Redrawing Democracy: A Vision

I've been thinking today about my personal vision for the kind of society I would like to live in, a sort of "ideal picture" of an ideal country. It's actually pretty specific, and I think I am finding words to describe this picture. The first part is unabashed utopianism. The second part is serious "political science-fiction" as I like to call it.

Physically, visually, it looks somewhat like a plant, with each part being of equal importance, though some parts are more visible than others. The roots would be in the countryside, where much of the population growth would occur and a reserve of unspecialized yet hardworking people would be maintained, where both new population and raw materials would originate. The stem would be a network of incrementally larger transportation arteries and commercial hubs, from an unmanaged network of dirt and gravel backroads linking rural communities to more paved roads and rails, to factory towns that process the raw materials, finally to the flower of the society: the cities. The cities would be clean, dynamic places, where the great variety of cultural, commercial, and industrial forces that originate in the countryside would shine, hybridize in ever changing ways, as people, products, and ideas moved in and out.

The Root (Country)

The roots would be an essentially unorganized countryside. There would not, in this society, be an organized, State-driven effort to extend the amenities of urban civilization to the farthest reaches. In other words, tax dollars would not be spent to directly extend or subsidize the extension of things like transportation and communication networks to these places. If the phone company sees no profit in extending phone lines to a particular community (and the people of that community are unwilling and/or unable to finance the extension of the network to their community), the lines would not be extended. If the only way to build a paved highway to such a place is coercive finance, the road would not be built.

Th result of this would be that unique rural communities would be more able to continue their existence. Places where labor specialization is less, where jacks-of-all-trades flourish, where traditional values are under less pressure by a ubiquity of instant communication with the rest of society. The various communities would be highly diverse, with some being ethnically diverse, others ethnically homogenous. Some places would host things like free-love hippie communes, while others would host more religiously motivated communities. Some would be essentially commercial operations, focused on profitably providing raw materials for a market. Others, particularly ones further off the beaten path, could be more idealistically founded. There would be a government over this all, but the primary purpose of this government would be to ensure that no particular group of individuals could either monopolize the available resources or impose their communal visions on others.

From these places more adventurous souls could come, migrating to the cities with no particular specialization but a well developed work ethic, revitalizing urban cultures that all too often lose sight of the value of hard work and perseverance in favor of blaming their neighbors for their woes. To these places could go the world-weary of the urban world, who would have a wide range of communities to choose from, and be able to revitalize rural cultures that all too often lose sight of the value of innovation in favor of a dogmatic adherence to tradition.

Ultimately, the character of the root would be a spectrum of degrees of connectivity to the world market, ensuring that there are always places where the value of hard work and personal perseverance is always apparent, unlike in urban societies where the value is often more abstract, hidden as it is by layer upon layer of business-controlled access to capital and other resources.

In our current society (Western civilization and the more urbanized Asian civilizations), the root is undervalued, weakened by well-meaning but misguided efforts to extend the benefits of modern civilization to these places by any means necessary. The result is a sort of grafting-on of the rural societies in other parts of the world, as population growth slows in over-urbanized societies and are are gradually replaced by alien populations. The civilization I describe would be a more balanced civilization, accepting its less incorporated rural populations as kin (being linguistically compatible with their urban counterparts), with an economically resisted but politically free flow of individuals between the root and the flower. Urban civilization would also be more evenly distributed, as opposed the overconcentration of urban communities in the geographic West, with rural populations on the outside.

The Flower (Shining City)

Cities would ideally be clean, prosperous, diverse, and well-engineered, with multi-use buildings being the norm, "zoning" being minimal. These would be the places to which raw materials would flow, both physical and cultural, and from which refined materials would be released, from manufactured products to novel cultural movements. Populations would be dense, and the ubiquity of mass transit would make it possible to travel by foot alone (auto accidents would be few, with most of the drivers being those who have no choice due to their professions). Further, most of the cities would be linked by advanced mass transit (high speed rail?), allowing convenient, almost seamless movements of people and goods between the most advanced cities. Travel between the cities and less urban communities would have a continuum of convenience, from being able to reach the larger towns via older rail systems, the smaller towns via less developed roads, to remote communities that one can reach by inconsistenly maintained gravel roads... at best. And there would yet be places the hardiest of urban tourists would have to themselves, reachable only by foot (whether human or equine).

To these places would come the more adventurous persons of rural origins, hungering for a faster paced and more competitive life than exists in the countryside. From these places would depart those who are weary of that same fast pace and high level of competition, and they would have a wide variety of places to choose from. Thanks to the equitable distribution of access to natural resources (most chiefly, access to physical space, to be described in a later section on the political institutions defending this society), "captive" populations mired in urban poverty would not exist. Further, due to those same institutions, city boundaries could shift and move periodically, to account for changes over time, speeding the decomposition of the dead institutions of dying cities.

Branch and Stem (Everything In Between)

The cities would not be walled; the country would not be isolated. The chief characteristic of the connecting tissue would be variety, variety, variety. There would not be one single plan defining the nation's transportation system. Larger towns, serving as hubs of trade and manufacturing between the two extremes, could be connected by robust transportation systems. But there would yet be places connected by only the most tenuous threads, with minimal (but still present) commercial connection to the urban flower. The further one got from the most rural communities, the more diverse the communities would become. While the great megatropolises would connect with others around the world, the smaller cities would connect regionally. But new transportation systems would be established in an organic fashion. Megatropolises could shrink to more regional status; new cities could rise (though this happens less often than one might think, with the oldest city sites having been continually occupied).

I'm not sure what else to say about this.

Bark and Thorn: Government

There would be, constitutionally speaking, two levels of government: the national and the local. Local could be big in some places, representing the populations of entire cities or wide-ranging territories. It could also be small in other places, representing entirely independent villages or even individual homesteads.

The concept would be that all individuals have an equal right of access to the land. By default (due to the absence of equally distributed "ancestral estates" in most of the world), this right would be exercised by equal and inalienable ownership of shares in a single corporation, which would function as the national government.

This government would collect "taxes" in form only. In substance, they would simply be rents paid for the privilege of excluding others from use of land resources, which would include everything from physical, geographic space, to the limited capacity of the atmosphere (locally and globally) to process the byproducts of human activities, to exclusive use of segments of the electromagnetic spectrum. It would always seek to collect the most it could, keeping rents at revenue-maximizing levels (seeking neither to raise them so high it hurts productivity, nor lower than necessary). It would spend these revenues on whatever the board of directors, elected by the population at large, decided was necessary. Any extra would be returned to the shareholders (read: again, the population at large) as a dividend.

Ideally, in my opinion, this government would focus primarily on defense of people against aggressors, both foreign and domestic, keeping the peace and leaving more in-depth governing to the lower levels of government, and thus returning as much of its revenues as a dividend as possible (this practice is what is meant by "geolibertarianism"). This is what I would advocate as a participant of the political process. However, the actual results could be whatever the citizenry enabled via the board of directors.

Local governance would not be set in stone, and would be formed in the following manner. Groups of shareholders would have the right to redeem, temporarily, their corporate share in exchange for a physical share of the land equal in value to their share of the corporation. Essentially, segments of the population could "secede" from the level and govern themselves in whatever manner was mutually agreeable to the participants. They would, first, have to had legal occupancy of that land; they would have to already "own" it and be paying the appropriate rents for it (which would tend to be higher per square foot in urban areas, and potentially nearly-free in the most remote rural areas). The value the population would receive back as a dividend if the rents could somehow be collected without bureaucratic overhead and the government returned the entire amount as a dividend would have to equal the rents that would normally be paid for protected occupancy.

From that point until the expiration of the charter, no more than fifty years later, the national government would not collect physical land rents from this area, nor would they exercise jurisdiction over internal affairs in this area. (They would still collect, and its people would still participate politically, in a limited fashion as joint-owners of overlapping broadcast regions and pollution basins.) At expiration, the population would be re-issued their shares in the national government, the land be returned, and if they so desired and the re-assessed rental-value still matched the re-counted population (and they all still wanted to participate), the charter could be re-established. I suspect, however, that people more often would take this opportunity to adjust borders, try entirely new divisions, or even return to direct national governance.

Examples of how this might work include cities that make the decision to become "free cities", establishing independent political institutions (particularly independent of more tradition-bound rural populations), collecting local revenues more efficiently, spending them locally on urban priorities, and so on. It could include a small town that wants to defend it's unique local character from what it perceives as an overbearing national government. It could include an individual homestead, the members of which want to attempt a fully "market anarchist" type of political life. It could include a pioneering community, who believe the rental-value of an area could be substantially higher given some work, and who could use this institution to secure the benefits of putting in that work and taking the risk over a period of fifty years... but not allowing their descendants to perpetually place themselves over the remainder of the population.

Most importantly, it would include a great variety of different sizes and types of local governance, making such a country, overall, into a true "laboratory of democracy." Successful experiments could be easily extended and imitated; unsuccessful experiments would liquidate by default after a time. Populations that wish to break away could do so peacefully; others that wish to join together could do so without dragging their neighbors into it. THINGS COULD CHANGE... and nobody would have to fight a war to make it happen.

The national legislature could even be bicameral. One house would be the board of directors elected by all who choose to be governed directly by, and participate directly in, the national government. The other could be the representatives of voluntary contributors (a version of the "openly sold Senate" I described nearly a decade ago).

Anyway, that's what the vision of this particular brainstorm looks like.

Market Dynamics of Police Protection

I wrote this a few years ago. I'm not really sure why I never posted it.

The Flaw in Anarcho-capitalism

Go here for a really long definition of anarcho-capitalism. Go here for articles from the point of view of anarcho-capitalists.

It has often been said, and I believe, that there can be no monopoly in any industry where government does not create it. Even in products with a network component to their value (those products that become more valuable to the individual consumer when more people use it, like telephone systems and computer operating systems), the constant flux in technology and habits will inevitably wear away at any particular company's market share. AT&T had a monopoly, but only because telecom regulation made it prohibitively difficult for competitors to enter their market. Microsoft seemed to have a monopoly at one time, but challengers to that monopoly crop up every day--we're not far from a Linux distro that can be used by the average person, for example.

It is also recognized that every product and service in a free market is going to have the highest quality and lowest cost any human system can give it. Anything that turns a significant profit is going to attract more labor and investment, the effort of outsiders to that industry to claim a part of those profits. Rising supply meets the demand, prices fall, profits fall, untill some other industry becomes "too" profitable, and everybody who can rushes to meet the need there. Provided there are no artificial barriers to entry into the market for a particular product or service (like requiring government-issued licences to practice everything from law and medicine to hair-styling and pest-control), prices and services must ultimately be reasonable. (You want to know why health-care is so costly? Look no further than the government's entry-fee of fifty-thousand dollars or so for the practice of medicine, and their exclusion of any form of medicine that does not meet current political needs.)

The anarcho-capitalist suggests that police protection would benefit from the same dynamics every other service does in a free market. Current policing is wasteful, inefficient, and corrupt. The belief is that if there was NO entity with an exclusive monopoly on police protection, things would be significantly better. If a particular security organization became corrupt, they would simply loose customers; taxation would not continue to fuel an ineffective and corrupt institution, since there would be no taxation. Thus, police protection would be subject to the same mechanism of economic choice every other service is subject to, which would be good, right? Unfortunately, I belive, so long as men are sinners, such a situation will never exist, not for any length of time. The market dynamics of the use of force and the threat of such use are fundamentally different from every other product and service.

When one produces, when one labors to change one form of matter to one that is useful, one has a number of choices as to what to do with this piece of property: it can be used for immediate personal gain, or it can be exchanged for the fruit of another's labor. For example, a farmer might spend the year ploughing, planting, watering, and finally, harvesting. A subsistance farmer consumes the whole of his produce, and does his own house-building, tool-making, and such besides. A more prosperous farmer specializes in farming, acquiring better tools, using better methods for a particular subset of crops, and then exchanges the produce (which is greater than a farmer who had to spend time and energy on other tasks) for the produce of others: the wheat farmer exchanges wheat for apples with the orchard owner; wheat for beef from the cattle herdsman; wheat for plough maintenance from the blacksmith; wheat for bread from the baker, who bought his flour from the miller, who bought the wheat from the wheat farmer. As wealth increases, that wheat farmer starts to produce so much wheat that he can exchange it for music and arts, research in the art of wheat-growing, or anything else he might desire.

The use of force is no different in that it can be used for immediate satisfaction of desires or in trade with another; however, it is here that the similarities end, because, unlike the subsistance farmer, we perceive a significant moral difference between the use of force for immediate satisfaction of desires, and the use of force in trade.

The use of force for immediate satisfaction of needs and wants is what we call crime. The burgler breaks windows, enters a house, and takes what he wants. The raider sweeps down on the countryside in the company of his fellows and steals the produce of the farmer. The mugger knocks a man down and takes his wallet. The angry man kills the one who "made him angry." The zealot murders in the name of his god (though this might be described as an exchange, between the murderer and the "god"). Standing against them are the "subsistance-fighters" who raise their own weapons in defense of their own property.

Such people are the reason police protection is required. The idea of the anarcho-capitalist is that the second group, those who professionally use violence for money, but only when violence is warrented by the initial violence of the other party. I would argue, however, that in addition to that particularly professional form of violence-on-the-market, there would be a proliferation of many corms.

First, you'd have your basic thief. Whether there would be more or less of those than there currently are, I don't really know. It is possible that, more lucrative occupations existing due to the absence of taxes and regulations, there would be fewer. More effective police services migh reduce their numbers in areas inhabited by people who can afford more effective police services. I don't know, but I suspect that, given the considerably more dangerous nature of petty crime, and more lucrative nature of other kinds of violence, petty crime would, at worse, be no more common than it presently is.

Then you'd have the armed citizen type. These would own and be practiced in the use of a weapon, but have as their primary occupation something else, using said weapons only in self-defense. Among these would be people who, when angry or drunk, would also use their weapons, but I suspect such people would be weeded out in all but the ares of lowest population density. People who do this might shoot someone, but they tend to get shot themselves, far more often than the average person--particularly when the average person is not prevented from carrying their own weapon by a police force. The lower population-density areas I refer to are such places as the high seas, rural areas, etc.

Then you'd have private police organzations. In exchange for money, they would do the job of defending people's lives and property, generally only of those who could afford to pay. Of course, mercenaries would come in many other forms, as well.

A local olive oil distributor could hire men to intimidate competitors out of the market. A rancher could hire men to protect "his" property--which just happened to be on the OTHER guys ranch a few days ago. An investor could include violent men as part of his attempt to buy someone else out of their business. And finally, a police protection organization could attempt to use their capacity to do violence to force competitors out of an area they claim. The question is, which form would be the most profitable to both provider and customer, and thus predominate?

Let us examine the situation where money is the only concern. The doers of violence can be grouped into three basic types:

a = those who use force solely for direct acquisition of property (thugs)
b = those who provide police protection for a price, and who will take "no" for an answer.
c = those who provide police protection for a price, the payment of which is enforced coercively, competitors being excluded coericively.

We must consider the amount of police protection required by a client, and that amount differs by which type they choose. If they choose the police group "b", they are going to need an amount of protection equal to "a + c", since the group that won't take no for an answer will also be attacking. If they take the protection of group "c", the amount of protection they'll be paying will be equal only to "a", since group "b", as a matter of principle, will not attack. Thus, model c wil predominate, since it will be the most profitable model for both the customer and the provider.

The wildcard in this analysis, of course, is the vast body of armed citizenry. If a community is inhabited by people who are violently opposed to allowing anyone to FORCE them to accept police services, anyone who tried, or even seemed to be trying, might end up strung up by a lynch mob. This assumes, however, that either the capacity to use force is relatively evenly distributed (and it generally isnt in a specialized economy, any more than the ability to produce food or build houses is), or that enough of the people at large are willing to die for a matter of principle, since it would be bloody work for a lynch mob to take down a bunch of well-armed gangsters.

Many anarcho-capitalists wisely focus on education, rather than political action. The State is group c, writ large, the result of natural economic forces. The only thing that will shut down model c is if people generally stop trying to use force for personal economic gain--if group "a" goes away on their own. So long as men are sinners, there will always be government in some form. The only question is the scale.

Consumer Time Preference Part Two

Last week I described the nature of consumer time preference in terms of a primitive economy. Today I shall discuss how consumer time preference is regulated in a more fully developed economy.

The key feature of a highly developed economy is the specialization of labor: nobody does everything himself, but rather does one thing very well, in exchange for everyone else doing their one thing very well. A well developed financial sector allows the division of one more economic function: waiting.

For that's what a saver does on behalf of a borrower: he waits, so the borrower doesn't have to. He can forgo leisure and consumption now for the sake of a better tomorrow, without knowing the exact details of how that future comes about. All he needs to know is how much another will pay him for the use of his savings today, and whether that potential borrower is trustworthy.

A civilization which has a higher time preference will have more borrowers than savers. This will result in a high interest rate, rewarding the few people who have a lower time preference, and ensuring that the extra resources made available by savers go only to the most potentially productive borrowers, limiting the impact of that overall high time preference upon the overall standard of living.

A civilization with a lower time preference will tend to have more savers than borrowers, resulting in a lower interest rate. The more effective the entrepreneurs that arise in that society, the higher the interest rate will be... but if the opportunities for innovation are more limited, the interest rate will fall, telling savers that it may be time to spend. Their time preference being low, they are more likely to spend that money on things like education... thus potentially increasing future innovations.

Thus, an unregulated interest rate does precisely what needs to be done: it shapes consumer time preference, rewarding those with lower time preference when overall time preference is high, and signaling when its time for people to take the cause of progress into their own hands.