I’m sorry to have to announce that my author and friend, J. Neil Schulman, has died. Here is an obituary written by another friend of Neil’s, Stephan Kinsella.
Announcing a new novel by J. Neil Schulman
For Immediate Release
Steve Heller Publishing is pleased to announce that its premiere book publication is The Fractal Man, the fourth novel from award-winning novelist and filmmaker, J. Neil Schulman. The novel will be serialized at stevehellerpublishing.com and will be published as an Amazon Kindle book when completed.
Schulman’s previous novels, Alongside Night (Crown 1979) and The Rainbow Cadenza (Simon Schuster, 1983) each won Prometheus Awards, and his third novel Escape from Heaven (Pulpless.Com, 2002) was a Prometheus Award finalist.
Over the course of his literary career Schulman’s novels and nonfiction books have received endorsements from Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange); Nobel laureate Milton Friedman; Nebula Grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein; Academy-Award winner Charlton Heston; and many other celebrities and best-selling authors.
His books have received rave reviews in The Los Angeles Times, Detroit News, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Reason, National Review, and many other national magazines and newspapers.
In addition to his work as an author, J. Neil Schulman wrote one of the best remembered episodes of the 1980’s CBS Twilight Zone — “Profile in Silver”; wrote and directed two feature films currently streaming on Amazon Prime — Lady Magdalene’s (2008) and Alongside Night (2014); and the Wall Street Journal in January 1989 called him a pioneer in the field of digital book publishing.
Full information on J. Neil Schulman is available at http://www.pulpless.com/jneil/jnsbio.html as well as on Wikipedia, Amazon, IMDb, Facebook, Twitter, and his YouTube channel.
Why the negative formulation of the Golden Rule implies the positive one
The positive formulation of the Golden Rule is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
The negative formulation (according to Rabbi Hillel) is “If something is hateful to you, do not do it to others”.
Here is the proof that the negative formulation implies the positive formulation:
If there is an action X that you find hateful, then by definition you would not want someone else to do X to you.
Therefore if you do X to another, you are not doing unto them as you would have them do unto you.
This therefore violates the positive formulation of the Golden Rule.
Q. E. D.
Now, does the positive formulation imply the negative one? Yes, but that is more complex to prove, so it will have to wait until I have the time for another post.
Why the NAP does not apply to animals
On occasion, a good-hearted person decides that the NAP applies to animals. What they usually mean by this is not that animals can be expected to accept it, of course, since almost no one is that divorced from reality.
What they mean is that if person A is harming an animal, then person B is entitled to use “defensive” force against person A, just as would be the case if person A were harming another human.
Obviously this cannot be true, because if it were, it would mean that anyone who interacts with any animal without the animal’s consent is guilty of a crime, as he would be if the animal were a human being.
This leads immediately to the conclusions that pet owners are slaveholders, meat-eaters are (at least) accessories to murder, and many other obviously ridiculous conclusions.
Again, of course it is not true that anyone who follows the NAP is a “good person”, or is entitled to have others deal with him voluntarily. If most people think that meat-eating is a terrible evil, then those people would be free in anarchy to shun meat eaters. But they would still not be free to use violence against them, as that would be a NAP violation.
But if you don’t accept the consequentialist reasoning above, then you should also consider that “argumentation ethics”, which logically proves the validity of the NAP, applies only to beings capable of reasoning. If a dolphin (for example) turns out to be able to discuss and agree to the NAP, then that dolphin would also be entitled to claim its protections.
So far, though, we have only us.
What is a crime?
Short answer: Anything that violates the NAP.
Long answer: A crime is any aggressive action. For example, theft, assault, fraud. The NAP says that no one may initiate aggression against another; thus, any such action violates the NAP.
Note that this does not mean that all actions that avoid violating the NAP are morally correct. They aren’t. Many actions violate the Golden Rule, and are therefore morally improper, but that doesn’t mean that one can use violence in response to them, as that itself would be a NAP violation.
Of course it must also be noted that this is not the legal definition of a crime. All that means is that we do not live in anarchy. Under anarchy, that would be the definition of a crime, because anarchy does not authorize the violation of the NAP by anyone at any time. Using violence to prohibit actions that are not NAP violations is in itself a NAP violation, which cannot be considered legitimate in anarchy.
Does paying taxes mean that you consider the State legitimate?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: No, because paying taxes is involuntary.
It should be obvious that anything that another person forces you to do cannot validate the legitimacy of the commands of that other person.
By definition, if you have not initiated aggression, any use of force against you must be violating the NAP, which means that it is a crime.
Thus, it is impossible for your forced cooperation with this person to signify that their commands are legitimate.
What it signifies is that you are choosing to avoid even worse penalties as a result of disobeying a command backed up by force.
Does voting violate the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP)?
Short answer: No, if you are voting defensively rather than aggressively.
Longer answer: If the reason you are voting is to gain benefits at the expense of someone else, e.g., subsidies from the State, then it violates the NAP. However, if the reason you are voting is to try to defend yourself against aggression in the form of higher taxes, more regulations, or other State intrusions in your life, then it does not violate the NAP.
Furthermore, defensive voting not only does not violate the NAP, but it doesn’t violate the Golden Rule either, as everyone has (and should have) the right of self-defense.
Does voting mean that you accept the legitimacy of the State?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: No, because choosing one master instead of another master does not mean that you want a master at all.
What it means is simply that you believe that the rule of one master would be less harsh than the rule of another, or in some other way would be preferable.
For example, if you were convinced that one candidate would be more likely than the other(s) to start WW III, it would be reasonable (and not a NAP violation) to vote for that candidate.
Of course, if I were given the choice of voting for having no President at all, and there were any possibility that such a choice would actually have an effect on the outcome, I would take it; otherwise I could hardly claim to be an anarchist. But such a choice was not available, so I picked the lesser of two evils.
How would contracts be enforced in Anarcho-Capitalism?
Without a State to enforce contracts, would breaching a contract be risk-free?
Not at all; in fact, it would probably be much more hazardous to breach a contract in anarchy than it is under a State.
Contract enforcement under anarchy
Because in anarchy, although there would be no State to punish such breaches, there would also be no State to authorize them.
In anarchy, everyone would have the option to purchase insurance against contract breaches from competing contract-fulfillment insurance firms, who would investigate claims of breach and compensate their customers if a breach were to be found.
Of course, the cost of such insurance would be proportional to the product of the likelihood of breach and the cost to remediate the breach. Thus, buying insurance against breaches by known crooks would be unaffordable or completely impossible. This of course would not make it impossible to deal with crooks, but only the most careless customers would do so.
This put the burden of determining reliability on specialized firms who would do their utmost to price the risk properly, since it would be very expensive for them to misjudge the risk in either direction.
And to answer the obvious question as to what would happen in the case of an insurance company’s refusal to pay a just claim: that would damage their reputation severely, as anyone who was paying attention would be less likely engage their services in the future.
Who would notify their customers or potential customers of this situation? Their competitors, of course.
Contract enforcement under a State
Of course competition in contract enforcement under a State can also exist, but it is mostly pre-empted by the State courts, which are slow, expensive, and unreliable.
However, in more cases than might be immediately obvious, we can see the effects of social disapprobation acting toward fulfillment of contracts without State intervention.
One example is the “handshake deals” made by diamond dealers in the New York jewelry district. They never sue one another, but they also keep their word as given. The reason, of course, is that anyone who breaches an agreement will be excluded from future dealings with the rest of the closely knit group. This method of contract enforcement would be unaffected in a state of anarchy.
Conclusion
As with other situations, the absence of the State leads to better results than its presence.
The importance of culture in Anarcho-Capitalism
Does anarchy mean “anything goes”, assuming that the NAP is not violated?
Yes and no.
Yes, because you would be free to do as you wished so long as you didn’t violate the NAP.
No, because others’ equal freedom to do as they wish means that they could do anything OTHER than violating the NAP to affect your behavior.
The example of IP laws
To take an example commonly discussed. there could be no IP (“intellectual property”) laws in an anarchy, because such laws require a State to enforce them.
But let’s suppose that everyone, or almost everyone, in that particular anarchy believed that creators of IP deserved payment for their work, and thus that copying such work without their permission would be an inappropriate act, deserving social disapprobation.
In such a situation, those who did copy would find themselves isolated from the rest of the community. Violence could not be used against them without violating the NAP, so they would be free to continue this behavior if they wished to do so. However, they would probably find it too expensive to continue, in terms of lost opportunities for interaction with others.
Conclusion
If the vast majority of members of society disapprove of a particular behavior, such behavior would be deterred even in the absence of violent prevention of that behavior, especially in a business setting; no businessman wants to face boycotts that seriously impact his ability to sell.