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April 10, 2005
CIP seminar and Benson's paper get attention.
The CIP seminar series was presented this semester in conjunction with Mercatus at GMU. It focused on the issues of providing security on the internet without government regulation. Skarbek recently blogged about one of the critical papers in the series by Bruce Benson. It was also discussed on the Mises Blog. I attended this presentation when Benson came through for the CIP project and was very impressed (all papers are available at the previous link. The entire series brought a few particular insights to mind.
1. I noticed how the broad notion of property right enforcement had permeating effects into trading on the internet(this point was focused on most closely in Stringham's piece). Without expost mechanisms available (cost effective) individuals are left with only ex ante deterant efforts to protect themselves from fraud, theft, and intrusion. This paralleled very closely with my line of research on prisons and privatization. Despite opting out availability in police and security provisions the state still maintains a monopolized hold on criminal enforcement and corrections which provides a disoriented institution of property throughout the entire market place.
2. The internet environment creates an ambiguous notion of property rights. Few of the papers distinguished between security and privacy on the internet. This allowed me to see the institutional parallel that may also exist between my prison research agenda and Stephan Kinsellas intillectual property rights work. In some objective sense, protection against invasions of privacy is impossible, since there is no way of completely compensating a victim of his privacy once information has been used for ill means.
Clarifying issues of property rights in cyberspace would give more objective methods for ruling on cases like this one.
I plan on writing a paper as a response to the entire series and focusing on these two insghts as I beleive they are inherent in the research but not as emphasized as much as others of the presented arguments.
Posted by djdamico at April 10, 2005 5:26 PM