utility to them and the enforcement of their contracts. He's just using words: "fascistic", "paranoid", "forceful", etc. He's not proving anything. The future will most likely include a wide variety of conflict resolution approaches including DRO's, home owner associations, business associations, educational associations, personal reputation apps etc. It may even be that DRO's are reserved for very serious contracts and would be seen as overkill for most types of disputes. My thinking is that they should be scary. I don't accept the premise that scary is bad. 1
shirgall Posted March 1, 2016 Posted March 1, 2016 Contracts which violate the law are invalid, so it may well be that you can posit a contract with a DRO that does not, in fact, enable the use of force. I am not Anarchist Caveman Lawyer. Tort bad. Mutuality good.
dsayers Posted March 1, 2016 Posted March 1, 2016 this person was very concerned about the difference between DROs and a state. ...he claimed that I was paranoid and crazy and proposing an even more "forceful" society than what we have now. Is love making more forceful than rape? I suppose it can be, but consent is the difference.
Just Chillin Posted March 1, 2016 Author Posted March 1, 2016 Thank you gentlemen, I appreciate your responses. I guess I will just have to brush his claims off, since they have no logical basis but are instead emotional attacks.
Mister Mister Posted March 1, 2016 Posted March 1, 2016 Hello fellow AnCaps; I recently had a discussion with a friend about a voluntary society and this person was very concerned about the difference between DROs and a state. Specifically, he was questioning me about the difference between having to pay a fine to a government for violating a law and having to pay increased rates to a DRO for violating a DRO law. Of course the difference is that failing to comply with the government means that the last resort of enforcement is the initiation of physical force, whereas the DRO may revoke their side of the contract and refuse to do further business with the individual, excluding him from social and economic life. This person was very perplexed at the thought of being economically ostracized, claiming that it was much more fascistic than the government's punishment of physical force. Hello, Just Chillin. That's a very interesting question. What does it mean "more fascistic"? Of course you realize that's not an argument, just an adjective, right? I wonder how much this could relate to emotional defenses around childhood trauma. Most children prefer physical abuse to neglect, and will act out knowing they will get yelled at or spanked rather than be ignored. Just something I thought of. Are you close enough with this person that you could investigate this? One strategy when breaking these things down for people, is to look at interpersonal ethics at a more individual level, and extrapolate from there, before speculating how a whole society of millions of people might be organized. Do they recognize that, at a personal level, economic and social ostracization is perfectly legal, while physical force is not? Would they rather date someone who was openly willing to use force as a consequence for disobedience (only as a last resort of course), or someone who was merely willing to withdraw contact from them, and try to persuade others to do the same? It is in some ways a legitimate concern, that people will unfairly ostracize someone and cause immense distress to that person. But that is not ONLY the problem of a free society. That happens today. A child might be kicked out of their home at 15 because they are gay or renounce the faith of their parents. Scores of people have lost their jobs due to hysterical SJW campaigns, over a quote taken out of context, or a slight difference of opinion, such as 80 year old Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt who made a joke about women in the lab being a distraction (referring to how he met his wife), or the Mozilla CEO who was fired and remains unemployed because he had donated to an organization which was anti-gay-marriage, at the same time that Obama and Hillary were still anti-gay-marriage. So is this person you're talking to at all concerned with this kind of fascist economic ostracism? So it's true, economic ostracism is a weapon, like physical force in some ways, that can be used for good or for evil, regardless of whether we live in a free society or not. That's why we have to push for reason and voluntarism. As for the difference between DROs fees and government fines, there are two big ones. One is the question of whether the laws are just, and the punishments reasonable. We aren't advocating for DROs to kidnap cocaine-addicts, bust prostitution rings, enforce school curricula, mandate business licenses, and so on. The other thing is that a government fine is completely arbitrary, while a DRO fee would have been agreed to beforehand, and like most competitive market prices, is a constantly adjusted calculation of profits and losses, risks and rewards, costs and benefits. A good example is government parking fines, where you could have your day or even week or month RUINED because you parked 2 minutes longer than you anticipated, and now have a $120 fine. If I keep a movie from the video store 2 days longer than I said I would, they don't subject me to those kinds of fines, because if they did I would never shop there. But the government has a monopoly of course. So you made a reasonable argument about something very important, and your "friend" throws some very strong insults at you. Has it occurred to you that these insults could just as easily apply to him, and may in fact be projection? If you are paranoid and crazy for accurately describing violence as a consequence for disobedience to the government, is he/she not paranoid for imagining unprecedented disaster as a result of commonly accepted business practices by a hypothetical security company in the future? At a certain point, when you are discussing these things, a person satisfactorily demonstrates they are committed to irrationality. When you know this for sure, there is no longer much benefit to arguing with them.
Just Chillin Posted March 2, 2016 Author Posted March 2, 2016 Wow RoseCodex, a fantastic reply with fantastic insights and depth; I really appreciate your time. I've known this person for about a year and am not too familiar with his childhood, but from what he has told me, he did not suffer very much punishment for his actions; he believes he was "too free" and frequently characterizes his mother as a very passive individual. His parents were divorced so his father wasn't too much in the picture; I don't know much about him.So is it reasonable to assume that maybe this person received a decent amount of attention (he was not very much "socially ostracized") from his parents/mother especially and that perhaps this links with his fear of DRO ostracism; he is afraid of being alone or not being noticed. But according to the mainstream, he believes that physical force (spanking in his childhood) would have been warranted, and perhaps this is why he is more sympathetic with government action/physical force. But I have no idea; I've yet to study childhood and psychology in detail.
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