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Originally Posted by J.C.D.

So, if there are any libertarians or experts on libertarianism here, and anyone who knows more about Duncanite society, I'd appreciate it if you could answer some questions about how a libertarian society in general or the duncanites in particular could deal with some issues I'm curious about.

Speaking as someone who has been a libertarian for forty years now (and learned that that was the name for it about thirty-five years ago), I'm going to say that this isn't really the best place for answers to that. I mean, suppose you wanted someone to explain Marxism, or social democracy, or conservatism in a few hundred words—how good a job could they do?

If you want detailed answers, I'm going to recommend looking for books by libertarians. In particular, David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom is a very good book; Friedman is focused on practical methods of doing things rather than moralistic arguments, he's a trained economist (son of Milton Friedman, who got the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics some years back), and he has a good clear prose style with some humor. He's also from a fannish background (he's a longtime member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, for example) and was one of the big influences on Transhuman Space. Another very good book, more focused on law, is Richard Epstein's Simple Rules for a Complex World

Oh, and he's an anarchist libertarian, not a miminal-government libertarian like me. The differences between the two are going to seem arcane to a nonlibertarian; let's just say that libertarians take them very seriously.

First off, how can a libertarian society defend itself from an organized and aggressive society with a government bent on conquest and controling other people? Thruout history there have been a lot of societies that would be classed as libertarian in many ways, and they usually get conquered and wiped out by more organized societies. I just don't know how a libertarian culture can really defend itself without an organized military and the industrial complex it takes to feed one.

That is what Friedman calls the hard question about anarchocapitalism. I think he's right. Of course, the usual limited-government libertarian's list of things that governments SHOULD do starts off with military defense, so you've got a different kind of discussion there.

Secondly, how can a libertarian culture make serious scientific and technological progress? I mean, up to the early 20th century a private scientist or inventor could make real progress or advances in his workshop or with just paper, pencil and some basic instruments. Today advancing science and technology takes millions or billions of dollars in equipment, lots of people working together, tons of resources, you get the idea. A real scientist today needs grants from government or corporations to keep going and make progress. How could a libertarian culture provide for real scientific and technological progress? Most semi libertarian cultures in history were often quite primitive, and easily wiped out by spainairds or europeans with black powder weapons and organized militaries.

You're being confounded by the idea that libertarians are against organization, or want only small, simple organizations. Neither is true. Libertarians are perfectly sympathetic to large, complex organizations—so long as they're large, complex, VOLUNTARY organization. You will find, for example, that libertarians are pretty strong defenders of the rights of corporations to conduct business without government interference.

For example, one typical libertarian concern is the funding of pharmaceutical sales. There are historical statistics on the development of new drugs. Basically, where in the 1960s the US and France were about tied in developing new drugs, currently the US leads by a factor of about 4. A libertarian interpretation would be that when you have socialized medicine, with a single provider of drugs, that single provider is also a single purchaser and can force the price of drugs down to where there's no profit in doing research on new ones . . . so that, in effect, Americans, by paying outrageously high competitive market prices for drugs, are giving a free ride to all the socialized medical system that won't pay that much, enabling them to benefit from American innovation without paying part of the cost. This is not by any means a position that everyone would endorse, but it shows that there is a libertarian point of view on innovation.

I have some questions about duncanite society in THS directly, but the above ones also apply to the duncanites.

Basically under their legal system, there's no state to bring charges and courts are hired by people to sue those that wrong them. So if someone is killed by another people, then the relatives can sue the killer and maybe claim his property, including his body, in damages. Does this mean a rich man can murder someone, pay a fine and basically get away with it if he can afford to pay the fine easily?

Also, if you kill someone, then kill off bis next of kin and there's no one to file a claim against you does that mean you get away with it?

Not necessarily.

For one thing, if you are wrongly killed, that creates a legal claim to damages on your behalf. That claim is property and can be inherited. If you die, and have no obvious heirs, someone is going to gain access to your property, perhaps under the law of salvage. Your house wouldn't be left empty forever, and your death benefits wouldn't be left unpursued forever.

There are also the secondary consequences of killing someone: You become known as a killer, and no one wants anything to do with you.

And, finally, there is the historical example of Iceland, which is often cited (I believe wrongly) as an anarchist society. If you killed someone there, without proper cause, they didn't just fine you. They declared you an outlaw, which means that your rights were no longer protected under the law; anyone who wanted to kill you could do so. If you wouldn't do your share in keeping people safe by obeying the law, you lost your claim to the safety that the law provided. I particularly admire the game theoretic insight of the law under which there was one way to stop being an outlaw: you had to prove that you had personally killed three other outlaws. (All of this can be found in Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, a very insightful study of how Iceland's law really worked.)

As I said, this isn't even close to complete answers. I just want to suggest that people have thought about such answers.

You might like to take a look at www.lfs.org. The Libertarian Futurist Society has been giving awards for best libertarian science fiction for a couple of decades now; its list of winners contains quite a number of good fictional treatments of libertarian societies.