The point of liability law is mainly to induce good behavior by having courts threaten to make related people pay cash later if a bad thing happens. The law tries to set who would pay how much to whom after what events in order to induce such people to take good care, so as to minimize the sum of the costs of bad things happening, care taken to avoid them, and the legal process itself.
Its shareholders and other stakeholders are Corporate governance also provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set, and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance are determined.
Rafal's idea is intriguing and doesn't deserve to be dismissed with hyperbole like "horrible and evil". It's not that different from the current car insurance system. No insurance, no right to drive. Live in a bad zip code but you are a good driver, you still get punished with higher rates.
You are also overly focusing on one segment of society. That's equivalent to reasoning by special case.
I don't know if Rafal's system would work but it could solve two real current problems: 1) compensation for crime victims, and 2) the ability of a community to protect itself by preventing crime. With this type of insurance crime victims could be appropriately compensated, something which they most certainly are not now.
Catching criminals after the fact is fine but preventing crime in the first place is much, much better. That is how security works in every other field. Banishing uninsurable people is a preventative measure. If they have such insurance but do commit a crime at least the victim will be compensated.
Such a system should be part of general reform like de-criminilizing vice. Would some people suffer unfairly under such a system? Yes, but that is always the case. It's not even a factor. The question is would the benefits for the communities that implement such a system outweigh the negatives.
When trying to think about market interactions you need to remember about the diversity of participants. There is no united front presented by insurers to clients: It's every company looking for its own benefit.
If an insured population is intrinsically unlikely to turn to crime, the company that erroneously believes they *will* turn to crime will lose to a company that correctly predicts crime and correctly prices its policy offers. There will be no 30 year hindsight on the erroneous policy, because after 30 years the company that sells it will be long since bankrupt, or on board with correct predictions. This is the standard, generally most likely outcome in an even halfway efficient market.
You accusation that I do not think but rather that I produce verbiage to justify some "pre-existing beliefs" you impute to me, is unjust. I am using bog-standard notions about markets and let them lead me to conclusions about likely outcomes; in other words, I start with methods and questions, and let them lead me to adjusting my beliefs, like a scientist should. Can you claim the same about yourself?
I'm saying that it's possible for initial predictions to become self fulfilling.
If you have a group who get charged a lot more on the basis that they're believed more likely to commit crime then the increased prices they're charged vs others in the population can create a self fulfilling prophecy by creating a situation where they're more likely to turn to crime.
30 years later the company looks at the initial predictions and says "yep, they were pretty accurate" even if those initial predictions caused the final outcome. If it was done scientifically by people who care about truth and cause and effect rather than the crapshow that most companies use where correlation is the only important thing then you might find that the control group without premiums and other confounders show no difference.
But then that's only of interest to people who want to know about what's real, people who are scientists at heart rather than people like yourself who just want to justify their pre-existing beliefs.
Plus there's the hideous moral issues IMASBA points out.
It seems plausible that the cost of mounting an effective legal defense benefits from substantial economies of scale that can't be realized by an insurer.
In other words if a person and a deep pocketed corporation engage in the same bad behavior it is much easier to successfully sue the individual since the corporation has invested many hours in policies ensuring the kind of evidence that might help in lawsuits isn't recorded/available and in carefully policies to take advantage of the law.
If I say something with the same effect on my blog that fox news does on their site (and somehow they reach a similar audience) their defense against a libel suit will be much more effective and cost less than what my legal insurer could provide me. My defense would be highly customized, I probably have all sorts of emails that might be useful to the person sueing me that fox has a policy never to keep etc..
Thus, it's actually desirable to balance this effect with the greater attraction suing deep pockets brings.
You wrote: "So they can't do anything about murderers and rapists then?"- I don't understand the question.
I don't know what you mean by "competitive" communities in this context. Discussing warfare is off-topic here, we are not discussing the stability of an anarcho-capitalist world, we are merely discussing the predicted results of using legal liability insurance for pricing of crime, under assumptions of freedom of association.
But, to try address your concern about the viability of communities that accept the banished, you may want to ponder the concept of comparative advantage here. A suburban community full of children and your women may be at a comparative disadvantage in playing host to thugs. A manufacturing plant or a large farm may have comparative advantage - thugs would be less likely to rape and kill bystanders, their crude capabilities would be more useful and having them isolated from victims would make surveillance and control cheaper. In a market there is a place for many types of players.
I strongly disagree with your disavowal of non-violence. Non-violence is the standard way of behaving among reasonable people, and I will judge ideas and their outcomes in large part by their closeness to this standard.
Banishing thugs could e.g. save your or somebody else's daughter from being raped. You still think it's wrong to banish thugs? Because they can't help it? Consequentialism be damned?
Again, if you feel that it is grossly unfair to know the truth, I am sure you could found your own insurance company that would offer racially based preferences to whoever you feel deserves them. Do not tell me about "non-discrimination" - it's you who wants to discriminate based on race, not I. You are inventing stories where you invert the arrow of causality (premium->crime instead of crime->premium). This is a classical case of motivated cognition.
You did not describe the mechanisms leading from the establishment of a legal liability market to the outcomes you listed (Mad Max wilderness, widespread dying of the banished). You only stated that such outcomes would occur. Hint: Try to quantitatively predict the actual premium levels and numbers of the banished, taking into consideration plausible incomes, crime and generosity levels. Do the math on plausible assumptions from the existing world, not from movies and fiction.
You don't understand Murphy's point. The point is that "we" find it unfair when someone is punished for something they have absolutely no control over, stuff that they can't even change with intensive therapy, medicines or education. Skin color is one of those things: an insurance company algorithm in the US will predict that men who work 40 hours a week for $30k per year will be more likely to be liable if they were born black than if they were born white (some kind of clustering algorithm would have to demarcate black from white of course, that'll create a whole set of issues of its own). An individual black man would have to perform better, not the same but better, in society than an individual white man to get the same insurance premium, society typiclly finds this grossly unfair. It is mathematically impossible to get around this. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: less black men will meet the requirements for low insurance premiums so more black man will get into trouble, which will raise the premium for black men even more, and so on and meanwhile a growing number of black men won't even try to achieve a lifestyle compatible with a low premium. In the end you end up with more people in trouble, and therefore higher societal costs than you would have under a less "efficient" screening system. Non-discrimination policies ARE a form of societal insurance against that situation, just like it's sometimes cheaper to just give an addict his drugs in a controlled fashion than it is to jail/rehab him. You can't talk seriously about economic efficiency and human welfare optimization without taking such effects into account.
"Some communities might choose to offer assurances that in case of banishment the community would find a receiving community for the banished person to reside in."
So they can't do anything about murderers and rapists then?
"Some communities might even actively recruit the banished, and use effective surveillance and control techniques to help them become net-contributing residents."
If these communities are able to remain competitive it means the other communities who leave people in the desert, etc... are apparently doing so purely out of moralistic ideology, not for the sake of efficiency or a broader sense of human welfare... Competitive recruiting communities would likely be the instruments of the inevitable collapse of any libertarian world (the growth of new power structures that eventually cannot resist the urge to form some kind of government, or who simply through their own success displace most other communities, or the growth of communities who do not agree with libertarianism in the first place) through their limitless armies of those who hold a grudge against their former communities. If recruiting and compassionate communities are not competitive then their territories will eventually be bought out by more ruthless communities and therefore those communities would cease to exist.
Please don't use phrases like "non-violent". ANY system has violence in it, whether it's the police busting you for tax cheating or a community throwing poor people out into the desert to die. You're only ever going to get a system that minimizes suffering, but there will always be minorities who suffer in some way.
I explained why I believe the system you proposed, which is itself far beyond the legal liability insurance Robin originally proposed, would lead to the dramatic outcomes I describe.
I have no desire to throw millions worldwide under the bus just so I can point smugly to "hypocritical" people who preach compassion without paying for it (why do you assume those people are poor and/or tax cheaters and somehow not "honest folks", why even care about such morality plays when another solution besides banishment might maximize happiness and lower costs?) The true cost of compassion is known to anyone who reads government budgets (and is quite affordable to a population as a whole, assuming we're not talking about the poorest African countries), now the cost of a lack of compassion, that one is a bit harder...
The suits I was talking about weren't about some ancient law on a woman's "honor", they were about "emotional damages" and reclamation of wedding expenses (of women who went bridezilla). They are part of a dangerous set of cases that usually center around emotional damages. Unfortunately the floodgates in Europe are beginning to crack with the introduction of new tort laws, so I guess we're headed to a claim culture as well... Oh well, at least it'll create jobs for lawyers...
In a market for residence there might be many approaches. Some communities might choose to offer assurances that in case of banishment the community would find a receiving community for the banished person to reside in. Others might just put them out on the border. Presumably, the communities populated by nice and reasonable people would do the former, and the rougher, more ruthless ones might do the latter. Some communities might even actively recruit the banished, and use effective surveillance and control techniques to help them become net-contributing residents. Charitably inclined folks may pay to establish communities where the banished would have a worthy, dignified existence without endangering others.
A lot of problems turn out to be easily solvable when an evolutionary, non-violent, consensual process of continued generation and testing of ideas is let loose.
You can make initial predictions even before a person is conceived, from their parent's DNA. More prediction is possible once the person's own genetic material is available. Then you can use pre-school information, social media, school scores, work records - the job of predicting never ends, and its precision is likely to increase the longer you gather data.
I wonder if what he's talking about isn't palimony, a recent development. It's not clear to me what cause of action is being sued under in the causes that IMASBA mentions. The tort of alienation of affections will no longer withstand demurrer in most jurisdictions.
Palimony is in contract. It's kind of a "social issue." I don't know (and kind of doubt) whether Europe, some parts more subject to feminist influence than America, avoid it.
[Generally (or at least ideally) a frivolous suit in America will be quickly dismissed by demurrer, and the plaintiff will pay the defendant's legal fees in sanctions.]
Its shareholders and other stakeholders are Corporate governance also provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set, and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance are determined.
Rafal's idea is intriguing and doesn't deserve to be dismissed with hyperbole like "horrible and evil". It's not that different from the current car insurance system. No insurance, no right to drive. Live in a bad zip code but you are a good driver, you still get punished with higher rates.
You are also overly focusing on one segment of society. That's equivalent to reasoning by special case.
I don't know if Rafal's system would work but it could solve two real current problems: 1) compensation for crime victims, and 2) the ability of a community to protect itself by preventing crime. With this type of insurance crime victims could be appropriately compensated, something which they most certainly are not now.
Catching criminals after the fact is fine but preventing crime in the first place is much, much better. That is how security works in every other field. Banishing uninsurable people is a preventative measure. If they have such insurance but do commit a crime at least the victim will be compensated.
Such a system should be part of general reform like de-criminilizing vice. Would some people suffer unfairly under such a system? Yes, but that is always the case. It's not even a factor. The question is would the benefits for the communities that implement such a system outweigh the negatives.
When trying to think about market interactions you need to remember about the diversity of participants. There is no united front presented by insurers to clients: It's every company looking for its own benefit.
If an insured population is intrinsically unlikely to turn to crime, the company that erroneously believes they *will* turn to crime will lose to a company that correctly predicts crime and correctly prices its policy offers. There will be no 30 year hindsight on the erroneous policy, because after 30 years the company that sells it will be long since bankrupt, or on board with correct predictions. This is the standard, generally most likely outcome in an even halfway efficient market.
You accusation that I do not think but rather that I produce verbiage to justify some "pre-existing beliefs" you impute to me, is unjust. I am using bog-standard notions about markets and let them lead me to conclusions about likely outcomes; in other words, I start with methods and questions, and let them lead me to adjusting my beliefs, like a scientist should. Can you claim the same about yourself?
I'm saying that it's possible for initial predictions to become self fulfilling.
If you have a group who get charged a lot more on the basis that they're believed more likely to commit crime then the increased prices they're charged vs others in the population can create a self fulfilling prophecy by creating a situation where they're more likely to turn to crime.
30 years later the company looks at the initial predictions and says "yep, they were pretty accurate" even if those initial predictions caused the final outcome. If it was done scientifically by people who care about truth and cause and effect rather than the crapshow that most companies use where correlation is the only important thing then you might find that the control group without premiums and other confounders show no difference.
But then that's only of interest to people who want to know about what's real, people who are scientists at heart rather than people like yourself who just want to justify their pre-existing beliefs.
Plus there's the hideous moral issues IMASBA points out.
It seems plausible that the cost of mounting an effective legal defense benefits from substantial economies of scale that can't be realized by an insurer.
In other words if a person and a deep pocketed corporation engage in the same bad behavior it is much easier to successfully sue the individual since the corporation has invested many hours in policies ensuring the kind of evidence that might help in lawsuits isn't recorded/available and in carefully policies to take advantage of the law.
If I say something with the same effect on my blog that fox news does on their site (and somehow they reach a similar audience) their defense against a libel suit will be much more effective and cost less than what my legal insurer could provide me. My defense would be highly customized, I probably have all sorts of emails that might be useful to the person sueing me that fox has a policy never to keep etc..
Thus, it's actually desirable to balance this effect with the greater attraction suing deep pockets brings.
You wrote: "So they can't do anything about murderers and rapists then?"- I don't understand the question.
I don't know what you mean by "competitive" communities in this context. Discussing warfare is off-topic here, we are not discussing the stability of an anarcho-capitalist world, we are merely discussing the predicted results of using legal liability insurance for pricing of crime, under assumptions of freedom of association.
But, to try address your concern about the viability of communities that accept the banished, you may want to ponder the concept of comparative advantage here. A suburban community full of children and your women may be at a comparative disadvantage in playing host to thugs. A manufacturing plant or a large farm may have comparative advantage - thugs would be less likely to rape and kill bystanders, their crude capabilities would be more useful and having them isolated from victims would make surveillance and control cheaper. In a market there is a place for many types of players.
I strongly disagree with your disavowal of non-violence. Non-violence is the standard way of behaving among reasonable people, and I will judge ideas and their outcomes in large part by their closeness to this standard.
Banishing thugs could e.g. save your or somebody else's daughter from being raped. You still think it's wrong to banish thugs? Because they can't help it? Consequentialism be damned?
Again, if you feel that it is grossly unfair to know the truth, I am sure you could found your own insurance company that would offer racially based preferences to whoever you feel deserves them. Do not tell me about "non-discrimination" - it's you who wants to discriminate based on race, not I. You are inventing stories where you invert the arrow of causality (premium->crime instead of crime->premium). This is a classical case of motivated cognition.
You did not describe the mechanisms leading from the establishment of a legal liability market to the outcomes you listed (Mad Max wilderness, widespread dying of the banished). You only stated that such outcomes would occur. Hint: Try to quantitatively predict the actual premium levels and numbers of the banished, taking into consideration plausible incomes, crime and generosity levels. Do the math on plausible assumptions from the existing world, not from movies and fiction.
You don't understand Murphy's point. The point is that "we" find it unfair when someone is punished for something they have absolutely no control over, stuff that they can't even change with intensive therapy, medicines or education. Skin color is one of those things: an insurance company algorithm in the US will predict that men who work 40 hours a week for $30k per year will be more likely to be liable if they were born black than if they were born white (some kind of clustering algorithm would have to demarcate black from white of course, that'll create a whole set of issues of its own). An individual black man would have to perform better, not the same but better, in society than an individual white man to get the same insurance premium, society typiclly finds this grossly unfair. It is mathematically impossible to get around this. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: less black men will meet the requirements for low insurance premiums so more black man will get into trouble, which will raise the premium for black men even more, and so on and meanwhile a growing number of black men won't even try to achieve a lifestyle compatible with a low premium. In the end you end up with more people in trouble, and therefore higher societal costs than you would have under a less "efficient" screening system. Non-discrimination policies ARE a form of societal insurance against that situation, just like it's sometimes cheaper to just give an addict his drugs in a controlled fashion than it is to jail/rehab him. You can't talk seriously about economic efficiency and human welfare optimization without taking such effects into account.
"Some communities might choose to offer assurances that in case of banishment the community would find a receiving community for the banished person to reside in."
So they can't do anything about murderers and rapists then?
"Some communities might even actively recruit the banished, and use effective surveillance and control techniques to help them become net-contributing residents."
If these communities are able to remain competitive it means the other communities who leave people in the desert, etc... are apparently doing so purely out of moralistic ideology, not for the sake of efficiency or a broader sense of human welfare... Competitive recruiting communities would likely be the instruments of the inevitable collapse of any libertarian world (the growth of new power structures that eventually cannot resist the urge to form some kind of government, or who simply through their own success displace most other communities, or the growth of communities who do not agree with libertarianism in the first place) through their limitless armies of those who hold a grudge against their former communities. If recruiting and compassionate communities are not competitive then their territories will eventually be bought out by more ruthless communities and therefore those communities would cease to exist.
Please don't use phrases like "non-violent". ANY system has violence in it, whether it's the police busting you for tax cheating or a community throwing poor people out into the desert to die. You're only ever going to get a system that minimizes suffering, but there will always be minorities who suffer in some way.
I explained why I believe the system you proposed, which is itself far beyond the legal liability insurance Robin originally proposed, would lead to the dramatic outcomes I describe.
I have no desire to throw millions worldwide under the bus just so I can point smugly to "hypocritical" people who preach compassion without paying for it (why do you assume those people are poor and/or tax cheaters and somehow not "honest folks", why even care about such morality plays when another solution besides banishment might maximize happiness and lower costs?) The true cost of compassion is known to anyone who reads government budgets (and is quite affordable to a population as a whole, assuming we're not talking about the poorest African countries), now the cost of a lack of compassion, that one is a bit harder...
The suits I was talking about weren't about some ancient law on a woman's "honor", they were about "emotional damages" and reclamation of wedding expenses (of women who went bridezilla). They are part of a dangerous set of cases that usually center around emotional damages. Unfortunately the floodgates in Europe are beginning to crack with the introduction of new tort laws, so I guess we're headed to a claim culture as well... Oh well, at least it'll create jobs for lawyers...
In a market for residence there might be many approaches. Some communities might choose to offer assurances that in case of banishment the community would find a receiving community for the banished person to reside in. Others might just put them out on the border. Presumably, the communities populated by nice and reasonable people would do the former, and the rougher, more ruthless ones might do the latter. Some communities might even actively recruit the banished, and use effective surveillance and control techniques to help them become net-contributing residents. Charitably inclined folks may pay to establish communities where the banished would have a worthy, dignified existence without endangering others.
A lot of problems turn out to be easily solvable when an evolutionary, non-violent, consensual process of continued generation and testing of ideas is let loose.
You can make initial predictions even before a person is conceived, from their parent's DNA. More prediction is possible once the person's own genetic material is available. Then you can use pre-school information, social media, school scores, work records - the job of predicting never ends, and its precision is likely to increase the longer you gather data.
It takes decades to optimize human welfare.
I wonder if what he's talking about isn't palimony, a recent development. It's not clear to me what cause of action is being sued under in the causes that IMASBA mentions. The tort of alienation of affections will no longer withstand demurrer in most jurisdictions.
Palimony is in contract. It's kind of a "social issue." I don't know (and kind of doubt) whether Europe, some parts more subject to feminist influence than America, avoid it.
[Generally (or at least ideally) a frivolous suit in America will be quickly dismissed by demurrer, and the plaintiff will pay the defendant's legal fees in sanctions.]
Where would people be banished to? The ocean?