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TracyW: If you want to abolish the state entirely, that’s one thing. But if you’re still going to have a legal system, recognising marriages strikes me as a logical thing for it to do.

This involves an elementary mistake. If Gary thought that the only form of “legal systems” available were monocentric legal systems administered by territorial states, then he would be “contemplating a role” for the state in adjudicating land disputes (say). But he doesn’t think that. So inferring that his comments about a “legal system” entail a role for a government to administer the legal system is premature. (Gary is in fact an anarchist and advocates the general and complete departure of the state from legal systems, not only in the case of marriage.)

TracyW: With over-lapping, competing, polycentric outlets, what’s the process for deciding if A made such a commitment to his girlfriend?

I don’t want to be rude, but a question like this strikes me as little more than a belligerent lack of imagination. Can you really not figure out some minimally creative way that people might try to deal with this? You might start by asking around. Or you might count on the parties to the dispute to provide evidence of a past public commitment one way or t’other by A (since, if they intend to have their claims taken seriously, they have an obvious incentive to point out the basis for those claims). In your imagined case, if we presume that we’re living in a community where the local norm is that the next-of-kin will be presumed to speak and decide for a patient who is unable to speak or decide for herself, then, given that context, either (a) A has taken it upon herself to publicize an explicit waiver of this presumption, and to vest the decision-making with someone else; or (b) A has taken it upon herself to publicize an explicit choice that someone should be considered her next of kin (for example B, which A might have done when she married B), or (c) A has not taken it upon herself to do either of these things. Ex hypothesi, we were supposed to assume that (a) was not the case, but you said nothing about whether (b) had been done or things had been left to (c). If (b) had been done, then of course there is a perfectly clear answer, and whoever did the publicizing of A’s marriage to B would presumably also have an interest in making it known should the question ever come up whether B really was A’s next of kin. (And in any case B would have every reason to point the doctor to these folks if the doctor had any questions.) It would then of course be up to the publicizing folks to produce any documentary evidence that the situation might call for. (Maybe they didn’t keep any documentary evidence of a public ceremony. If so, they’re evidently not very good at documenting marriages, and I expect anyone who seriously cared about the outcome would want to entrust the formalities with somebody else.) In case (c), then it seems like A didn’t really care too much about making sure that B would be able to make decisions for her, and the best that we can do is to rely on whatever local conventions may have developed for sorting these things out. (If A is a grown adult, and A and B have been living together for years, with or without explicit commitments about next-of-kin issues, then I suspect a local convention that strongly favors the parents in the absence of any explicit declaration is likely to lead to some pretty unjust outcomes. But then that’s a reason to develop some different social conventions.)

And if A is thinking ahead of time, and wants to sign a contract to keep his parents out of the decision, how can he do so in a way that will stick if his parents don’t agree to any such contract?

Easily. A does not need parental agreement to designate someone else as his proxy for medical decision-making (or any other kind). It’s not a “right” that they have to waive (A is their child, not their property); it’s a privilege that they have as long as A still consents to give it to them.

I agree that in an anarchist society there would be definite interest for both parties to agree on an arbitrator when signing a contract, which would get around the problem with polycentric, overlapping outlets …

Well, this seems like an odd way to put it. I deny that there is any “problem with polycentric, overlapping outlets” to be solved. Choosing one outlet among many is not the same thing as solving a “problem” with having many outlets; when I say, “Let’s go to Cottage Inn for dinner tonight, not Blue Nile,” that’s not exactly solving some “problem with polycentric, overlapping” competition in food.

So why seek the departure of the state from this particular area?

Well this seems simply like a flat denial of the central problem that Gary’s comments were introduced to discuss (the problem that gay couples, among others, have in dealing with these issues by means of a marriage through the exsting legal system). Because it is not actually something the state does reasonably well. Notably, the state currently engages in extensive discrimination against those who attempt to make use of existing legal forms for handling these situations; it fails to serve the specific real-world needs that you claim it is serving “reasonably well” for significant numbers of couples. There are three ways of trying to deal with these problems: you could deny that these forms of discrimination really are a problem (i.e., there’s some good reason for them); or you could try to deal with them by urging the state to make those legal forms of recognition more general and universally available, without changing the monopolistic control over the recognition of marriages (and family relationships more broadly); or you could try to deal with them by getting rid of the monopolistic control over the recognition of marriage (so that other kinds of social entities, non-institutionalized social processes, social conventions, etc. could emerge to handle it, for those who wish for an alternative to the current norm). But given left-wing market anarchist commitments to LGBT liberation (among other left-wing values), a left-libertarian is hardly going to deny that there is any problem here. And given left-wing market anarchist commitments to anarchism, there seem to be some strong reasons to favor the radical and anti-statist solution over the reformist and statist solution. One reason being the great likelihood that, whatever reforms you may be able to make in the short-term under the right circumstances, anarchists typically point out the likelihood that any monopolistic, politically-administered social entity is going to be captive, to a lesser or greater degree, to dominant social norms and political power structures. Thus, when you write:

It strikes me as much more convenient for there to be a central registry of marriages.

… I’m inclined to doubt that it really is as “convenient” as you think it is for everyone concerned. It might seem more convenient, if you haven’t got any worries about subjecting the definition of marriage to a uniform, centralized community monopoly in a moral and religious environment where many people have deeply conflicting ideals about marriage. But many people (LGBT people among them, not to put too fine a point on it) may have some reasons for thinking that community monopolies will tend to reflect some pretty strong bias in favor of the dominant ideals of marriage in the community, and may not allow a space for alternative ideals. Certainly this has been the outcome so far.

n8chz:

BTW, just how confident are you that, once ALL the stuff that's got to go is gone, the going rate for entry-level labor will pay for the going rate for entry-level housing and other necessities?

Well I think there is very little anyone can confidently predict for sure, but if you want to take a look at likely tendencies, then (1) I'd say that in freely competitive markets there's a something-more-than-coincidental relationship between available incomes and the cost of basic housing, because one of the basic pressures on bidding for houses are the incomes available in the communities where you'd be living. Of course there are many other issues that affect housing prices, notably the markup from development rackets, landlords, property taxes, the effects of land speculation, etc. but then precisely the sorts of liberation from Land Monopoly that I mention above would, I argue, have the effect of dramatically reducing, if not simply eliminating, exactly those sorts of factors. (2) In any case one of the major effects of the kinds of liberated markets that I'm calling for is an across-the-board dramatic reduction in recurring housing costs, so that far more people would own their housing free and clear, many would be able to gain housing without any cash expenditure at all through the direct exercise or exchange of personal labor, etc. Other fixed costs of living (e.g. medical costs, credit, access to culture and entertainment, food costs, etc.) would also be dramatically decreased, all forms of taxation and monopoly rents would be eliminated; and to a great extent transferred into grassroots, worker-controlled organizations such as mutual associations, co-ops, unions, or to ad hoc or informal-sector arrangements, rather than being in the hands of powerful for-profit corporations. So aside from any economic reasoning about the connections between incomes and housing demand curves, I'd also rest a fair amount of confidence in simply the absolute magnitude of reductions in fixed costs of living to ensure that working folks would generally be in much less precarious positions when it comes to covering the costs of living (housing included).

My recent post December 17th is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

n8chz:

Also, assuming someone like me is the intended audience (not saying such a someone should be, but…) implying the existence of people whose market value is below minimum wage should be accompanied EVERY SINGLE TIME by the point that the baseline cost of living is artificially high. . . .

O.K. Didn't I specifically make that point? I think in the final sentence of the article I explicitly identified it as half of "the point I'm trying to stress."

Ideally you'll offer a demonstration that the latter problem is considerably larger in magnitude than the former. Otherwise you are effectively telling me that some people aren't earning their keep; are literally worthless, and I'll have no choice but to assign you as "right of center" in my mental filing cabinet.

O.K. But the view I explicitly stated and argued for in this article is that the dominant effect of the state on working people's income is not to prop it up but to drive it down from where they would be if workers were more free to organize and seek alternatives to capitalist wage-labor employment; I'm not sure how that gets you "effectively" to a claim that people are "not earning their keep." I also suggested that minimum wage laws are a dysfunctional, or actively counterproductive, means to "ameliorating" the effects of the dominant trend of state capitalist laws, and that the right way to deal with these kind of problems is not through liberal state labor regulation, but rather through militant workers' unions, the destruction of capitalist land monopolies, and worker ownership of the means of production. If that gets you to "right of center" in your mental filing cabinet then I think that may be a problem with the filing, not with me.

Broadly speaking, I have trouble seeing much of my article in this reply to it. It sounds like you're spending a lot of time riffing on something that might be suggested to you by the words "against the minimum wage" rather than responding to the argument I wrote.
My recent post December 17th is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

is packing up the last Market Anarchy and Anarchist Classics Series orders to go about before the Christmas holidays. Anarchy is coming to Omaha, Neb. and Floral Park, NY….

Hey there,

Sorry to hear you're having this problem. I'd be happy to try and help.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to reproduce the problem on my test servers (I've attempted editing active menus while FeedWordPress was running, and didn't see any disappearances or other problems with the menus.) Could you let me know a bit more about (1) which version of FWP you're using, (2) which version of WordPress you're using it with, (3) which menus you're having trouble with, and (4) the specific circumstances or tests that led you to conclude the problem is linked to FWP? This information should help me get a better grip on how to troubleshoot the problem.

Thanks,
-C

Hey there,

Sorry to hear you're having this problem. I'd be happy to try and help.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to reproduce the problem on my test servers (I've attempted editing active menus while FeedWordPress was running, and didn't see any disappearances or other problems with the menus.) Could you let me know a bit more about (1) which version of FWP you're using, (2) which version of WordPress you're using it with, (3) which menus you're having trouble with, and (4) the specific circumstances or tests that led you to conclude the problem is linked to FWP? This information should help me get a better grip on how to troubleshoot the problem.

Thanks,
-C

TracyW -

1. I haven’t spent a lot of time offering “good solutions for [your] hypothetical As and Bs” because I think that giving detailed legal advice to the characters in an underspecified thought-experiment is probably going to be missing the point without having a lot more knowledge of the interpersonal and social circumstances that you’ve constructed for them. It seems that you have some fairly specific circumstances in mind (rain, sunscreen, etc.) but I haven’t any real way of knowing from what you say how much these people are operating in good or bad faith, how willing they are to sacrifice their putative goals in order to try to “win” the conflict, etc.

If you just want some short answer or another then, briefly, the first case sounds like a case for a medical ethics board (although I can imagine other ways of dealing with it; but whatever means they adopt it seems like all the parties concerned have a pretty strong incentive to make the process as quick as possible); and the second case sounds like a case for entering into binding arbitration, either with a professional or with disinterested arbitrators chosen ad hoc. (Let me just assert that there is every reason to think that there will be medical ethics boards and disinterested arbitrators in any anarchic society that has medicine, and contracts.) Of course you might wonder how A and B could agree on an arbitrator if they can’t agree on the terms of the contract, But historically people have figured out ways to do this when government court’s weren’t available. In any case if people are making contracts in a social environment where there is no single entity that can be presumed to exercise a monopoly on final arbitration of contracts, then there will be both an incentive to write high-stakes contracts in such a way as to specify, ahead of time, the process for arbitration; and also a reason to develop some pretty strong customary conventions for finding arbitrators after the fact if it’s not spelled out in the contract.

2. You write: “A in my medical system will have died before there is resolution, and in the divorce situation A and B’s kids will have grown up and had kids of their own.”

Of course this kind of move is exactly why I hesitate to spend a lot of time on the detailed suggestions for A and B, and why I referred you to some of the existing literature. The existence of multiple overlapping institutions and processes for resolving disputes does not mean that disputants will want to, or will be able to, avail themselves of every possible venue for their conflict; and it doesn’t mean that the disinterested parties who participate in those processes will be willing to play along with them.

Now if we begin by assuming that in each of your cases A and B will be infinitely unwilling to let an adverse decision stand, no matter what the cost involved in prolonging the case; and also that people on boards, hearings, arbitration associations, private arbitrators, folkmoots, etc. will be infinitely willing to take on a nightmare dispute that has already been heard and reheard; and that third parties (e.g. the doctor in your first case) will also be infinitely unwilling to act on any decision until every logically possible venue has been exhausted, then I don’t doubt that there is no difficulty in proving that anarchy will be an absolute nightmare for cases like these. But if you start with that presumption there is no difficulty in proving that government legal systems will produce similarly nightmarish results. (People have been known to stonewall and to drag out legal proceedings under the existing legal system; sometimes courts let them get away with it, sometimes not.) Maybe you think there is some argument that shows that in anarchy sufficiently nightmarish people with intractable conflicts will be more able to prolong nightmarish legal situations than they are under a state legal system; or that third parties would be more willing to play along with them in prolonging it. But then you’d have to give the argument. (And you’d have to show why an argument that starts from such strong starting presumptions about the hypothetical people involved in the dispute would justify a general conclusion against anarchism, rather than a narrower conclusion to the effect that anarchy might mean that some fairly narrowly specified subset of the population will be at greater risk for getting themselves into intractable legal nightmares. I don’t know about that; but maybe. But if so, is it a defeater for the claim that anarchy would on the whole be desirable for other reasons? Why?)

In any case, this is largely a retread of the argument over “legal finality” that Roderick Long discusses at some length in his article “Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism.” Note especially the section in that paper on Platonic legal finality and realistic legal finality.

3. You write: “As for your comments about the lack of a need for a single, territorial authority, etc, that strikes me as an attempt to change the topic from the anarchist solutions to an attack on the current world, . . .”

If that’s how it strikes you that’s how it strikes you, but it seems to me that this is something you’ve brought to my comments more than something I put there. My point in mentioning those peculiar features of the State is that from the start of this particular sub-thread you repeatedly asked questions on the presumption that anarchism somehow contemplates a society in which there is no “assigning of property rights , in matters of dispute,” no social “process for deciding” matters of medical ethics, no social “process … for deciding on the ins-and-outs of unclear contracts,” or at least that the idea of anarchism poses some large and obvious conceptual problem to developing any answer to these questions. And my point is that it poses a large and obvious conceptual problem to developing an answer if you assert that, in order for these social functions to be exercised, there must be a single social entity with some or all of the peculiar features (territoriality, sovereignty, etc.) that I mentioned to do the exercising. But of course that assertion is precisely what anarchists deny. And you gave no argument at all for that assertion until your reply just now.

The reason for mentioning Stringham’s anthology and the rest of the literature on this is that in the absence of a concrete argument for why you think social processes for dispute resolution would necessitate a monopoly-state-like social “entity” to handle them, I could either try and guess what the background argument for this presupposition was supposed to be; or I could point you to the people who have already written on several different arguments in the neighborhood that you might have had in mind. Unless you have something in the hole that is very novel compared to the cards you’ve shown so far, what you’ve been asking are very basic questions about anarchist theory that have been extensively dealt with elsewhere, in forums that are probably more conducive to explaining the ins and outs of how it works than is a Disqus comment thread, which I’ve already wildly overburdened just with this response.