Cite articles as: Author, “Title,” Libertarian Papers [volume #], [article number] (year). Example: Jan Narveson, “Present Payments, Past Wrongs: Correcting Loose Talk about Nozick and Rectification,” Libertarian Papers 1, 1 (2009).
12. “The Role of Subscription-Based Patrol and Restitution in the Future of Liberty”
by Gil Guillory & Patrick C. Tinsley
Market anarchists are often keen to know how we might rid ourselves of the twin evils institutionalized in the state: taxation and monopoly. A possible future history for North America is suggested, focusing upon the implications of the establishment of a subscription-based patrol and restitution business sector. We favor Rothbard over Higgs regarding crises and liberty. We favor Barnett over Rothbard regarding vertical integration of security. We examine derived demand for adjudication, mediation and related goods; and we advance the thesis that private adjudication will tend to libertarianly just decisions. We show how firms will actively build civil society, strengthening and coordinating Nisbettian intermediating institutions.
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The authors write:
“The vertical integration assumption is to suppose that in laissez faire the production of adjudication and the production of patrol/security should be or would be unified in a single business.
…
It appears that the first author to display one of these errors (17) was David Friedman:”
This is not merely wrong, it is wildly wrong. If you had read a little farther in the same chapter you quote from, you would find:
“The man from Tannahelp suggests that the better solution is arbitration. They will take the dispute over my television set to a reputable local arbitration firm. If the arbitrator decides that Joe is innocent, Tannahelp agrees to pay Joe and Dawn Defense an indemnity to make up for their time and trouble. If he is found guilty, Dawn Defense will accept the verdict; since the television set is not Joe’s, they have no obligation to protect him when the men from Tannahelp come to seize it.
What I have described is a very makeshift arrangement. In practice, once anarcho-capitalist institutions were well established, protection agencies would anticipate such difficulties and arrange contracts in advance, before specific conflicts occurred, specifying the arbitrator who would settle them.”
Far from proposing that arbitration and rights enforcement be combined in a single firm, I am proposing a market structure in which (enforcement) firms buy the service of settling disputes from (arbitration) firms. A single enforcement firm might employ the services of a dozen different arbitration firms, a single arbitration firm might sell its services to a dozen different enforcement firms.
How you could get from that to the idea that I think enforcement and arbitration should be produced by the same firm I have no idea.
The relevant chapter is available online for anyone who wants to see what I was proposing in it:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freedom/MofF_Chapter_29.html