Hanson: derribemos el muro contra la ley privada

Hablando de muros, Robin Hanson defiende una idea parecida a mi cláusula "opt out" para que los individuos que lo deseemos podamos escindirnos del Estado del Bienestar. Hanson propone que los ciudadanos de un Estado puedan salirse del sistema legal público estipulando solemnemente en un contrato que las disputas entre las partes serán resueltas por un tribunal privado (como el arbitraje actual, pero en áreas que hoy monopoliza el Estado, como el derecho penal). Hanson dice que no propone (todavía) la abolición del Estado, pues quizás tenga un rol anti-trust en el ámbito de la ley privada, pero sí defiende la posibilidad de salirse de su sistema legal y desplazarse entre leyes privadas en competencia.

[T]eaching law & econ has reminded me of just how ossified and inefficient is our standard legal system, and Bryan Caplan recently guest lectured in my class on the vast potential of private law to improve efficiency.  The idea is to let people contract around standard law, privately choosing new legal rules and processes.  Local agreements between nations is what protects us now when we navigate the anarchy between nations, and the greater efficiency of private legal regimes of credit card firms, insurance companies, and social networks like Facebook greatly improve our lives. The idea is to extend such approaches to a wider range of legal issues. (...)

Imagine North Korea sent out agents to forcibly return escapees, arguing that escapee agreements to join other nations were void because escapees didn’t understand the full consequences of their actions. The world would loudly denounce such weak and transparently self-serving excuses. We want the act of agreeing to a private law to have such obvious and clear deliberateness, making government courts who overturn such agreements also seem self-serving.

Therefore I suggest: let individuals in a nation pay a large cost to with great solemnity declare their membership in a private law, a legal system covering disputes between its members and negotiating rules for disputes with members of other private laws.  If government courts refuse to enforce such agreements, then one could more reasonably ask a wider world of opinion to condemn such overreaching repression. Here one would have a stronger and clearer case pitting freedom against totalitarian control.