L29Ah (question accompanied by a donation of 0.00035466btc)

To start, I would like to recommend a recent column by Bitarch about contract enforcement. It provides several historical examples of how, in a free market, contract enforcement happened not through violence, but through the refusal to cooperate, and indicates that this is an inevitable consequence of a sufficiently balanced potential for violence in society — and ancap is presumably just such, otherwise a dominant aggressor would not be long in appearing. Therefore, relatively stable markets usually already possess all the necessary tools for peaceful conflict resolution — such as arbitration, rating systems, and sanctions.

Nevertheless, reputation works well only where it is easy to refuse cooperation by replacing a defaulting counterparty with their direct competitor, and where all other market participants also monitor such situations and strive to deal with counterparties who have a good reputation.

However, if you have a short planning horizon, and it is not very important to you what long-term negative consequences the person who did not pay for your work will face, but you would like to quickly receive the money under the contract and spend it on urgent needs — then it is important to have threats in reserve that are more serious than “I will no longer do business with you, and I will try to make sure everyone follows my example.” For example, the ability to shove a barrel into his liver, after which you offer to part with the car keys as collateral that the contract money will be paid tomorrow. Or, as you indicated in your question, simply beating him up.

At the same time, it is important to understand what exact reputation you are creating for yourself with such actions. If you are satisfied with a reputation as hot-tempered but forgiving (beat them up and forgave the debt) — well, go ahead, crack some knuckles, then write off the losses, and you’re even. If you prefer the reputation of a tough guy who isn’t to be trifled with, you can try beating them up first, and then declare that this was the interest on the debt, while the principal must be returned by a certain date, or new interest will be charged. But this is already a serious claim that you are capable of completely determining the rules of the game in this area (since you have de facto revised the terms of the contract unilaterally, which is no less of a blunder than a breach of contract by the party withholding payment), and many may find a reason to challenge such a claim, even if you were previously, in essence, irrelevant to them.

So I would recommend avoiding violence whenever possible and limiting yourself to threats of violence. Demonstrate to the contract violator your ability to cause them unacceptable damage, and then offer, as an alternative to such a miserable scenario, to revise the terms of the contract by providing the possibility of payment in installments — or, if that is clearer to you, putting them “on the clock.” And, again, it is better to get their consent to the new terms in an explicit form, because what use is it to you to let go of a person whose only desire is to get as far away as possible without actually paying the bills. It is far more profitable if they leave happy, understanding that they got off easy, that it is actually realistic to pay the debt under the new terms, that their business reputation will not suffer, and that they don’t need to run from anyone.

And in conclusion, if you are concerned specifically with the formal compliance of certain actions with the non-aggression principle, I will describe the conflict from that point of view.

You weren’t paid, you act in accordance with the clause of the contract regarding delays: usually, both a penalty and a specific arbitration body are specified there. The NAP is not violated.

You weren’t paid, you beat up the non-payer, after which you proposed to consider that the parties are even, and the beaten person agreed. There was a mutual violation of the NAP followed by a reconciliation of the parties.

You weren’t paid, you beat up the non-payer, after which you demanded the return of the debt — there was a violation of the NAP on your part, unless, of course, the beating was written into the contract as a disciplinary measure in case of payment delay or even as the payment itself (the classic description of labor relations known to us, ending with the words “you shouldn’t have chased after cheapness, priest”).

You weren’t paid, there is no hope for arbitration, you insist on a revision of the contract through threats, after which the new contract is fulfilled by the counterparty — there is no violation of the NAP (but if you overdid it, the situation may only become more complicated; this is a favorite plot of action movies, and they don’t make action movies about peaceful and cloudless market relations).