Nazi Flower Power wrote:I don't see it working very well. What happens if two people have a dispute and they can't agree which court to go to?
1) I would recommend checking out David Friedman's video I provided (he's a far smarter man than I and he makes his living teaching law; he specializes in polycentric legal theory and in medieval history). He goes through numerous scenarios like this to see how they would plausibly play out.
2) The point is that the system overall produces strong incentives for cooperation and smooth mechanisms for resolving disputes. Courts no doubt anticipate that there may be disagreements amongst their clients as to who should adjudicate their disputes: client A1 may subscribe to court A2, and client B1 to court B2, and neither trusts one another's court to rule fairly in a dispute involving the two. Court A2 and B2, however, have much to gain from cooperating with one another in the long term (we can't think of the conflict between A1 and B1 as an isolated incident, because there will be innumerable other cases in which the courts A2 and B2 will have to deal with one another or with other courts). So A2 and B2 have strong incentives to create a system of rules for these sorts of cases: if their clients cannot agree, they could contract a third party C2 (a third court) to resolve the dispute fairly, or both courts could simultaneously adjudicate, etc. etc. The point is that there are numerous ways through which they can resolve the dispute peacefully, and the courts have strong incentives to (in fact, their survival is dependent on) develop a procedure for resolving these disputes across cases.
3) Following from (2), it doesn't make sense to engage in aggressive behavior. I went over a long list of reasons why polycentric legal orders counterbalance aggression in my reddit post I linked, but there's a simpler argument that follows from (2). Two courts have to deal with one another routinely for a long time: breaking protocol in a particular case (especially violently) sacrifices that cooperation. So it's not just a matter of "winning the case of A1 and B1", but of sacrificing the business of all subsequent cases in which the clients of A2 and B2 disagree. Law derives its usefulness based on its ability to resolve disputes between different people, so courts cannot survive if they are unable to cooperate.
4) By means of example, imagine two cell service providers. Cell service gains value depending on how many people you can call: if subscribers to one service A1 cannot call subscribers to another service B1, A1 and B1 will lose a lot of value. They have much more to gain by cooperating and allowing customers to contact one another across services.
Having more than one agency to enforce the law isn't totally unworkable, but you still need a consensus on what the law is, and I don't see how a you would provide that without a state. I'm still not seeing how privatized law enforcement would be preferable, but possible? Yeah, OK. It's possible, but it doesn't get around the problem of needing a state to decide what the law is.
The point of polycentric law is not only that you can have more than one agency to enforce the law - that much is very easy to imagine, because history (and contemporary society) is replete with examples of this occurring. Private law enforcement is very easy to imagine; it's very easy to see, because it takes place routinely.
Polycentric law is more interesting because it implies that we can have multiple legislators of law: that is, we can have multiple different legal orders simultaneously interacting. We don't need a "consensus" legal order, but "harmony" between legal orders. I would imagine that legal orders would likely tend toward the same standard - people generally want certain policies because these are policies that make economic sense from their perspective. People are probably going to want legal agencies which protect them from fraud, for example. Because each independent legal firm (each court) only profits by providing what people want, they will provide these policies.
But there are probably examples where firms may differ in their legal services depending on material circumstances. In water-scarce regions such as the desert southwest, it's possible that there will be harsher restrictions on water use and consumption, whereas in other regions water is so abundant that conflicts over its use would not warrant norms for dispute-resolution. Maybe certain businesses will contract with one another with certain explicit understandings for restitution if one agent should fail to meet his end of the deal - this is how corporate law currently works, and it's also essentially the same as a 'prenup' that many couples take before marriage.
There are two important considerations. First, because courts gain value from their interoperability (you need to be able to resolve disputes with other courts), they will tend towards similar laws. If 1% of the population wants legalized murder and 99% does not, no court will be able to provide that service for the 1%, because no court that does so could ever resolve disputes with the other 99%.
Second, this is not identical with democracy, because the competitive and heterogenous nature of the law means that consumers both have direct control over the policies they live under (if court X provides a bad service and court Y provides a good one, consumers can switch from X to Y), and consumers actually have to pay the cost of their own policies (if you want to outlaw drugs, for example, you'll have to choose to pay the massively higher fees of a legal insurance company that will prosecute a drug war; obviously very few people are actually willing to fork over that sort of case, so no such agency could plausibly exist. We'll see a tendency towards libertarian law because these are the sorts of laws that make financial sense for most people: 'minding your own business'. In the statist system, you can pass off the costs of these policies to tax payers more broadly, so costs - in tax burden - are distributed, and people don't face the same disincentives to choosing bad policies).
This is better for a few reasons:
1) We can expect that it will choose more efficient laws, because those laws are produced in a competitive market place in which people must internalize the cost of their behavior. Competitive markets tend to approximate consumer demand better and at a lower price, and consumers can't just pass off the cost of their bad ideas to other people, so they'll make decisions more rationally.
2) A monopoly can unilaterally determine the quality, quantity, and price of the good it produces - the state can produce low-quality laws and a high price (taxes), and consumers have little recourse (we can talk about the electoral process if you want, but the evidence on this is fairly good). Per point (1), the competitive market solves better.
As for the auto manufacturing analogy, we do not have anarchy in auto manufacturing. There are antitrust laws, labor laws, etc. to prevent the automobile industry from becoming too monopolistic or abusive. Competition between auto makers works because there is a higher authority to regulate it and prevent it from derailing into something destructive
Anti-trust is not employed to break up firms in these competitive markets, though. There are certain markets in which anti-trust is employed because monopolization naturally occurs, but in others, the market remains competitive over time. There are generally reasons why monopolies come into being, though: there's only one river, for example, so only one person owns it, and you'll have to use anti-trust to break that up. But there's no "natural monopolization" of, say, the market for apples, because there's no reason why we'd expect competition to break down in that market. You have to provide an additional warrant for why you think monopolization would take place in a market (it's not just the 'presumption' in all cases).
