David B. Shemano wrote: > You want to conflate the creation of law with the enforcement of law, but > they really are two distinct categories for the purpose of discussion (which > was how law is created). <
Actually it was the enforcement that I was talking about: how can there be a "spontaneous order" if it involves gendarmes? I would say that there will be no spontaneous order unless people have great feelings of solidarity with each other. > ... I absolutely disagree with your statement that "state coercion is > required to keep people from taking each other's property by force, fraud, > etc.," which is a truly Hobbesian statement. < The operations of the capitalist social system is based on and encourages greed. If we assume that a capitalist system prevails (as it does), then this "Hobbesian statement" is accurate. (BTW, whatever one thinks of his philosophy, Hobbes was a smart guy, much clearer-headed than, say, Locke.) > The overwhelming people in my world, for example, are law abiding not because > of state coercion, but because most people recognize the inherent > "wrongfullness" of fraud and theft and don't act that way. There are always > exceptions, and that's why we have enforcement mechanisms, but for most > people in the US, they have very infrequent interaction with the coercive > elements of the police and the justice system.< Your experience is not wrong. But it is based on the coercive elements, which have a "force multiplier," as it were. In a system that uses state coercion to enforce property rights, etc., it is _normal_ for people to respect others' property and to see that property as endorsed by morality. Thus, coercion plays a larger role than it appears on the surface, since it is like a backbone for popular morality about these issues. But if a small minority of greed-heads can get away with stealing from others (e.g., employers paying their employees below what the contract says) and there's no coercion, this normality and morality is progressively undermined. Without the backbone, in a conflictual and greedy society such as our own the popular morality becomes like a jellyfish, except less viable. What used to be thought of as "crime" becomes normal. Hey, why not allow me to have slaves, no matter what the legal status? It's like the speed limits. If the cops don't enforce the speed limits, more and more people will break that law, until those of us who "drive with the traffic" are breaking the speed limit. Then there will still be people who want to drive even faster (in their BMWs, etc.) If they get away with it, the average rises again, along with the speed of those who drive with the traffic. Next, people start lobbying to just get rid of the speed limit, to legalize illegality. There seem to be natural and technological limits here: in LA, to choose a random city, the density of the traffic normally prevents driving faster than 80 MPH, while my car can't go 70 for very long without having the MPG hit the floor. But the limits to dumping pollution on the natural environment, cutting wages and benefits, pushing medications with only "mild" negative side-effects, etc. are much less obvious, so that major catastrophes can occur before limits are hit. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
