Police Forces and Courts of Law ...

Michael,

All of your discussions on this subject revolve around and use as examples commercial transactions.

What would you advocate in cases involving rape and murder, for example?

Under Muslim law and practice, it's acceptable for brothers and uncles to kill an unmarried young woman who has been raped, or have her raped if she's had consensual sex with a man.

Would you leave the Muslim community in Detroit free to carry out their own preferred 'judicial' practices?

And, if a community can have competing agencies to carry out legal protections, why should not every individual be left free to decide for him or herself what law he or she will or won't follow? After all, they can be their own protective agency, operating according to their own rules, provided they have enough firepower. What do you think would be the real-world consequences of implementing that principle?

Post 101

Sunday, November 25, 2007 - 3:44pm

Answering for myself, not Michael:

Law, LAW! We don't need no stinkin... (with apologies to the late B. Traven.)

In reference to a hypothetical anarcho-capitalist society, I think that most of us who adhere to that position do not assume that there will be any "laws" as such.

What there would likely be would be contracts and arbitration. When matters went beyond the scope or intent of existing explicit contracts, then the general social contract, assuming there might be such a thing, would kick in.

As a last resort, and perhaps specified explicitly under the general social contact, the option of a sui generis (if that's correct terminolocy for starting from zero) common law trial could be employed. Such a trial would look at the entire set of applicable precedents and the various parties reasonable expectations, and finally, failing all else, at what a reasonable man would consider fair and just in the circumstances.

Some cases would perhaps always tend to fall into this final category as it is impossible to specify everything. However, the vast majority of cases that could not be settled privately between the parties - after they had run their simulations of outcomes and decision trees, etc. - would fall under whatever special contracts existed between the parties or under the general social contract, or its equivalent.

At no point would there be some "law" referenced. Instead there would be the records of contracts and titles and the facts of the particular case.

The common law method of dealing with assaults in general is to reference a substitution table. If you were a reasonable person, then would you rather be stabbed - non-fatally - or lose your home? At some point, there would be a set of data values that could be rendered in terms of an exchange medium, such as the dollar or gold.

For murder, under the ancient common law, this would typically be a rather high price, paid to the family and other survivors who would have benefited from the murder victim's life. However, in those societies there was typically a family that introduced the person to society and took responsibility for his or her actions - for life. They would have to pay the weregeld.

In a modern society, it would likely be the insurance company that underwrote the ID card that the murderer used to get into the malls or use the roads, etc. The murderer's premiums would reflect that cost to the insurance company.

Post 102

Sunday, November 25, 2007 - 4:21pm

My blood runs cold when reading your near total non-response to the scenario I raised.

Are you suggesting (a) that if the murdered woman were considered of no monetary value to anyone, the murderers get off scot free?, and (b) that money is the sole form of compensation or retribution for their heinous act? So, if they can afford the toll, they get a 'get out of jail' card?

In any case, you don't specify who is to enforce even this monetary compensation, since -- in the scenario I posed -- the act is perfectly acceptable within the hypothesized (yet very real) community.

As near as I can tell from your meandering discussion, the concept of inviolable individual rights is completely absent from your ideal society.

Post 103

Sunday, November 25, 2007 - 6:15pm

William, you cited three bullet points where you did not understand the connection to the wider abstraction. Does that mean that you do understand and agree with the other examples?

Private international law for marriage, inheritance, etc.
Toyota buys parts from Korea for cars to be sold in the USA. Multinational corporations pick and choose the laws they want to enforce contract under.
a purchase order, bill of lading, and invoice will be three documents with three intentions under three (now four) different laws, all within the USA.
Bank robbery is once state and federal.
you have a federal right to keep and bear arms but perhaps no such (local) right
the sanctions for academic cheating and plagiarism.

As for the ones you did not understand, my point was that under the United States Constitution, states are supposed to recognize the legal proceedings of other states. Married in New York is married in Connecticut (unless, of course, you are gay) or as with gun control or as with police certification and as with many other such examples, the separate states maintain the privilege of ignoring this overarching federal requirement, as they do with the Second Amendment as as they did with others, such as torture for confessions. Supposedly, by the statist theory, this could not happen because each locale would have a uniform set of mutually exclusive laws. However, as these examples show -- the three in this paragraph and the others above -- such is not the case. We live with parallel competing systems in many walks of life.

It is not that "the" law permits this, but that many of these traditions -- such as real estate title transfers -- antedate the law. In that case, they go back to the Middle Ages.

Ayn Rand borrowed directly from the sociologist Max Weber when she said that the purpose of government was to provide police and courts of law. Find that in Locke or Hobbes or Puffendorf. The word "police" never appears anywhere in the U. S. Constitution because the first police department was created in London in 1829 and in the USA only later. As late as the 1890s to 1920s the policeman was a kind of roving magistrate, settling disputes between neighbors, as opposed to protecting lives and property -- for which, in fact, the wealthy contracted private guards. The point is that there is nothing in the actual operation of protection that requires a geographical and mutually exclusive framework.

If a guy in your church -- oops, Objectivist study group -- cheats at golf, you have two different ways to address that (either or both) and neither of them involves going to the law.

Post 104

Sunday, November 25, 2007 - 6:18pm

Individual rights never have been and never will be inviolable. They are violated all the time, occasionally by individuals and on a consistent basis by governments.

The goal is to constantly seek to reduce the number and severity of violations of individual rights. The difficulty is figuring out the best way to do that.

Post 105

Sunday, November 25, 2007 - 6:59pm

Jeff Perren asked: "Under Muslim law and practice ... should not every individual be left free to decide ..."

The examples I give are from the real world. Do you have any and do you have solutions for them?

Presumably, if a girl were abused by her brothers for being raped, she could go to the police and file a complaint. They would investigate and if her accusations were grounded in fact, the brothers and the rapist would be arrested -- and presumed innocent and released on personal recognizance or bail -- and would be free to assault her again or kill her or otherwise pressure her into dropping charges or refusing to testify or recanting her statements, etc., etc., etc., and this happens all the time in domestic cases that do not involve wierd wild alien foreign islamofascist scum camel jockeys and towelheads but real live apple pie Americans and not just the poor trash put your own very neighbors -- but you do not know about it because they cover it up with the complicity of the police.

Theories of government enforced rights protection are fantasies. They are not even an ideal. They are metaphysically unreal and impossible. When and as government police agencies etc. have actually acted according to objective justice it has been because the social context supported, expected and demanded objective justice. Absent that no system will work.

With it, the details are not so important. I just point to the real world of a competitive market in defense and adjudication for the same reason that Tom Peters advocated pursuing excellence -- as opposed to groupthinking mediocrity -- in the corporation. We see examples that work and we think that more is better.

The discussion here is not about suppose versus suppose but is versus is. Statists want to hold up some ideal theoretical system while waving their hands at the counter-examples, as for instance the American jurisdictions that allowed torture for confessions before 1930. When the examples of people wrongfully convicted but released now via DNA are brought out, the statists counter that we are not omniscient, so the present system must be tolerated. I grant that we are not omniscient, but I also insist that by the same token, another imperfect system cannot be dismissed for lack of perfection.

What counts is whether private protection and private adjudication as practiced here and now in the real world work (marginally) better than socialist systems of police and courts.

Post 106

Monday, November 26, 2007 - 9:35am

... and this just in...
Here is an example of how justice does not need to be applied within a locality, but can be brought to anyplace where it can work.

A scene toward the end of the documentary film Calling the Ghosts shows two Muslim women from Bosnia, survivors of the Serbian concentration camp of Omarska, looking through a rack of postcards. They have come to The Hague to testify about their experiences at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The voice-over is one of the women reading what they wrote to their former Serbian colleagues in the now Muslim-free city of Prijedor: "Greetings from The Hague. Hope to see you here soon."

Hajjar, Lisa, "Alternatives to an International Criminal Court," Middle East Report, No. 207, Who Paid the Price? 50 Years of Israel. (Summer, 1998), pp. 5-6.

Post 107

Monday, November 26, 2007 - 7:21pm

In the society I envision, you would generally know who you were dealing with, as their reputation would be very valuable, getting them discounts or premiums based on the expected transaction costs. Like having a Gold Card vs. a prepaid generic credit card, only much more so.

Part of the reputation aspect would be the fact that you did or didn't have a bond or other assets, in addition to maximum insurance coverage. If you did kill someone and didn't have insurance, then the victim's insurance would likely kick in for the survivors, but that insurance company would either go after your bonds and other known assets, filing claims under the social contract, or simply sell the claim to a collections agency that would do the same. Insurance companies would compete - as they do today - to provide basic coverage even to the very poor - although I suspect that the very poor (at least in today's terms) would be very few and far between in a real free market society.

Not having any insurance or assets, due to being a sociopath, for example, would pretty much lock a person out from most opportunities to commit theft, assault, murder, etc., as they simply would be unable to get close enough or acquire weapons. Anyone approaching a security monitored area - which would be pretty much everywhere, without a transponder card identifying themselves and providing access thereby to their standing re insurance coverage, etc., would find themselves faced with automatically locked doors and a whole lot of attention from the local security company.

Of course, there would still be murders of passion, etc., that are virtually impossible to predict and thus forstall. And even a very poor person could probably find an agency that provided a joint fund kind of membership, such that their death by other than natural causes would result in an investigation and assessment of at least some significant loss to society in general.

And, yes, without prisons - except for those who are obviously a clear and present danger (and even that would be on a different basis, as in, offering a person - let's say a paranoid schizophrenic psychopath - a safe place to stay and survive, in return for doing useful work, volunteering for medical experimentation, etc., as otherwise they might find themselves simply locked out of everything and starving - )...without prisons, a person could commit murder and walk scott free, except for the fairly hefty weregeld, and the fact that most people would want the fact that someone had committed such a murder to be available to them in every transaction they had. I.e., such a person would find life after the murder rather unpleasant and expensive, on top of the sum paid to the survivors. Many or most people would refuse to deal with them.

Post 108

Sunday, March 16, 2008 - 5:27pm

Steven D. Levitt is known to advocates of the free market for his popular book, Freakonomics. In 1997, Levitt published a study that showed a correlation between election cycles and the hiring of police.

Murder, burgalry, rape and larceny rates are independent of the number of police. Auto theft rates are correlated negatively with the number of police -- more cops, fewer thefts. Robberies and assaults (especially domestic assaults) tend to have higher clearance rates because the victim can identify the assailant.

The presence or absence of police has some effect on some crimes and no effect on others.
Whether or not your city allocates more police correlates with whether or not an election is close, rather than with the crime rates.
Levitt's original paper was "Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime," The American Economic Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Jun 1997), pp 270-290. Justin McCrary of UC Berkeley found errors in Levitt's model and published his findings in the same journal "Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime: Comment," The American Economic Review, Vol 92, No. 4 (Sep 2002), pp. 1236-1243. Levitt then replied with an acknowledgment and a correction in the same issue of that journal, "Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime: Reply," The American Economic Review, Vol 92, No. 4 (Sep 2002), pp. 1244-1250.

McCrary granted that Levitt's was only one of two studies that actually used city-level data (over 100 towns of 100,000 or greater) for more than a two-year window. McCrary also acknowledged that cleared of its mathematical errors, Levitt's paper still demonstrated the connection between election cycles and the hiring of police.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 3/16, 5:30pm)

Post 109

Saturday, March 29, 2008 - 8:35am

Attempted hostage taking:
WALGREEN'S MANAGER FOILS CAPTOR
http://www.local10.com/news/15740021/detail.html

Imbedded video feed links here:
http://mfile.akamai.com/12918/wmv/vod.ibsys.com/2008/0329/15740191.200k.asx

Note:

1. Police Call Situation Homicide Investigation
What homicide?

2. The manager struggled with the gunman as he was pushed into the car. Eventually, the manager was able to push the gunman away and get out of the car as the gunman fled ...
Risky, but being a hostage seldom works out well...

3. About 18 shots can be heard being fired as the Civic flees the scene.
Police say they might have hit him. They are lucky that they did not hit anyone else. All that required practice time on the range, too...

4. The driver fled to 82nd Street and North Miami Court, where he crashed the car and then ran.
Witnesses said the man was about 6 feet, 2 inches tall, with an Afro and a black hoodie covering his face.
Crashed his car and ran away.

So, if faced with an armed robber who takes you hostage, you can:
1. Do something about it.
or
2. Call the police.

By the way, the Miami Police are actively recruiting.

Post 110

Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 8:18am

Michael:

I've always been puzzled as to why a hostage, when being held up as a shield, doesn't just feign a heart attack or collapse his legs. The hostage taker couldn't hold him up and it would be pointless to shoot him on the ground and he would expose himself to the cops when he shoots. Is it because the hostage doesn't have the presence of mind to do it, or are they just too overwhelmed by the authority of the taker? Are there any incidents of this? I've probably seen hundreds of movies of a taker using a hostage as a shield and the hostage always cooperates, except when he is a macho hero. I suppose a knife to the throat is more difficult to deal with than a gun to the head.

Your opinion please.

Sam

Post 111

Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 10:49am

I always love hearing stuff like this:

In a modern society, it would likely be the insurance company that underwrote the ID card that the murderer used to get into the malls or use the roads, etc. The murderer's premiums would reflect that cost to the insurance company.

So criminals now will carry insurance to cover the cost of their crimes? Criminals don't care about compensation, or insurance, or participating civilly in society, they just take and destroy, that's why their called criminals. They don't need to pay for insurance if they can just live by stealing and murdering others.

Not having any insurance or assets, due to being a sociopath, for example, would pretty much lock a person out from most opportunities to commit theft, assault, murder, etc., as they simply would be unable to get close enough or acquire weapons.

Just like the American colonists weren't able to get close enough to the British armories in Lexington and Concord to acquire weap.....oops. Criminals are good at stealing, and weapons like any other commodity can be stolen.

without prisons, a person could commit murder and walk scott free, except for the fairly hefty weregeld, and the fact that most people would want the fact that someone had committed such a murder to be available to them in every transaction they had. I.e., such a person would find life after the murder rather unpleasant and expensive, on top of the sum paid to the survivors. Many or most people would refuse to deal with them.

Sorry, I wasn't aware criminals pay attention to the price of a commodity. I thought they just simply take the commodity? Life would be unpleasant for them? Of course, but they don't seem to care about unpleasant things. Someone refuses to do business with a criminal? Well shit, I didn't know the criminal would even bother with a business transaction in the first place? Wasn't the murdering and looting evidence enough they don't really care if people refuse to deal with them?

Murderer: "Hey how much for that car?"

Citizen: "It's not for sale to you, because you're a murderer"

Murder points gun and shoots citizen, and takes car.

The End.

Post 112

Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 11:08am

Michael:

As for the ones you did not understand, my point was that under the United States Constitution, states are supposed to recognize the legal proceedings of other states. Married in New York is married in Connecticut (unless, of course, you are gay)

This is too simplistic an explanation of the U.S. legal code. Only the federal government mandates what legal proceedings in one state must be recognized by another. In no way does a state have to recognize all legal proceedings in a different state. They obviously do not, only to ones that the federal government has said they must recognize.

or as with gun control or as with police certification and as with many other such examples, the separate states maintain the privilege of ignoring this overarching federal requirement,

You have set-up a strawman. There is no federal requirement that states follow all legal proceedings of other states.

Supposedly, by the statist theory, this could not happen because each locale would have a uniform set of mutually exclusive laws. However, as these examples show -- the three in this paragraph and the others above -- such is not the case. We live with parallel competing systems in many walks of life.

We live with a complex legal code, but by no means can this be construed to mean competing sets of differing laws within the same geographical area. Federal law takes priority over state law. As I've said in another thread but that you never addressed:

"Again you are confusing yourself. Yes we have zoning laws, traffic laws, etc all working concurrently and different laws from different levels of government, but they do not compete with each other as different conflicting laws. Where there may exist a conflict in one point in time of different laws (say a local government forbids the construction of a strip-club where the state says such restrictions are not permitted) a superior level of government (for example state law supercedes local law) make those conflicts go away because one law trumps the other.

There isn't one law that says red light at a traffic stop means go while another law says red light means stop. And again if such a conflict arises one law is discarded by an authority with a superior level of jurisdiction."

And

"You confusingly show instances where you think there is no monopoly of government such as pointing out international trade and overlapping jurisdictions. But you ignore the fact international trade occurs under international trade agreements (which is two jurisdictions coalescing into one in the context of trade between two territories), and overlapping jurisdictions in our country only means some are inferior to others over who has final authority. And when there were instances of anarchy, either war broke out or one authority won out over another over which law applies. Which is precisely why anarchy doesn't work, the definition of anarchy, that of competing legal systems, is nothing more than a state of war or conflict."

And

"Anarcho-capitalism says multiple governments can come up with a legal-framework and use their own subjective idea of what legitimate force should be within the same geographical area, so naturally if you have conflicting ideas of what is appropriate retaliatory force, how do you resolve such conflicts? Either by negotiation to establish a uniform system of due process, which means a de facto monopoly government because two governments coalesce into one, or you have warfare and the side with the bigger guns win. Since anarcho-capitalism says no one should have a monopoly on what constitutes appropriate retaliatory force, the only realization of this to reality is constant warfare (because after all what is negotiation between these governments on a uniform set of laws anything but a monopoly government?)"

Post 113

Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 4:31pm

John Armaos writes:

This is too simplistic an explanation of the U.S. legal code. Only the federal government mandates what legal proceedings in one state must be recognized by another. In no way does a state have to recognize all legal proceedings in a different state. They obviously do not, only to ones that the federal government has said they must recognize.

Article IV of the U.S. Constitution says:

Section 1. Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.

Section 2. The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.

A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.

Bob Kolker

Post 114

Sunday, March 30, 2008 - 6:27pm

Bob thanks for posting this but what was your intent in posting article IV with regards to this thread?

As Article IV states: "Section 1. Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof."

Post 115

Monday, March 31, 2008 - 5:28pm

Sam, it is a funny thing, but if you try to cut in front of someone in line, it often works, but may not. If you ask, you will more likely be refused than deferred to... unless you offer an excuse: "Because..." then that often works. The point is, people usually do whatever you ask. Sometimes, they do not. Sometimes you can pursuade them.

When I am faced with force or counterforce, I rely on training, on learned response. My instinct (for lack of a better word) is to go along. I am not fast on my feet. Even in conversation, I am not one for zingers. I sleep on everything.

I think that someone like you might be more likely to take direct action -- as did the store manager. People like you are few and far between... which explains a lot more than we can go into here and now.

Post 116

Monday, March 31, 2008 - 5:54pm

John, as you returned to your objections, I will take the time to give you my best answers. I cannot do this all at once, but I will make this a little project over the next few days or weeks.

Please understand that I left them hanging the first time because I see the differences in our positiions as being personal, not ideological. I point to the statement by Ludwig von Mises that facts are less important than theories. (Mises was rationalist. That's a problem for Objectivists, I know.) He made the point that socialists and capitalists agree that at a certain place at a certain time, some commodity had a price. What they argue about is not the facts, but what the facts mean. So, too, with us, do I perceive a difference in personality that is independent of any arrangement of facts. We can agree to the facts. We will not agree about what they mean.

That said, I will grant that within the context of Objectivism, we can exchange our facts and meanings and hopefully both of us will be better off for it. Exchanging value for value is what this is all about. I trust that as a businessman, you are concerned with your own profits and you feel fully confident to know your own best interests. In fact, the causal arrow goes the other way: because of your rational self-confidence, you are a businessman. So am I.

Let me start off by stipulating a major point. I often tell my anarchist friends that people have governments because they want them. If governments are market entities -- as every acting entity must be ("human" action applies to institutions) -- then, they must exist because they meet a perceived need.

That is the reason why any replacement of government services with market services must meet the same needs in better ways. "Meeting" thost needs might include defining them away. For example, when I was a kid, we used to have milk delivered by truck to the house. We used to be able to call the grocer and have a delivery. That changed. I will grant you freely and fully that those changes apparently did not come about because of propaganda or philosophical argument. It was just practical marketing. I say "apparently" because of course, there must have been a philosophical shift, a different paradigm of expectation. People found it more convenient to go to the supermarket where the milk was also always fresh whenever you wanted it, in whatever quantiies were convenient. So, too with bread. (I had an uncle to drove for a local baker.) The modes of production and distribution changed.

Right now, it is as if you and I were in a board meeting at the milk plant and we are trying to figure out how to keep deliveries profitable and wondering if wholesale sales to supermarkets is better than retailing to home -- and then what would that mean for us? We are in the same poisition as the homemaker, deciding whether to order more milk, or buy it right now... and then making that a habit... and abandoning a traditional relationship with a known provider.

So, too with government versus market in protection and adjudication. We are looking at the way things are done now and trying to figure out what it would mean if they were done differently.

Post 117

Monday, March 31, 2008 - 6:25pm

In a modern society, it would likely be the insurance company that underwrote the ID card that the murderer used...
So criminals now will carry insurance to cover the cost of their crimes? Criminals don't care about compensation, or insurance, or participating civilly in society, they just take and destroy, that's why their called criminals. They don't need to pay for insurance if they can just live by stealing and murdering others.

1. You did not cite your sources. Are you quoting from The Market for Liberty?

2. We need to parse out our criminals. Tomorrow night, I will be delivering a paper for my senior seminar class in criminology. My topic is "The Choice to Think: A Metachoice to Explain the Conflicting Data of Rational Choice Theory." It based, in part, of course, on Ayn Rand's theories, but also draws from Robert Bidinotto, Stanton Samenow and others. There are many theories about why people commit crime. I agree that the simplest explanation is that they do because they choose to. I support the "classical theory" of "rational choice." That said, there are probably as many motivations as there are individuals. I regard it as a sociological fallacy to ignore the fact that "societies" (so-called) are comprised of individuals.

That said, just as people are short, tall, rich, poor, etc., so, too, are there kinds, types, classes of criminals.

Most robbers, though assauiltive by definition, are not murderers and seek to avoid killing. Seldom does a burglar resort to violence. Few shoplifters are prepared to kill. This is why resisting a criminal is often effective.

Statistical indicators are that "most" criminals actually do "care" about participating in society. (I can show you studies on top of studies that prove whatever you want to believe. So, we are both painting with broad brushes here.) Crime indexes and reports indicate that a strong ecnomy and low unemployment correlate with lower rates of property crimes. Now, the Marxists claim that when people are not suffering they do not need to steal to survive and the capitalists will reply that when crooks have jobs, they (a) are too busy to steal and (b) are stealing from their employers, a different tally entirely ("white collar" crime). The fact remains that the neighborhood burglar will take a day job and otherwise be engaged as a member of the community: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.

So, yes, just as criminals have driver's licenses --- until they lose them -- they will also have whatever ID it takes to get into the mall -- until they lose it as a consequence of crime. And, in a litigious society, the insurance company that issued it could be sued. And losing the use of it will have consequences for the criminal.

That is for property crime.

Murder is a whole other problem.
Most people are killed by family members or friends.
Most victims know their killers.
Insurance ID cards have nothing to do with the home situation.

Post 118

Monday, March 31, 2008 - 8:31pm

John, on the matter of "Full Faith and Credit" see if you agree with these general guidelines. I suggest them because what I do not find is any body of federal law telling states what judicial proceedings, laws, acts., etc., they will or will not give full faith and credit to. The attempt at DOMA would support that claim, as a special case.

Full Faith and Credit Clause
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Faith_and_Credit_Clause

Section 1. Full Faith and Credit
SOURCES AND EFFECT OF THIS PROVISION
Private International Law
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article04/01.html

Civics Library of the Missouri Bar
"Full Faith and Credit"
http://members.mobar.org/civics/Full%20Faith.htm

Then, based on those, consider again, that being licensed to drive in one state is usually pretty good in another state -- but being licensed as a police officer often is not, though being licensed as a security guard company often is. These are all variable, not absolute: not all states apply these the same way or by the same standard.

My points are:
(1) we have overlapping as well as contradictory laws, created by one government and applied (or not) by another, so therefore we do not need a geographic monopoly in order to have laws.
(2) And as much hassle as that is, we get along all right.

Yes we have zoning laws, traffic laws, etc all working concurrently and different laws from different levels of government, but they do not compete with each other as different conflicting laws. Where there may exist a conflict in one point in time of different laws (say a local government forbids the construction of a strip-club where the state says such restrictions are not permitted) a superior level of government (for example state law supercedes local law) make those conflicts go away because one law trumps the other.

I agree that this is the way things usually are. I cite the exceptions to show that they do not need to be this way. There are other ways to do things and they work out all right.

There isn't one law that says red light at a traffic stop means go while another law says red light means stop. And again if such a conflict arises one law is discarded by an authority with a superior level of jurisdiction."

I work for a security firm that provides a service to a client who also contracts for janitorial service, building maintenance ("facilities"), and cafeteria (four different providers). So, the maintenance manager wanted the keys to an elevator so he could use it while loading and unloading some large thingees. Our manager said, No. There was no procedure allowing us to give him the keys and it was just as well for all for him to use the elevator and then release it for others rather than to lock it out while nothing is going on just for his convenience. So, not taking the no, the maintenance manager went to the client HR guy and got him to lean on our boss. He gave in because the client requested it. This is the same situation you describe and has more to do with social psychology than it does with constitutional law. We like to know what the rules are. We like to have them all one way. When we have problems, we go to authorities. Where is the mystery in this?

On the other hand, the employees of different entities at this site all punch different time clocks (or none), have different hours and the rates of pay are set by independent entities beyond the scope of the HR manager's desire to see everyone just get along. Again, even "high context" people have a need for autonomy.

What we are looking at is whether and to what extent a complete geographic monopoly on law is both necessary and sufficient. Governmentalists have not demonstrated that it is both necessary (as opposed to convenient) and sufficient (needing no exception-handling).

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 3/31, 8:56pm)

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 3/31, 8:57pm)

Post 119

Monday, March 31, 2008 - 9:05pm