Theme: Property

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Lega…/LegalSystemsContents.htmON DAVID FRIEDMAN’S BOOK ON LIBERTINE LEGAL SYSTEMS

ALL (Feedback) (Joseph Valerius thanks for inviting me to respond.)

Just read through these chapters quickly – I know this material already. As usual David’s work is readable and enjoyable. My central criticism is that ‘different from ours’ plus the choice of legal system’s included, implies an arbitrary equality (difference) rather than an honest statement of intent by which these particular legal systems are chosen according to their shared properties.

1) The list is interesting because it includes so many failed peoples, and does not include many successful peoples. By successful, I mean, those that can hold territory, create their own institutions, and defend them against competitors. Why is it that most of these legal systems could not produce sufficient productivity and as a consequence sufficient investment in the commons to hold territory against competitors?

2) Why NOT include these systems of law:

Hammurabi’s Code

Early Roman Law

Late (Stoic) Roman Law

Frankish Law (Saliq Law)

Germanic and Anglo Saxon Law

Continental (Napoleonic) Law

Soviet Law

International law

(FWIW: in intelligence gathering and in propaganda production, what is mentioned tells us more about the speaker than what is mentioned. Just as in straw man arguments, we learn more about the speaker from what he avoids speaking of than we do of what he speaks. Just as in marxist propaganda and postmodern propaganda we learn that heaping of undue praise, and straw man arguments as excuses for criticism serve as the principal means of deception by suggestion.) So I don’t like the selection without qualification of its purpose: what did so many legal codes fail, and why did others succeed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_legal_codes

3) The list is even more interesting if we look at which produced high trust societies – where high trust is the most expensive commons, which is why no one outside of the Hajnal Line produces it. Societies that progressed through the agrarian phase and succeeded in holding territory emerged with superior demographics through the reduction of the scale of the underclass. Societies that did not progress through holding territory and the agrarian phase either failed to develop truth, reason, technology, science, formal institutions, and particularly institutions of competitive law.

4) The Han are the largest homogenous ethnic group, that other than northern europeans, has held the same territory, for the longest period of time. There is a reason that history of only two peoples is worthy of study: the Han and the European: the han could not produce trust but they held territory, produced reason and technology. The Europeans held territory less effectively (particularly against islamic invasion), produced reason, trust, technology and science.

5) Laws express a group’s evolutionary strategy both in-group and out-group. And it is trivially easy to judge a set of laws by their survival from competition – their evolutionary success or failure.

6) There is only one universal criteria of decidability in matters of conflict: non imposition of costs against that which others have born costs to obtain an interest: reciprocity. And that is how international law functions today.

The origin of all legal codes that I know of is the need to suppress retaliation cycles (feuds) in eras where property was largely insured by kin (brothers, uncles, cousins), and where crimes and punishments (or restitutions) were asymmetric, which led to exacerbation of retaliation cycles. So if we look at early legal codes, they emphasize not rules, but standardization of punishments.

As legal codes mature, they include standardization of crimes, not just punishments. in fact, the word ‘liberty’ refers to the permission to retain local law and custom independent from the ruling law (territorial defense and taxation).

As legal codes mature further, they include weights and measures (prohibitions against metric fraud). And further as they mature they include prohibitions against verbal fraud. At present for example, we lack prohibitions on a great deal of verbal fraud using pseudoscience (we call this set of frauds economics and financialization). But nearly all the social sciences consist largely of pseudoscientific frauds yet to be prohibited.

As legal codes mature further they include prohibitions on externalities. And if we go through david’s list, it’s easy to see which of these legal codes prohibits externalities, and which LICENSE or actually encourage externalities. (poly-logical, poly-ethical) legal codes in particular. (Jewish and Islamic ethics in particular).

The most interesting is the chinese structure for families (it’s a crime to report on your parents) vs the soviet (it’s a requirement to report on them). Or the class based systems where punishments are progressive as are taxes today. Or the egalitarian systems that prohibit differences by class or group.

In large part these different ethics tell us a great deal about social orders, and the group’s evolutionary strategy. (Western market model is to profit from domestication. Han model is just a large extended family with identical interests. )

7) We can judge (measure) the difference between legal systems by the methods of parasitism (ir-reciprocity) that they preserve. What kinds of parasitism do each of the listed legal systems preserve? Why did they preserve it. So it is possible to objectively compare the morality or immorality of different cultural systems by their judicial method and content.

8) Diversity is bad – particularly ethnic diversity. High trust is good. Empirical law is good. Empirical law requires a method of decidability. The only universal method of decidability is perfect reciprocity. Perfect reciprocity is only possible under non-imposition of costs upon that which others have born costs to obtain an interest.

9) The roman failure is reducible to the underinvestment in the Great Wall Against The Steppe and Desert Peoples that the chinese had managed to construct, and attempts to integrate undomesticated (inferior) peoples into the empire. Or better said: empires leave behind monuments, but cause the death of their originators. As such, as the Han and Medieval Europeans demonstrated, the optimum strategy is nationalism.

10) Our lesson is that while conquest is profitable in the short term, the cost of colonialism is always higher in the long term than the benefit. And that the success of the only people who rely on fully on markets (europeans), was possibly only where they eradicated prior peoples. The fact that this is obvious from any study of evolutionary biology should not surprise us.

Worse, wherever europeans (light haired european, dark haired iranian) expanded, wherever they integrated with the locals they were destroyed. They survived only in Europe and Persia. And were (it appears) eradicated by the arab conquest. Those that made it to india are simply outbred and gone.

Our lessons are the trust of the europeans by use of militia and reason, and the security of the Chinese through isolation and reason.

11) At present the only matters of contention in legal theory are:

a) whether democratic polities should be permitted to construct legislation that circumvents reciprocity, or merely agree upon binding contracts within the limits of reciprocity.

b) whether to contain the law to strict construction, textualism, and original intent (all of which may mean the same thing), or whether to allow judges discretionary control over the law.

c) when the law is unclear whether to demand clarity from the legislature, or whether judges decide and compensate for weaknesses of the legislature.

d) whether or not to rely on the common law’s argument to first principles and judicial review, or whether to rely on the continental law establishing intermediary first principles, regardless of judicial review.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine.