brad%looking.waterloo.edu@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA (08/25/86)
Courts provide a service - judgement, just as the police provide protection from the initiation of force. Now what is protected is your person and property. While (most) everybody has the same amount of person, property varies. Thus the amount paid should increase with the amount of property protected. [This conclusion has the nice property of being saleable even to Socialists] It's quite easy to get people to pay for the protection of police and courts if they don't get the protection without paying. Don't wanna pay your court fee? No problem, you're now totally responsible for your personal safety. If somebody guns you down in the street, it's perfectly legal. Now you may call this coercion, but it's not by the state. The secret to making this easy (and not too different from today) is to make court services come as a package. You can't buy them on a case by case basis, only on a yearly basis. No need for a strict monopoly, either. Any court agreeable to both parties could judge a case. Some system could exist when the parties subscribe to different courts and can't agree on a common ground. The simplest such system is the one we have today - the default court is the state court. (This is an imperfection, one that I'm working on.) I feel that the basis of society should be an explicit contract, the signing of which is an individual's act of majority. Part of this contract includes the agreement of the signer to accept the authority of certain courts. Those who don't want to join may either join a sub-society, (which no doubt has reciprocal agreements of various kinds with other compacts) go on their own, or leave the area. Those who go on their own are totally free, but it's also open season on them. Sounds rough, but it demonstrates (with drama) exactly what the government is doing for you (protecting you from anarchy) and why you should pay for it. There would be not trouble getting people to pay. Governments would only have trouble collecting funds where their services are not so obviously valuable. And that's fine by me, too. Brad Templeton -------