The Paradox of Free Markets
Has anyone here read Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance? Here are his word, copied from wikipedia:
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
In short, a tolerant society should tolerate everyone except the rabidly intolerant, because those radicals will not tolerate you to exist. So it's you or them, and thus it is intolerance, or the tolerance of all except the intolerant.
A paradox!
A Paradox of the Free Market?
There is something of the same paradox in the free market. Many in the EOS world have said, gosh, we have free markets in BPs and in dApps and in price and in devs and all, why can't we have a free market in dispute resolution? Look! Lo and behold, the market for arbitration is indeed free, we should adopt free market principles to ECAF ("EOS Core Arbitration Forum").
Why ever not? It's very centralised, we should open up that market.
Yet, the paradox of the free market operates here. To paraphrase Popper
Unlimited freedom must lead to the disappearance of freedom itself.
What then cannot be free? A market can be free in all things, except that which makes it a market. In the operation of the market two things are essential: rules and enforcement of those rules.
Consider what a market is - it is a place with rules. There have to be some rules because otherwise it's just a place that is indistinguishable from all other places, and therefore cannot be a market.
The rules, by the numbers
The zeroth rule is where the place is. The next rule is, who's in charge? Who owns this place and not the place next door?
Without these two rules, consider what will happen. There will typically be some process to establish the law. Either
- the place exists in which case it is homesteaded and/or fought over, or,
- in more modern digital virtual terms, the place is created by
- a person. Or,
- a group of people, as there is space here for Elinor Ostrom's Common Pool Resources.
Either way, whatever path, someone/thing ends up in charge of some place/market. As an exercise, you can examine
and decide who's in charge :-) There is always a rule somewhere that says who's in charge. Where that person could be variously a regulator, a single owner, a community, a monarch, a github owner, a ruling minority, a committee, a plutocrat, a voting populace, ...
The next rule is established by that person, whoever, he or she or they or it may be. And the next and all the rest. Including how to dispute and change the rules.
You are not free to change the rules
The point here is that the rules of a given free market are fixed at any point in time and you by yourself cannot change them. The rules are therefore not free! In the market for free rules, you are free to start a new market, somewhere else, but you are not free to change the rules of an existing market, no matter how free it claims to be.
In the paraphrasing of Popper:
If we extend unlimited freedom even to those who are uncooperative, if we are not prepared to defend our free market with rules against the onslaught of rule-breakers, then our rules will be destroyed, and our market with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always oppose the utterance of alternate rules; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.
You are not free to avoid the rules
The second observation is that in a market of rules, the rules have to be enforced. To see this is true, simply find a market that hasn't any enforcement, go in and start breaking all the rules. As they are not enforced, anyone can do it. And will. Anything of value will be stolen, because, it can be.
Which leads to the dismal outcome: Rules that are not enforced aren't rules. And, if there are no rules, anything goes, and we're back to a random place that cannot be a market.
Therefore, in a free market, the rules must be enforced, and you are not free to avoid that enforcement.
These two non-freedoms - rules & enforcement - in a free market are essential to allow a market to be free - in all other things. In Popperphrasing:
But we should claim the right to impose our rules if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rules-based change, but begin by denouncing our rules; they may forbid their followers to abide by our rules, because they are non-free, and teach them to break our rules by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of our free market, the right not to give freedom to the rule-breaker.
Can Dispute Resolution be a Free Market?
We can now compare & contrast this view with the popular debate of free market dispute resolution on EOS. Frequently people propose to open up the market for Dispute Resolution so that forums can compete to provide dispute resolution services. People imagine that because we are building a free market, then dispute resolution should be free too, else it is not a free market.
The shame, the horror! Yet, if there is to be a free market in dispute resolution, this also implies that anyone can propose forums, rules, arbitrators into the chain. To some extent this is true because in the free market for dapps, you can write your own code and your own legal agreement.
But what you can't do is avoid the rules that everyone is bound to in the marketplace: you can no more write your own protocol to talk EOS to BPs than you can walk down a street with a billboard saying "these are my road rules, you get your own." Nor can you expect to set your own dispute resolution, because obviously, everyone would choose the forum they set up to say they are right.
We can go some way to opening up the market for dispute resolution - see my last post - but because of the paradox of free markets, there appear to be some fixed elements:
A free market is a fixed place with non-free rules and non-free enforcement.
And with that, we can build a market that allows free trade in most everything else.
As a separate comment, I want to tell you, I was thoroughly impressed on the way you wrote this article and broke it down. You have a new follower now...
My sincere congratulations on a job well done. :)
I'm also thinking you'd be a great asset to have on whaleshares.io -- do some investigation on it. :)
For sure, Our Rules! It is just whether it can be yours and mine or must it be everyone's? Overarching rules can reverse the problem. Rules can be pistols too. Facebook's new rules have just fired a few shots.
Hopefully it's a bit of both depending on the context. And that the rules don't overreach beyond the context. I wonder what Karl Popper would have done with blockchains. Great post.
In some sense this is the challenge. Once we understand that the rules are fixed and enforcable, the question is, how did we arrive at the rules?
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Dispute resolution shouldn't be free.
Otherwise people will freely open up disputes, whether frivolous or not.
Disputes should be minimal when possible, because they force a person to participate who must not have to defend themselves from silly claims.
The traditional court system awards the winner of a case, who was justifiable in their actions and should never have been in court in the first place.
...that concept seems to work "enough".
Dispute resolution should not be free in my opinion.
Right - altho here we're finding two meanings for free - free beer and free dom. In the above I was referring to the latter, in some sense or other. Freedom to dispute the rules was excluded, in the sense that of course, the bad guy chooses the best outcome for self.
Once we get past that, then yes, free dispute resolution cases quickly turn into spam. Turns out people will file cases as therapy. And there's alot of people who need that.
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Whoop! There is now a Chinese mandarin translation of this post at 翻译 | 自由市场的悖论 ! Here's the Abstract...
有人是否读过卡尔·波普尔的《宽容的悖论》吗?下面是他的原句，摘自维基百科:
鲜为人知的是宽容的悖论:无限的宽容必然导致宽容的消失。如果我们把无限的宽容延伸到那些不宽容的人身上，如果我们不准备捍卫宽容社会以抵抗不宽容的冲击，那么宽容将被摧毁，并且我们还将容忍他们。-例如，在这种提法中，我并不是说，我们应该总是压制不容忍哲学的言论;只要我们能用理性的论据来对抗他们，用公众舆论来控制他们，压制始终是是不明智的。但如果有必要，我们应该主张使用武力压制它们;同时，我们也将很容易发现在理性论证层面上很难与他们有交集，一切也要将从谴责所有的论证开始;他们可能会禁止追随者听取理性的论证，因为它具有欺骗性，并教他们用拳头或手枪等暴力方式回应争论。因此，我们应以容忍的名义要求不容忍那些“不容忍者”的权利。
简而言之，一个宽容的社会应该包容除了极端不宽容的人以外的所有人，因为那些激进分子不会容忍你的存在。因此要么是你要么是他们就会归为不宽容，也可能变成除了不宽容的人之外的所有人都是宽容的。
这根本就是一个悖论！
read on
It took me a little while to parse and compress this article for understanding. Here's my output.
Conflating tolerance, freedom, free market, mediation, and algorithmic rules (deterministic law) for a tree-level view is ambituous. Tolerance can be related to mediation in the sense they allow resolution when there has been an error. Freedom is a right which is different from an error (like tolerance) that's allowed. Conflating freedom with free market threw me off, but I guess they really are deeply related. This is my interpreation of how these ideas can be conflated: "We have the freedom to conduct free market txns within legal bounds, tolerating errors in the pre-txn sales/buying pitches, and resort to arbitration when errors that law could not detect and correct exceeded our tolerance."
Dispute resolution is about deciding things that the algorithmic rules could not determine. It seems to be based on selecting an oracle who, almost by definition, can make errors (because he's to decide situations where the truth can't be determined). So it must be off-chain which seems to require a free market of mediators. The rules that create the mediator market can be determined by the same people (ideally all stakeholders) who determine the rules for the primary market. Both markets are algorithmic but the mediator can override primary market. The primary txn and the mediator were free market choices the parties made.