Thank you, Stephen. Thank you also for pointing out your article. It was a very interesting read. There were a couple of points I was unsure of in your article. First, you wrote: The dues you speak of are clearly a form of taxation, since a person cannot decide not to pay and cannot secede from the alliance. However, the tax is levied against income from land, whose operty rights exist only because of the alliance, so it is reasonable to demand that the cost of the alliance supporting the owner's right be paid by him. Is this how I should understand your meaning? -------------------------------- -------------------------------- Another point about your article raised alarms. You said: What happens in the case where two justice agencies come into conflict? I believe this was the whole point of why Rand believed that the use of force must be a government held monopoly. I give the following two examples. Suppose two people enter into an agreement and write up a contract. However, these the wording of the contract has an ambiguity in it which neither person recognizes, but which each interprets differently. If these two people each subscribe to different justice agencies, how could this dispute be resolved? Would not a more reasonable solution be to have people entering into an agreement agree at that time on a justice agency to arbitrate any disputes, and register their agreement for a fee, rather than have such agencies work on a subscription system? A similar dilemma could be suggested where two people, subscribing to different justice agencies, get into a fight which was witnessed by no others, and each claims the other was the agressor. Suppose both agencies investigate, but come to opposite conclusions based on the evidence, each supporting their own subscriber. How will these agencies determine whose assessment is valid to be enforced? The subscribers of each agency would demand that their agency upheld their verdict and failure to do so would result in a loss of business. It seems that there is need of an impartial agency which can, at a minimum, settle disputes of this kind. Neither of these scenarios considers differences in rules by which such agencies would judge cases and determine punishment. (I apologize if this material is covered in your references. Unfortunately, I do not have easy access to these materials to read the background to your assertions.) -------------------------------- -------------------------------- Unfortunately, there seems to be very little discussion of this article in the original thread on RoR. Has there been discussion of it elsewhere? This article, combined with the original thoughts sparked by Michael Stuart Kelly's article on rights, as well as some other material I've investigated since then, has given me some interesting ideas that I hope to expand on here in the coming weeks. Dennis.