Helmuth writes:
And you answered that "Our only defense is the rule of law." But I don't know how true that is, or more precisely how useful. Every civilization and their dog throughout modern history has had "rule of law" in some sense. What was fundamentally different with European law vs. Chinese law or Arab law? Because there was a fundamental difference. I agree with you: liberty is a cultural acheivement of Western Civilization. But why did the Chinese legal system not evolve to respect the liberty and property of individuals?
I would say that the key element Europe had was decentralization:
-- The many, many tiny principalities, bishoprics, kingdoms, city-states, etc., which made it very easy to move if one prince got too overbearing,
-- A common language and religion spanning political boundaries, also making it easy to move without leaving behind your whole culture and civilization,
-- The checks and balances on power and taxation provided by a powerful, wealthy, institutional Church (the Catholic Church), which was a competitor for the funds and loyalty of the people and thus had a strong incentive to not permit princes to raise taxes too high. The Church would sometimes excommunicate those princes who raised taxes higher than the Church wished, launched wars the Church forbade, or did other things the Church disapproved of.
The West via Roman law and the Catholic Church developed an independent judicial system. Law was not simply an instrument of the administrators. I think that is what distinguished Western law from other cultures. It was also more objective. Precedent was a major part of it instead of being subject to being changed as the discretion of bureaucrats.
It wasn't very easy at all for serfs to move from one ruler to another. Yes, the medieval kings were weak, but the lords of the manor had great power over their serfs. Did these serfs ever flee and start new lives of their own? Of course, in much of Europe serfdom has largely disappeared before it was abolished, but this was a process that spanned hundreds of years. In fact, pretty nearly a thousand years. I don't see where they had a common language. The masses did not speak Latin. Even the French didn't speak a common language through most of this period.
How did the checks and balances of the Catholic church produce individual liberty? I'll grant that the Church may have played a role in the development of medieval law so it had an indirect influence in that respect because medieval law recognized some individual rights, but that certainly wasn't a major concern of the Church especially when it came to heresy. And the Church sometimes used it's influence in exactly the opposite direction as, for example, in the case of Huss who had been protected by Emperor Sigismund until the Church forced him to back down by threatening excommunication. In fact, the exact opposite occurred with Luther. Emperor Charles abided by his grant of safe conduct to Luther and the Church was unable to force him to violate it because he was also King Charles of Spain, and Spain was the superpower of that day. Sigismund was sympathetic to Huss and forced to back down, but Charles was a very devout Catholic who kept his word and couldn't be forced to back down because he was also a powerful monarch.
But actually, I would say that it was the decentralization of the western European feudal system that led to liberty's advancement and blossoming. The kings managing to undermine the feudal lords and get a monopoly on ultimate conflict resolution was an aberration, a step backwards.
Personally, I have little fondness for the feudal system but, more significantly for our discussion, I'm trying to see where liberty flourished under it. Historically, liberty has flourished most under commercial and mercantile systems. The Black Death did a lot to promote cities in Europe because labor became expensive and serfs had more incentive to flee the land, but it was the rise of city-states like Venice and Genoa that allowed trade and commerce to grow and prosper. It took powerful fleets to rid the Mediterranian of pirates and centralizing monarchs to free the highways of bandits. Knights protected their own estates, but they had little interest in protecting travelers.
There is no benefit whatsoever for giving the king (or sheik, or parliament, or council, or soviet, or Pope, or board of directors...) a monopoly over all dispute resolution (including disputes involving himself!).
Agreed. But that isn't what happened. The centralizing kings had centralized power but they did not have absolute power. You still had an independent judiciary, and the king was still subject to common law. You also had the Parliament in England, not a democratic body to be sure, but still a check on the monarch. And in France you had the Estates-General. Elsewhere you had other legislative bodies. The king had the power to rule by decree, but he was limited in that power. How did the French Revolution begin? It began when the French Parlements (courts) refused to register the king's decrees for new taxes. They argued that only the Estates-General could authorize new taxes. It hadn't met in over a hundred years, but the king was forced to call it into session. But many radicals (holding views similar to modern libertarians) were elected to it, and that's when things got out of hand. These "libertarians" produced a reign of terror.
During the reign of "Lord Protector" Oliver Cromwell, critics of the regime called for making Cromwell a king because that would have limited his power! There were checks and balances in the medieval system, but they weren't particularly centered on the Church and they weren't necessarily intended to promote individual liberty. That was the product of the rising mercantile class which was made possible by the centralizing monarchs.
So ultimately, what will protect us from the king or militias or police? The rule of law, yes, but a rule of law backed with teeth: the teeth of many other competing militias or kings or police, all following the same rule of law, with customers demanding that law be obeyed, with strong incentive to bring down wrath upon any king or militia or police which decides to go rogue and violate it, and with plenty of resources to do so.
Private property society is just the next logical step in the great Western experiment. It takes the genius of Western politics -- decentralization -- radicalizes it, and canonizes it.
The knights of the middle ages did nothing to protect the liberties of the peasants or the serfs. It was the farthest thing from their minds. Nor would I expect that my neighbor's militia would somehow feel an obligation to protect me from my own militia. I think there is something to be said for more participatory government and less professional government, but I think that has a very limited applicability in the modern world. I think the division of power between states and the federal government and the separation of powers at the federal level that our forefathers created is probably as good as you can do. We need to restore the substance of that because the federal government has attained too much power and the executive branch has also.
Repealing the 17th amendment might be a good idea but that will happen when pigs fly. Somehow, I'd like to see a Supreme Court chosen by the states although 50 judges is way too many. But it is the informal changes that have been most damaging to our liberties. Things like federal aid to the states for all kinds of different programs, the huge growth in federal criminal law, and the close cooperation of federal and state law enforcement that virtually corrupts state and local law enforcement agencies.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to see what is anarchist about your proposals. How would your local, decentralized agencies function without the use of coercive power? And how would these agencies defend themselves from each other much less from foreign powers?
And what does private property have to do with? And what IS private property? Nearly all cultures have private property, but they don't all define it the same way.
