Listening to Michael Savage just now, on AM1280,

rip into Richard Dreyfuss' speech at Oxford [I suspect this is what he was talking about, though I have such a slow connection that I'm not going to wait for it--Savage played clips], it occurs to me that most people haven't heard or understood the libertarian doctrine of voluntary unanimity. (I'd put it in quotes, but I haven't actually heard it expressed that way.) I bring this up because Savage was claiming that we all must trust and obey our elected leaders.

L. Neil Smith, in one of his books, probably Lever Action, a collection of essays published in various places, provides an example of what I mean. He says that usually, when a group of people order a pizza, each person gets what he wants for the simple reason that it is possible to put on the toppings in such a way as to make that possible. Some negotiation may be in order, involving some compromise, but any such compromise never involves items that the final consumer must ingest that he considers to be disgusting. It may also be necessary to shop around for a pizza parlor that will accomodate the group's desires. (Assuming that everybody is sufficiently familiar with the available products to make informed choices.)

Basically, nobody should have any moral objection to somebody in the group who'd rather have a hoagy. Of course, Smith never tried to go through a drive-through with me when I'm driving. I consider it immoral for my passengers to order more than a single non-numbered item.

Smith also presents an interesting example of voluntary unanimity in Star Wars: Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of Thonboka, in which Lando has to convince a sufficient number of super-powerful creatures, who had never been threatened before, to fight for their own survival. He only gets a small fraction of them to cooperate. [Is it enough to turn the tide? Only if Lando can find the key to breaking the Empire's blockade! (No, that's not from the cover, it's my parody of a sci-fi cover.)]

Here's a related matter for people to consider:

PRIVATELY PRODUCED LAW

...I am not calling for the abolition of all laws. Humans cannot
live in complex societies without the guidance of laws. They can,
however, live without the coercive imposition of laws. This is an
essential distinction, for anarcho-capitalists are often misunderstood
as denying the validity of laws per se. Nothing could be further from
the truth. Anarcho-capitalists see the state as a criminal
organization. In their eyes, state law is essentially *lawless*.

What is the alternative to state law? Overlapping jurisdictions or
privately produced law in free and open competition - a polycentric
legal system. In what follows, I will provide a brief introduction to
the history and principles of privately produced law, and argue that it
offers a more efficient and just alternative to state law.

LAW PRIOR TO THE STATE

Friedrich A. Hayek finds the origins of law in the natural selection of
social orders. Not all types of behaviour support social life, he
explains. Some - like violence, theft, and deceit - render it
impossible.

Society can thus exist only if by a process of selection rules have
evolved which lead individuals to behave in a manner which makes
social life possible. [2]

The development of these rules predates courts, written law, and even
the concept of law itself:

At least in primitive human society, scarcely less than in animal
societies, the structure of social life is determined by rules of
conduct which manifest themselves only by being in fact observed.
[3]

Because such customary laws exist prior to state laws, they have
attracted the attention of those who research polycentric legal systems.
In "The Enterprise of Law", Bruce Benson concentrates on the legal
system of the Kapauku Papuans of West New Guinea. [4] This "primitive"
legal system exhibited some remarkably sophisticated qualities. It
emphasized individualism, physical freedom, and private property rights;
sorted out fantastically complicated jurisdictional conflicts; and
provided mechanisms for "legislating" changes to customary law. [5] In
a separate work, `Enforcement of Property Rights in Primitive Societies:
Law Without Government', [6] Benson points out similar features in the
legal systems of the Yuroks of Northern California [7] and the Ifuago of
Northern Luzon. [8]

David Friedman adopts medieval Iceland as his favorite example of a
polycentric legal system. He writes that it

... might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the
lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its
most fundamental functions. [9]

Murray Rothbard backs up his arguments for privately produced law by
pointing to a thousand years of Celtic Irish Law. [10]

These and many other examples of customary legal systems demonstrate
that we don't need states to have laws. They also tell us what sort of
laws arise free of state interference. After an extensive review of
customary legal systems, Benson finds that they tend to share six basic
features:

1) a predominant concern for individual rights and private property;

2) laws encorced by victims backed by reciprocal agreements;

3) standard adjudicative procedures established to avoid violence;

4) offenses treated as torts punishable by economic restitution;

5) strong incentives for the guilty to yield to prescribed punishment
due to the threat of social ostracism; and

6) legal change via an evolutionary process of developing customes and
norms. [11]

This is about ten percent of the article. My point is to show that extensive thinking has been applied to a great many aspects of the argument.