Law Without Government. Robert P. Murphy.

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This just takes all power away from regular people and gives it corporations and the wealthy. Especially since they control information.

Your explanation sounds absurd, because it is.

This is just government with extra steps

What brilliance to come up with a system that basically already exists!

Very good video, but im surprise to learn how difficult is to find a video about this topic in English... here in Brazil, we have a dozen ancap channels with videos talking about it.

And they say communists are utopian smh

What about poor and destitute people who cannot afford legal protection? Are they just screwed?

a society without taxes would literally be like an irresistible magnet for capital, it would attract every capitalist and their mothers to invest, even the relative advantage of safe heaven countries or low tax countries is enough to turn the most inhospitable places on earth into economic miracles at incredible speed, now imagine a 0 tax country, in such a crazy boundless prosperity i don't really think there would be that many disputes, people would be so well off, imagine the morale of the people of a 0 tax country, there is no one above, we are all together in this, this society is ours to take care of, it's something out of a dream, a beautiful utopia, i would die in war to leave my kids such a system to live in.

This whole video is positing a society where there is not corruption or political issues.

After many years I still find myself recommending this video to anyone curious. Thank you!

Who protects us from the people that are supposed to 'protect us'

This is a reasonable intro to how private law can work. However, there is a place where this breaks down. In the case that the guy that stole your TV has his own personal army, you're kind of out of luck in that situation. You don't want private armies pitting themselves against each other. You don't want people hassling eachother with death threats. There is a certainly level where private arbitrators and community social pressures isn't going to be enough. I just heard about polycentric law. No idea what it is or how it works. It purports to be a solution to this. But since I haven't found more info about it yet (I came across this video while looking for that info), I don't know of any private solution to this problem without a monopoly supreme arbitrator that can enforce justice even on eg violent gangs and paramillitary groups.

As corrupt as our system is you honestly think this would be better. Look at other cultures like south American, African and Arab. Some used a similar brokerage type of conflict dispute like the Jews in day of judges. The ability for a person to be manipulated still isn't going away.

Cool video I love it

You’re assuming that not going to arbitration is always mutually un-beneficial. If I kill your mother, what stops me from not showing up to arbitration?

This system of his has a billion holes. Very bad system.

It sounds to me that Murphy’s ideal system is analogous to the credit rating agencies from the 2008 crash. Firms will ultimately just pay them off, and the judges will bend to the firms because of they don’t then the firms will go to their competitors. Saying “no because employees wouldn’t agree” is horse shit because employees are coerced into a bunch of stuff even today that they don’t like in their firms given their need to earn a salary in order to survive. Look at the trend of all these employers putting arbitration clauses in their employment contracts; most employees don’t like them but they take it because it’s better than being unemployed. That means firms have ALL the power in the dynamic. Very bad system.

"If Webster's changed the definition of up to "moving toward the ground", we wouldn't just all admit we'd been mistaken up till now."

Oh how times have changed.

This drawing is so good. I'm a upper secondary school teacher and I think I might use this, because this needs to be introduced early, and no one else in their lives will.

I'm confused though, how does one decide what is and is not law without one government that all people agree on?

i think it's important to note that, anybody you're in a dispute with would almost certainly have their own Dispute Resolution Organization, and that person (who stole your TV) would be incentivized to play ball or else suffer reputation damage. if they didn't have a dispute resolution agency, there are would likely be lots of activities they'd legally (private law) not be able to participate in.

i've been an ancap since 1999, and I'm always looking for good short videos to share with new friends. and I love your content bitbutter

It's all about reputation if it is known that a business scams people you would not go to it and you would go to the one that has a good to perfect reputation

Now it is right by tthe law for a policeman to shoot someone and not be responsible for what they did just because they thought he had aa gun

Gah. Don't shoot the dog.

"Trained non lethal means"... To me it looks like a children's dream society. In real life there are huge cartels of gangsters and thiefs, you cannot get anything back from them bringing a swat team with "trained non lethal means". Seriously? Are we living on the same planet?

So what's to stop someone in community A getting a van, kitting it out to be the "we hate looters" van from community B, then driving over to community B, looting someone in community B's home, then going back to community A, selling the stuff and denying all knowledge.

Or take it further, if someone murders someone in say New York, then moves to LA. How would that be dealt with?

Who then pays for the prisons?
What's to stop someone who runs prisons to run them purely for profit, forsaking any kind of rehabilitation or human rights standards?
What's to stop someone who runs a prison from teaming up with someone who "finds criminals" and just declaring lots of people are criminals for little reason?

a profit driven judicial system seems like a terrible idea to me because there are numerous ways to maximise that profit that doesn't mean providing a better or safer country, let alone community.

just seems like it'd very quickly get back to a "has money, is innocent" situation

The nature of the market is derived from what kind of a government we have, what kind of government we have is determined by ethics. Ancap'ism is an attempt to turn this whole process on its head, and derive politics from economics.

It is individual rights, protected by a government, that lead to a good market, which again leads to good products. Ancaps start at the end of this process and argues; because the market gives us good products the market can give us individual rights as well. Which is to omit the fact that it was individual rights in the first place that gave us a good market and additional good products.
To get rid of the government because the government, for instance, gives us bad education and health care, is like saying that since air resistance prevents us from flying fast, we should get rid of air resistance completely. Just as the airplane would fall to the ground without air resistance, the market would fell apart without a government. It is a properly defined government—a government that only protect individual rights—that gives the structural framework to the market to function, therefore, one cannot have a market for rights without turning it into something like a black market.

The nature of rights are conceptually different than goods and services in general, due to their different relations to the market — rights are the building blocks, goods and services are not.

We arrive at a functional and ethical politics through a long process of philosophy. Economics is just the end product of all this. That's why one cannot convince socialists through economic arguments. Socialists have not accepted socialism because they have accepted bad economics; they accept bad economics because they have accepted socialism as an ethical system. Ancaps have accepted good economics, but have no ethical base, so they overextend and think that economics can solve everything.

My progression into an ancap is going to be a good one.

That's a pretty compelling case. Does anyone know of at least similar instances in the real world, current or historical where a society has formed such a legal system without an absolute ruler?

Aren't these ideas from the book of david friedman?

What a fantastic lecture. Thank you, Dr. Murphy and bitbutter.

I love this video thank you for posting it

this feels to me a one way ticket to mob rule and feudalism. All you need now is some wealthy and powerful person to start attaining force around his banner, start using that force to bully weaker people to fall in line, start manipulating justice, and start demanding taxation and you are stuck under a feudal lord. nice!

Brilliant

Government= governing the mind, no thank you I govern my own mind!! bring Anarchy=without masters, ASAP!

THIS IS A GREAT VIDEO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Arbitration is not objectively fair and the argument that employees and employers enter into it on equal footing is also not true. Are you going to turn down a job you need because a company is forcing you to waive your rights to legal action? Do the employees or the employee choose the arbiter?

GET TO THE POINT, BOBBY!

"if arbitration always ruled on the side of business, the employees wouldn't agree to it'. There are many ways where this could be false but the first, given that you like evolutionary arguments, is we might not have reached the local optima yet

This is such a good video. It deserves more views.

I'm super interested in these concepts but not convinced. Here are my thoughts.

Regarding the word use analogy, I agree with the principle, but would point out that in a given game, the rules that are most commonly used are the ones that have the best, longest maintained consensus. So when you try to apply the consensus model to law, you will have less stable consensus, and less and less so as you get to more specialized law. That's no problem in terms of adjudication, since lawyers and judges are expert, but people being able to determine what the law itself says provides a benefit of certainty that erodes under the consensus system. People would be less willing to take risks without having a sure understanding that all those judges are looking at the same books.

Now the fun part! I see a number of potential issues with the criminal enforcement portion. Using the provided example, I would say it's lucky he was able to ID the theif, because if he had to pay an investigator to locate his TV or the thief, he would probably pay more than the TV was worth.l, so you would probably have to have an insurance policy on all your stuff so when it gets stolen you can either afford the investigator and the judge and the enforcement agency or you could just buy a new TV. Either way, people just got a massively increased incentive to steal. If you don't get positively IDed at the time of the crime, you're probably skating unless you stole something awesome. Second, the question of jurisdiction is immediately at issue. It is suggested that the plaintiff go and make a list of adjudicators from which the defendant should pick. That's a good approach, but it's rightly suggested that the defendant isn't compelled to agree. So what if the defendant says "yes, but I don't like your list" and gives you a list for you to pick from? Who says he can't do that and compel you to pick from his list? That's a serious point, because what's at stake is whether people can compel other people's positive behavior or not.

Here's another important question. In the scenario as exactly outlined, who pays the adjudicators fee? Initially, it must be paid by the plaintiff, but by what moral reason does the victim of theft have to pay the cost of adjudication? Is it not clear that people with more money have greater access to this system of justice? And if you disagree that the plaintiff should not have to pay for the expense of this method of adjudication, how do we compel the defendant to pay? In the outlined example, the defendant didn't pick the judge. What if the plaintiff went to a judge that charges 10 times the value of the TV in fees? Couldn't the plaintiff in that scenario pick the most expensive judge possible purely as punishment? And this all assumes the guy actually did steal that TV.

Taken to the logical extreme for sake of brevity, who in this system would pay the cost of investigating and adjudicating the murder of a homeless person?

Awesome work

For 1000 years, Ireland had a privatised system of law under Brehon Law

Didn't he resign from this point of view some time ago?

How much of this this thinking looks at societies without a strong nation-state? Something like a nordic ting or clan societies.