[ExI] The Flight of the Lawn Chair Man, Part II

[Bryan Bishop]

On Sunday 06 July 2008, Gary Miller wrote:
> Come on, there's no such thing as free. And I suppose you think we

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity

Free is baseline, it's physics; anything nonfree is usually socially 
constrained. There's a difference.

> should all equip our cars with skateboard and bicycle detectors so
> that children can play in the streets and now have to observe any of
> the same traffic laws that automobiles do?

You shouldn't be running into kids, yes. It's called right of way.

> We live in a society where safety is based upon people following
> certain laws for the sake of safety.

Okay.

> When you violate those rules you risk the life of not just yourself
> but others.

Nah, there are many bogus rules. Wasn't there a helmet discussion on 
this list a few weeks ago?

> In many states you are required to pass a safe vehicle inspection.
>  You are required to have working brakes on your vehicle.  The
> government does not buy you brakes.  If you want to drive you must
> follow the commonsense laws that are created for the sake of safety.

As opposed to, you know, not building a transportation system that kills 
tens of thousands of people every month. Yes, sure, blame the victims. 
Not the engineers and designers. No way, they didn't do a thing, right?

> Safety laws for the most part are created to save lives.  Which the
> last time I checked was an Extropian thing to do.

Laws are hardly extropic.

http://www.maxmore.com/extprn3.htm

"Open Society — Supporting social orders that foster freedom of speech, 
freedom of action, and experimentation. Opposing authoritarian social 
control and favoring the rule of law and decentralization of power. 
Preferring bargaining over battling, and exchange over compulsion. 
Openness to improvement rather than a static utopia."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/extropians_pr.html

"Further along there was a concerted attempt to flesh out the Extropian 
dream. Tom Morrow, the Extropian legal theorist, wrote articles 
about "privately produced law," showing how systems of rules can and do 
arise spontaneously from voluntary transactions among free agents, 
without the assistance of Mother Government. He also wrote about "Free 
Oceana," a proposed community of Extropians living on artificial 
islands floating around on the high seas."

http://users.aol.com/gburch1/exlaw.html

" 

Individual liberty and reciprocity are the highest values in an 
extropian approach to law and legal issues. These values follow 
naturally from a desire for self transformation and a stress on social 
systems that arise as a spontaneous ordering of free individuals. 
Accordingly, extropians look to legal systems as tools for freely 
ordering their own lives and their interactions with others and they 
resist the use of law as a tool of repression or coercion."

"Extropians strongly question the presumption underlying the current 
almost universal paradigm of law that assumes that law is inextricably 
intertwined with the power of the state. They seek to free the law from 
this confining assumption as much as possible and see the law more as a 
fluid ground of action for ordering the affairs of individuals on a 
consensual basis. Thus, extropians are interested in current 
developments in various regimes of so-called "privately produced law", 
such as private mediation and arbitration, and look forward to the 
possibility of expanding the reach of such regimes of private law to 
new areas of human activity. Many extropians think that the coercive 
state as we know it today could be more or less completely replaced 
by "polycentric legal codes" of privately produced law, an example of 
spontaneous order on the largest social scale."

- Bryan
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http://heybryan.org/