Free Market solutions to Government Ran Services

[Aquagraph]

Government services are funded by taxes and thus tend to have an advantage (if not outright monopoly) to free market solutions, even if there would be more optimal solutions available. So I've been thinking about lots of alternative solutions to things typically ran by government that humans could come up with in the absence of government and I want to challenge you to do the same in this thread.

This thread isn't about debating whether libertarianism is optimal for society but for discussing alternatives that the free market could provide. If you want to debate about libertarianism with me, I'll be happy to let you present your case for state's superiority in another thread.

Feel free to modify or build upon the ideas that are represented, but to shoot them down bluntly is just not constructive, fun nor creative.


PS: I closed the first thread because several users didn't understand the bolded part of the OP.

[Aquagraph]

Roads

-A certain faction controlling a certain section of the road could electronically register a driver in the beginning of the section and at the end of the section. First timers would have to drive aside to set up an account and could give out something that the sensors at the electronic booths could pick up. These signals might become standardized in order not to have to register to every road like this. Below I will represent good uses for this solution.

-The payment could drastically increase if that section is passed too fast which would decrease speeding. If somebody constantly would drive too fast, it would restrict their access in the future. It could be programmed to charge more if there is too much delay as long as it doesn't suffer from traffic often. Then again I'm sure there might be ways to adjust the price of slowness to traffic via automated traffic calculating surveillance. With traffic calculation it could also adjust the prices during high traffic times so that the traffic would disperse more effectively thus improving the driving experience.

-If a road would be controlled by residents nearby, they could give significant discounts to themselves. As a possible bonus, since it's likely your children or your neighbour's children are playing there, there might even be more incentives to drive more safely. This might be good for tight-knit family-oriented communities.

-With enough studying the driving patterns that lead to safety issues, the surveillance monitoring might be able to pick up unsteady driving of individuals and charge them more or restrict access. If this could be determined accurately, it would decrease reckless driving that happens with drunken or inexperienced drivers. If this is effective, it will let judge people by their ability, not by external symptoms that often strongly correlate with that ability, such as drunkenness. Therefore a man who can hold his liquor better than the guy next to him could drive without penalization even if he had two glasses instead of one while recklessly sleepy drivers would be penalized for endangering the traffic. This alone might very well not be enough to ensure safety.

-Societies could develop and inform about symbols in the street signs that quickly tell which kind of contracts you will be bound for entering into a road, just like Creative Commons works. For the sake of fairness, an opportunity to turn around could be provided. How this fairness is controlled might be something that is up to dispute resolution organizations to decide.

-Traffic jams that happen in highway accidents could be untangled with a crane-equipping service vehicle that could maybe specialize in driving on the unpaved terrain next to the road. As highways tend to be long these vehicles could have several checkpoints to pick up their detachable cranes from so that they could travel light as a crane platform. It might be able to do this with a specialized helicopter. I'm really unsure about the cost-efficiency of these solutions, but maybe you could improve on this idea?

-Environmentally friendly communities could also register vehicles on their roads by the amount of pollution or noise they create. Then again, as pollution is a harm on the surroundings, this might be a job for the dispute resolving agencies.

-If a private faction doesn't want to sell land for a company building a road, that company could improve their offer to that faction by offering a contract that gives a portion of the road's income on that section of the road. The contract could involve an increased payment to the original owner of the land if there is a lot of polluting or noisy traffic if the the feature mentioned above is implemented.

-Residents owning a nearby road could also regulate what stores get access. If it's a conservative community, they might want to deny an entrance to a liquor stores, bars, gun stores, gay discoes or other things they don't want near their homes. Of course the more they restrict, the less jobs there will be nearby and the more homogenous the residents will be.

-If an owner identifying car registration is implemented, they could deny the access to vehicles owned by criminals made public by the watchdog agencies.

-Many of these solutions might be decided to be implemented democratically or vote-per-stock-share basis depending on the contracts that apply to the situation at hand.

[mu4]

I wasn't debating libertarian-ism in the other thread, I was just criticizing your solution. I was specifically discussing your solution which excludes public interest, just because Government doesn't exist doesn't mean public interest doesn't exist. And whatever organization that exist to champion public interest would want a say in roads and their material force is not insignificant. You can't talk about roads without talking public interest and of course one of the most important part of public interest, which is freedom of movement. I the other thread I never mentioned government, because I want to talk about public interest, which doesn't disappear with government. Any solution to the problems of society needs to have a mechanism to deal with public interest. I.E non-stakeholder interest.

[Absurd]

[InvisibleJim]

Free market border controls would be useful. They are to a point, but because they are inconsistent between countries they are remarkably inefficient and the service itself at the border tends to be a situation where the government is the customer rather than the traveller.

[xerx]

Roads...

people won't stay in their houses, they'll change the intensity of their road use. the case you have to make is that private roads would be less expensive to use than public roads for the economy as a whole to grow faster.

[Ainfigur]

Just some ideas I had about free market solutions for financing environmental services in a city, because I feel bad about derailing your thread yesterday.

Disclaimer: I'm not a libertarian and don't condone free market principles.


Cities have centralized authorities that take care of the environment, for example cleaning litter, providing and maintaining public property such as toilets (which can be privatized of course) and recreational facilities like libraries and museums, and also providing and taking care of inner city park/public garden areas and street lighting. I've been thinking about how a free market would handle this. Providing that this is for a hypothetical total free market and all property would be private, it would be of course be in everyones interest to deal with these things, because there would be a movement of wealth from outside to areas that are well taken care of.


Small business could band together to form localized committees with the responsibility of financing some of these services. This could provide competition between both cities and areas of cities for who is providing the best public area. Residential areas could also have bodies and groups dealing with these issues, providing DIY community services or collectively raising money to pay for areas of land for parks and recreational facilities. Workers unions may also contribute to providing these kind of things in less affluent areas.


Large business's and corporations in a free market could outright buy entire areas of cities. They could have their employees live in and look after these areas as a condition of working for that company. Companies could eradicate crime in these areas because they can decide who lives in these areas or even who visits them, thus creating a glorious corporate ran nightmarish utopia. There would be a huge concentration of wealth and talent in well run areas.

Such competition would probably genuinely create astounding innovations in public services. Corporate ran museums would be interesting...

[Aquagraph]

Free market private security parody or a parody of what statists think of how voluntaryists think it would go down.

[Aquagraph]

Marriage

There could be templates for different types of contracts that spouses have towards one another and their property and these contracts can be stretched to a wide variety customising, like deciding not to give the partner a permission to pull the plug off the life support or adjusting protocol for child support and custody situations in case of divorce. In a voluntary society the state couldn't give tax exemptions for a "traditional" marriage nor fuel other priviledges that widen the gap between people of different values fighting for petty priviledges through democracy, the other options would seem more approachable, especially with a court system that is trying to be cost-efficient and avoid bureaucracy that is regulated to contracts. Of religious communities might still give better deals to heterosexual married people through a variety of ways, like neighborhood store discounts and those same people could also refuse to have a non-married couple share a room at their inn and so on.. ..assuming those people can stand to lose some business and rise the prices a bit.

[Aquagraph]

This is a repost from another thread, but it belongs here too.

Dispute Resolution Organizations

Basically the idea is that you hire one of the dispute resolution organizations (DRO) to protect you and secure your transactions, the latter will probably provide an additional fee that insures you. Whenever someone aggresses you or violates a contract, your DRO contacts their DRO. If the other DRO thinks that their client has violated you, they will demand a reparation from their client. Your DRO can also pay you recompensation and inform a credit rating agency (CRA) along with the violator's DRO about the violator's untrustworthiness. This will increase fees for transactions made with him.

However, if they think your claim of their client's violation was false, they hire an independent third party arbiter which both of your DROs submit to agree with. In order to be efficient, DROs will design the protocol by which they will align with one another, just like cellphone companies do. They will already probably have the designated arbiter and investigators for the case. This even allows you to have a specific code of law apply to you, if you both of you have contracted DROs following a Sharia law or whatever. The DROs have great incentives not to go to war with one another since it skyrockets their prices but they also can't just dismiss their client's contract since it will lose them business.

However, if you are somebody that gets into trouble all the time without actually doing technical violations, your contract insurance fee will rise, just like it will if you can't pay debts. There will probably also be CRAs for these purposes which will increase the fees with your shady dealings. If you are truly vile in your contracts, no DRO will want to insure the contracts with you and then nobody will want to do business with you. You will be ostracized until you make amends.

Basically the same will also happen to those who violate the body of another, of course. In the end, you will be unable to find any services to work with you because they can't insure contracts with you.

These sort of arrangements are better because they:
-will give incetives to be clear about your dealings (this also will include informing customers about what's in their food)
-can be also used for insuring against pollution in your property. (the cellphone-company-like connectedness of DROs required so that the neighbourhood can unite) In this case the DROs will want to help the potential local polluters to pollute less so that they don't have to pay that recompensation for your insurance.
-will incetivize your DRO to prevent crime against you and thus help you secure your person and property (less fees for you if you have voice-activated TVs, only deal in fingerprint-controlled currency, give you discounts on martial arts courses nearby and whatnot)
-won't make you pay for expensive prisons nor expensive and exhausing trials
-won't make you fund drug wars and other petty "crime" enforcement

Ebay is, in fact, a private dispute resolution organization. No trials needed, it uses only non-violent solutions (DROs can also use forceful methods but will avoid it), it uses a reputation system to give incentives to honest deals and it will refund the insured customer in case of a violation.

Also, if there's a danger that the biggest one would just turn into a dictatorship, other ones will market based on that fear. They would most likely start auditing one another. Of course there is not many reasons why would DROs keep an army large enough to install a government to a region since aggressing armies are kinda expensive.



If you want to debate on how this wouldn't work, do it here.

[Iris]

The recent scandal over patient care response time at the VA points to what everyone's healthcare is going to look like under Obamacare. Please find a free market alternative, @Aquagraph

My feeble brain can't figure out how the cost of medical care has gotten to the unaffordable level for everyone without insurance. Like why did my one hour sinus surgery cost $20,000? Is it because of the costs of lawsuits and malpractice insurance?

Another unbalanced aspect of medicine is that medical residents who are performing a lot of the surgeries make about $50,000 a year for the first 5-7 years of their residency program. I know a resident who is $400,000 in debt after going to a really fine private college for undergraduate, and then having to pay out of state tuition for 4 years of medical school. He can barely afford to live after paying his monthly loan repayment. And he leaves for the hospital at 4 am and gets home at 8pm many days. He usually has to work on Saturdays. That will be his life until he is 33.

[Aquagraph]

I don't propose these changes to our legal structure but they are imagination inspiring in theirselves. I present you:

THE LAW IN THE FREE STATE OF ICELAND

In the late 9th century Norway was ruled by a ambitious King called Harald. Like all ambitious kings, it did not fare well for the people fighting his conquest. Some of them left Norway and went to an island found recently. To this island called Iceland they brought lot of their old traditional laws from Norway with one major exception: They thought they could do very well without a king. So the Icelandic Commonwealth was born. In 930 AD the Icelanders formed a government over the whole island.

A central figure in theri legal system was the goði. They were chieftains and pagan priests. They had rights that were called as goðorðo. Goðorðo was private property and it could be sold and inherited. It was also a collective name for those people who voluntarily joined under that particular goði. They were the link of the common man to the legal system. They held the courts, voted on legislation, handpicked a jury of 36 people. The courts had several levels.

The actual federal government had only one part-time employee, the lawspeaker. He was elected by the goðar (plural for goði) from amongst randomly selected candidates. He had to memorize the law, give legal advice and every year he had to recite all of the law code at an annual assembly. Here's my favorite part: if a part of the law code wasn't mentioned and nobody complained, that law would be omitted. That stopped the piling of the law into gargantuan stacks of books that are a blight of many modern nations.

Here are the legislative and judicial branches described but there wasn't an executive branch. The courts didn't have a way to enforce the law. The victims and their allies had to do it. If the you harmed my property and the judges said you'd have to pay me 5 silver but you didn't do shit about it, I'd show your refusal to make amends to the courts and they would make you an outlaw. You had a couple of weeks to get out of Iceland or you would be free-for-all. This might seem cruel but remember that in the middle ages they couldn't afford rehabilitation and all those nice things.

If your friends helped you fight back, they too could be sued. If I was too weak to enforce my claim, I could sell or give all or part of it to someone who had muscle behind it. I'd buy a message of "Don't fuck with me or I'll fuck you up" which is what a civil society needs at it's base. It might seem unfair that I'd have to give a part of what belongs to me to get the rest of it but it's not very different in our world since you hire lawyers and even pay taxes for the dispute resolution of others. There is no free court.

If you killed an ordinary man illegally, there would be a price of compensation you'd have to pay to the family of the victim. This was called wergild ("man gold"). Many of you detest that then the rich can get away with crimes and it is true to some extent but the payment was high enough for the rich to see killing as a bad investment. According to some calculations it was 12.5 years to 50 years of ordinary mans wages. And it's not like the rich can't get away with crimes nowadays.

The legislation saw murder and killing as different things. If you killed someone you'd have to go to the nearest three houses to confess your deed and tell your name. Murdering was shameful and despised killing that happened in secret and thus served harsher penalties mentioned above.



Read Njal's saga and you can find out more about the daily life in Iceland. It scopes on the action a lot and it may seem violent because of it but according to a scholar the kill rate for the last turbulent 50 years that ended the Icelandic Commonwealth was around 350 out of the 70.000 people. The kill rate was higher in other countries comparable, like Normandy, England and Norway. And we are talking about men whose second occupation was often being a viking.

[WVBRY]

I recently watched a video with David D. Friedman explaining his views on how a totally free market run society would work. He mainly explains how private enforcement agencies, private courts, and private law would work. He also talks about private military.



I have some issues with this which I will write about below, but basically, this is how it would work:

Private enforcement agencies would be private police forces competing with each other in a free market. Private courts would be separate from these enforcement agencies but would work with them. The problem everyone sees with this at first glance, he says, is that competing agencies would be fighting each other over who's rights to enforce (since law is not the same for everyone). He says this is unlikely to happen, because violence is expensive. For example, he says, disputes and violence are costly, different enforcement agencies would agree to the same private court to settle disputes between agencies. So you have private courts settling disputes between private enforcement agencies and the agencies would agree by contract to which court would settle their disputes.

He also talks about private military, and how the main problem with this idea is that national defense is a public good, meaning that you can't control who benefits from it, which also means you can't control who to charge. He gives the example of airwaves and how that is a public good, since you can't control who listens to your radio station and who doesn't. In order to privatize the airwaves, he says, you can make it profitable however for the radio station or whatever that owns the airwaves by adverstizing: companies pay for airtime to pass ads which is profitable to radio stations and allows them to run on a profit. So he says, we can also envision a way to make military profitable while it remaining a public good.

My critique:

My critique of the private enforcement agency/private court idea is related to what Adam Smith called cartels, I can easily imagine these agencies and courts all banding together in order to lower prices of services to bar possible new competitors from the market and once they have a monopoly, set any price they want. This can happen in any sector of the economy but the problem with this in the case of courts and law enforcement is that they would have a monopoly over force, and thus become just another government. So we are back to where we started.

I do like his idea about having a militia system which he talks about at the end of the video when he talks about national defense. He argues the founding fathers of the US wrote the second amendment by envisioning a small professional military and a large civil militia. He says the right to bear arms was envisioned because they were scared of something like what Cromwell's army did in the 17th century in England. They were afraid of a military dictatorship which could result from a large professional army. The second amendment was written so that if the professional army tries to take over, they would be outnumbered "a hundred to one" by voluntary militia. The role of the professional army was to coordinate the efforts of the militias, while the militias would supply the manpower.

My critique isn't meant as anything definite; I think these ideas are interesting but I must admit I am skeptical.

I do like the idea of private roads and especially how Aquagraph describes them though.