Interesting! This reminds me of what Prospera wanted to do, where someone in a traditionally regulated category could choose to be regulated by any OCED country of their choice. In general, I think I agree that this approach has lower risk of having bad unknown-unknown consequences than most other approaches I've seen that would achieve the same level of libertarian-ness.
Some significant game-theoretic risks that immediately come to mind:
* If Interland gets into a strong rivalry or cold war with another country, that country could try to attack Interland by legalizing something terrible that happens to have negligible impact in the other country for situation-specific reasons but has a big impact in Interland. For example, Iran could legalize murdering Korean people. This would have a very small impact to Iran itself, but it would make Interland permanently useless as a cosmopolitan business and culture hub in addition to severe one-time costs on Koreans even if there's a waiting period before the law propagates.
* Texas-abortion-law-style strategies. Another country that wanted to affect Interland policy could avoid banning X, but instead legalize private individuals doing some really harmful thing to people who do X.
* There are lots of poor countries that are probably very easy to corrupt but also not really worth corrupting because not much (in dollar terms) is happening there. But if Interland law is tethered to the weakest one of those countries, then people could corrupt those countries in order to legalize terrible things in Interland.
Possible mitigations:
* Instead of using a total-intersection rule, use a 90% intersection rule. Something must be illegal in 90% of reference countries to be illegal in Interland.
* Have a judicial body define a legal category of "private punishment behavior" (basically, selectively going after people with the goal of disincentivizing a particular act), and require that behavior to follow the opposite rule (it must be _legal_ in all or almost all reference countries to be legal in Interland). The definition of "private punishment behavior" intuitively feels similar to categories like "hate crimes", so there's probably precedent that you can carry over.
* Allow the legislative body to remove a country from the reference country list if something terrible happens as a result of that country being on the list, and constitutionally rate-limit the use of this mechanism. In addition to the self-correcting property, this creates an incentive alignment: countries know that if they screw up and influence Interland law in bad ways, they will lose their influence over Interland.
Hmm that's very interesting. I was so focused on how Interland would be durable w.r.t passing new laws, but you're totally right that it becomes super sensitive to one country legalizing something. I didn't imagine that could be used as sabotage, that's a cool insight.
I like the 90% solution. The incentive alignment from the ability to remove bad actors from the intersection list is interesting, but then I would worry about insulating the judicial system from influence. Part of the goal of this idea is to spread out the sources of influence to make it difficult for even very powerful and concentrated interests to make changes. Putting that power into an oversight board concentrates it again. Although since the intersection of laws is difficult to define well enough for an algorithm, such a board may be necessary.
Nov 18, 2022·edited Nov 18, 2022Liked by Maxwell Tabarrok
There's a more intuitive way to determine the intersection of laws: require that to be convicted of a crime in Interland, you must be independently convicted of it according to all the legal systems that Interland is an intersection of. You can clone their justice systems, perhaps by starting with hiring retired judges from each of them.
Convictions will become much more of a hassle for more subjective 'crimes', while stuff like murder will remain easy to prosecute given sufficient evidence.
If the goal is to increase freedom, this is a great thing.
Not a fan of the 90% idea, because if implies that the First, Second and Fourth Amendments will not apply to Interland. The right to bear arms is especially underrated in a hypothetical Interland because people will naturally be less willing to trust that a startup society won't suddenly pivot to tyranny and block the exits out of Interland
To improve decision times, the Interland system can be refined upon using a delineation between contract law and "basic law," where contract law deals with mutual agreements voluntarily entered into by one or more parties, while basic law deals with the set of laws that all Interlanders are obliged to follow.
To be convicted of a crime under basic law, you must independently convicted by all the legal systems that Interland is an intersection of, with concurrent judicial proceedings. However, for cases involving contract law, the parties to the contract can include a clause stating which legal system they choose to arbitrate any disputes that might arise.
Higher standards are required under basic law, as anyone, including prosecutors working for the Interland corporation, can file a case against you.
(Side note: we haven't really thought about how sentencing should be handled, but the best idea is to let the convict pick from their various convictions which punishment they will undergo, which nicely fits in with Interland's philosophy of minimal law.)
Contract law, however, is a market-based system, especially when Interland becomes willing to enforce the decisions of any non-state legal system that the parties have agreed upon as an arbitrator. Entrepreneurs could come up with new amd innovative legal systems, competing in a free market on factors like faster decision times, low costs, and a better reputation for unbiased and thoughtful dispute resolution. Legal systems for contract law could even be optimized to different sectors of the economy, like how Kleros is to crypto. These legal system startups could make money by registration fees on contracts + additional fees for dispute resolution.
This is a smooth and steady gradualist path to anarcho-capitalism, especially once we allow two or more individuals to agree that their contract, as arbitrated under their mutually agreed system, supersedes basic law. (Stuff like an agreement to an old-fashioned duel nullifying the prohibition on killing under basic law, or a million-person contract that if any party murders another, they are sentenced to a hundred years of imprisonment, which is much more stringent than basic law). The mechanism of a free market for law, including enforcement, is beautifully described in Part 3 of the Machinery of Freedom: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
* A governing body should be required to vote to introduce new legislation held by 90% (or 100%) of tracked nations. This way, Interland can preserve additional freedoms beyond those preserved in the tracked nations.
* The vote to remove a piece of legislation should be easier than to introduce it.
* If tracking <100% conformity, the votes' difficulty should be inversely proportional to agreement by tracked nations. More popular laws are thus easier to pass.
> Unfortunately, almost no one is willing or able to experiment with new institutions. A first step towards changing this, is changing people’s minds.
There's lots and lots of people experimenting with new institutions; see Optimism, Uniswap, Gitcoin, IPFS/Filecoin, Arweave, Tally.cash, Radicle, LabDAO, Toucan, Celo, EF, Worldcoin and on and on.
Most are the same strategy:
- Create a pool of funds (typically by charging a % of transactions) in a community treasury
- Give out programatic votes that control that treasury to your stake holders
- Write code to create rules as to what those votes can do (ie governance)
- Fund public goods that the stake holders vote on
True! I hope Balaji is right that these technologies and ideas will make entry into the governance marker much easier and more common. Excited for his network state book.
So would Interland have elected leaders, legislatures, or a judiciary? It seems like it wouldn't, according to this definition - the laws that describe how the President is elected in the US aren't the same as the laws that describe how elections for in France, so the intersection is roughly the empty set. But then what group is just enforcing the mundane laws like "no murder"?
I feel like there is a problem with intersecting laws, in that sometimes you have a law A that doesn't make sense on its own. It requires either B or C to function. For example A might be "murder is illegal" and B and C are two different ways to accomplish the same goal of "here's how the police force is set up and empowered to fight murder". Then one country does "A and B", which is coherent, and another country does "A and C", which is also coherent, but then "just A" isn't coherent.
The leaders of Interland would not need to be elected, the country could be run by a corporation as it is in other private cities and charter cities.
I think your criticism about coherence is fair. I think it would be a problem for a purely algorithmically generated intersection. However, given the difficulty of cataloguing and interpreting laws a purely algorithmic method is unlikely. In practice, the intersection rule is more of a guiding philosophy than a mechanical process. The original founders would have to use some discretion in defining overlap and keeping things coherent. It would be necessary to create a more mechanical process with many fewer degrees of freedom for adding laws in the future else future leaders would just be dictators. I think this would be easier since the search space of laws passed after 2023 or whatever is much smaller. Still, defining an equivalence that allows two laws written in different words but mean the same thing is difficult. I will have to think more about solving this in the future.
Perhaps you could proactively enforce the intersection rule in ways like the bill of rights - you have core laws like "Any product that may be sold in any of countries X, Y, Z may be sold here." Or "Any speech that is permissible in any of countries X, Y, or Z is also permissible here." So laws that are "restricting natural rights" you want to do the intersection. Alternative you want the rights to be a union of rights. But a law that is "executive" like, here's how we allocate post offices around the country, here's the process for doing the census, those laws you don't generate from the intersection process.
Most rules are of a type in which there is neither consensus nor an obvious 'pro-freedom' default, like whether a federal court or bureaucratic body will resolve certain disputes. What is default for Interland? Will the districts be drawn by a committee of experts or an elected council? What's the pro-freedom default?
Some freedom issues are controlled by framing effects. If everyone believes all humans have rights and human life begins at conception, then the default freedom is for the fetus. If everyone believes, a woman has a right to choose to have an abortion, then the default freedom is for the woman. If everyone believes both freedom statements, then how can Interland resolve the conflict?
Interland furthermore will always be the last country to act on a positive or negative externality. During a pandemic, it will never get positive government interventions (OWS) or negative ones (price controls, aggressively subsidized demand). It will be the last to make any smoking laws,
When the facts change, Interland will be the last to change its mind. For example, when a previous negative externality has been solved by technological progress and no longer needs regulation, Interland will be late. Consider the adverse selection in Interland markets!
If you can figure out an additional rule to govern when the Interland algorithm goes in and out of effect, then you will have solved the problem. Until then, Interland is best avoided.
Interesting! This reminds me of what Prospera wanted to do, where someone in a traditionally regulated category could choose to be regulated by any OCED country of their choice. In general, I think I agree that this approach has lower risk of having bad unknown-unknown consequences than most other approaches I've seen that would achieve the same level of libertarian-ness.
Some significant game-theoretic risks that immediately come to mind:
* If Interland gets into a strong rivalry or cold war with another country, that country could try to attack Interland by legalizing something terrible that happens to have negligible impact in the other country for situation-specific reasons but has a big impact in Interland. For example, Iran could legalize murdering Korean people. This would have a very small impact to Iran itself, but it would make Interland permanently useless as a cosmopolitan business and culture hub in addition to severe one-time costs on Koreans even if there's a waiting period before the law propagates.
* Texas-abortion-law-style strategies. Another country that wanted to affect Interland policy could avoid banning X, but instead legalize private individuals doing some really harmful thing to people who do X.
* There are lots of poor countries that are probably very easy to corrupt but also not really worth corrupting because not much (in dollar terms) is happening there. But if Interland law is tethered to the weakest one of those countries, then people could corrupt those countries in order to legalize terrible things in Interland.
Possible mitigations:
* Instead of using a total-intersection rule, use a 90% intersection rule. Something must be illegal in 90% of reference countries to be illegal in Interland.
* Have a judicial body define a legal category of "private punishment behavior" (basically, selectively going after people with the goal of disincentivizing a particular act), and require that behavior to follow the opposite rule (it must be _legal_ in all or almost all reference countries to be legal in Interland). The definition of "private punishment behavior" intuitively feels similar to categories like "hate crimes", so there's probably precedent that you can carry over.
* Allow the legislative body to remove a country from the reference country list if something terrible happens as a result of that country being on the list, and constitutionally rate-limit the use of this mechanism. In addition to the self-correcting property, this creates an incentive alignment: countries know that if they screw up and influence Interland law in bad ways, they will lose their influence over Interland.
Hmm that's very interesting. I was so focused on how Interland would be durable w.r.t passing new laws, but you're totally right that it becomes super sensitive to one country legalizing something. I didn't imagine that could be used as sabotage, that's a cool insight.
I like the 90% solution. The incentive alignment from the ability to remove bad actors from the intersection list is interesting, but then I would worry about insulating the judicial system from influence. Part of the goal of this idea is to spread out the sources of influence to make it difficult for even very powerful and concentrated interests to make changes. Putting that power into an oversight board concentrates it again. Although since the intersection of laws is difficult to define well enough for an algorithm, such a board may be necessary.
There's a more intuitive way to determine the intersection of laws: require that to be convicted of a crime in Interland, you must be independently convicted of it according to all the legal systems that Interland is an intersection of. You can clone their justice systems, perhaps by starting with hiring retired judges from each of them.
Convictions will become much more of a hassle for more subjective 'crimes', while stuff like murder will remain easy to prosecute given sufficient evidence.
If the goal is to increase freedom, this is a great thing.
Not a fan of the 90% idea, because if implies that the First, Second and Fourth Amendments will not apply to Interland. The right to bear arms is especially underrated in a hypothetical Interland because people will naturally be less willing to trust that a startup society won't suddenly pivot to tyranny and block the exits out of Interland
This is a good idea! I worry about decision times although I suppose you could run the cases concurrently.
To improve decision times, the Interland system can be refined upon using a delineation between contract law and "basic law," where contract law deals with mutual agreements voluntarily entered into by one or more parties, while basic law deals with the set of laws that all Interlanders are obliged to follow.
To be convicted of a crime under basic law, you must independently convicted by all the legal systems that Interland is an intersection of, with concurrent judicial proceedings. However, for cases involving contract law, the parties to the contract can include a clause stating which legal system they choose to arbitrate any disputes that might arise.
Higher standards are required under basic law, as anyone, including prosecutors working for the Interland corporation, can file a case against you.
(Side note: we haven't really thought about how sentencing should be handled, but the best idea is to let the convict pick from their various convictions which punishment they will undergo, which nicely fits in with Interland's philosophy of minimal law.)
Contract law, however, is a market-based system, especially when Interland becomes willing to enforce the decisions of any non-state legal system that the parties have agreed upon as an arbitrator. Entrepreneurs could come up with new amd innovative legal systems, competing in a free market on factors like faster decision times, low costs, and a better reputation for unbiased and thoughtful dispute resolution. Legal systems for contract law could even be optimized to different sectors of the economy, like how Kleros is to crypto. These legal system startups could make money by registration fees on contracts + additional fees for dispute resolution.
This is a smooth and steady gradualist path to anarcho-capitalism, especially once we allow two or more individuals to agree that their contract, as arbitrated under their mutually agreed system, supersedes basic law. (Stuff like an agreement to an old-fashioned duel nullifying the prohibition on killing under basic law, or a million-person contract that if any party murders another, they are sentenced to a hundred years of imprisonment, which is much more stringent than basic law). The mechanism of a free market for law, including enforcement, is beautifully described in Part 3 of the Machinery of Freedom: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Additional solutions along these lines:
* A governing body should be required to vote to introduce new legislation held by 90% (or 100%) of tracked nations. This way, Interland can preserve additional freedoms beyond those preserved in the tracked nations.
* The vote to remove a piece of legislation should be easier than to introduce it.
* If tracking <100% conformity, the votes' difficulty should be inversely proportional to agreement by tracked nations. More popular laws are thus easier to pass.
very cool thought experiment
> Unfortunately, almost no one is willing or able to experiment with new institutions. A first step towards changing this, is changing people’s minds.
There's lots and lots of people experimenting with new institutions; see Optimism, Uniswap, Gitcoin, IPFS/Filecoin, Arweave, Tally.cash, Radicle, LabDAO, Toucan, Celo, EF, Worldcoin and on and on.
Most are the same strategy:
- Create a pool of funds (typically by charging a % of transactions) in a community treasury
- Give out programatic votes that control that treasury to your stake holders
- Write code to create rules as to what those votes can do (ie governance)
- Fund public goods that the stake holders vote on
True! I hope Balaji is right that these technologies and ideas will make entry into the governance marker much easier and more common. Excited for his network state book.
oh huh, I did not know about Balaji, thank you for the searchable keyword!
So would Interland have elected leaders, legislatures, or a judiciary? It seems like it wouldn't, according to this definition - the laws that describe how the President is elected in the US aren't the same as the laws that describe how elections for in France, so the intersection is roughly the empty set. But then what group is just enforcing the mundane laws like "no murder"?
I feel like there is a problem with intersecting laws, in that sometimes you have a law A that doesn't make sense on its own. It requires either B or C to function. For example A might be "murder is illegal" and B and C are two different ways to accomplish the same goal of "here's how the police force is set up and empowered to fight murder". Then one country does "A and B", which is coherent, and another country does "A and C", which is also coherent, but then "just A" isn't coherent.
The leaders of Interland would not need to be elected, the country could be run by a corporation as it is in other private cities and charter cities.
I think your criticism about coherence is fair. I think it would be a problem for a purely algorithmically generated intersection. However, given the difficulty of cataloguing and interpreting laws a purely algorithmic method is unlikely. In practice, the intersection rule is more of a guiding philosophy than a mechanical process. The original founders would have to use some discretion in defining overlap and keeping things coherent. It would be necessary to create a more mechanical process with many fewer degrees of freedom for adding laws in the future else future leaders would just be dictators. I think this would be easier since the search space of laws passed after 2023 or whatever is much smaller. Still, defining an equivalence that allows two laws written in different words but mean the same thing is difficult. I will have to think more about solving this in the future.
Perhaps you could proactively enforce the intersection rule in ways like the bill of rights - you have core laws like "Any product that may be sold in any of countries X, Y, Z may be sold here." Or "Any speech that is permissible in any of countries X, Y, or Z is also permissible here." So laws that are "restricting natural rights" you want to do the intersection. Alternative you want the rights to be a union of rights. But a law that is "executive" like, here's how we allocate post offices around the country, here's the process for doing the census, those laws you don't generate from the intersection process.
Most rules are of a type in which there is neither consensus nor an obvious 'pro-freedom' default, like whether a federal court or bureaucratic body will resolve certain disputes. What is default for Interland? Will the districts be drawn by a committee of experts or an elected council? What's the pro-freedom default?
Some freedom issues are controlled by framing effects. If everyone believes all humans have rights and human life begins at conception, then the default freedom is for the fetus. If everyone believes, a woman has a right to choose to have an abortion, then the default freedom is for the woman. If everyone believes both freedom statements, then how can Interland resolve the conflict?
Interland furthermore will always be the last country to act on a positive or negative externality. During a pandemic, it will never get positive government interventions (OWS) or negative ones (price controls, aggressively subsidized demand). It will be the last to make any smoking laws,
When the facts change, Interland will be the last to change its mind. For example, when a previous negative externality has been solved by technological progress and no longer needs regulation, Interland will be late. Consider the adverse selection in Interland markets!
If you can figure out an additional rule to govern when the Interland algorithm goes in and out of effect, then you will have solved the problem. Until then, Interland is best avoided.