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Secession is the natural and logical extension of the right of association. Mises defines this as:
“The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.”
If people secede from a government that means they withdraw from its various forms of inefficient, obtuse forms of law enforcement and peace keeping. What’s the option for people who want to settle disputes in such a society? The option is private security, which can take multiple forms. I would do those various forms injustice if I attempted to briefly summarize them here, so instead I’ll give links to examples of stateless law enforcement in security.
Here is a discussion about stateless, competitive law in Viking-era Iceland:
http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long1.html
This paper discusses enforcement of private property in Celtic law:
https://mises.org/journals/jls/1_2/1_2_1.pdf
And lastly we have a discussion about Xeer, the traditional private law of the Somali:
http://mises.org/daily/2701
There’s also the potential for non-traditional forms of private security that would exist in places without traditional systems. To know more about those forms of private security, read the following pieces.
The first political philosopher to write about privatizing law enforcement, Gustave de Molinari, discusses the production of law enforcement in a modern society in this work:
http://library.mises.org/books/Gustave%20de%20Molinari/The%20Production%20of%20Security.pdf
In more recent times, Hans-Hermann Hoppe discusses insurance companies producing private security in a stateless society:
https://mises.org/daily/5270
As you can see, private law enforcement is nothing new nor is it even all that radical. People could make their cases about first appropriation without the need for public courts and there would even be competition between private courts to discover the best forms of law enforcement. Indeed, due to the competition between companies we’d likely see an increased quality of law enforcement at increasingly lower costs. This is the opposite of the case now, where there is no incentive for government to provide better law enforcement at a low cost due to monopoly.
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Going back to the hypothetical farms, let’s say each farm owner claims that they own the land of the other. Each claims that their ancestors worked the land first and passed the deeds down the generations to them. In a stateless society, there are many options as I have just described. It’s possible that each would file a claim with their respective companies and then the companies would determine ownership based on the evidence provided. There’s also the possibility that the sons would go to regional elders or their respective Goðar to get it figured out, depending on tradition. In any case, there would little incentive for violence or theft, due to the high costs involved.
This is also the case if one son says the other son is using land that is rightfully his and then expects compensation for loss of property. If the son who files for compensation has proof that he owns the land due to his ancestral land title, he will file the claim with the appropriate entity and then that entity will contact the other son’s representative. The key to all this is that one son can prove, beyond doubt, that specific plots of land are his. Without some form of deed, title, or certificate, such a claim would be hard to fulfill. In a stateless society, families would likely take far more care when it comes to crafting wills and keeping property titles secure for further generations.
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If you take anything away from this, it ought to be the following. In a state where there is a monopoly on law, people will only have one option. Regardless of how good or bad that option may be, they will only have that single recourse. In a stateless society, many forms of law enforcement are possible, likely with a great deal of overlap in a single region. People will have more options that will be suited to their individual needs, and those options will likely be better and cheaper than what we see now.
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