Handbook on Contemporary Austrian Economics

How much order can spontaneous order create 145
protectors to prevent cattle rustling and recover stolen animals. Miners
and the members of wagon trails devised their own, similar institutions of
governance to facilitate cooperation in the American West.
These private institutions of governance seem to have worked quite well.
Popular Wild West fiction has promoted the idea of widespread western
chaos, complete with lawless cowboys, gun-slinging showdowns, and
frequent shoot-outs like the one at the O.K. Corral. But the evidence of
spontaneous order's effectiveness in the Wild West paints a rather different
picture. Between 1870 and 1885, for instance, in five of the largest cattle
towns in the American West, Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City,
and Caldwell, there were a total of only 45 homicides for the entire 15-
year period in all five cattle towns combined. That's an average of about
1.5 homicides per cattle-trading season (Dykstra, 1996). Historian Robert
Dykstra provides some additional data on the not so Wild West. In the
infamous Deadwood mining camp's first year, when there was no government
to protect persons or property, there was a total of four homicides.
Or consider Jesse James' infamous gang of bandits, which averaged only
about one murder per year over the course of its career (ibid., p. 512).
Despite claims to the contrary, spontaneously ordered meta-rules -
encompassing, private institutions of social order - evidently can emerge
and secure social cooperation. In the international realm, spontaneously
ordered merchant law and an attendant dispute resolution system developed
to facilitate international commerce despite the pocket of anarchy
that multiple international sovereigns create. In pirate societies and the
American West there was utter anarchy. Far from preventing social order
from emerging, the complete absence of formal government in these cases
created strong incentives for individuals to devise private governance solutions
that would permit them to realize the gains from cooperation. In the
case of pirates, the result was a private system of constitutional democracy
and separated powers that predated its adoption by governments in
the legitimate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century world. In the case of
the American West, the result was private associations that defined and
enforced property rights where they previously did not exist. Both systems
of spontaneously ordered meta-rules succeeded in generating social order.
Despite this success, neither system generated wealth for their participants
that approaches the level of wealth enjoyed by citizens under some
governments today. Critics of the idea that spontaneous order can create
significant order are fond of pointing this out. Perhaps spontaneous order
can function without the shadow of the state; perhaps it can generate
meta-rules of social order. But it cannot do so more effectively than government.
Where, these critics ask, are the examples of rich, spontaneously
ordered societies