thathopeyetlives asked: Promethea, do you have any interesting comments on what to do about stuff like the FAA?
This is an interesting question. The Full Anarchist ™ solution would obviously be that the FAA would be a private voluntary organization with zero coercive power, just their social position as providers of useful services (comparable to eg. the linux kernel or bitcoin devs).
However, that relies on the absence of PoliceMob and laws, as people who don’t follow FAA recommendations and do it in a way that actually endangers others would be liable to getting their asses kicked by the people they would endanger or people acting on the behalf of those people, and thus their Dia Paying Groups would be incentivized to negotiate agreements that minimize the asskickedgettingness while maximizing the utility to people who want to do things that are very non-dangerous to innocent people yet b& by the current regulatory regime.
In the presence of PoliceMob and a sclerotic regime of laws where avenues for retaliation towards people who do cause harm are shut off while the avenues for causing harm themselves aren’t, the situation is more complex. I suspect there’s an uncanny valley in minarchism where the absence of counter-distortions in other directions amplifies the distortive effects of the structures that would remain (so if people’s right to fly unmolested is ironclad, but their responsibility to not endanger others isn’t, either de jure or de facto via eg. the practical limits of one person’s responsibility being their net worth or even less if it’s done through a corporation and there is no mandatory liability insurance to cover the costs, it would end up oversupplying the “endanger others with your flying” product, and information problems and moral hazards and principal-agent problems would probably be significant).
Thus, I believe that in the current environment the question of the FAA is complicated enough to warrant a hands-off policy on commenting on it as expressing an informed opinion that isn’t just “abolish everything we have now (eventually, through gradual substitution of coercive authorities with voluntary win-win structures), fight tha power (nonviolently)” would require information and expertise I don’t have. It’s trivial to say that the FAA has been regulatory-captured and is most likely simultaneously over- and under-regulating and overall serving the interests of established players against smaller ones and new technologies, but given everything else we also have “just abolish it” isn’t likely to be a workable solution in this particular instance, and specifying what would be is not something I have the competence to answer.
One interesting possibility would be to make liability insurance mandatory and replace criminal law with pure torts (”I don’t care why or how it happened, but you touched the thing and hurt someone so you will pay, that’s what the insurance is for after all”) which would mean that eg. airlines would pay the reasonable amount for the accidents that are expected to happen and thus could reduce their insurance premiums by reducing accident risks, and people fucking around unsafely with drones would also pay and be incentivized to not do it while people fucking around not-unsafely wouldn’t have extra premiums or onerous regulations, and thus the FAA could be reduced to advisory instead of coercive status, but even then the actual effects and “how to implement this so it would be actually better than what we have now” is something someone else would be more qualified to answer.
2 days ago · 3 notes · .permalink
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