<p>1) Product liability:
You want to stop government involvement in consumer affairs. Thus, there is no longer a CPSC or FDA in your ideal
world. This means that packages no longer have hazard warnings. There’s no minimum warranty
required on any good you purchase. Forget about (publicly funded) quality control on food. Drugs
do not need to go through a 5 year testing period. A company does what it is profitable to do, and a consumer
buys what he wishes to buy. Notice, however, that consumers now have far less information when making
purchase decisions.</p>
<p>Who does this effect? The rich could potentially create a private version of the CPSC/FDA where membership
fees will provide you with quality-controlled goods. The lower classes, however, will not be able to afford
quality control inspections. So, it will primarily be the working classes that lose. </p>
<p>These same working classes can’t sue for damages. Courts are now fee based. This means
that a judge’s salaries comes from plaintiffs and defendants. If “IKill Co.” is going to court every day,
then a majority of the judge’s salary is coming from the same company that these people are suing. There will
be conflicts of interest.</p>
<p>Does this mean that no one will sue? Hardly. There will be rich people who sue. There will be middle class
folks that go broke suing. There will be settlements and class action suits. But the individual cases aren’t
relevant. What’s relevant is that you’re provided an incentive
not to sue–by forcing plaintiffs to pay extra court fees. Less cases go to court, and product liabilities
go down. This doesn’t really help the “good” companies that are consumer-oriented, because they won’t get
many lawsuits anyways. It actually only helps the companies that previously would have been drowned in court litigations.
You are helping harmful producers find their market niche: lower class families who can not afford to sue, and have
no public protection from governmental agencies. </p>
<p>Most people would say this is bad.</p>
<p>2) Private Property rights:
As you said, you don’t plan to remove property rights. You simply don’t want government to enforce these rights.
Instead, you say that people should pay to have them enforced. I ask you: what does a person do to protect his
private? He goes to the police, or he goes to civil court. In your ideal world, these
entities are private.</p>
<p>What are the implications here? If you have private property worth $50,000, then is it worth
paying the police force a few hundred per year? Maybe not. What about if you have private property worth $500,000?
Definitely. If everyone pays a similar flat rate, then there is an incentive for the rich to buy a large police force,
and there is an incentive for the poor to have a small police force. </p>
<p>This is the opposite of what society needs. Even though a poor person has less assets, his assets are more
important (because of diminishing marginal utility). If you have a smaller police force controlling crime,
then it is the poor communities who are having their hard earned income stripped from them more often.
This is not allowing the working class mobility into higher income strata, and this mobility is an inherent
attribute of free capitalism. Not to mention that you’re increasing income disparity. Even if wealth redistribution
is not your thing, there is no reason to forcefully stratify society’s socioeconomic classes.</p>
<p>3) Intellectual Property rights:
Libertarians around the world are cringing at this one. We’ve already talked about why intellectual property
is a necessity for economic growth, so lets jump right into the implications.
You suggest that a private court system handle intellectual property disputes. This hurts the very heart of
innovation: the start up companies with no cash looking to find investors that will be the next “big thing.”
These companies apply for a patent–where? There’s no patent office without a government. Let’s assume there’s
a private equivalent of the patent office (although a private patent holding up in legal court is a strange
concept). Suppose, they’ve got their patent and someone tries to take off with a closely resembling concept.
We’re talking about the next generation’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin having to collect cash from someone
so they can pay off a judge to hear their patent protection case. </p>
<p>Now, some startups will manage to pay off the judges and defend their patent. Others won’t. Like before, the individual
cases don’t matter. But the long-term effect is that these early innovators know that even if they manage to make the next big thing,
and even if they patent in time, there’s STILL a chance that they won’t be able to defend their patents in court.
This reduces the overall number of innovators, and slows down technological advances. It won’t stop technology; it’ll just slow
it down. As mentioned, this decay in technological advancement has been proven to affect economic growth.</p>