Books

Just received The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State , a book on government failure in the provision of law, and private alternatives. Five sections, which are:

• From Voluntary to Authoritarian Law
• A Public Choice Approach to Authoritarian Law
• Reemergence of Private Alternatives
• Rationalizing Authoritarian Law
• From Authoritarian to Private Law

Thus far I've only taken it out of the box and read the introduction, but speaking as the creator of the Alarishi Empire, this is a book I'm really looking forward to.

Beyond Folk Activism

That's the title of a post by Patri Freidman at Cato Unbound. He starts of by saying, "My new perspective is that the advocacy approach which many libertarian individuals, groups, and think tanks follow (including me sometimes, sadly) is an utter waste of time.", explains why he thinks that and what he's doing instead. An interesting article, well worth reading. I particularly like:

Government is just another industry, where countries offer services to citizens, but it has some unfortunate features. It is a geographically segmented monopoly, and since all land is taken, the industry has an enormous barrier to entry. To start a new government you have to beat an old one, which means winning a war, an election, or a revolution. And it has very high customer lock-in: there are barriers to emigration and immigration, and switching countries involves both high financial and emotional costs. These characteristics result in a horribly uncompetitive industry, so it is no surprise that existing firms tend to exploit customers instead of innovating to attract them.

That pretty much coincides with my view.

Fairness in the Alarishi Constitution

I was finishing P.J. O'Rourke's Eat the Rich and had two thoughts on fairness. I'll break this into two posts.
A normal contract is bilateral, in that the seller and buyer both agree to the deal, and both come out ahead. It doesn't matter who initiates the transaction. By contrast, a transaction for the sake of "fairness" is unilateral. If Alice has $500,000 and Bob has nothing, Alice can initiate giving Bob $250,000, in which case she derives $250,000 worth of satisfaction from the deal; or Bob can initiate taking $250,000 from Alice, in which case she gets no benefit. The situations are not moral equivalents. The first is a gift, the second is theft.
If the government is taking on Bob's behalf, it's still theft. Ultimately taxes come down to "you will give us money or we will put you in jail"; if they were voluntary, they wouldn't be taxes. And it's a safe bet that Bob isn't even going to get the full $250k out of it either.
If the government wants to have "fairness", it should to give an incentive for charitable gifts, rather than promote a mentality that theft is socially sanctioned.

Alarishi Constitution

Somewhere around 1982, one of my roommates ran a game which he called Balance of Power. Each player ran a country, directing its economy, military, intelligence and research efforts, and conducting diplomacy with the other players. What made it interesting is that you designed your own country, applying 100 points to buy ratings in 20 factors, such as Area, Population, Cultural Unity, Military Size, Military Skill, several natural resources, and so forth. You could put a 5 into every category, or you could improve some abilities at the expense of others. Bruce Glassco pointed out that extremes are more interesting than the average is--they don't make movies about the average shark, or archaeologist, or con artist; they make Jaws and Indiana Jones or The Sting. From that idea, a few of us decided to buy our countries with every rating being either a 10 or a zero. I designed Alarish, a nation with a 10 for Defensible Terrain, Science Skill, Military Skill, Government Legitimacy and other things, and a zero for Area, Coastline, Navy Size, Navy Skill, and so forth. My country was a tiny enclave of top notch scientists and commandos living in Himalayan mountains.
Around 1995, I started playing Full Thrust, a game of starship combat by Ground Zero Games. The official background had several major nations and their navies, but it was generally accepted by the publisher and the fans that players could either flesh out the existing nations or design their own. A lot of people did their own variants of Scotland or the Confederate States or such, which struck me as unimaginative. I decided to translate my Balance of Power country to the GZG universe. This led to the libertarian monarchy known as the Alarishi Empire, which controls a group of three M stars with no habitable planets, but lots of asteroids.
The Alarishi Empire has been described as an orbiting collection of experiments in social Darwinism. The Imperial government will generally let you start your own local government and run it however you like, as long as you pay your lease on time and refrain from blowing up your neighbors. If your local government and social system works, you'll thrive; if not, that's your problem, and the Imperial government feels no obligation to bail you out. Think of it as federalism on steroids.
The point of this is that it gives me a background for thinking about government in terms of "what is theoretically workable and just" rather than "what's politically possible given the mess we're in and all the history behind it." I'll be considering various issues from the point of view of "if I were making the rules, I'd say....". Comments are always welcome.