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July 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:32
325 Sharia Law Versus The Non Aggression Principle - Anarchy and Crazy Laws

How will anarchy solve the problem of disparate legal systems?

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Good afternoon, everybody.
I'm switching topics around like a mad fiend because I'm running a...
I'm not a little late, but I sort of want to get home, I guess you could say.
And so I have decided to skip a topic that involves a reading of a fairly lengthy post, but an excellent one, so I definitely want to get to it.
But instead, we're going to go with a shorter question and answer set around DROs.
And this is another... I mean, it's so funny.
I start off with DROs in the very first podcast, and then around podcast 300, we end up going into the idea in a little bit more detail.
So I think that's a good barbell of information.
Scanty stuff in the middle, good stuff on the other side.
So... Sorry about that rumble that was...
It's just another one of the exciting things about doing a podcast in your car is you have to have the air conditioning pointing straight at your...
Anyway, let's just say that I'm not going to be posing for any boxer ads when I get home.
So... I would like to talk about DROs relative to a topic that comes up quite a bit when you start working with the concept of DROs, dispute resolution organizations, the private substitutes for governments that occur in a free market situation or free market system.
And the question that comes up is something like, well, what about these crazy Muslim Sharia law guys, right?
So you have a DRO that's sort of around the Western concept of universal property rights and the non-initiation of force and the binding nature of contracts and so on.
And you also have within the society a whole bunch of Muslim Sharia guys who will try and kill you if you have sex with their unmarried women, right?
Especially if you're Not have an air conditioning pointing at you for the whole drive.
But anyway... What is going to happen there?
I mean, how is this particular situation going to be resolved?
So, the Sharia DRO wants you dead for having sex with a Muslim woman.
And your DRO says, Dude, way to go!
Those shawls are really sexy.
There's nothing as hot as a burqa.
Or something like that.
So you get the high fives from your DRO. The other DRO kind of wants you dead, right?
How is this going to be resolved?
Well, of course, the way that anarchistic philosophy would generally approach this is with the traditional Wild West shootout.
It's the DRO shootout.
It's the gunfight at the DRO corral.
And whoever is left standing becomes the next government.
That's sort of generally how we approach these things.
but maybe you have another approach.
One other approach could be that the important thing to understand about DROs, and this is sort of important to understand about society or economics as a whole, everything, everything, everything, everything, everything, everything, everything is a process.
Everything you touch changes everything else.
Everything is continually being optimized.
That's sort of the nature of the free market because it's fun and challenging, rewarding and pleasurable.
To always try and do more with less, except words for free domain radio, in which case more is more.
More is better. Quality is quantity, as I have said before, but haven't said for a while.
So, you absolutely do want to look at the DRO model, or I would invite you to look at the DRO model, not as something wherein you graft all of the existing craziness On to the DRO model and say, well, how would that work? So, yeah, 40% of British Muslims want to live under Sharia law.
And that's fine.
I mean, people say a lot of stuff, right?
People talk a lot of shite pretty continually.
And the real question, of course, do you put your money away?
I support the troops.
Great! I don't.
So you can pay your bill for the war plus mine.
You would sort of find that people's support for the troops would diminish just a little bit, I think, if they actually had to pay the bills directly for the war in Iraq.
I am for the liberation of Iraq.
Fantastic. Then here's your bill.
That's sort of important, right?
If you've ever done marketing, you know the difference between people who say they'll buy something and people who will actually buy something, right?
It's... We're good to go.
People say a whole lot of stuff, and the government, of course, by its very nature encourages people to say a whole lot of stuff because the government is a massive agency which shifts costs from the evil to the good and shifts rewards from the good to the evil.
Or is it somebody said, government is a fiction by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everybody else.
And that's pretty important, but that doesn't quite get enough of it.
Right? So government is a fiction.
Wherein the good are punished and the evil rewarded.
And then we wonder, of course, when we look at that situation where evil has been rewarded, by evil I mean the initiation of the use of force and fraud, the evil stuff, evil people have been rewarded through gaining access to the treasury of the public person, passing preferential laws for their friends, and using the violence of the police and the military to...
Heard the sad and pathetic taxpayers from one end of the enclosure to another while pillaging them along the way.
Living in the government is like death by a thousand mosquito bites.
You have no one blow, but just bit by bit it wears you down.
And so you get a situation in society where, yeah, there are huge numbers of criminals in the modern world.
There are massive amounts of bureaucratic inefficiencies in the modern world.
There are massive problems with the legal system in the modern world.
And there's a massive amount of organized civil war in the modern world.
And by organized civil war, what I mean is lobbyists all fighting over the last dollar that we taxpayers have clutched in our gnarled and broken hands, right?
So the civil war is over the carcass.
The state and its parasites are a bunch of jackals fighting over the magnificent horse of the population in general and bringing it down, you know, how you see the cheetahs try and bring down a large zebra.
They just all pile on its back and try and cling it down, right?
So you get this incredible distortion in society that's brought about by the completely skewed negative and revolting incentives of state power And then you look at the DRO model and say, well, how's the DRO going to deal with all of these kinds of problems?
And, of course, the DRO system is going to go to work on those problems right away and change things, right?
So the equivalent in economics would be looking at a centrally planned economy, With all of these problems around distribution and resource allocation and capital allocation and getting goods to market and so on.
And you look at all of that massive inefficiency.
And you say, well, how on earth are DROs going to survive, given all of this inefficiency, and how are DROs going to reproduce the existing system in a more optimal way?
Well, of course, DROs are not.
Sorry, how is the free market going to recover or solve all of the problems or reproduce, but in a more efficient manner, all of the issues created by central state planning?
Of course, the free market is the complete opposite of central state planning.
It's a completely different animal.
The DROs are a completely different animal from centralized state coercive monopolies.
And so, when you look at all the crazy problems that are out there, the question then becomes, well...
What happens in the DROs over time?
Over time. You can't just sort of take a snapshot of all the crazy people in the current society and then say, we graph DROs on this, how is this going to work?
Right? So the equivalent in history, if you don't mind me casting about for equivalents, because I just don't feel like I'm doing as good a job explaining this as I'd like to, The equivalent in history would be to say, okay, we have the scientific method.
We finally figured it out. The scientific method is the most enormously productive thing known to mankind.
The scientific method plus the free market is sheer paradise on earth.
So, we finally figured out the scientific method and what we're going to do is we're going to go back in time to the Vatican in the 12th century.
How on earth are all the priests Going to work with the scientific method.
Well, of course they're not going to, right?
They're going to attack it like crazy.
And this is the whole issue around transition.
I don't want us to get too stuck into this, but the important thing to understand is that anarchism is a process.
It is not a snapshot.
And it is quite unjust to say to anarchism, how are you going to solve and deal with all the problems of all the crazy people when the crazy people are produced through state coercion and through religion?
And people, to some degree, will have to stop believing in these things in order to have an anarchistic society.
Anarchism isn't going to be imposed by some warlord.
Anarchism isn't. It's going to arise as people begin to understand the value of pacifism and they sort of stop believing in the fictions of the state and the church, country, race, culture and all this sort of nonsense.
And so it's going to arise somewhat organically, right?
So by the time you get an anarchistic society, whether that's 20 years or 200 years or 2,000 years...
People are going to no longer believe in all the nonsense that they believe in now, or at least it's not going to be the dominant form of belief.
You can still find people who probably think slavery is a good idea, but it's not really the dominant form of belief, right?
So this is sort of part of the whole process.
Now, I know that sounds like a total cop-out, and I'm not going to leave it at that.
I just sort of want to make that point that, I mean, most of the problems that we have in society is caused by centralized coercion, And then to say, well, a free society has to take that exact snapshot and make it more optimum.
It's like, well, that snapshot only exists because things are not optimum, right?
Our current social problems largely exist because we have a state.
And so saying, well, how would DROs deal with all these problems?
It's like, well, by preventing them.
That's a point, right?
But let's take this Sharia law example.
Again, I don't mind. I sort of want to put that out as a framework.
I don't mind at all looking at these things in more detail and assuming that we simply do inherit the existing system.
We simply do inherit the existing system.
The real challenge with government in the area of legality is that legality is not subject to market forces.
In fact, legality, like all processes of government, are subject to the exact opposite of market forces.
So with market forces, you aim to provide the minimum number of resources, the minimum amount of time, energy, or capital to achieve a given end.
So if I want to get from here to Nantucket, then I can walk, I can crawl, I can drive, I can fly, I can try and make my own helipad or whatever, right? I can hitchhike. But what I want to do is to instantly arrive in Nantucket with no effort.
Unless I'm into the scenic route, in which case Nantucket is the means to the end, which is the drive.
But assuming that Nantucket is my end, then I just want to get there immediately with no intervening.
I want to teleport, right? That's what I want.
So human beings always want to achieve their goals with the smallest amount of energy, time, and resources as humanly possible.
That's what the free market does in a system of volunteerism, in a system where people get to voluntarily associate with each other on property rights and so on.
Then that's what the free market does, and I don't need to lecture you about that, I'm sure.
Lecture you about something else.
I don't need to lecture you about that because that's pretty much understood by anybody who's come this far in the podcast series.
Now, state activities have never, certain state activities, have never, ever been subject to market forces.
And the law is one of them, right?
The law has always been run by the government.
So, in the realm of law, we have no idea...
How cheap it can be.
No idea how cheap it can be.
So when the government, for instance, had a pseudo-monopoly on, or the government created and enforced a largely monopolistic situation within Canada up until about ten years ago, where you had, actually eight years ago, I think, nine maybe, where you had a monopoly of phone service with Bell Canada, well, man, you used to spend a huge amount of time, sorry, you used to spend a huge amount of money on long-distance calls.
And so you say, well, this is very expensive, long distance calls are very expensive, so who's going to invest, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then, of course, what happens is when this stuff's all broken up, then you start to get significant competition, you start to get phone cards, you start to get people who will give you incredible deals for calling on off hours, and you will also get the growth of alternative means of communicating with people.
Cell phones, emails, and Carrier pigeons and smoke signals.
Anyway, you also will start to get, later on, you start to get broadband telephone service, which is fantastic as well.
So now, for instance, I go with Vinage, which for like $20 a month, I get like 8.5 hours of long-distance calls, or calls as a whole, and I don't really talk on the phone that much.
It's mostly my cell phone. So, basically, it's free.
Free long distance. It's gone from, I can't remember how much it used to be, but I remember spending on a long distance relationship like $60, $70, $80, $90, $100 a month in long distance calls.
Now, that's free.
And of course, you can just email, voice, stuff like that as well.
So it's gone from X amount of dollars to essentially more or less free, because it was more than $20 for the phone per month, and now it's $20 for the phone per month.
With all these services, Finage is great.
And also, it is free long distance.
So that's a pretty significant reduction in price and cost, which didn't occur when there was no free market, blah, blah, blah.
So if we think that...
If we think of laws, what we see is lots of problems all over the world, lots of problems of competing legal systems that are constantly jostling with each other.
So people are always advocating for their own particular approach to legal systems, but it's like only one person gets to inflict their legal system sort of finally on everyone else.
So we're just not used to looking at legal systems and saying, well, what would the free market do with them?
How could these be conceivably optimized if the vast and staggering and cosmic intelligence of mankind were applied to the problem as a whole?
What could conceivably be achieved?
Well, given that all human beings, especially when it comes to necessary evils, right?
Like when you go to the dentist, you want the dentist to be as quick as possible, as painless as possible, and as cheap as possible.
And in fact, you'd really like to not go to the dentist at all.
So when it comes to necessary evils, the ideal is non-existence.
When it comes to maintaining my dishwasher, the ideal is zero.
I want to do zero maintenance on my dishwasher.
And so the market, of course, provides that to the degree that it can.
Now, law is a necessary evil.
Law is just something that you do and get by with and sort of grumblingly pay for, like national defense, in order to achieve another good, right?
So you sort of grumblingly will do it, and it's a necessary evil like dentistry.
So basically the ideal law, legal system, is zero, none, no problems whatsoever.
Not no problems, but no need to spend money on legal solutions, right?
So the ideal solution for a dispute that you have with your neighbor over where the fence should go is that you all resolve it between yourselves.
And you do it by thumb wars or something like that.
You deal with the issues that you have in terms of conflicts.
You deal with those very quickly and without involving external agencies.
That's the most efficient way to deal with disputes and to deal with conflicts.
So I know that this is a bit of a long explanation, but I sort of want to point out that the ideal legal system doesn't exist.
it.
The ideal movie delivery system exists because movies give you pleasure and it's something you pursue.
The ideal dentistry situation doesn't exist.
You don't ever want to go to the dentist and your teeth are perfect and never hurt.
And the same thing with the legal system, the defense of the realm or whatever.
The ideal is zero.
It's a necessary evil.
Now... The one thing that occurs with the state is that you get to pass off the enforcement of these edicts to other people.
It's a sort of fairly significant, a fairly important aspect of the state.
So let's just say that I'm some Muslim guy, and tomorrow I'm going to snap my fingers and impose Sharia law on the entire population.
Well, Muslims and non-Muslims now have to pay for Sharia law.
So basically, the Muslim preference for Sharia law is heavily, heavily subsidized by everybody else.
So I get Sharia law dirt, dirt cheap.
This is a very important thing to understand about the state and the inefficiencies and the constant escalation of problems and violence and conflict and so on that has occurred within the state.
And we all understand this when it comes to manufacturing, right?
Like if I want to keep foreign steel out and I have to go and hire my own army to do it, it's really not worth it for me.
But if I can shift the costs of keeping foreign steel out to everyone, including the consumers that I'm ripping off and the competitors that I can now out-compete with to some degree, then it is economically valuable for me.
It's the same sort of thing that I've written at antiwar.com on the state is the health of war.
You can't have war without a government because then you have to pay for your own costs of destruction and that doesn't really work as well.
So basically, people who want stuff desperately and don't want to pay for it, in other words, people who want things that are inefficient and crazy and deranged and nutty and confusing and so on, all of these people desperately want the state to exist because that way they get to shift over the costs of enforcement to everybody else.
This is why state power always grows and states always grow to destroy the whole society and so on.
So if you are somebody who wants Sharia law...
If there's only one of you who wants Sharia law, right, let's just say, there's two Muslims in a country, and let's just say that the cost of setting up Sharia law is $100 million, right, and let's just say whatever in some sort of universal or countrywide kind of way.
Well, what happens is, if there's two of you, and you want Sharia law, and there's, you know, 10 million people in the country, and there's only two of you that want Sharia law, and there's no government, then you each have to pony up $50 million, right? $100 million. Two of you each got to pony up some portion of the $100 million.
If there's only one of you who's got any money, one of you is a priest, say, and I can produce anything other than shame, guilt, and destruction.
But then what happens is the person who, if only one of you has money, then one of you got to kick up $100 million to put in Sharia law.
Now, if there are two Muslims in the country, 10 million people, and it costs $100 million to set up Sharia law, and they can get it through the state in some manner.
I know it's not democratic or whatever, but just sort of go with me on this.
Then it's going to cost each one of those Muslims ten bucks to set up Sharia law.
So that's fairly significant.
It's quite a cash difference there.
So this is all pretty important.
And furthermore, if they can get it into the national debt, other people to pay for it, they're actually paying one dollar of it, or maybe not even that.
Maybe it's all deferred. So you go from two guys having to spend a hundred million dollars between them to two guys spending nothing.
And So that's a pretty significant reason why crazy people want the state, right?
Because they know that people won't voluntarily choose what they have to offer, but if they can force people to fund it, then suddenly they can get what they want without having to pay for it.
That's why environmentalists want environmental regulations or laws to protect property rather than going to buy the Arctic themselves, because that way they would actually have to pay for it themselves, right?
If you can get the government to prevent anyone from drilling in the Arctic, which is what you want as an environmentalist, then you don't have to pay for the land yourself, right?
You just, taxes go up 40 bucks or whatever, but otherwise you'd have to pay, I don't know, a couple hundred million dollars to buy the land and then it would be yours and you could prevent all the drilling you wanted.
But the environmentalists don't want to do that, right?
People with economically inefficient ideas desperately need the state, right?
Culture, religion, irrationality of every single...
It desperately needs the state because without it, you know, crazy got to pay its own way.
And when crazy got to pay its own way, crazy don't like to go, right?
So crazy people want everyone else to foot the bill for them being crazy, right?
So to return to the DRO model, if you're in this DRO environment...
Boy, I'm getting squeaky.
Environment! If you're in this DRO environment and you want to set up Sharia law, fantastic.
Well, what is the cost of DRO enforcement going to be for your 15 volumes of Sharia law, the endless, very, very complicated legal cases that occur in every way, shape, and form, right?
Because in Sharia law, pretty much everything is related to religion, right?
I mean, there's a few things, maybe like traffic signals, which are not specific to religion, but in everything else, everything...
Else has to be arbitrated by these religious councils.
So, it's going to be, you know, some seriously pricey system to set up.
Now... Even that is something that you're okay with as long as there's no competition, right?
People don't mind who are crazy, right?
They don't mind an expensive legal system that they also have to pay for as long as there's no other competition because everyone else is paying for it and they're still being subsidized relative to what they would be paying if they were paying for it themselves.
So they're still subsidized and also there's no competition so people can't go anywhere, right?
So yes, the Saudi princes, they're still profiting from This crazy situation in Saudi Arabia, but there's no chance for them losing people to competing legal systems, right?
So they don't have to worry about competition, so their false self, crazy, nutty sides don't ever have to worry about reality lurking around and poking them in the eye with a bright light, I guess you could say, in terms of reality.
So... So if you look at DROs, so you go, well, I've got a bunch of people, 5% of the population or 20% or whatever, want to set up Sharia law.
Fantastic. Okay, well, then you say to these people, okay, well, it's $100 a year for a regular DRO, but it's $1,000 a year.
For the Sharia law, DRO, and I bet you it would be much worse than that.
I bet you the differential would be much higher.
But let's just go with that because I'm in the car and I can't write anything down.
So I need figures that are easy to remember.
One thumb is non-sharia.
All four fingers and two thumbs is Sharia.
I think we can manage that so far because it doesn't strain my calculus-deficient brain.
So this is where this whole notion of process comes in, I think, very importantly.
And this is why I sort of started off this by saying that this whole thing around anarchy is a process.
The whole DRO system is a process.
So yes, will you get a whole bunch of people right off the bat who will sign up to these crazy, ten times more expensive...
Absolutely you will. For sure, for totally sure, you will get a whole bunch of people who will sign up for these because, you know, they're all brought up.
She really loves the best thing ever and a lot of social pressure, a lot of social guilt, right?
But that doesn't mean anything.
I mean, it means something, I guess, in the short run.
But if you know anything about immigrant culture, of course, if you looked at the first generation of immigrants who came across, say, from Greece, something I know a little bit about...
Then what you'd say is, well, these people don't assimilate at all.
Hell, their English isn't even that good.
They tend to stick within their own cultures.
They go to their own social institutions.
They keep on to their old world religious beliefs.
So integration is impossible, right?
That's sort of looking at the first generation of immigrant culture and then saying, well, integration doesn't occur.
But what you want to do, of course, is look at the second and third generation, because it's a process.
So people who are raised in one particular way, yeah, they're going to shift over to that.
Are their kids going to have the same kind of allegiance that they have?
Well, of course not. Of course not, for a wide, wide variety of reasons that we don't have to get into here, because traffic's picking up and I might not need to spend an hour in the car, but...
Of course, the next generation isn't going to care about it as much.
So the first generation, yeah, maybe 70% of people sign up for this Sharia thing, and then a whole bunch of other people pretend to and don't get involved or whatever, right?
But what happens in the long run?
Well, the Sharia law DRO system, assuming you're not in sort of one tiny Muslim village, the Sharia law DRO system is going to have a really tough time getting reciprocity agreements, except in the basics, with non-Sharia law DROs.
So, you have all these crazy rules in the Muslim world, Ramadan and all that kind of stuff, that your DRO as the Sharia DRO is going to enforce, but of course it's not going to get reciprocity with other DROs.
Your average honky DRO, white guy DRO is not going to be sitting there going, great, can I do anything to help you enforce these crazy Sharia laws?
That would be excellent! They're not going to care about that kind of stuff.
They're not going to prosecute or punish or sanction or enforce anything to do with those laws.
I'm under the bridge, just in case people are wondering, and we're out.
It's quite a day.
I'm waiting to drive into my house and have a nice swim in the garage.
But they're going to have a tough time getting reciprocity agreements.
And even, of course, within the Sharia law system, they're going to have an enormous amount of problems...
Getting reciprocity even DRO to DRO, because this is an irrational preference, not a necessary evil that you're working to get the bare minimum of, or towards, or around.
All right, we've taken a short burst through the hail.
Believe it or not, this is a lot quieter than it used to be.
And we will continue as I go hydroplaning off at 45 degrees towards the shoulder.
Anyway. So...
The DROs are going to have trouble, even getting, the Muslim DROs are going to have trouble getting reciprocity agreements going.
So if you want to go and deal with a non-Muslim, then you are going to face additional costs.
Because the non-Muslim DROs are going to say, oh man, dealing with those Sharia things, it's constantly changing, there's lots of different interpretations.
You're going to have to, I mean, DROs are going to profit from standardized kind of agreements, right?
The sort of bare-bones minimum agreements between each other, right?
And so they're not going to get involved.
They're not going to want to get profitably involved in dealing with each particular Sharia interpretation or approach.
They're going to just say, you know what?
We don't deal with Sharia DROs.
It's way too expensive. It's way too complicated.
And we have to hire 15 Muslim experts who don't want to work for us because we're not a Sharia DRO, blah, blah, blah, right?
So I don't think that's really going to...
That's really not going to work very well.
So... What is going to happen then is you're going to pay not only the additional penalty within the DRO system for wanting your own DRO Sharia thing, but also because it is a subjective and irrational preference, this DRO, the Sharia law, You're going to face an extraordinary degree of fragmentation, or amount of fragmentation, even within the Muslim community.
So, for those who know anything about Judaism, if you say, okay, we're going to have one set of rabbinical laws for all Jews, well, that's not going to work, right?
It's seriously not going to work.
Because you go all the way from Hasidic Jews to, say...
Steven Spielberg or, technically, me.
Right? So that's not going to work.
I'm not going to submit to any sort of way, shape, or form to any kind of Hasidic Jew law, and they're not going to want to submit to my two laws or whatever, so they're going to want a whole lot more because their irrational preference is not going to want to have this bare minimum thing occur, right? All the culture and religion, they can't handle the bare minimum law thing because they want their irrational preferences to be maintained and funded by everyone else and all this sort of stuff.
So, You can't get any kind of consistent rules across Jews, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, anything.
And of course, the Sharia thing is going to be exactly the same.
So DROs, even within the Muslim community, are going to have different degrees of liberality and interpretation and this and that.
So for them to deal with each other It's going to be incredibly expensive.
The overlap, the research, and they're going to have to sort of send updates in terms of policy 300 pages long, like every couple of days, to their members, to the people who have them as DROs, because it's constantly going to be changing.
This is the beauty of the bare minimum DRO. Okay, well, I don't steal, I don't kill, I don't rape, and I keep my contracts.
Yeah, I'm pretty much good to go. And maybe there's some white-collar nonsense involved there, too.
Who knows, right? But it seems quite unlikely.
But let's just say that you're going to have a couple of basic rules, which are easy to enforce, which don't need constant updating, which are going to be cheap as all get-up.
And, of course, the longer you keep these laws, the cheaper it's going to be, right?
So the basic reality is that when you start to have all these irrational preferences, the cost of those to the individuals who want them absent a state...
It's going to be horrendous.
Now, are some people going to bear this?
Sure. Some people are going to pay $5,000 a year for their Sharia DRO that deals with 12 other Sharia DROs and one non-Sharia DRO. They're going to pay the $12,000 a year, and they're going to submit to the economic hardships that come about from only having one non-Sharia DRO to work with, which means that it's going to be that much higher.
And that DRO's cost is going to be a lot higher than everyone else's, so there will be some people who do that, and they're also willing to read the 200 pages of DRO updates that come out every week as these people continue to negotiate different interpretations of Sharia law and update the 500-page DRO booklet about what's permissible and what's not and what the punishments are and so on.
Sure, there'll be people who do that, and there are people who like to go and live in the woods and they're naked, right?
But that's not really the majority that you need to worry about in terms of trying to find some way to structure society in a positive way, right?
You don't necessarily deal with, yes, there is spontaneous combustion, but that's not the only thing you study when you are a doctor because, well, it's not really common enough, right, for you to spend a whole lot of time and energy trying to figure it out.
So, when it comes to these kinds of institutions, they're not going to last.
I absolutely, completely, totally guarantee that these things are not going to last.
So, what's going to happen is, yeah, there'll be a whole bunch of people who's like, yes, I absolutely want to sign up to the Sharia law because I am so Muslim, I can spell it backwards.
And they're going to be keen and all this.
They're going to be the first generation that come from the old country in any sort of immigrant culture.
They'll be so all up with that that it's going to be ridiculous.
And then, my friends, there's going to start to become a silent collapse of the invisible middle as people go, well...
You know, this seems like really expensive, and it's really a lot of work.
And over here, I'm paying $5,000 a year, and I got all this documentation to review.
And over here, there's some guy that's going to give me a protection for $100 a year, no updates, and I can do business with anyone in the world.
I mean, really?
Are you going to want to do that?
If you feel that that's going to work, then try, if you like, try and set up a courier company that's really complicated and inefficient but uses local talent and just see how well you do relative to, say, FedEx or...
UPS or whatever, right? And you're going to die.
You're going to die a painful economic death, right?
Because people are about economic efficiency.
And I'm not talking about ethics and all that.
I'm just talking about this aspect of the free market in terms of goods traded and sold, of which protection from violence and dispute resolution is a good bought and sold.
We're all sort of clear about that, right?
It's not a shining metaphorical example of virtue on a hill.
It's a good bought and sold.
And so, yeah, you'll get some people and then they'll slowly drift away and they'll sort of say, you know, this DRO thing was really not a good idea because once you get beyond the basics, it's way too expensive and complicated to deal with anyone else.
And so people are going to start to drift away from it.
And I think that's going to do a whole lot to get rid of religion because right now religion is alive partly because of the state, right?
So you're going to have...
People who drift away, even within sort of the first generation, they're going to say, okay, well, I could do this Sharia law thing, or I could refinish the basement.
I could do this Sharia law thing, or I could put my kids through college.
Or whatever, right? So there's going to be a lot of enthusiasm up front, and it's going to seem very daunting.
It's like, oh my god, everything's going to fragment!
The same way that when immigrants come across, lots of people say, hey, they don't even learn English, why do we even let these people in?
For the second generation, right?
They're almost completely assimilated, so...
So then the second generation is going to be very, very different because they didn't grow up with direct knowledge of sort of the original situation when the imams were around with Sharia law or whatever.
It was sort of a big thing. And they're not just going to have the same loyalties at all.
And they're going to want to maximize their resource consumption and minimize their resource expenditure just like every other sane human being on the planet.
So they're going to look at trying to find ways of working with DROs that have nothing to do with paying $10,000 a year for all this hyper-complicated Sharia law stuff.
Now, they are probably going to want to keep up appearances.
Right? So, there's going to be some way of impersonating the logo of the generally approved Sharia law GRO, or there's going to be people who sell something that's very similar, but it's kind of hidden in secrecy, and you can say, yes, I belong to it,
but it's actually only 200%. I mean, I'm not going to sit there and do this whole Sharia law thing because it's way too expensive.
And even if nobody in the entire Muslim community does that, and they all want to spend their $12,000 a year, well, all that happens is they then just become poor.
Their expenses are so much higher relative to everyone else's that they're just going to get relatively broke.
It's not going to be the major issue.
They're just not going to have any money.
And at some point, they're just going to get sick of that, right?
As the rest of society gets richer and richer, and the Muslims relative to everyone else get poorer, or relatively poorer, or stay relatively poorer, they're just going to get sick of it.
And they're going to say, well, this is all well and good, but, you know, man's got to eat, and you get all this coming.
This is what Christians do, right? Christians are supposed to give away all their products and give away all of their money and send it to somebody else.
You may have heard the phone call.
Now I can't remember what I was saying.
Never mind. Anyway, so it's the most disjointed podcast in the world.
Actually, it's one of the top 320 most disjointed podcasts in the world.
I'm fairly sure that I can say that with impunity.
I sort of hope that you understand that when you begin to accrue the costs of irrational system towards those who prefer them, yeah, there'll be a bunch of people who'll sign on sort of up front, but fundamentally it's going to decay pretty quickly.
And if it lasted longer than two generations, I would be completely and totally shocked.
It would be like trying to detect a Greek accent from Christina's kids, or Christina and I's kids, right?
Maybe a really, really trained linguist would say, yes, that is absolutely a third-generation Greek accent.
But, boy, most people are just going to hear, you know, the good old King's English.
So, from that standpoint, I would say that's pretty important to understand, that...
You really do have this situation wherein when you have a DRO system and a non-centralized government that can enforce crazy rules on everyone and so subsidize craziness and punish sanity, which would be a minimization of laws to sort of bear the bare requirements to have a functioning society or to be able to hang on to your property, then I would say that that would be a situation where Wherein you really do end up with the best of all worlds, right?
Because what you do want, since laws are a necessary evil, you really do want a system...
Wherein you are constantly having people jostling to bring the price of these things down, because by bringing the price of law enforcement down or contract resolution down, what you're doing, which I think is kind of cool, is you are raising the costs of crazy laws relative to the new price of the sane laws, the effective and efficient laws that are sort of in bare minimum of the necessary evil.
And so, you are raising the price.
So, when you're the first dentist to introduce sort of numbing the mouth or whatever, he raised, basically raised the price of going to everyone else, right?
So, whereas it's like everywhere you go is pain, right?
Before this, before this Novocain, right?
Everywhere you went was pain.
Now, you can go one place where there's no pain.
So, whereas pain before was a constant, now it's actually a cost because it's optional.
It's a variable, right? So, So in the state, right, there's no competition, there's no way of getting cheaper and more effective and more efficient necessary evil laws than in any other context.
But once you start to get people making really efficient and optional systems wherein one-tenth the price, one-twentieth the price of crazy complicated laws, then you really do start to create a price for crazy complicated, difficult-to-enforce laws like this sort of stuff,
right? Now, last but not least, it is a very real possibility that you're still going to have one or two crazy Sharia DROs that are going to say, hey, if you have sex with our Muslim women, you're going to kill, right?
They're going to kill you. Well, I mean, let's just say that this is the case.
I don't think it would be after a certain amount of time, but let's just say it is.
Then, of course, it's certainly possible that DROs are going to say at some point, you know, we're not going to protect you.
If you go have sex with a Muslim woman, good luck.
But this is, you know, the way they have these travel advisories like, don't go to Iraq because you might be killed by freedom, by the liberation.
Or if you're in Iraq, get out, right, or whatever, right?
The same thing, of course, will occur with DROs.
If people continue to do really dangerous things like have sex with unmarried Muslim women or Married Muslim women who want their wives, and these blood cults, this death worship cult comes out and wants to kill them.
Well, the DRO is going to say, look, this is happening way too often.
We simply can't. There's no we're guilt.
We're not going to enforce this.
Good luck. It's a state of nature.
And that's certainly possible.
At least you're getting a good warning about the consequence.
Of doing these things, right?
So insurance companies would probably consider that a form of suicide then at that point.
So it certainly is the case that you could have these different kinds of systems wherein there is going to be a problem of resolving things.
But around the couple of basic rules that all human beings need and property rights and no violence and keep your contracts...
These things are going to be enforced in general.
This is what you need to enforce with other people.
I don't need to enforce that they have to like the band Queen, although that would be logical, and I'd like to, but the Queen Enforcement DRO still remains in paper form only, working on for the most part, of course.
But what I need from other people is not that they like the band Queen, but that they don't hit me, or steal from me, or rape my wife, or rape me, for that matter, and that they, you know...
Fulfill their contracts to me or whatever, however you sort of want to put that.
So that's what I need.
I just need the bare minimum from people.
Everything else is like wide open.
Do whatever you want, right? You can hump a camel while smoking a joint.
As far as I care, that's your business, right?
But just don't, you know, do it to me kind of thing.
So, what you want to do is have competing legal systems where the bare minimum is the cheapest and prevention is much more important than cure and all these kinds of goodies.
You want all of this kind of stuff so that the really expensive crazy convoluted laws End up falling away, right?
Just like the Edsel, just like New Coke, just like every damn stupid thing that capitalists have thrown on the market that people don't really want.
And they might pay lip service to it, for sure, and they might donate to it and so on.
But you can certainly see that Christianity has managed to do away with the whole don't own property, give everything to the poor and wander around ragged thing, right?
They obviously had to adapt a little to that, right?
So now they'll just take a little bit of money and You know, provide a certain amount of comfort or whatever it is that the Christian church does to people that makes them need it.
Kind of a heroine pusher in my view, but, you know, maybe there's some sort of positive comfort that people do get out of these kinds of things.
I guess I'll have to get into arguments about determinism because they can say that free will comes from the existence of the soul.
Who knows? I mean, hey, I might become religious just for that.
So that's sort of my approach to trying to understand how differing DROs work together, is that they're all going to end up offering pretty much the same thing, right?
I mean, they're going to start competing on other things, right?
They're going to start competing on prevention, right?
Look, we can go $50 a year because we have now thumbprinted all of your valuables and can get them back, and they don't work unless you activate them.
We're going to put that sticker on your window so that without a biometric scan, you can't turn on your TV, so no one's going to bother stealing it.
So we can go $50 a year.
They're going to do all that kind of stuff.
It's all going to be around prevention of the basics, right?
And so that's where you want people competing, right?
Instead of people competing to impose Sharia law on you or have you fund the imposition of Sharia law on their own women or children or whatever, you don't want that for sure.
That's what the government provides.
But you do want people to be constantly challenged to provide more prevention, cheaper ways of achieving this necessary evil we call the law.
And that's something that the DRO system can provide, which nobody else can, and I think that's one of the things that makes it so exciting.
Thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate donations.
Looking forward to them. None so far today, but I will struggle on.
And I will talk to you soon.
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