J'accuse le libertarians

simplistic2 wrote: »

You can certainly raise an army if you wish, the courts won't stop you. Just, what are you going to do with this army?

In For A New Liberty starting on pg 226 you will get an idea of how private courts could work. I'm going to leave the debate now, I'm only repeating what he says anyway.

If stating a fact like the state will murder you if you reject it frightens people away, then good, they're hardly the kind of people who will fight this evil.

Belfast wrote: »

“For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has writ*ten: “There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforce*ment of justice…. There was no trace of State-administered justice.”9

How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All “freemen” who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath’s members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their “kings.” An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location. Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, “the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension.”10 In short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area, divorced from the landed prop*erty rights of its subjects; on the contrary, tuatha were voluntary associa*tions which only comprised the landed properties of its voluntary mem*bers. Historically, about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland."

more detail here
http://lilarajiva.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/murray-rothbard-a-libertarian-society/

Belfast wrote: »

“For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has writ*ten: “There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforce*ment of justice…. There was no trace of State-administered justice.”9

How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All “freemen” who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath’s members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their “kings.” An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location. Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, “the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension.”10 In short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area, divorced from the landed prop*erty rights of its subjects; on the contrary, tuatha were voluntary associa*tions which only comprised the landed properties of its voluntary mem*bers. Historically, about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland."

more detail here
http://lilarajiva.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/murray-rothbard-a-libertarian-society/

For one thing, Irish society was remarkable for it's homogenity. This carried over onto it's laws. The classic definition by Binchy held Irish society as "tribal, rural, hierarchical and familiar". Ó Cróinin defined Irish law as having "the edifice of law standing above all local and regional rivalries as a unified system of custom and practice. (Early Medieval Ireland 400-1200, p.112)
Furthermore, it is common knowledge that it is a mystery how the law came about as an edifice. The most likely explanation being that it was preserved over from the times when there was a strong central High King, who even when his kingdom was fragmented, the laws were carried on by the learned order; priests, lawyers and poets.
Crimes against society existed (betrayal of the Tuath to the enemy)
Irish society at the time was also incredibly hierarchial, with four different law tracts determining the different legal grades (and treatment) accorded to different types of aristocrats and so on. Hardly egalitarian.

Eoin Mac Neill noted that in order to succeed kingship, he must belong to the same derbfine of the previous king (father, son, grandson, greatgrandson) Only if he was a member of the derbfine was he electable (along with other criteria like not missing any body parts and be a man of property as he was expected to maintain royal officials). While it would not be the same kind of vast estates as the Merovingian kings had, Ó Cróinín notes that it clearly precluded the common man from being king, ensuring it was a sort of oligrarchical structure.
In addition, the king had numerous other rights which would horrify any modern libertarian such as the right to treasure trove (which was banned from applying to non-monarchs) In addition, the king was to be a judge himself, as the judicial office belonged to the king (although he could delegate this to a lawyer). The king was also usually above the law, as were his muire. If the king was to be chastised, then a whipping boy ('substitute churl' was used to represent him, to prevent dishonour on his office unless he committed an extremely serious offence. In any case, the damages were usually born by the 'substitute churl' rather than the king himself.

Furthermore, Irish society was incredibly patriarchal. Women were subject to their husbands/fathers/ fine head. Most of their rights were constrained to allowing divorce if the husband was impotent/unable to have sex/gay etc. One of my favorite law tracts had it that a woman who went into a mead house unaccompanied and who was then raped was not actually raped. The logic went that only a whore would go into a mead house unaccompanied. Likewise, if a woman was in a relatively public place and didn't cry out then she couldn't claim to be raped. Best of all, if a man was only able to support one parent, he was told to "leave his mother in a ditch and carry home his father to his house.

The basis of the entire society was also based on clientship; the lord advanced a grant/stock/land to his clients and recieved rent and services in return, while the most important unit in society was the familly and not the individual. The law was even based around the preconception that farming would be done cooperatively. Hardly a free market capitalist society as Simplistic 2 claims.

My favorite point is where he claimed that "minor brawls" ensued. Ireland at the time was an utter mess in constant states of warfare.The vikings get a lot of stick for raiding monasteries, when it was usually Celtic Irish who were doing most of the raiding. The reason Ireland wasn't getting involved in large scale warfare as seen across Europe was that they were too busy fighting each other to be able to muster any sort of warfare. Not surprising in a society where clan feuds were recognised as a legitimate and proper part of the legal order.

This is all before the Church is brought into the equation with it's church taxes, paruchiae (which functioned as effective confederate states themselves) and so on. Religious law was also commonplace, which was an effective parallel to secular law.

If you simply must denote this as having the abscence of a state, then some corrupted form of anarcho-syndicalism (communitarianism?) is far more apt. Certainly not capitalist or free market. How a hierarchical and patriarchal society can be seen in any way as libertarian is beyond me.