Article ...in case you'd rather read than listen.
Yes, this really is worth reading in spite of the academic writing
style. The author proposes and supports, with impervious arguments, that
insurance companies (i.e. DRO's) are the most effective and affordable
purveyors of protection of life and property, while explaining quite
clearly and logically how governments fail so miserably.
While I am very grateful for the author's offering of a methodology for implementing "free cities" (it's all too easy to complain without proposing a solution), it seems that he lends gravity to the idea that succession is
still legal. While technically this is probably true (I did not check),
I would think that politically and popularly, this idea would be
considered quaint and therefore ineffectual. I'm certainly willing to
give it a try (cautiously), but I have my doubts.
I also have a hard time imagining how local governments would tolerate what they would consider tax evasion by these free cities. Same for the federal level -- what about federal income tax? Would people in these free cities stop paying them and would that be tolerated? Tax evasion is probably the most aggressively repelled aspect of government coercion.
excerpts:
while a private owner, secure in his property and owning its capital
value, plans the use of his resource over a long period of time, the
government official must milk the property as quickly as he can, since
he has no security of ownership. … Government officials own the use
of resources but not their capital value (except in the case of the
"private property" of a hereditary monarch). When only the current use
can be owned, but not the resource itself, there will quickly ensue
uneconomic exhaustion of the resources, since it will be to no one's
benefit to conserve it over a period of time and to every owner's
advantage to use it up as quickly as possible. … The private
individual, secure in his property and in his capital resource, can
take the long view, for he wants to maintain the capital value of his
resource. It is the government official who must take and run, who must
plunder the property while he is still in command.
...
Indeed, no one in his right mind would agree to a contract that allowed
one's alleged protector to determine unilaterally, without one's
consent, and irrevocably, without the possibility of exit, how much to
charge for protection; and no one in his right mind would agree to an
irrevocable contract which granted one's alleged protector the right to
ultimate decision making regarding one's own person and property, i.e.,
of unilateral lawmaking.
...
Competition between insurers would instead systematically encourage
individual responsibility, and any known provocateur and aggressor
would be excluded as a bad insurance risk from any insurance coverage
whatsoever and be rendered an economically isolated, weak, and
vulnerable outcast.
I would say that this article expounds on quite of few of Steph's podcast topics.