You, dear reader, have been very patient as we have laid the groundwork for our Common Respect Protocol. (Building a Just World, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) The process has been long, but necessary.
This isn’t a theoretical exercise. We’re designing an agreement meant for real use. Whether it’s ultimately adopted remains to be seen, but the time for complaining and theorizing has passed. We’re building something real, and we should approach it that way—carefully, and with the aim of getting it right.
The world we envision isn’t chaotic; it is consensual. It is a world in which people are free to choose their polities or modes of governance, rather than being forced into systems based on geography and accidents of birth.
The world we envision is peaceful. It will not be perfect, for nothing on Earth can ever be. However, if we do this right, it will not be riven with the horrifying strife caused by the serial violations of consent under which humankind has for so long languished.
The world we envision is coming. It may take several generations, but it will happen because we will make it happen. It will happen because we're moving from theory to practice.
So let’s get to it. This is our final installment before we create an actual draft document for the Common Respect Protocol (CRP).
The CRP must facilitate inter-polity travel
The right of movement
Travel and movement are natural rights. No human—indeed, no flow system in all of nature—can live or “persist in time” if it is not free to move.
Roads are more than just a means of travel, however. They are also a physical manifestation of the necessary balance between the rights of movement and property. Everyone needs to move, but no one wants people traipsing across their front lawn. Roads are the solution.
Roads are a kind of neutral territory. I get to be there. You get to be there. This is as it should be.
The need for free travel
Roads are thus a necessary human phenomenon … one that absolutely must be maintained in a condition of consensual order. But how?
We may safely presume that, in an effort to satisfy their customer-citizens, territorial polities will maintain a system of accessible local thoroughfares. However, if we are to maintain a pluralistic meta-order, with consent at its foundation, we must not seek to dictate how territorial polities manage their internal infrastructure.
And yet, there must also be some way for people to EXIT polities, travel between polities, travel freely in unaffiliated regions, and move across large landmasses unimpeded. Free travel is essential to flourishing.
Without free travel, trade is impossible at anything but the smallest scale.
Without free travel, the right of EXIT becomes meaningless. People must have a physical means of exit and the ability to seek residence or refuge elsewhere. Otherwise, people might be held in de facto captivity: Sure, you have a right to leave … but where're ya gonna go, eh? And how are ya gonna get there? Looks like you're stuck.
Without some common thoroughfares, people and polities could be cut off by hostile acts of border strangulation.
Without free travel, a panarchic, consensual order will fail. And we must not fail. So how do we do this?
Who will own the roads?
People who have not explored anarchocapitalist arguments, and who have spent a lifetime living with the reality of the state, have difficulty imagining how security, justice, and infrastructure can be provided by private means. (There are answers to every one of their fears and objections, but that is not our purpose here.) As a result, the question “Who will build the roads?” (if the state doesn't do it) has become a joke in anarcho-libertarian circles—snarky shorthand for the objections we frequently encounter.
“Who will build the roads?” is not really the proper question to ask, however. Outside of full-blown communist countries, roads are always built by private entities, though they are generally paid for with tax dollars. The real question is “Who will OWN the roads?”
In today's world, there are already plenty of private roads. In a polycentric consensual order, the number of privately owned thoroughfares would increase significantly.
Any territorial polity, for example, is likely to own and maintain its own roads:
Some will fund them in ways similar to today's governments.
Some will charge drivers usage fees using transponder technology.
Some will sell or lease their roads to for-profit roads corporations. These might use transponders, or perhaps they would charge businesses rent or fees to access the lucrative roadside market of automobile travelers.
Some will no doubt come up with other clever ways. There is no end to innovation in a truly free market!
In areas unaffiliated with any territorial polity, we can expect either some sort of de Puydtian panarchism (jurisdictionally coterminous governance providers) or market anarchism (jurisdictionally coterminous private agencies) to predominate. In such areas, ownership and management of major thoroughfares would be even more likely to fall to roads corporations.
All that said, another possibility has also occurred to me—one to which fellow libertarians may, at first, raise an eyebrow. I will explain.
Roads minarchism
Ultimately, we want to be rid of involuntary governance. Consent is the taproot of the moral tree, and involuntary governance is poisoned groundwater. BUT…
We do not want to use any sort of violence or coercion ourselves. We want peaceful evolution, not bloody revolution. So how do we do that?
One pathway for that peaceful evolution might be to make roads the LAST thing privatized, rather than the first.
Let us begin by imagining a plausible scenario in which private parties and agencies slowly adopt services currently performed by governments. This already happens, to a degree:
The police do not patrol Amish farms; most of the time, the Amish handle their problems internally.
Garbage pickup in my neighborhood is private. Leaf pickup is still "public." Leaf pickup could easily be privatized at any time.
Many city buildings and shopping facilities have their own security.
Private arbitration and security are big business, and could easily scale up to meet more needs.
And so forth.
Western governments are on an unsustainable economic trajectory. Sovereign debt, fiat currency, and unfunded liabilities dangle above us like a Damocles Sword. As those chickens start coming home to roost, we may find that cash-strapped governments (especially local governments) are happy to outsource more and more of their services to private providers.
Sure, governments could sell off their roads to private entities. That would be ideal, as market forces incentivize higher quality and lower prices, in contrast to the perverse short-term incentives of politicians. But I can see an advantage to having roads be the last domino to fall.
The involuntary state, after all, has enjoyed nearly unbroken dominance over human life for 5,000 years at least, and probably a lot more. They aren’t going to go quietly. But if it happens gradually—with polities and agencies slowly taking on an increasing share of the business of governance and the provision of vital services—maybe we can have a peaceful transition.
And there is yet another reason why roads might actually be the ideal thing for governments to hold onto the longest…
Neutral spaces
In most developed countries, roads are "public." They are government property, but anyone can use them. You have to pay, either through taxes or tolls, of course, but unless you are incarcerated or have lost your license, you are just as free to travel upon them as anyone else. They are, in a functional sense, neutral territory.
That neutrality is essential to freedom of movement.
In the absence (or reduced presence) of involuntary governments, there will be many private roads. Of course, some territorial polities might control access at their borders, just as governments do today. However, there will also be a need for inter-polity thoroughfares and other recognized common routes.
Since markets do an excellent job (better than any government) of meeting human needs, we can expect that private agencies will arise to provide this service. And we have every reason to believe that they would establish such routes as neutral spaces, available for common use. After all, they want the business, and one person's money is as good as another's.
Here too, however, there may be a role for governments to play, as we slowly evolve towards a polycentric consensual order. Perhaps maintaining neutral thoroughfares would give the world’s remaining involuntary governments a sense of purpose. And if they had that, they might be more inclined to let polities form and agencies slowly take over the provision of other services.
This is somewhat conjectural, of course, but the conjecture has merit. Obviously, as a panarchist and consentist, I would prefer full privatization of everything as soon as possible. But preferences aren’t reality, and this might provide a healthy path forward. I will take what I can get.
Either way, some form of travel provision is a necessary component of our CRP, and it must include a reference to respect for the neutrality of recognized common thoroughfares.
The CRP must enshrine respect for property
Outside of communists, Georgists, and a few others, most people know (either explicitly or intuitively) that property rights are essential to life. A bear's den is his own for the winter; he cannot share it with all the bears. The morsel of food you are about to eat, or the broom you fashioned out of a stick and some straw, are not useful to you if everyone has a claim upon them. They must be yours. And if you acquired them without force, they are yours. The same applies to the kitchen in which you cook, the house in which you live, and the land that sustains you.
Efforts to create common property only work at very small scales, or when land is plentiful and people are few. All large-scale efforts to eradicate property have been, and must always be, imposed by violence. Their inevitable result is failure, oppression, and much, much worse.
The CRP must reinforce the sanctity of property. It's the right thing to do, and if we didn't, almost no one would choose to become a signatory.
The CRP must include an arbitration provision
When a dispute arises between people or parties, there are three choices: ignore it, resolve it by force, or resolve it peacefully.
The first option is not a viable solution. Most disputes will end up being resolved by force or through some form of arbitration. Needless to say, we prefer the latter.
As with most things, the devil is in the details. Will there be third-party arbitrators, agreed upon in advance? What happens if there is no such agreement in place when a dispute arises? It will be complicated.
Then again, such matters are complicated now, and governments have slaughtered hundreds of millions in their attempts to 'resolve' disputes just since the start of the last century. We should be able to do better than that, and it begins by asking signatories to make a principled commitment to prefer arbitration over war.
The CRP must include a provision rejecting collective punishments
People sometimes mistake the purpose of the Lex Talionis ("an eye for an eye"). At first blush, it sounds rather brutal—putting out someone's eye is not generally how we want to think of justice. The point, however, was to establish the concept of proportionality. A punishment must be proportional to the original offense.
Proportionality also requires ensuring that no one other than the responsible party is punished. An eye for an eye was intended, in part, to replace You and your whole damn clan for an eye.
Keeping the peace requires establishing, in no uncertain terms, that there must never be any collective punishment or retaliation. Disputes must involve responsible parties and contractual counterparts only.
Most of the people harmed by war and conflict are not the actual disputants. They are civilians. Draftee soldiers. Third parties. Collateral damage. People completely innocent of any involvement or wrongdoing.
We must do our best to cultivate a world in which this does not happen.
The CRP must establish non-interference
Throughout this series, we have discussed the reality that in order to foster and maintain a condition of consensual order and mutual respect, we will have to accept certain trade-offs. Foremost among these is the need to allow people to live however they choose.
Consent is the fundamental unit of moral concern. If we are to engender a spirit of common respect, we must first respect individual consent. We may disagree with the way certain polities conduct their affairs. We may be surprised that anyone would consent to live in such a way. However, these are things we must accept. As long as no one is forced to participate in any arrangement, that will have to be good enough.
Thinking of it from the standpoint of a diverse array of polities, it makes perfect sense. A free city, a for-profit micro-nation, and a collection of Amish farms might agree to a constrained set of protocols designed to keep the peace: Don’t interfere with transit along recognized common thoroughfares. Don’t initiate force. Don’t hold people hostage. But as soon as we try to go much beyond that, no one is going to sign on.
And rightly so. The whole point here is to allow human beings—alone or in groups—the self-determination that has been so long denied to us by involuntary governance. The last thing we want to do is repeat the mistakes of the past.
The CRP must stand on its own two feet
The data are unmistakable: politics and power attract psychopaths. Bureaucracies attract people who get a kick out of meddling in others' lives. Systems are ripe for corruption. And anything that depends on a 'great leader' is vulnerable once that leader is gone.
Thus, to the greatest degree possible, the CRP, and the condition of consensual order we hope it can foster, must not depend on authorities, centralized systems, or any particular people.
Naturally, it will help to have competent people in every generation: wise jurists, meritorious stewards, and passionate advocates committed to maintaining a harmonious order of peace and respect. But if we expect to last far into the future—and that’s the plan!—we cannot be dependent on one particular leader or a special generation of individuals. In order to stand the test of time, the words, and the principles upon which they are built, must stand on their own.
So we have to get them right.
And that is what we shall endeavor to do in the next installment, in which we will attempt a Draft 1 of the Common Respect Protocol.
Through the power of swarm intelligence, we can make the CRP even better, so please do not hesitate to send your feedback and suggestions on this, or any installment, to chriscook@theadvocates.org.