Author: Curt Doolittle

THE ALTERNATIVE TO PSEUDOSCIENCE

The natural state of man is to adapt his family (reproductive organization), and his rules of cooperation (property rights, norms, rituals and myths) to the continuous changes in the structure of production made possible by his technical advancements.

There exists no natural state of man, only natural PROPERTIES of man. Two of those properties are the necessity of voluntary cooperation and the problem of free riding that emerges from it.

Any cooperative organism must solve the problem as it evolves: creating incentives both in favor of production and against free riding and parasitism.

Expansion of production in a division of knowledge and labor increases the opportunity for free riding and parasitism because of increasing anonymity of the participants the structure of production.

Expansion of production requires increases in the complexity of the tools of cooperation: those that assist in transforming the imperceptible to analogy to experience, such that increasing complexity is open to calculation; and such that information distribution expands as well.

Each major advancement in human cooperation has been achieved by increasing the information processing capacity of the population such that not only actions are open to voluntary coordination, but also such that free riding is increasingly suppressed.

When we invented government we traded pervasive high transaction costs from violence fraud and deception, for systemic free riding and corruption. Thanks to Hoppe we know how to construct some necessary institutions that will make it more difficult to conduct free riding and corruption.

But the answer ‘no government’ is actually admission of failure. It is still necessary for groups to coordinate their interests in a commons that produces beneficial common goods. Just as it is beneficial for shopping mall owners and market owners to produce investments that are beneficial to both vendors and customers as well as owners. Just as it is beneficial for all of us to construct norms that prohibit all forms of free riding, discounting, cheating and stealing.

Competing government do not solve the problem of high local transaction costs. So the argument in favor of heterogeneous competing polities works if and only if there is some monarch that profits from all equally and polices all equally. (Which is where ROthbard and Mises got their ideas from: the ghetto.) For people to grand one another property rights voluntarily without a superior state or empire, they will require universally low transaction costs – at least locally. People demonstrate this everywhere and anywhere in history.

So we are left with a large number of private monarchies as the compromise between the minimum homogeneity required, and the maximum size wherein a polity maintains a commonality of interest.

At present, large city states with homogenous polities (the nordics) that are able to create reasonable amounts of liberty.. Even heavy redistribution is often tolerable to homogenous polities. Landed heterogeneous polities are notoriously intolerant of redistribution because it’s actually bad for the productive classes.