LiberaLaw

Left-Wing Market Anarchism and Ron Paul

2011-12-21T06:50:00.000-08:00

If you say you're against the state these days, someone's sure to ask you how your views parallel Ron Paul's.

I'm sitting out this year's electoral battles: I'm not a principled non-voter (though I'm skeptical about electoral politics), but my friend Brad Spangler has agreed to promote my book, The Conscience of an Anarchist, in connection with his Vote for Nobody campaign. But that doesn't mean I don't have opinions about the election season.

To begin with, anyone who's derailing proponents of the corporate/warfare/administrative/national-security state like Willard "Mitt" Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry deserves three cheers for performing a public service. Until now, the Republican field has been dominated by warmongers and corporatists outdoing themselves in their support for state thuggery.

And, in case you haven't noticed, the same thing is true on the Democratic side, except that there are no alternatives there. Barack Obama clearly wants to serve George W. Bush's third term. His record of support for war, for the various abuses of the national security state—including surveillance, assassination, secrecy, and indefinite detention, and for bailouts and other forms of corporatism make him largely indistinguishable from his predecessor. And his willingness to legitimate evils that could previously have been framed as GOP aberrations as the products of a bipartisan consensus is especially troubling.

A Gingrich, Romney, or Perry term in the White House would be a disaster. So would another Obama term.

On many of the issues that I care about most, Ron Paul stands tall. New Left icon Tom Hayden writes: "Paul opposes the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He opposes the empire of military bases. He opposes Wall Street thievery, tax subsidies for oil companies, the suppression of WikiLeaks, the drug war and the criminalization of marijuana. Those positions might just save America." And Hayden is surely on to something.

Politicians are most unlikely to save America. But by far the worst thing governments do is to make war, and Paul's campaign is committed to dramatically reducing the chances that the US government's awesome power will be used in war-making.

And of course he's right about his other signature issue, too: as long as there's a central bank, the state will use it to fund otherwise unsupportable wars. Ending the Fed is a crucial step toward peace.

He's opposed to bailouts and other forms of corporate privilege. And he's acknowledged the legitimacy of many of the Occupy movement's concerns.

But while positions like these are worth affirming, that doesn't mean that Paul's candidacy is an unmixed blessing for those of us on the anti-state left. For Paul is, after all, a self-proclaimed conservative.

His stances regarding immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage are wrong, and he needs to be much more clearly radical where other issues, like racism, poverty, and health care, as well as IP and worker freedom, are concerned.

It is unclear to me precisely what Paul actually thinks about immigration, but it seems apparent that he is open to at least some immigration restrictions. Anyone who believes in the freedom to work, who regards borders as arbitrary lines drawn by politicians, and who sees immigration freedom as a key weapon in the real war on poverty should have no time for nativist or nationalist stances on this (or any other) issue.

Paul's conservative positions on abortion and same-sex marriage aren't conservative enough for many on the religious right. But they're still mistaken.

He'd like to see the legality of abortion decided at the state level—an option I fear would lead to lots of victimless crime prosecutions. And he has supported the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which has had devastating consequences for same-sex couples. (Of course all levels of government should get out of the marriage business, but turning marriage into a private contractual relationships will pose serious problems for people in same-sex relationships until relationship status stops mattering entirely to government agencies.)

As a leftist, I believe in abortion rights and marriage equality. And I believe it's important to challenge not only bad laws and policies regarding these matters but also the moral convictions and cultural values that underly them.

I am confident that Ron Paul is not himself a racist. But the controversy about the racially inflammatory language in some of the newsletters his office mailed out in decades past, and the racist and anti-immigrant flavor of some immigration materials Paul campaigners have distributed more recently, is sure to raise its head again now that his campaign is attracting more attention. Paul has sometimes reached out to unsavory, even racist allies in the past, employing a strategy I find deeply troubling and utterly unwarranted. I believe he needs to repudiate this strategy while reemphasizing his own principled opposition to racism.

As an anarchist, I believe the state is unjust, unnecessary, and dangerous. So I'd certainly like to see it reduced in size rather than expanded. And Ron Paul is actually interested in making the bloated behemoth that is the United States government smaller (though he still seems mistakenly to treat it as legitimate in principle). But I think it's vital to proceed dialectically, in full awareness of the interconnections among various forms of oppression. The state is excellent at breaking people's legs and then offering them crutches (thanks to Harry Browne for the analogy). In a sane world, it would do neither; but taking away the crutches while leaving the state's leg-breaking activities in place or unremedied isn't sane, or fair, either.

And if Paul were a candidate on the left, he would be very clear about this point when discussing issues like racial discrimination, poverty relief, and health care.

Ending state support for segregation, the provision of remedies for past injustice, and a continued program of non-violent protest could have undermined entrenched white dominance in the South in the absence of the state action a gentle Paul critic like Hayden would like to promote; you don't need state action to promote racial justice and inclusion. Eliminating state-secured privilege and rectifying the effects of violent dispossession, subsidy, and land engrossment could deal with the problem of structural poverty, while mutual aid networks could provide ongoing economic security in the state's absence. The same sort of approach could ensure the widespread availability of health care services and make them dramatically more affordable than those on offer today.

There are clearly alternatives to state action in response to these problems. A leftist anti-statism would emphasize them in a way that Paul has not.

And as far as I know, Paul hasn't noted the ways in which monopolistic intellectual property privileges boost corporate power at the public's expense, or the ways in which the state empowers employers at the expense of workers or makes centralized, hierarchical corporations more economically viable than they would be without politically secured support. A leftist campaign would address these kinds of concerns head-on. And it would take a firm stand for markets, but against capitalism.

Ron Paul is, as far as I can tell, a kind and decent person who has said important things—things leftists should endorse. Anti-state leftists would do well to affirm Paul's positions on war, civil liberties, the drug war, corporatism, and the national security state, while challenging his stances on abortion, immigration, and same-sex marriage and his cultural conservatism and urging him to radicalize his views of remedies for racial injustice, of poverty, of IP, of worker freedom, and of capitalism.

Santa Claus: America’s Most Wanted Fugitive

2010-12-20T15:06:00.001-08:00

WASHINGTON, DC—A joint federal-state task force intends to apprehend Santa Claus, whom it regards as a dangerous fugitive, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Chet Waldron told reporters yesterday.

Among the factors making Claus a “person of interest,” according to Waldron:

Claus’s entry of private property makes him guilty of civil, and probably criminal, trespass.
Claus’s immigration status is in question. He has repeatedly entered the United States without a passport.
Claus appears to have purposefully avoided the inspection of the goods he has imported into the United States by customs authorities and the payment of relevant tariffs.
Self-described “pro-family” groups have asked the administration to take action because Claus’s provision of toys to children interferes with their parents’ rights to oversee the upbringing of their offspring without adequate supervision, since many popular toys may encourage attitudes and behavior of which parents disapprove or legitimize values and lifestyles parents find objectionable.
The fact that Claus has failed to provide information about the contents of the packages he carries has raised questions about whether any of his actions violate US drug or money-transfer laws.
Claus enters and traverses US airspace using a custom-built vehicle that lacks approval by the Federal Aviation Administration. Further, FAA officials note that he does not file flight plans, lacks a pilot’s license, and flies through darkened skies guided only by a tiny bioluminescent red light, in a clear violation of traffic safety regulations.
Justice Department attorneys have raised questions about Claus’s willingness to distribute his products for free, asking whether doing so violates anti-dumping rules.
There is no record that Claus, who clearly “conducts business” in the United States, has eever obtained a business license.
Some items delivered by Claus are believed to have been produced in violation of US patent and copyright laws and international treaties.

Clause defenders had hoped that the arrival of the Obama administration would lead to reduced emphasis on the planned Claus prosecution. But the presence of vocal Claus critics—including Secretary of State, said to regard Claus as a “persistent threat to national security,” and Transportation Security Administration head John Pistole, who has been quoted as urging the North American Air Defense Command to “shoot the old guy out of the sky”—in the upper echelons of the Obama administration suggests that Claus will continue to be a federal target.

US Senator Joseph Lieberman (Ct.) has called on the White House to support designating Claus’s North Pole workshop a terrorist organization. “We’ll see how long people keep supporting this bastard when they realize we can seize their assets and lock them up in Guantanamo,” Lieberman enthused to a National Press Club audience.

While the administration has yet to formally endorse Lieberman’s proposal, “We’ll keep looking,” Waldron told reporters. “Americans concerned about their safety can be sure that we’re going to put a stop to this persistent threat.”

This is an altered version of a piece originally drafted by George Getz, who deserves full credit for the idea and much of the text. I discovered the original at Independent Political Report.

Humanizing Air Travel

2010-11-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

It is gratifying in the extreme to see consumers responding in increasingly vociferous fashion to the accelerating dehumanization of air travel: kudos, in particular, to the founders of We Won’t Fly. It would be truly exciting if ordinary people managed to persuade the USG to retreat by ending the pat-downs and pornoscanners.

But it would be very unfortunate if, should they win this battle, passengers let up the pressure for more decent traveling conditions. Yes, the TSA has gone too far; but it’s never not gone too far. While the latest indignities are atrocious, if we treat the air travel regime in place before they began as largely acceptable, we will provide incontrovertible evidence that, like the frog in the proverbial kettle, we’ve become far too tolerant of abuse.

Even before 9/11, air travel was often unpleasant. There was too much screening; too much passenger time and energy were wasted on dealing with security theatre. But during the past nine years, we’ve moved from the antechamber of hell to its seventh or eighth circle. To take some obvious examples:

Our ability to check in at the last minute has been impeded by rules that preclude checking in less than thirty minutes before take-off. (Remember Robert Hayes’s last minute pursuit of Elaine onto her flight in Airplane? Presumably, it wouldn’t even be possible under today’s asinine rules.)
More broadly, our time is wasted by tedious security screenings that simultaneously necessitate our spending far more time in airports than we once did and subject us to persistent and repeated indignities. We’re forced to remove our shoes, to permit our belongings to be searched in a far more detailed fashion than we once did, and to surrender harmless nail clippers and toothpaste tubes to thugs backed up by other thugs with guns.
Perhaps most irritatingly, in order to avoid making the screening process even longer, people without tickets aren’t allowed to come to airport gates to see off or collect their friends.

And the entire process is designed to treat everyone like a potential criminal. It’s this process, and not merely the use of this or that screening device or security technique, that has to end. A few tweaks here and there simply aren’t sufficient to fix the problem.

(1) The most basic feature of any solution has to be the recognition that the TSA’s security theatre is a response to factors created by the USG’s foreign policy. Suicide terrorism isn't a product of blood-lust or religious mania, however much those things may facilitate it: it's a (completely immoral) reaction, born of powerlessness and frustration, to imperial violence. If the USG really wants dramatically to reduce the risk of suicide terrorism, it simply needs to leave Iraq, leave Afghanistan, and close its network of military bases around the world (a move that would, conveniently, also save taxpayers [at least] hundreds of billions of dollars).

(2) As long as it continues to provide or regulate air travel security, passengers must keep demanding that the USG roll back air travel security regulations, at minimum, to their pre-9/11 level.

(3) Ultimately, though, the USG needs to get out of the airport security business. Consumers themselves need to be free to decide just what kinds of risks they're willing to tolerate: they should be free to choose low-risk/low-intrusiveness airlines or minimally-lower-risk/high-intrusiveness airlines (the deliberately tendentious formulation reflects my conviction that the real impact on passenger safety of Gestapo tactics is limited). (One qualifier: airlines that negligently allow passengers to be harmed in virtue of the imposition of risks greater than those for which the passengers contracted, or which negligently allow third parties to be harmed by suicide terrorists’ use of planes, ought to be subject to appropriate sorts of tort liability. This would presumably affect airlines’ security policies.) Michael Chertoff can fly under whatever conditions he likes; I just don't want him and his corporate paymasters determining under what conditions I do.

Responding to an earlier version of these remarks, an acquaintance observed that airlines could use responsibility for security as an excuse for higher prices and bad service. No doubt. But it is difficult to imagine a less consumer-friendly environment than the one that obtains now. And since airlines and airports would have reason to compete on the convenience-and-dignity vs. security mix, there would, at any rate, be pressure for the treatment of consumers to improve. At present, by contrast, airlines and airports have no reason to give consumers’ concerns any weight at all.

Passenger anger at airport indignities can play a crucial role in making air travel more humane. But it can do so only if passengers continue to protest until they are treated like valued customers rather than criminals and slaves—until the root causes of suicide terrorism are addressed, post-9/11 indignities are eliminated, and, ultimately, air travel security arrangements are set by mutual agreements between airlines and consumers.

Cranick Fire Fund

2010-10-10T16:38:00.001-07:00

Tom Knapp has just alerted me to the existence of a PayPal account, CranickFireFund@Yahoo.Com, designed to help the victims of the Tennessee fire that’s received so much attention of late. I would encourage readers to consider supporting this fund.

The Fulton Fire Fiasco

2010-10-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

The decision by a Tennessee fire agency to deny service to a family with a burning house because the family had failed to pay the agency’s subscription fee (the agency was operated by the city of Fulton but provided service to non-residents on a subscription basis) has prompted sustained discussion throughout the blogosphere, with repeated claims that the incident demonstrates inherent difficulties with the fee-based provision of fire services. Implicitly, then, statists are inclined to see the incident as supporting an argument for state provision of such services, and thus for statism more generally.

The story is complicated, as such stories always are, by the facts. The incident happened, it appears, because the homeowners’ grandson started a fire too close to their home. The decision not to provide service was evidently a long-standing city-council voted policy, and the fire-fighters’ insurance apparently wouldn’t cover them if they provided service to a non-subscriber. On the other hand, the homeowners had apparently received fire service on a previous occasion when their service subscription was similarly unpaid (they evidently paid the day after they received the service), and so might reasonably have expected that they would in this case, too. It would be easy to become engrossed in the details of this particular story; but I’d like to take a step back and think about the big-picture issues it raises. I don’t believe it has to be seen as offering any support for statism.

Fire Service Is Not a “Public Good”

Characteristically, statists maintain that the state needs to deliver a good if it is “public” or “collective”—roughly, such that, if it is provided to anyone in a given public, it is effectively available to all the members of the public, including those who opt not to pay. The standard public goods argument for the state suggests that public goods will be undersupplied on the market for this reason.

There are all sorts of interesting things to say about this argument, but the important thing to notice is that it doesn’t apply here. Fire service is, in general, a private good: providing it to one person doesn’t entail providing it to everyone. So it’s not clear why it shouldn’t be provided on the market, even on the statist’s own preferred criterion.

Fire Services Should Not Be Tax-Funded

The statist answer, in this case, seems to be that the consequences of not providing service are so devastating that it is better to de-link fee payment and service provision. For the statist, this means funding services via taxation.

There are three obvious objections to the statist’s solution to the problem. First, the extraction of taxes at gunpoint by the state is itself unjust. Second, even if tax extraction to fund fire service provision were legitimate, a state powerful enough to extract taxes to be used to support fire service provision would obviously be powerful enough both to extract taxes for other, less desirable, purposes and to engage in other sorts of mischief. Third, if funding for fire service provision is delinked from expressed consumer demand for fire service provision and is instead set politically, funding levels are likely to be inefficient and unrelated to actual need or demand.

Why It Might Seem Reasonable to Deny Service to a Non-Subscriber

If fire service is not funded by taxation, does that means that it needs to be funded by subscriptions? And, if so, must a subscription-funded agency deny emergency service to non-subscribers?

Tom Knapp has made a very plausible case for denying service here and here. (Art Carden’s comment on the story is not altogether conclusive, but might be read as a case for something like Tom’s view.) Tom argues that subscribing to a fire service is like placing a hedged bet. If the odds are low that one will need the service, it will always be tempting not to pay one’s subscription. However, providing fire service is a capital intensive business (trucks and fire houses are expensive) and one with ongoing operating costs (firefighters need to spend long periods on-duty, even when they’re not fighting fires, so they’ll be available when fires actually occur). If people don’t subscribe to a fire agency, the agency will lack the resources it needs to function in a consistent manner on an ongoing basis. And the only realistic way to ensure that they will subscribe is consistently to deny service to non-subscribers.

Duties and Consequences

This approach raises concerns of two kinds.

(a) It seems to involve support for arrangements in accordance with which firefighters will stand idly by and allow their neighbors’ homes to burn, thus violating what would generally be regarded as a moral responsibility to eschew indifference to the vulnerability of others to harm.

By referring to this responsibility, I’m not suggesting that there is a general duty to prevent any and all harms. Rather, my claim is that, per my preferred version of the Golden Rule, I ought to prevent or end a harm to you in a given set of circumstances if I would resent your refusing to help me in similar circumstances were our roles reversed. Also, to be clear: I’m also not arguing that force may be used to require people to fulfill the duty of limited beneficence that follows from the Golden Rule or to punish them or secure compensation from them if they do not do so.

(b) It obviously leads to a terribly undesirable result: someone’s home is destroyed, even though the cost of saving it is significantly less than the value of the home itself.

It is, of course, possible to respond to (a) by noting that there is a duty on the part of firefighters in the imagined situation to all those in a position to benefit from the provision of fire service and willing to pay subscription fees. It might be maintained that one would be ill-serving paid-up subscribers if one rendered assistance in this case, since doing so would increase the odds that potential subscribers would fail to pay their subscriptions, and so limit the ability of the agency to meet its capital and operating needs and protect existing subscribers. Paid-up subscribers willing to pay subscription fees might well have reason to resent the provision of service in this case if it prevented them from receiving service when they needed it. Firefighters might recognize, in turn, that their reaction would be the same as that of the subscribers, and that they would therefore act unreasonably if they provided services to non-subscribers.

This is not a silly argument, and I do not want to treat it dismissively. It is surely right that obligations to all subscribers might trump the responsibility to show limited beneficence to non-subscribers in danger of suffering severe fire damage. However, it is possible to imagine arrangements that would not require fire agency personnel to stifle their compassionate responses and to refuse to prevent immediate, proximate potential loss but that would simultaneously ensure adequate service to those willing to pay their fair share of service costs via subscription. And such arrangements are surely preferable to those that make adequate service levels possible while requiring a firefighter to suppress her or his desire to help someone else in serious danger.

Competition as a Guarantor of Emergency Service to Non-Subscribers

Perhaps the firefighter need not be concerned, because another fire agency would step in were one agency to decline to provide service. Roderick Long and Bob Murphy both see market competition as a crucial source of security here. And it surely would be as regards subscription fees, for instance. On the other hand, it seems as if a competing agency would confront the same incentives as the agency initially contacted by the fire victim: if the competitor agency operates with a subscription-based funding model, it runs the risk of discouraging the subscriptions it needs for ongoing, consistent operation if it opts to respond to a call from a non-subscriber. So it, too (if Knapp’s argument about the economic challenges faced by a solo agency is correct) might find it counter-productive to provide on-the-spot services to non-subscribers.

Imposing High On-the-Spot Charges as a Way of Ensuring Regular Subscription Payments

But perhaps this criticism assumes that the non-subscriber pays only the subscription fee. Trey Givens, David Henderson, Long, Murphy (see here and here), and Jacob Hornberger all suggest that an economically rational fire agency would have been willing to deploy and extinguish the fire for some appropriately high on-the-spot service fee—one significantly in excess of the standard subscription rate. Long suggests that the victim be asked to “pay full price.” Murphy proposes “a penalty rate.” Givens suggests “a premium for on-the-spot requests” and notes that “[t]he firefighter who negotiates a decent rate for . . . [on-the-spot service] would get praised for his initiative.” Henderson endorses an approach featuring an on-the-spot charge that is “a high multiple of the annual fee.” And Hornberger maintains that “a private fire department would have the incentive to have pre-written contracts in which an owner who had failed to purchase fire protection would be asked to agree to pay, say, double the costs of putting out the fire.”

I think it is possible to be more precise than this. If Knapp is correct, as I believe he is, that the hedged-bet analogy is appropriate, then a homeowner will be inclined to avoid paying the subscription fee as long as she estimates that it will be more efficient for her to pay the on-the-spot fee. The question, then, is: at what level should the on-the-spot charge be set to discourage homeowners from declining to pay the subscription fee? The answer seems relatively clear: at a level such that the on-the-spot charge, when discounted by the actuarially determined likelihood that a given homeowner will need fire service, exceeds the subscription fee. A safe estimate of this likelihood might be 0.25% (thanks to Tom Knapp for dialoguing about this and related matters). If this estimate is correct, the on-the-spot charge would need to be over $30,000. A rational consumer would judge that paying $75 on an annual basis would make more sense than paying, say, $32,000 in the event of a fire.

(An aside: it appears that one reason the Fulton fire agency stopped providing service to non-subscribers outside the city limits was that it was difficult to get them to pay after the fact. I think Hornberger is right that “pre-written contracts” would help; and I share Nathan Byrd’s view that a contract providing the fire agency with a lien or other security interest in the property would help to ensure payment.)

The Claim That Letting a Home Burn Would Ensure Regular Subscription Payments More Effectively than Levying a High On-the-Spot Charge

Knapp’s objection to this analysis is, if I understand him correctly, that the odds of losing $32,000 will seem so low in a case like this that people simply won’t pay the subscription fee. Thus, the only way to ensure that subscription fees are consistently paid will be refusing to protect a non-subscriber’s home pour encourager les autres. I don’t want to deny the obvious motivational power of the image of a neighbor’s home burning. But there are at least two reasons why one might not necessarily accept this conclusion.

First, recall that the suggestion is that someone would judge paying a fire-agency subscription unnecessary in view of a possible $32,000 on-the-spot charge because of her estimate of the probability of actually needing fire services. But notice that she’s going to make the same estimate of the probability of a home fire without the possible availability of an on-the-spot alternative to a subscription. What’s going to change, of course, is her estimate of the cost of the fire. If her house is worth $320,000, the potential value of the $75 investment in fire service certainly increases. However, the potential pay-off for making that investment is still enormous even given the availability of an on-the-spot fee, and many of those not willing to make the investment in one case can thus be expected not to make it in the other.

Non-subscribers obviously fall into two groups: the lazy and forgetful on the one hand and rational calculators on the other. Someone who’s lazy and forgetful—who would have purchased a subscription but has simply neglected to do so—is not going to be affected by incentives. Ex hypothesi, she’s simply not thinking about the problem. Learning that someone else lost a house by not paying a fire agency subscription might awaken her from her neglectful slumbers, but so might learning that someone else had had no choice but to pay $32,000 because of having declined to pay such a subscription. By contrast, a genuinely rational calculator would certainly make the judgment that paying $32,000 in the event of a fire is less efficient than paying a $75 annual subscription.

Second, setting the on-the-spot fee at the level I have envisioned would enable the agency to cover its costs even if significant numbers of people chose to avoid the subscription fee and gambled on not having to pay the on-the-spot charge. Of course, this might mean that cash-flow was not as consistent as it would be in the case of subscriptions (and it is not clear that this is so, given that subscriptions would likely be paid at different points throughout the year, and perhaps somewhat erratically). But it would be considerably easier, with substantial payments by non-subscribers in hand, for the agency to opt for debt-based financing. It could borrow against its expected income, including income from on-the-spot charges. And it could build the cost of interest payments into the on-the-spot charges (perhaps increasing them from $32,000 to $35,000).

Alternatives to Subscription- and Debt-Based Funding for Fire Agencies

The conversation to-date has operated on the assumption that subscription and debt were the only mechanisms available for an envisioned fire agency to fund its operations. The fire agency has effectively been envisioned as (i) a member-funded cooperative (a reminder that “the market” need not mean the realm of for-profit commercial transaction) and (ii) a free-standing entity delivering only fire-related services. It is possible to envision at least three other options. Selecting any of them (and they could in some cases be combined) could make a fire agency that offered services to people who had not paid subscription fees more viable.

1. The agency could explicitly incorporate a charitable component in its operations. Community members able to do so could be asked to either to (a) cover the costs of subscriptions for particular persons or to (b) contribute to a fund designed to cover the emergency provision of services to non-subscribers. (Presumably (a) would be less subject to abuse, since it would be possible to assess genuine need on a case-by-case basis and exclude free-riders.)

2. The agency could bundle services of various kinds (insurance more generally and protection against violence are obvious examples) and could obtain needed operating funds in connection with its other services. This might allow it to have larger cash reserves and, in effect, to borrow from itself rather than from an interest-charging lender, “paying itself back” from on-the-spot fire service charges. (Thanks to Kevin Carson for outlining a version of this option to me.)

3. The agency could operate on a for-profit basis, obtaining funds, therefore, not only from customers but also from investors. The investor-provided funds could obviously cushion the agency in cases in which subscriber payments were low.

In principle, it seems as if any of these options, or several in combination, would make it possible for a fire agency to provide on-the-spot services to non-subscribers (perhaps for less than the sort of on-the-spot charge I have discussed here) and still maintain the resources needed to cover its capital and operating costs.

Conclusion

Private fire agencies like this one (CHT David Henderson) operate successfully in today’s economy. But critics of the market have argued that the behavior of the Fulton fire agency, even though government-operated, is evidence that the market cannot be trusted with the provision of fire services and that these services must be entrusted to the state. There are good reasons to avoid giving the state responsibility for fire services or anything else. But anarchists must still acknowledge that statist critics are right to note the morally troubling nature of the denial of service to a fire victim who had failed to pay a fire service subscription.

There are, roughly, two possible, contrasting responses anarchists can offer to the charge that the market-based provision of fire services leads to morally disturbing behavior. On the one hand, they can argue that the actions of a freed-market fire agency that behaved like the Fulton fire agency would be morally justified, even if harsh, because only by denying service to non-subscribers could the agency ensure that it received the subscription payments it needed to operate successfully. On the other, they can maintain that freed-market fire agencies would have alternatives other than denying service to non-subscribers and trying to operate with wild cash-flow fluctuations.

While I believe that the first option could be a morally responsible one, and while the assumptions about human behavior that underlie it may be correct, I have sought here to argue that we are not required to accept it and that other alternatives may be preferable in that they might make it possible for a freed-market fire agency both to provide emergency services to non-subscribers and to maintain a satisfactory financial position. Charging sufficiently high on-the-spot emergency services fees could be sufficient to incentivize rational calculators (and at least some of the otherwise lazy and forgetful)—who might under other circumstances be inclined to gamble that they would be better off not subscribing to a fire service—to pay low annual subscription fees. Charging high on-the-spot fees would also make it possible for agencies to maintain operating reserves and would render it easier for them to cover their costs effectively with debt-based financing if they needed to do so. Delivering some services as a charity (supported by appropriate fundraising) would enable a fire agency to provide emergency on-the-spot services to non-subscribers while enhancing its reputation. Bundling fire and other services would make it easier for an agency to assist those charged high on-the-spot fees without losing needed operating funds. And adopting a for-profit business model would enable an agency to secure needed funds from investors, and so to depend less on subscriptions—rather than on-the-spot charges—for financial stability.

The behavior of a tax-funded agency operated by a monopoly government is not necessarily a particularly good guide to the likely actions of a freed-market fire service. But statists have enthusiastically pointed to the Fulton tragedy as evidence that the market cannot be allowed take responsibility for fire safety. The actions of the agency can be seen as an understandable, if imperfect, response to the need to ensure satisfactory ongoing funding. But rather than defending it on this basis, I think freed-market advocates should point to alternate business models that would enable a freed-market fire agency to thrive even if it provided emergency services to non-subscribers. High on-the-spot service charges set in light of the likelihood of needed service, debt financing, charitable fundraising, service bundling, and investor funding could all contribute to the success of such a model. Thus, it can reasonably be argued that a freed-market fire agency need not behave like the Fulton fire department, and that a key criticism of non-state methods of service provision, and so a key argument for the necessity of the state, therefore fails.

Cultural Roots and Collective Identity in a Libertarian Society

2010-10-06T16:06:00.002-07:00

In general, a libertarian society would be hospitable to people’s cultural roots and collective identities.

Placing one’s life story in the context of a larger, more inclusive narrative can help to give one a sense of meaning and direction. Some of the tales we tell for this purpose are religious, some metaphysical, some scientific, some ethnic, some cultural. Political libertarianism would not deprive anyone of the sense of identity conferred by any of these stories—unless, of course, it could only be preserved by force—and would doubtless contribute to the flourishing of a significant number. Cultural libertarianism might undermine some of these stories, but would certainly leave many undisturbed.

Varieties of Libertarianism

Political libertarianism opposes aggression—the initiation of force—by individuals, including those acting under the color of law. Cultural libertarianism seeks peacefully to undermine hierarchies in workplaces and other social institutions; to promote individual freedom of self-development, self-definition, and self-expression; and to foster an ethos of openness, dialogue, and critical reflection on social norms. Proponents of cultural libertarianism argue plausibly that their position emerges from the same respect for the value of freedom that underlies political libertarianism; that people who are not consistently skeptical about positional authority will find it difficult to sustain a free society; that the assumptions that ground some cultural arrangements are inconsistent with those embraced by political libertarianism; and that aggression frequently makes possible the maintenance of hierarchical social arrangements, even if those arrangements are not themselves aggressive.

Political Libertarianism and Collective Identity

Political libertarianism would leave people free to form whatever non-violent social arrangements they might like and to remember and celebrate whatever narrative sources of cultural identity they might opt to embrace. Do you claim the story of the Israelites following Moses through the wilderness as your own? Are the Cluniac monks your spiritual ancestors? Do you see the Boxer Rebels as your forebears? Political libertarianism leaves you free to identify with them, to celebrate what you judge to be their accomplishments, to treat them as central to your own heritage.

Creating Space for Identity

Indeed, it is important to emphasize that your ability to preserve and share a cultural identity you cherish would be greater in a politically libertarian society than it is in societies dominated by states. By taxing people, states claim resources their subjects could have used to preserve identity-constitutive places, objects, and traditions. But the state poses more serious problems for those who want to nourish particular cultural identities.

The state’s haphazard identity-preserving projects are funded in part by taxes paid by members of minority cultures who may have little interest in preserving the artefacts or life-ways on which the state focuses the resources it has acquired. In addition, even putatively liberal states frequently suppress or relocate cultural minorities; and state-owned media and schools can operate to erase regional dialects and other signs of sub-cultural distinctiveness. At the same time, because governments overseeing increasingly diverse societies frequently wish to treat all cultural groups inclusively, state-funded cultural projects tend often to be instances of characterless pabulum, with little or no capacity to contribute to the transmission of any particular cultural identity. Further, when the state claims the authority to safeguard a majority culture, it almost unavoidably also claims a hegemonic role as interpreter of that culture—often distorting or reconstructing it in perverse ways, or co-opting its values and symbols as sources of legitimation.

The existence of state-owned property and employment by state agencies creates endless opportunities for conflict over cultural matters in statist societies. Which religious symbols may be displayed on public land? Will officially led prayers be permitted in state schools? Which holidays will be officially recognized? Which culturally significant dress codes will teachers, soldiers, judges, or nurses be allowed to follow? Different interest-groups with the ability to influence the state can engage in repeated contests over such matters, each seeking to ensure that the state works to preserve particular identity markers. The end result is that cultural, religious, and ethnic communities come into conflict with each other, and that pressure to avoid any expression of distinctiveness increases.

The problem is only exacerbated when the state opts to use force not only to manage affairs on the property it claims for itself but also to constrain people’s freedom with respect to admittedly private property in the interests of preserving or suppressing particular cultural identities. The French government’s bans on the public wearing of the burqa and on the wearing of the hijab in state schools are obvious examples—they prevent people from using their own property in relation to their own bodies. So are efforts in New York and elsewhere in the United States to use the state’s claimed power to regulate land use to prevent the construction of religious structures. In statist societies, people’s peaceable attempts to express their identities and nourish their traditions can be opposed by actual or threatened state violence.

In a politically libertarian society, by contrast, members of varying cultural groups would obviously be free to spend their money as they chose. They would not be required to subsidize others’ cultural preferences. They could erect monuments and houses of worship, put iconic images on display, at their own discretion on their own property. They could invest in efforts designed to preserve objects and practices and memories they cherished. They could operate schools that transmitted their beliefs and habits.

Obviously, conflicts over the proper uses of places and things with multiple cultural meanings will not go away in a politically libertarian society. However, by removing these conflicts from the realm of politics, by assigning responsibility for the contested sites or objects to particular people or organizations in accordance with outcome-independent rules, a libertarian society can in some ways localize their intensity, reducing the likelihood of spill-over clashes, and render them more manageable.

Aggression and Culture

In a politically libertarian society, people would be free to retain cultural roots and collective identities—and unlikely to confront many of the conflicts over cultural issues that the state unavoidably creates. Such a society would thus not only be free from state-related tensions that often prompt the suppression of cultural particularity but also provide more room for cultural expression than a statist society. At the same time, however, it would not and could not make room for any and all practices designed, even in good faith, to preserve deeply valued cultural mores. For a society that genuinely embodied political libertarianism would be one in which a norm precluding aggression was rightly understood as a necessary prerequisite to social peace and to both individual and cultural flourishing.

In such a society, the claim that a given practice somehow supported the preservation of this or that group identity would obviously be insufficient to justify the practice if it involved aggressive attacks on persons or their justly claimed property. To take obvious examples, clitoridectomy, infibulation, and foot-binding could not be regarded simply as expressions of particular cultural preferences, to be treated with the same deference as habits of dress and efforts directed at the preservation of historically significant monuments. As instances of aggressive force, they would clearly fall beyond the pale in a politically libertarian society. (I prescind from those cases in which those who would otherwise clearly qualify as the victims of these aggressive acts indisputably render free and informed consent to them. Cultural libertarianism surely embodies a commitment to discouraging such consent and the beliefs and attitudes underlying it.) So, too, would the use of physical force to exclude people from trading relationships, prevent people of the purportedly wrong sort from living in particular neighborhoods, or keep people from destroying or altering their own property in ways likely to eliminate or distort objects of cultural significance.

Some kinds of collective identities might not survive if those who valued them could not use force to preserve them. To this, the advocate of a libertarian society will have no reasonable choice but to say: so be it. A politically libertarian society would leave room for many cultures and collective identities to flourish, but it would obviously not be equally welcoming to all. Only those which people were prepared to own without the threat of force would survive and thrive. Of course this would remove one means of preserving and transmitting collective identities. At the same time, however, it would ensure that those who shared those identities did so voluntarily and were thus more personally invested in them—and so more likely to preserve and transmit them—than might be the case in a society in which they were preserved by force.

The Limits of Libertarian Culture

While a politically libertarian society would nourish diverse collective identities, a society that was also culturally libertarian might be friendly to fewer such identities.

Individuality and Identity

Cultural libertarianism is fundamentally individualistic, so it might be thought that a fully libertarian culture would have no room for collective identities at all. But there is surely no reason to suppose this. For the sense in which libertarianism affirms individualism need not entail any deep-seated conflict with the affirmation of a densely textured cultural identity. It is quite possible to be an individualist who cherishes a sense of place, who treasures the contribution historical predecessors have made to his or her sense of self, who recognizes the importance—indeed, the inescapability—of learning about the world and one’s place in it from one’s traditions. Cultural libertarianism need involve no commitment to a Promethean view of autonomy, an existentialist vision of self-creation, or a naïvely foundationalist rejection of tradition. One can be a cultural libertarian without aspiring to be the deracinated individual of philosophical fantasy.

Cultural libertarianism is animated first and foremost by a desire, positively, to see the full range of human possibilities explored and put on display and, negatively, to avoid the suppression of dignity, freedom, creativity, and uniqueness that occurs when people are subjected to the whims of hierarchs, experts, blue-noses, busy-bodies, and paternalists. In short, cultural libertarians “don’t want to push other people around . . . and . . . don’t want to be pushed around themselves” (Murray N. Rothbard, letter to David Bergland, June 5, 1986, qtd. Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus 2000) 263-4). Seeking neither to push nor to be pushed is quite compatible with seeing oneself as part of a wider whole, with making sense of one’s own story in light of a more comprehensive narrative.

Rejecting Illiberal Identities

But if support for cultural libertarianism need not mean opposition to collective identity in principle, it is still certainly the case that it does mean rejection of particular sorts of collective identities. Cultural libertarianism will certainly prompt rejection, for instance, of racism and of multiple varieties of nationalism.

It is quite possible to be a peaceful racist—to avoid racially motivated violence against person or property while nourishing prejudice and fostering and engaging in unwarranted discrimination. One may quite non-aggressively develop and cling to a sense of oneself defined by identification with one group of people on the basis of their race and dismissal of others on the basis of theirs.

A narrowly political libertarianism may have nothing in particular to say about this sort of non-aggressive stance. But it seems likely to fall foul of a more broadly cultural libertarianism. Even if it is itself expressed non-violently, this kind of racism can prompt violence. Racialized distributions of wealth and social power are often rooted in past acts of violence—enslavement and dispossession are particularly clear instances. Racism features an implicit unwillingness to see people as particular, as individual, and a penchant for reducing them to sets of stereotypes. And the underlying sense of the moral equality of persons that grounds libertarianism’s rejection of statism is, at minimum, difficult to square with racial prejudice.

None of this means that the cultural libertarian will judge it appropriate to use force to punish the racist for thinking bad thoughts or to prevent anyone from catering non-aggressively to racist tastes. But the cultural libertarian will be quite aware that, without statist privilege to sustain it, racism in the context of economic life will prove to be prohibitively costly over time. In addition, the libertarian—here, the purely political libertarian will have no quarrel with the cultural libertarian—will favor remedies for past acts of injustice that may often serve to reduce the aggression-based power of the racist. The cultural libertarian will also strongly favor the use of non-violent forms of social pressure—shunning, public shaming, peaceful boycotts, and peaceful protests and strikes—to challenge the racist’s behavior.

Cultural libertarians will actively discourage racism. And, more fundamentally, the widespread adoption of libertarian cultural values would make it difficult for anyone to sustain a sense of self rooted in racial superiority or exclusivity.

There is no obvious incompatibility between embracing cultural libertarianism and identifying with a particular place—provided one simply values its treasures for their own sake, or prizes its contribution to making one who one is, rather judging other places to be objectively inferior. G. K. Chesterton and Bill Kauffman provide obvious and appealing models for an admirable localism. Conventional nationalism is another sort of creature altogether, however.

Nationalism characteristically involves loyalty, not to a revered place as such, but rather to the nation-state. The libertarian can hardly welcome a willingness to cheer for “my country, right or wrong,” not only because to support wrong-doing is to risk moral corruption but also because “my country” really means, not people and places dear to my heart, but rather the implacable apparatus of the state.

Nationalism too often finds expression in violence, especially militaristic violence—whether of an irredentist variety or in support of state expansion. Of course it need not. But the cultural libertarian will be wary of its capacity to underwrite aggression.

He or she will also look askance at nationalism’s frequent valorization of state boundaries, which often fail to track culture or geography meaningfully. There may be little connection between the actual people and places on which one’s loyalty focuses and the borders of one’s state. Similarly: sensitive to individuality and diversity, the cultural libertarian will also recognize that the geographic territory claimed by nation-states is characteristically home to people with varied cultural identities. Loyalty to the nation often seems to mean loyalty to the majority in a particular region, or perhaps to a minority that holds the reins of state power. As a variety of collectivism, nationalism too frequently seems to involve the erasure of the particularity of those who don’t identify with the majority’s culture—including members of minority cultures, people who identify with multiple cultures, and people in some sense within the majority culture who seek in one way or another to transform it.

The territory claimed by an enormous nation-state may arguably be not only too arbitrarily demarcated but also too extensive to provide a manageable focus for personal loyalty. A genuinely local perspective may often prove more compatible with human-scale attachments. This does not mean, of course, that one can or should ignore the role of others who are not local in shaping one’s identity and experience. The Loiner may recognize London as a world quite different from his or her own while still acknowledging that Trafalgar Square memorializes events without which life in Leeds might be very different indeed. But this need not provide an opportunity to smuggle nationalism in through the proverbial back door, for we can reasonably treasure our connections with geographically dispersed people and places—ones it would never occur to anyone to link with us under the same national umbrella—that have helped to make us who we are.

Preserving Identity in a Libertarian Culture

Whatever the fate of national and racial loyalties in a libertarian society, tensions surrounding families will doubtless be unavoidable. A society that tolerated aggression against children would hardly count as libertarian, but families unavoidably shape children in innumerable peaceful ways, and there will surely be those of culturally libertarian bent who will seek to challenge what they see as illiberal indoctrination of children by parents. In a politically libertarian society, not only individuals but also families and other groups in search of mutually reinforcing support for their distinctive worldviews and life-ways could obviously craft communities, territorial or virtual, in which their critical mass could allow them to counter the effects on each other of what they saw as objectionable elements of the wider culture. At the same time, it is easy to see that a society that created space for diversity would, indeed, render it difficult for any sub-cultural group to ensure wholesale identification with its traditions by all of its members.

Cultural libertarianism will tend to militate against a range of habits and practices that might be seen by some people as integral to their collective identities. Identities of some sorts—I have already instanced racism and many sorts of nationalism, but there are obviously others—will not be likely to survive in a libertarian culture. Others will persist, and perhaps even thrive, while being transformed by libertarian attitudes that undermine subordination and exclusion. And it would be unfair to deny that the loss of some cultural forms is a genuine loss, in the sense that it deprives people of patterns of existence and ways of understanding themselves and others that offer meaning and order to their lives. Those committed not only to political but also to cultural libertarianism will need to remind themselves and others that there are costs associated with the embrace of freedom.

But this is hardly reason to treat cultural libertarianism as underwriting cultural decline. To repeat: no more than political libertarianism does cultural libertarianism require or promote the abandonment of all sources of collective identity. Those that respect freedom and individual particularity can thrive in a libertarian culture. To be sure, the very capacity of some life-ways to fostering meaningfulness and order may be seen as depending on their immunity to criticism and their appearance of inevitability, and they will lack both in a culture of liberty. But an awareness of possibilities for improvement and a denial of uncritical regard to previously established cultural authorities can be quite compatible with continued esteem for and identification with traditions and communities and ways of life that offer people meaning and identity.

Libertarianism and Identity

A politically libertarian society will create space for many different kinds of identity-maintaining ways of being human—more, in general, than a society in which aggression is legitimized. Only those collective identities maintained through the use of force will be excluded from such a society, and we will be, I believe, well rid of them. A society that is not only politically but also culturally libertarian will likely be free of such sources of identity as racism and nationalism. But this kind of society can still welcome local loyalty, and any number of other identity-conferring relationships compatible with regard for individual dignity and freedom and the diverse forms of human flourishing.

I submitted a version of this essay to the 2010 Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize essay competition. Stephen R. L. Clark and Kevin Carson both provided insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Two Cheers for Conspiracy Theories

2010-09-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

I don’t have much of a dog in this race. But I confess that I’m put off by blanket attempts to distance anti-authoritarian politics from “conspiracy theories.”

In practical terms, whatever the literal meaning of the words, a conspiracy theory is an account of an event that differs significantly from the account of the event endorsed by the mainstream media and the political establishment—characteristically in a way that can be seen as injurious to the establishment’s interests, and often involving the attribution of responsibility for mischief to the establishment or its agents.

If those C. Wright Mills called “the power elite” are essentially thugs and bandits—as a sensible class analysis suggests that they are—then there is surely good reason to expect them to engage in theft and violence. If political leaders are selected for their ambition—and so their willingness to put principle to one side—and their inclination to serve the interests of the power elite, there is surely good reason to expect them, too, to engage in theft and violence. Thus, there’s an argument to be made that a story suggesting that members of the power elite or their retainers in the political class are up to no good is more likely to be true than a similar story about an ordinary member of the population.

Similarly, if the members of “the power elite” play a significant role in shaping both state policy and the stances of media companies, there is good reason to assume that the stories injurious to the interests of the power elite are less likely to receive support from the mainstream media and government officials than stories beneficial to their interests. So it is sensible to expect that true stories of misdeeds by the power elite will not be endorsed or publicized by the mainstream media.

That the members of the power elite and the political class are more likely than ordinary people to be involved in plunder and murder and that the mainstream media are unlikely to give much attention to stories of their involvement in such activities does not, of course, show that any particular story about elite misconduct that is ridiculed in the mainstream media is correct—each such story should be gauged on its own merits. However, it does provide good reason to suspect that some conspiracy theories might be correct and to refuse to dismiss such theories simply because they are treated as silly by the mainstream media.

Class Struggle, Conservative Style

2010-09-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Codevilla, Anthony. The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do about It. New York: Beaufort 2010. Pp. xxvi, 150. Index. 978-0825305580. $12.99. Paper.

I

Class is a libertarian issue.

When today’s believers in free markets hear someone mention “class struggle,” they may be tempted to think of Karl Marx. The rhetoric of class conflict has been largely Marxist during the past century. But students of libertarian history know that classical liberals Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer pioneered class analysis before Marx (he gave them credit for doing so). Class was a central feature of the work of such libertarian stalwarts as Franz Oppenheimer, Albert Jay Nock, and Frank Chodorov. Class theory formed the heart of libertarian and one-time SDS leader Carl Oglesby’s neglected classic, The Yankee and Cowboy War. An article on class theory was featured in the very first issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. And class analysis has continued to be an aspect of the work of such otherwise very different libertarian scholars as Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Roderick T. Long.

A simple way of getting at the difference between Marxist and libertarian versions of class analysis is this: for orthodox Marxist class theory, the problem is private property; for libertarian class theory, the problem is aggression.

Orthodox Marxism has tended to see class stratification as rooted in the institution of private property. Random differences in circumstances and endowments will lead to disparities in property. The existence of property rights will enable the wealthy to consolidate their holdings, transmit their property inter-generationally, and create an entrenched ruling class, which dominates political and economic life. Thus, the only way—according to orthodox Marxists—to deal with problem of poverty and oppression that results from class stratification is to dispossess the wealthy of the capital goods they’ve been able to acquire because of the property system and to eliminate the institution of private property in capital goods entirely.

Libertarian class theory, by contrast, sees the institution of private property as a bulwark of freedom, as long as it protects property that has been justly acquired—acquired by what Oppenheimer famously termed the economic means: characteristically, by homesteading unowned land or physical objects or receiving property through voluntary transfer from others. However, libertarian class theory maintains, from the very beginning of organized human society, some people have preferred to use force (or fraud) to obtain property—to employ the political means of obtaining wealth. For their mutual protection, and to make extracting wealth from others easier, some of the thugs engaged in the use of the political means created governments; a combination of propaganda, memory loss, and the tendency to treat existing arrangements as beyond question covered these governments with a patina of legitimacy.

Not all the thugs occupied government positions themselves, of course. Many simply welcomed the protection the government provided for their ill-gotten gains and concentrated on making more wealth. Without directly participating in politics, they improved their economic positions by ensuring that their existing property holdings were treated as legitimate, by stealing land and other resources (in partnership with the government or with its blessing), and by extracting privileges from the government—often lubricating its machinery with their wealth—that enabled them to increase their possessions. Others joined them as beneficiaries of state privilege. Some people who might have become wealthy initially through voluntary exchange could also use their wealth to secure privileges from the state. And some people who acquired governmental power because of their skills at electioneering or bureaucratic infighting used their positions not only to do the bidding of the wealthy but also to gain wealth and enter the economic elite themselves.

For libertarian class theory, the ruling class comprises those people who control the state and those whose wealth and social influence depend primarily on state-secured privilege (who are generally, in turn, either members of the first group or behind-the-scenes manipulators of those in the first group). Following C. Wright Mills, we can refer to those at the top of the twin political and financial pyramids as “the power elite.”

For libertarians, as Jeremy Weiland has put it, “the free market [would] eat the rich”: in a market genuinely liberated from politically secured privilege—including patents and copyrights, tariffs, land engrossment by the state, and state control of the money supply—it would be much harder for people to sediment great wealth and even harder for them to keep it. Competitive pressure would make it difficult for people to hang on to great fortunes. Contra the Marxists, the free market is the enemy, not the friend, of economic and social stratification. The rigged markets that obtain in today’s corporatist economies, by contrast, do indeed help those who already have wealth and power to retain it.

The libertarian enthusiasm for revisionist history—championed especially by Murray Rothbard—is inexplicable without an understanding of the centrality of class analysis to libertarian thought. Libertarian revisionism emphasizes that civics textbook explanations of economic-cum-political events, which take politicians’ high-flown rhetoric about philosophical ideals and military necessities at face value, frequently mask the self-interested pursuit of power by economic elites. The revisionist approach possesses more explanatory power if, as libertarian class theory holds, there really are distinguishable common interests and socio-cultural characteristics that link influential people and both encourage and enable them to manipulate the political process to their benefit.

II

Given the importance of non-Marxist class analysis for libertarians, it might seem like good news that Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla has made a contribution to the genre. In The Ruling Class, Codevilla argues that America has a ruling class—consisting of the people who “hold[] the commanding heights of government” (xv), those, “whether in government power directly or as officers in companies,” whose “careers and fortunes depend on government” (11). The Ruling Class is made up of “relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans” (7). That third of Americans is, roughly speaking, socio-culturally liberal and, at the same time (and not coincidentally from Codevilla’s point of view) enthusiastic about expert management. While Democrats tend to support the Ruling Class, “[t]he Republican Party” hasn’t “disparage[d] the Ruling Class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it” (5).

The interests and concerns of the Ruling Class, Codevilla maintains, are sharply at odds with those of the rest of us. Well, about two-thirds of the rest of us—socially conservative people Codevilla calls “the Country Class” or the “Country Party.” The Country Party’s defining characteristics are its conservative attitudes regarding “marriage, children, and religious practice.” It favors civil society over the state as a means of solving problems, and prefers home schools to government schools. Politically, it “can be defined in terms of its lack of connection with government, and above all by attitudes opposite to those of the ruling class” (53). (Since the Ruling Class is said to valorize science, it is perhaps not surprising that Darwin is blamed for promoting elitism [16-7] and belief in evolution is identified as a sign of being “bitter about America” [19].)

The Country Class believes in human equality (57). And we can see what Codevilla’s getting at when he says this as a version of what Roderick Long has labeled equality of authority: no one is by nature anyone else’s boss; and attempts by experts paternalistically to manage others’ lives are rightly causes of anger. Thus, Codevilla opposes top-down planning, and notes that the Country Class “views the way people live their lives as the result of countless private choices rather than as the consequence of someone else’s master plan.” But he simultaneously assures the reader that “[t]he Country Class is not anti-government, just non-governmental” (53). Apparently members of the Country Class can be “government officials or officers of major corporations whose decisions will have far-reaching effects” (54). It is unclear how to square this possibility with the claim that the Ruling Class consists of everyone associated with the state, as all government officials and most officers of most major corporations certainly are.

“The Country Class,” Codevilla asserts, “thinks that individuals, and in special circumstances local elected officials—not federal or state bureaucrats—have the right to decide what kind of light bulbs a home should have, how much water should flow from a shower nozzle, what kind of toilet you should install” (56). (One might think local elected officials were officious meddlers just like federal or state politicians and bureaucrats. Perhaps they know more about local conditions. But this on its own doesn’t give them any more justified authority over other people’s lives.)

On its face, Codevilla’s proposed division sounds very much like that of standard libertarian class analysis—especially when he argues against corporate bailouts (1-2), notes the ruling class’s penchant for non-defensive, imperial warfare (23), assails “crony capitalism” (xx, 30-1), complains about the elite’s penchant for “picking [economic] winners and losers” (33), notes that the ruling class is bipartisan (3), fingers organized medicine as a politically privileged group (39), and objects to rule by paternalistic, managerial experts. When he writes that “[t]he Country Class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever” (55), populists and left-libertarians alike can be expected to cheer.

Codevilla argues that the ruling class’s power continues to grow as people are encouraged to accept the authority of culturally sanctified experts. And his brief against managerialist paternalism will ring true not only to libertarians but to decentralists across the political spectrum: we don’t need experts to run our lives, and trust in professionals, combined with a dismissive attitude toward ordinary people’s capacity for good judgment, can easily be seen as laying the groundwork for friendly fascism.

III

But the fact that Rush Limbaugh is credited as the author of the book’s preface will alert even the not-too-careful reader that this is not a libertarian book. The problem is that Codevilla often seems to lose sight of the difference between cultural and political-economic divisions.

For instance, the Country Class as intensely patriotic (59), despite the ease with which patriotism can be associated with just the sort of abuse of power against which members of the Country Class are supposed to—somewhat inconsistently—protest. Codevilla also seems to miss the degree to which the state is thoroughly involved in supporting the preferences of the Country Class. Contrasting the preferences of the Ruling Class and the Country Party, Codevilla maintains that, “left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs” (33). Similarly—also, presumably, when left to themselves—“Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat and other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it” (34). He seems blissfully unaware here of the impact of land-use policy, tax policy, and road construction policy on people’s living, driving, eating, and health-care consumption patterns.

The pro-family agenda he attributes to members of the Country Class challenges “emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children’s education” (72). Codevilla articulates a disconnected set of attitudes that link the members of his Country Party: opposition to “higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc.” (52). It might be thought that opposition to abortion could be implemented legally only through “expanding government” and that involving the government in reducing or eliminating abortion was precisely a matter of “subsidizing political favorites”—of enabling some people to see their preferences implemented without having to pay the full cost of doing so. Obviously, this will not be the case if one judges that abortion is murder; but Codevilla certainly offers no argument for thinking this, or even much in the way of an elaboration of the details of a worldview within which it would make sense.

Codevilla is frustrated by the evacuation of religion from the public square, and he suggests that members of the Country Class are as well. Obviously, again, it’s hard to see how this has much to do with the desire not to be bossed around that clearly animates members of the country Class. But set that to one side for a moment: I fear sometimes that people who say things like this are simply tone-deaf to the ways in which members of religious minorities—adherents of religious traditions other than Christianity, moderate and liberal Christians, and non-religious people—experience the deployment of Christian symbols and language in the public sphere. The problem is not that people should be silenced when they want to give voice to their religious identities. The problem, instead, is that the state must either be neutral in ways that many people will find exclusionary, or else it must take stands that others will find exclusionary. There is no problem with religion in the public square if that means on the editorial pages of newspapers, on movie screens, in vigorous conversations between neighbors. The problem arises, instead, because when people say they want religion in the public square, what they often really mean is that they want religious convictions and communities to shape the policies of the state—or at least to have the opportunity to do so. If the state were a purely voluntary association which its members were free to abandon, there would be no problem with the presence of religion in its decision making. But the state is not voluntary: it is coercive. It claims territory and then demands that anyone in that territory submit to its demands and fund its activities. For this kind of organization to be shaped by religious principles is to open the door to religious tyranny. The only real solution to the problem of religion in public life is to ensure that all public life is state-free, organized on the basis of fully voluntary cooperation.

Codevilla bizarrely denies Ronald Reagan, an immensely successful and powerful politician with intimate connections with the wealthy and powerful, membership in the Ruling Class (75). Why? Because Codevilla asserts, without evidence, that Reagan shared the agenda of the Country Class. Since he did not in fact do much of anything to reduce state management of people’s lives, since he actually grew the federal government substantially, it seems far simpler to maintain either that Reagan deliberately deceived the members of the Country Class or that he shared their views but didn’t care much about them. To blame Ruling Class advisors for Reagan’s failure to adhere to Country Class values is as naïve as blaming establishmentarians a generation younger for keeping Barack Obama from ending war, torture, domestic surveillance, and corporate bailouts. In each case, it’s hard not to be reminded of the Russian serfs who really believed that, if the tsar actually understood what they were undergoing, he would be only too happy to liberate them—why, oh, why, they wondered, did his corrupt and wicked courtiers keep him from knowing the truth.

IV

In the course of distinguishing the Ruling Class from the Country Class, Codevilla dismisses official apologies for such clusters of events as the use of nuclear weapons against noncombatants in World War II, the slave trade, and the institution of slavery (which he trivializes by writing: “some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter” [25]) as apologies offered by elites on behalf of their inferiors, from whom they implicitly distance themselves in the act of apologizing.

The temptation to self-righteous condemnation of others is real and persistent. And if Codevilla had simply observed that no one has the right to apologize on behalf of anyone else, his argument would carry more weight. Of course, to acknowledge that would be to acknowledge that the United States as a going concern is a fiction, that people are responsible for their own actions, and that an entity that claims to act on behalf of others without their express consent lacks legitimacy. That hardly seems like the sort of argument he wants to defend, however.

V

The basic problem with Codevilla’s characterization of the Country Class’s putative agenda and identity is that the various elements don’t fit well with each other. Commitments to equality of authority, appreciation for civil society, and opposition to managerialism can be shared by a wide range of people, many of whom may value abortion rights, find marriage uninteresting, and loathe Christian radio. It is easy to see why someone who shared Codevilla’s family agenda would object to progressive managerialism; but there is no particular reason why someone who opposed progressive managerialism should be inclined to share Codevilla’s family agenda. There is not much, really, that links the Country Class’s social conservatism with its opposition to managerialist authority, unless opposition to managerialism is defined as an aspect of social conservatism. But the question would still be: what connects the various aspects of social conservatism thus defined?

I think this is because Codevilla’s work calls attention to two distinct problems, which he does not always clearly distinguish: the role of expert authority in our society and the role of the power elite in our society. It stands to reason that the power elite will employ experts to do its bidding. And experts may attempt self-aggrandizingly to increase their own social power. But it is crucial to distinguish between the managerial class and the ruling class.

He seems to maintain, with a straight face, that identity—embracing the values of educated, socio-cultural liberals—has more to do with membership in, and the agenda of, the ruling class than political and economic power. And this seems simply wrongheaded. The mistake is in supposing that what matters most about the Ruling Class is its members’ cultural identity or that its members’ primary goal is to force cultural change on the members of the Country Party. People often enjoy remaking others in their own images; but the principal objectives of America’s rulers seem to be much more prosaic than Codevilla’s narrative of culture war might seem to suggest: they want money and power, at home and abroad, with privileges for favored corporations, the various organs of the national security state to keep order domestically, and a global military presence to ensure access to resources and compliant cooperation with corporate interests around the world.

It may be—I offer no opinion on the matter—that a third of Americans (Codevilla’s figure) embrace generally liberal, cosmopolitan cultural values and that two-thirds are, in some important respects, more traditional in orientation. It may also be the case that many members of the power elite tend to be culturally liberal. But it obviously doesn’t follow that members of the power elite are unwilling to implement the culturally conservative preferences of “the Country Class” (they certainly seem to be when it’s politically beneficial to do so) or that no members of the power elite are culturally conservative.

Codevilla might be read as implying that statist leftists interested in the environment, for instance, were part of the ruling class; it would be more reflective of his argumentative approach, and far more consistent with a libertarian class analysis, to see environmentalists and advocates of human rights, say, as manipulated sources of rhetorical cover for corporatist politicians on the Democratic side of the political aisle, just as sincere proponents of free markets are consistently co-opted by Republicans. While there are surely exceptions, it is safe to assume that very, very little in the way of legislation or policy that doesn’t serve the interests of one segment or more of the power elite is ever adopted or implemented. In general and over the long-term, the rules aren’t made over the objections of politicians; and, in general, and over the long-term, politicians either are, or serve the interests of, members of the power elite. And it’s the economic and political manipulation engaged in by the power elite—think vast industry bailouts, subsidies disguised as consumer protection regulations, imperial warfare, the growth of the national security state, the legitimation of torture—that really ought to be troubling to coastals and heartlanders, the socio-culturally conservative and the socio-culturally liberal alike.

A similar problem with Codevilla’s narrative is that it seems to imply that government served the interests of ordinary people at some point before the rise of Progressive-era managerialism. While the power of the state over ordinary people’s lives was certainly less in 1800 than it is in 2010, and while politicians doubtless didn’t have quite the same sense of themselves as capable of managing the minute details of other people’s affairs, politicians didn’t serve the people. The Puritan strand of American intellectual and cultural life—which ultimately helped to birth Progressivism—was certainly far from inert. And politicians served the interests of the economic elite—as its lackeys or as its members—quite as much in earlier eras of American history as they do now, given the tools the political system made available to them.

Libertarians don’t share Marxism’s view that market freedom is responsible for society-wide injustice. Indeed, for libertarians, the restrictions on market freedom imposed by ruling-class privileges are focal instances of injustice. But libertarians do share with Marxists the recognition that the ruling class sits atop the state, enriching its members at gun-point—at the expense of everyone else. For libertarian class theory, the division between those who deploy or reap massive profits from aggressive force on the one hand and those who are the victims of that force on the other is the division that matters. Codevilla and those who read The Ruling Class appreciatively should focus on that division, at which he gestures, rather than the cultural rift with which he seems sometimes to confuse it. Despite the superficial appeal of Codevilla’s analysis, libertarians, at any rate, have no reason to let themselves be drafted as conservative foot-soldiers in the culture war.

VI

It is interesting to note that there are few, if any, arguments for the inferiority of the political, religious, and cultural positions Codevilla attributes to the Ruling Class. He seethes with resentment at many of these positions but he rarely tries to refute them; he simply assumes that Country Party readers will share his revulsion at the Ruling Class’s misbehavior. Perhaps the fifty-one pages of this 176-page book devoted to the texts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are designed to provide the rationales for his positions. If so, he does not explain how.

While he does not talk philosophy, however, he does talk strategy. The Republican Party is hopeless as a vehicle for Country Class aspirations, Codevilla acknowledges. The Democratic Party is the party of the Ruling Class. So the Country Party needs a political movement of its own. But such a movement, even if successful in ousting the Ruling Class, would face severe challenges. Most importantly: how would it avoid becoming entrenched and oppressive? As long as the penchant for entrenched power is explained simply as a product of progressive managerialism, then it might seem as if people with the right cultural values could simply turn the machinery of state around. We find much the same attitude expressed by leftists frustrated by elite dominance of the Democratic Party.

But if the problem is the state itself, there’s a more serious challenge to confront. If the people who run the state are almost unavoidably going to be members of the power elite, if the power elite can exert pressure on the state that others cannot, if the average public official is going to be more ambitious and thus less principled than the average person, then it seems as if a simple replacement of personnel won’t do the trick. A major cultural shift wouldn’t be sufficient to do so, either. Thus, we return to the basic solution to Codevilla’s problem, the one he keeps ignoring: if you want to get rid of the ruling class, you’ve got to get rid of the state. You’re got to strike the root.

Codevilla calls for cutting the size of government drastically. But he picks on such typical conservative whipping boys as the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts. A stateless society would not tax people to pay for the activities of entities like these, of course; but the impact not only on the public purse but also on people’s freedom and safety would be far, far greater if there were dramatic cuts in the government’s military budget. If foreign bases were closed, if the military were limited to defensive action within some reasonable range beyond US borders and its resources aligned accordingly, or if a standing army were eliminated entirely in favor of the kind of militia envisioned by the Founders, the consequences would be far more revolutionary than anything Codevilla explicitly mentions.

Codevilla seems repeatedly to step close to the brink and then step back. So, for instance, he writes: “to subject the modern administrative state’s administrative agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters” (84). But it is the administrative state itself that it is a crucial aspect of the problem of disempowerment that so troubles Codevilla and the members of the Country Class. Why not eliminate the various administrative and regulatory agencies entirely, rather than asking how they might be managed differently?

Though Codevilla stresses the Country Class’s purported commitment to equality of authority (even if he doesn’t use the phrase), he does not, I think, take the implications of this kind of equality seriously enough. If he did, he would deny the authority of the local government officials as much as that of the federal and state-level ones. He would realize that the political conflicts over family and religion will prove interminable as long as there is a state apparatus for influence on which groups with different cultural agendas can contend. He would see that the real problems with the evisceration of civil society and the elimination of personal freedom can’t be solved unless the state itself is defanged.

Cultural politics serve to distract people from the fact that Mills’s Power Elite is, as Codevilla suggests, engaging in plunder on a grand scale. The managerial technocrats who do the bidding of the Ruling Class may come disproportionately from a particular cultural sub-group (though Codevilla offers no real evidence that they do). But it is the Ruling Class itself that is the problem. And Codevilla’s wrestling in his final chapter with the question of the nature of the political institutions needed to prevent the resurgence of the Ruling Class highlights the reality he seems unwilling to acknowledge: that Ruling Class plunder will persist as long as there is a state for the Ruling Class to control. The only way to eliminate the power of the Ruling Class is to eliminate the state.

A much shorter version of this review will appear in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty.

Why Are So Many Market-Oriented Left-Libertarians Anarchists?

2010-07-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

Of the thinkers and writers commonly identified today as market-oriented left-libertarians (that is, leftists—opposed to workplace hierarchies, cultural authoritarianism, arbitrary exclusion on the basis of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and aggressive war—who are also market-oriented libertarians—opposed to aggression against people’s bodies and justly acquired possessions), almost all are anarchists; Chris Matthew Sciabarra is perhaps the only relatively visible one who’s not. The question is: how contingent is this connection?

It is possible, for instance, that many left-libertarians have been influenced by Murray Rothbard, and that they affirm both anarchism for something like Rothbard’s reasons for doing so and left-libertarianism on the view that it’s a logical extension of Rothbard’s views.

But this explanation wouldn’t cover those whose links with Rothbard are, like mine, pretty tenuous. And it would really just push the fundamental question back a step, in any case, since we’d still have to ask why the relevant views could be found in Rothbard’s own work.

Obviously, the answer will depend in part on just what one thinks might make a position leftist; I suggest that one intuitively appealing answer might be that a position is leftist if it opposes subordination, exclusion, deprivation, and war. I think there are at least four reasons why a version of libertarianism that is leftist in this sense would likely be anarchist as well.

The most important is the central role of libertarian class theory in left-libertarian thought. Since libertarian class theory tends to focus on the creation of the state through conquest and the dominance of the state apparatus by those who employ it to exploit, there really is a deep-seated connection between left-libertarianism and a suspicious view of the state that certainly might tend to dispose someone toward anarchism. Subordination and deprivation, on a typical left-libertarian analysis, are rooted in privileges secured by the state; exclusion is characteristically reinforced by such privileges; and wars are characteristically fought to create or extend such privileges and, in general, to advance the interests of the power elite who are the principal beneficiaries of these privileges. Opposing these privileges means opposing what the state is doing at present; but it also means opposing the characteristic tendency of state action for millennia. It would seem, at minimum, enormously difficult to cabin the options available to state actors in ways that would prevent them from seeking and conferring the privileges left-libertarians oppose. Thus, the simplest way to eliminate these privileges is to eliminate the state apparatus that has persistently secured them.

A further relevant fact is that leftism of the kind I’ve sketched above is radically decentralist, in favor of grassroots institutions and opposed to top-down control. The influence of the New Left is obvious. This sort of leftism naturally militates against centralized political authority—and thus, ultimately against political authority of any sort. (My sense is that when they talked about “neighborhood power” and similar ideas, New Leftists were talking first of all about reconceiving the state—as Bill Kauffman says, you can have your home town, or you can have the empire, but you can’t have both—though of course decentralizing worklife, creating “human-scale” workplaces, has also mattered enormously to both New Leftists and left-libertarians influenced by them.)

Roderick Long has, I think rightly, emphasized the centrality to his way of thinking of the idea of equality of authority—the idea that no one has any inherent or natural right to govern anyone else. This idea is simultaneously a source of support for anarchism—since it undermines the claims of state actors to rights others lack—and a source of support for (what an ugly word) leftism—since, as Charles Johnson observes, it would be possible but weird to support equality of authority while being concerned about subordination, exclusion, and deprivation only when they they result from aggressive violence while regarding it as unworthy of attention when people are pushed around nonviolently. Presuming most left-libertarians aren’t unduly given to weirdness, their commitment to equality of authority ought to be linked with a commitment to anarchism.

The basic libertarian opposition to war is also a factor. To the extent that one is opposed to state-made war (and to most violence more generally), especially if on moral rather than merely prudential grounds, it’s easy to see unavoidable state self-aggrandizement as the culprit, and so to see anarchism as a remedy for war. At the same time, obviously, while there have been lots of principled opponents of war who have been in some sense conservatives, the opposition to imperial ambition and concern for the vulnerable that mark opposition to war are often thought of as leftist positions, and a contemporary position that wasn’t pretty strongly anti-war would be hard for me to recognize as authentically leftist. Given the centrality of war-making to what the state does (and, indeed, its centrality to quasi-Hobbesian justifications for the state), it’s easy to see why opposition to war could provide considerable support for opposition to the state, since it is difficult to see how violence could be nearly as destructive absent the state’s ability to tax, conscript, misdirect research funding, and create fiat money to facilitate its war efforts.

Are other factors relevant? If so, which?

Does Using Force Convert a Legal Regime in a Stateless Society into a State?

2010-06-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

I. Introduction

Apart from the rare exception—someone in the mold of Robert LeFevre or Leo Tolstoy—most anarchists are not pacifists. They suppose, that is, that there are occasions when it might be appropriate to use force—most commonly, to protect oneself or someone else against unjust attack or to secure compensation for such an attack. While the anarchist seeks to realize an ideal of peaceful, voluntary cooperation, she is likely to be very much aware that it may sometimes be necessary to call the people with guns. Force may sometimes be employed to settle disputes over just control over possessions—what I will call property rights without attempt to settle the question of just when someone might be thought justly to control a given possession. However, forcibly defending property rights in a stateless society is not the moral equivalent of state aggression.

In Part II, I briefly describe different sources of legal rules that might obtain in a stateless society and note the kinds of conflicts that might arise in such a society. In Part III, I explain why I believe the forcible resolution of conflicts between participants in the same regime would not qualify as state-like aggression and offer reasons for thinking that the same would be true of the forcible resolution of conflicts between participants in different regimes that upheld the same property rules or that were parties to agreements governing conflicts involving divergent legal norms. In Part IV, I consider two problems posed by the way I’ve framed my claim that legal regimes forcibly protecting participants’ property rights need not be viewed as state-like: the fact that the interdefinability of consent and aggression requires a pre-legal definition of property rights, and the fact that, if such a definition is available, affirming it might seem to be inconsistent with embracing the notion of polycentric law. In Part V, I argue that a regime’s use of force against an outlaw need not be state-like any more than its use of force against a participant in another regime. I conclude in Part VI.

II. Rules and Conflicts

We can imagine that legal rules in a stateless society might be generated by at least three different kinds of institutions (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to these sorts of institutions collectively as legal regimes and those who voluntarily agree to accept the legal rules they establish and maintain as participants):

the territorialized consensus-based legal regime, in which most people in a given geographic area accept a given set of legal norms. The regime might often be maintained by mutualized institutions formerly part of a state apparatus. The difference between this sort of regime and a state would be that no one in the relevant geographic area would be treated as having accepted the regime’s authority without her actual consent.
the deterritorialized contractual legal regime, in which people who might not occupy geographically contiguous territory opted for the dispute resolution services of the same cooperative, for-profit, volunteer-based, or not-for-profit dispute resolution agency.
the deterritorialized communal legal regime, in which people who might not occupy geographically contiguous territory opted for the dispute resolution services of a religious or cultural community to which they belonged for reasons independent of its provision of dispute resolution services.

A property-related conflict (PRC) in a stateless society could occur, in theory, between

two participants in the same legal regime;
two participants in different legal regimes;
a participant in a legal regime an someone not affiliated with any regime (without assuming anything about whether such a person engages in violent behavior, we can refer to her conveniently as an outlaw).

III. Regulated Conflicts

Conflicts between participants in the same regime, and between participants in different regimes with appropriate rules or agreements or both, would be consensual. Using force to secure compliance with a regime’s rules in order to end such conflicts need not be state-like.

A. Conflicts between Participants in the Same Regime

When a PRC occurs between two participants in the same legal regime, it is clear that, given that the legal regime is genuinely consensual, featuring full exit rights, the participants will either have agreed directly to the rules governing their conflict or have agreed to standards governing procedures for the determination of such rules in the awareness that such rules would, in fact, be determined. In either case, they will have voluntarily accepted the jurisdiction of the relevant legal regime—and, in the prior case, to the specific applicable norms. Using force to compel them to accept it is clearly not on all fours with using force to impose state dictates on people who have not actually consented to them.

B. Cross-Regime Conflicts

Different legal regimes may feature the same norms relevant to a particular conflict, or different ones. When a PRC occurs between participants in different consensual legal regimes with the same relevant norms, the participants will have voluntarily consented to the norms or to procedures used to generate them. Thus, again, using force to ensure their cooperation will be justified given their prior consent to the applicable norms.

If different regimes feature different norms applicable to a particular kind of PRC, then it will obviously be in the best interests of each regime to establish guidelines—choice-of-law and conflict-of-law rules, primarily—for resolving cross-regime disagreements about the resolution of disputes of this kind (typically, though not necessarily, embodied in agreements with the relevant competitor regimes). If a given regime is fully consensual, then a participant in that regime will have accepted these second-order norm directly or will, again, have consented in one way or another to procedures for their determination. A participant in a legal regime will thus have consented to the employment by the regime of such second-order norms to reach a conclusion regarding the substantive principles to be applied in resolving a dispute and then to use force, if need be, to resolve the dispute. So, again, the use of force here will be legitimate.

IV. Aggression, Consent, and Polycentricity

There are two further related problems here, however. Someone might object that talk about free consent only makes sense given a definition of aggression, but that aggression can only be defined by a legal regime, so that no one could be said to consent to a legal regime. I argue in Section A that a pre-legal account of property rights is at least to some extent possible, so that the objection is unsuccessful. An objector might also hold that relatively stable, uniform property norms would be incompatible with the existence of a truly polycentric legal order. In Section B, I explain why it is possible to support polycentricity and endorse the existence of pre-legal norms.

A. Defining Consent and Aggression Pre-Legally

The first concerns the nature of consent to the jurisdiction of a given regime. We can imagine such consent taking the form of joining a particular religious community (in principle, I suppose, someone might opt to have legal disputes resolved by a religious community to which she didn’t belong, but it seems more likely that people will opt for full-scale involvement in a community and then take advantage of its legal system as an incident of membership), contracting with a for-profit dispute resolution agency, or joining a cooperative. The problem is that whether someone’s decision to consent to a regime’s jurisdiction was voluntary depends on how her rights were defined prior to membership. For I understand a voluntary act as one in which I am not compelled to engage by aggressive force (that is, force not intended to defend against unjust attack or secure compensation for such an attack) or the threat of aggressive force. But what counts as aggression is obviously dependent on what rights someone is judged to have. Thus, for the notion of free consent to have any meaningful content, it must be possible to specify a core of relevant rights that obtain independently of the determinations of any legal regime.

However, the notion of a polycentric legal order presupposes the existence of multiple legal regimes, specifying different legally recognized rights. It might seem as if the reasonableness of a polycentric legal order implied that all rights were legal rights, dependent on the existence and operation of some legal regime or other. If this is so, then there would be no pre-legal rights. And so, in turn, there would be no way of specifying content for the notion of voluntary consent to a legal regime. And this would suggest that the notion of a consensual legal order, fundamental to the concept of a stateless society, was unsustainable and perhaps incoherent.

We can imagine at least four possible moral conclusions regarding the status of property rights, in particular: (i) there is one just set of property rights; (ii) there are several just sets of property rights; (iii) there are no just property rights, because it is wrong for anyone to claim to control any part of the material world; (iv) there are no just property rights because there are no true moral claims at all; or (v) there are no just property rights because, for one reason or another, while there are true moral claims about other matters, there are no true moral claims about our relationships with items in the material world apart from the determination of an organized legal system (I ignore the possibility that pre-legal social consensus might play the same role, because this option can be handled under [ii], above).

If (i) is correct, then there will, indeed, be an unequivocal baseline against which it will be possible to measure the freedom of consent. An act will be free just insofar as someone is not compelled to engage in it by aggression or the threat of aggression against that person’s rights, including her property rights.

If (ii) is correct, then there will not be a single set of property rights that can serve as a baseline against which it will be possible to measure the freedom of consent. However, there will be, ex hypthesi, moral constraints on what a just set of property rights can be like. So while (on this view) different social or legal norms might define property rights in different ways, the choice among just norms would not be unlimited (and might, in fact, be fairly narrow): there are some norms such that acting as if they were in place would be wrong; acting in relation to someone’s possessions in a way that was not consistent with any reasonable property norm would be morally wrong and would certainly count as aggression against that person. So, again, if (ii) were correct, the notion of aggression would have determinate content.

Of course, if (iii) were correct, this would indeed establish a moral equivalence between actions with respect to property claims in a stateless society and actions with respect to property claims by a state. But it would do so at the cost of rendering orderly, purposeful action in the world impossible. No reasonable person would endorse (iii).

It is certainly possible that (iv) might be correct (though the very notion of correctness here is, of course, a normative one, and it would be difficult to affirm the validity of an epistemic norm while accepting the sorts of arguments likely to lead to skepticism about moral norms). Accepting (iv) as true would mean denying any moral difference between self-defense and state coercion. But it would also deny anyone who accepted it any basis for engaging in intelligible moral criticism of the anarchist or of anyone else. In any event, generalized moral skepticism cannot simply be asserted; it has to be defended in one way or another. Until it is, we need not be overly troubled by it; and if its validity ultimately is established there will be more serious problems to resolve than the best way to talk about possessions in a stateless society.

If (v) were correct, so that there were no moral constraints on property rules in the absence of a legal system, if a legal regime could create just any property rules, then there would, indeed, be no way to specify a contentful notion of aggression that could provide the basis for the justified claim that someone had consented freely to the regime’s jurisdiction. But I cannot see why anyone would suppose that this was true. A vast array of approaches to moral reasoning have fairly obvious implications for the moral status of possessions. The notion that there were lots of true moral claims but that none of them constrained how someone could appropriately treat someone else’s possessions is just barely conceivable. It would, however, be bizarre to suppose that an approach to morality developed, in whatever fashion, for the benefit of embodied persons in a world remotely like ours would lack implications regarding the just treatment of their possessions. I believe we can safely proceed on the assumption that no such approach to morality would be credible absent substantial counter-arguments.

B. Right Answers and Polycentricity

It is perfectly possible to affirm that some property systems are just and some are not while still supporting the existence of a polycentric legal order featuring multiple property rules.

It is reasonable to assume that there are constraints on when something can be justly possessed and how others may justly treat someone’s just possessions sufficient to give the notion of aggression, and so of free consent, determinate content. But it might be thought that the existence of these constraints was incompatible with the existence of a genuinely polycentric legal order. In the absence of an overarching authority ensuring the operation of a consistent set of legal norms, some of the property rules enforced by some regimes in a polycentric legal order will doubtless be unjust. Since no one can reasonably want unjust norms to obtain, the argument might run, we must all be obligated to oppose the existence of a polycentric legal order and to favor the establishment and enforcement of a uniform set of legal norms.

A stateless society could, in principle, feature such a uniform set of norms. Murray Rothbard famously called for the adoption by the members of a stateless society of a Libertarian Code. But I think it is clear that the voluntary adoption of such a code would require far more consensus than is likely to be evident in the foreseeable future. In a society without the state, there would undoubtedly be multiple, probably overlapping, sets of legal rules.

It will certainly be possible to object to some of these rules. Different legal systems will doubtless make mistakes, perhaps sometimes very serious ones. And a stateless society’s equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade may sometimes have reason to become involved in remedying clear injustices perpetrated by some legal systems. But belief in objective constraints on property norms is quite compatible with supporting, rather than opposing, legal polycentricity.

First, that there is a fact of the matter about which property rules are just does not mean that everyone, or anyone, has infallible knowledge of those rules. Polycentricity creates room for experimentation and discovery.

Second, some just rules may be appropriate for people with particular characteristics—histories, personalities, and so forth—and communities of such people may tend to opt for those rules. It does not follow that other just rules won’t be appropriate for people with other characteristics.

Third, even if it is obvious that a given legal regime’s property rules are thoroughly wrong-headed, I can quite reasonably welcome a system that allows for the participants in that legal regime to voluntarily adopt those rules. I could only object to such a system if I believed a coercive authority with the power to impose legal norms on the unconsenting was preferable to a system that allowed for genuine diversity.

It is worth emphasizing that diverse property regimes could be just even if, as is surely unlikely, everyone in a given society endorsed the same underlying rules. For, since legal regimes would be fully consensual, participants would obviously be free to contract out of the baseline property rules everyone treated as society-wide defaults.

V. Outlaws

A regime responding to the behavior of people not affiliated with any regime need not be regarded as behaving in a state-like manner. I explain in Section A why the outlaw might be thought to pose for the clear delineation of the difference between a consensual legal regime and a state. I note in Section B that a regime can largely avoid the risk of engaging in state-like behavior by not engaging in non-contractual contact with outlaws. In Section C, I suggest that a regime responding to simple aggression by outlaws by forcibly upholding what are clearly legitimate property rights need not be seen as state-like aggression.

A. Why the Outlaw Is a Problem

A given legal regime will have various occasions to interact with outlaws. It’s easy to envision a PRC between the outlaw and a participant in the regime—perhaps the regime is mutualist, while she favors Lockean property rules, or vice versa. Because she’s an outlaw, she’s not a participant in any legal regime other than her own (by definition), and it’s likely that she doesn’t have any pre-existing agreement with the relevant regime about PRC (if she does, her case raises no special concerns and can be ignored). In this case, there’s no basis for saying she’s consented either to the substantive property rules enforced by the regime or to any second-order choice-of-law rules. Would the regime function like a state in relation to her?

B. Avoiding Non-Contractual Contact with Outlaws

If she sought to involve the regime in a contractual PRC between her and one of its participants who was, let us suppose, following the regime’s preferred legal norms but not her own, the regime could obviously decline to become involved. If it did, it certainly would not be engaging in the deployment of state-like force. The regime could similarly avoid being state-like if it declined to become involved when one of its participants asked it to resolve a contractual PRC with her using its preferred legal norms rather than hers. When the PRC involved a participant’s claim to property currently occupied by an outlaw, or an outlaw’s claim to property currently occupied by a participant, the regime could generally decline to become involved at all, absent the outlaw’s agreement, when preferred legal norms were different. And the outlaw would obviously have good reason to want to agree to the regime’s involvement to facilitate orderly dispute resolution. The regime could also instruct participants that, when concluding agreements with outlaws regarding matters affected by disputed property rules, they should incorporate provisions specifying that PRCs be settled by the regime.

C. Aggressive Outlaws

Following a policy combining preemptive contracting with a refusal in general to become involved with participants’ voluntary relationships with unconsenting outlaws would make it relatively easy for a regime to avoid state-like behavior. This does not mean, of course, that a regime would always be able to avoid using force against outlaws. Many PRCs are likely to involve good-faith disagreements about the contents of just property rules. But some outlaws may engage in what the regime regards as simple aggression against participants. In this case, it can reasonably be expected that the regime will use force to repel them and to secure compensation for the harm they have done.

In so doing, however, it would not be acting in a state-like manner, for its use of force would not be best understood as a matter of imposing legal norms on unconsenting third parties. Given the legitimacy of its property rules, in defending participants’ property it would be doing only what they would be entitled to do in its absence. This is obviously the case if there is a single set of just property rules. People who believed that there were and that they had identified them could obviously act in good faith in forcibly repelling aggression against property rights consistent with those rules. But forcibly repelling aggression could also be legitimate if multiple sets of property rules were just: diverse property systems will preclude the same kinds of infringements, and most or all will treat people’s reasonably settled expectations as worth honoring in many or most cases.

A regime’s decision-makers would need to consider the limits on forcible responses to what they view as aggression by outlaws, it seems to me, only when outlaws made good-faith claims to be acting on the basis of publicly defensible moral norms justifying the conduct the regime regards as aggressive. Outlaws who understand themselves simply to be using force to subdue others, who are, in effect, aggressors by their own lights, may always be repelled using proportionate force.

Even if a regime’s decision-makers were uncertain whether it was just to respond forcibly to some behavior by outlaws when it affected participants’ property, they could still in good conscience, and without behaving in a state-like manner, use force in two additional ways. (i) They could reasonably employ force to ensure that the relevant PRC be resolved through negotiation rather than through force. (ii) They could reasonably employ force to defend participants from bodily harm.

The same kinds of considerations would obviously apply if the aggression involved were undertaken not by outlaws but by another regime that simply refused to negotiate choice-of-law agreement with the regime. Such a regime could reasonably be treated as a collection of outlaws—not in order to justify hunting and killing its participants, but to ensure that they were treated with the wary respect due dangerous and uncivil predators.

VI. Conclusion

Forcibly resolving disputes regarding property rights need not make a legal regime in a stateless society state-like. Consensual rules accepted by regime participants and consensual agreements within regimes can resolve most property disputes, and, because they are consensual, enforcing them need not be state-like. While there may not be a single set of just property rights, there are, at minimum, constraints on the range of possibly just schemes of rights, and the existence of such constraints makes it possible for talk about the consensuality of regime membership to be meaningful. A polycentric legal order can certainly feature multiple property rights schemes; and, even if not all of those schemes are just, there will still be good reason to support the existence of the legal order as a whole, even though it makes room for the maintenance of some undesirable regimes (this certainly does not mean that organized and disorganized individuals are not free to actively challenge unjust regimes).

Whatever the legal rules upheld by a just regime, the existence of outlaws need not compel it to behave like a state. In large part, it can avoid non-consensual relationships with them, and when it has no choice to engage with them, it does not act unjustly if it uses force to prevent them from engaging in conduct which would be inconsistent with any just scheme of property rights.

There will obviously be considerable economic and social pressure on outlaws in a stateless society to affiliate with legal regimes and on regimes to standardize mechanisms for resolving cross-regime disputes. There will also be real, if less intense, pressures for regimes to adopt similar rules—though diverse cultural values, moral beliefs, and geographic circumstances may all tend to promote continued diversity. While the injustice of state-like conduct does not depend on its extent—subjecting anyone to aggressive violence is wrong—there need be relatively few pressures on a regime to engage in such conduct. It can, in any case, avoid such conduct by ensuring that its internal rules rest on the content of its participants, that it orders its relationships with other regimes consensually (and in ways that merit the consensual self-obligation of its members), by avoiding non-consensual contacts with outlaws where possible, and by using force against them only to defend unequivocally just claims.

This essay emerged from an extended conversation involving Sheldon Richman, Brad Spangler, Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, Roderick T. Long, Thomas Knapp, and others. While none of them is to blame for its final form, it certainly reflects their insights and perhaps even on occasion their choice of language. I am grateful for and honored by the chance to have such thoughtful dialogue partners and friends.

Any (Good) Thing the State Can Do, We Can Do Better

2010-06-07T18:01:00.000-07:00

The question whether people in a stateless society could respond satisfactorily to a disaster like the BP oil spill is really just a special case of the general question whether people without the state can do the things people attempt to do through the state. It seems to me that the answer is “yes.”

That’s because everything the state purportedly does is actually done by people. Sometimes they act out of fear; sometimes out of the perception that the state is legitimate; sometimes what the state commands turns out to be just what they want to do anyway; and sometimes because they believe that what the state is asking them to do is just what they are morally required to do anyway. But, for whatever reason, they do it.

This fact ought to be sufficient to make us confident that ordinary people, cooperating peacefully, can deal with environmental or other disasters in a stateless society. In what follows, I briefly discuss the purported advantages the state might be thought to possess in dealing with large-scale problems before noting some ways in which people in a stateless society could cooperate to prevent or remedy a disaster like the one currently taking place in the Gulf.

The State’s Supposed Advantages

What might be thought to give the state an advantage over the various non-state institutions of a stateless society? Statists are most likely to point to two kinds of factors: information and force. A third, concerned with a potential difficulty faced by a non-state legal system relying on tort law to deal with environmental harms, might also be highlighted by some statists.

Informational Advantages?

Statists often think the state has information that ordinary people lack. But to the extent that this information concerns optimal production levels and distribution patterns for goods and services, we know as confidently as we know anything about economics that more information is distributed throughout a given economic environment, possessed by various actors as a matter of “local knowledge.” Polycentric processes that mobilize this local knowledge will ultimately prove more effective than top-down, hierarchical ones at aggregating relevant information.

Statists might suggest that the state had an important role to play, not so much because it possessed information relevant to consumption and production, but because it possessed access to expert information. The assumption here seems to be that experts know just what needs to be done about a given problem but, because ordinary people aren’t convinced, the options are either to let nothing be done about a serious problem or to impose the will of the experts. Clearly, there are problems here related both to the ignorance of experts and to the right of people to make mistakes.

But here the question is how information comes to be classified as expert, and how it is used by the state. Political processes clearly affect the selection of experts and the assessment of the information they provide. Further, given both the potential abuse of expertise as a rationalization for authoritarianism, and the inherent value of personal autonomy, it does not seem as if the conclusions of particular experts ought to be imposed on people without their consent. There are, it seems, side constraints on the use of expert authority whatever its potential value. Finally, if expert claims are accurate, why can they not be winnowed by public evaluation—in the course of conversations in which other experts from outside the political process, as well as ordinary people able to employ their common sense, are free to participate?

Advantages Reflective of the State’s Monopoly of Force?

If purported informational advantages provide no reason to think that the state is better equipped to aid us in, for instance, responding to natural disasters, what about its capacity to use force to compel people to cooperate? As I’ve already suggested, the vast majority of instances of cooperation with or under the direction of the state do not reflect any immediate threat or application of force. Instead, they reflect people’s sense of the moral or prudential appropriateness of doing as the state directs.

Sometimes, of course, people may cooperate voluntarily, but only because they believe that others will do so, too, under the background threat of compulsion by the state. But there is no reason no to think that a combination of social norms and advance agreements (cp. David Schmidtz’s discussion of “assurance contracts”) could not in many cases foster the needed cooperation in the absence of threatened force.

I’m inclined to think that there are very few, if any, pure public goods, and it’s not clear to me that any environmental good we could currently affect would count as one. But, if there are any, it seems to me both that (i) as Schmidtz suggests, there are interesting market-based ways of providing at least some of them and (ii) the difficulties associated with alternatives mean that there’s no good reason to prefer coercive solutions to market-based ones. For if worthwhile cooperation is not forthcoming in some cases in which we wish it might be, we must still recall that the state is not, never has been, and never will be directed by angels, that instituting an organization with monopolistic control over the use of force in a given region opens up enormous possibilities for violence, abuse, cronyism, depredation, and dispossession. In short, while there may be failures of cooperation, the costs associated with these failures must be compared to the costs associated with failures on the part of monopolistic states.

Sometimes, of course, people will grudgingly obey the state only because of the its threats of violence. The fact that these threats would not be available in a stateless society does not seem like a particular loss. For it is almost certain that, in cases in which people only obey out of fear, they see little or not independent reason to do whatever it is the state wants them to do, and we have good reason to be glad, therefore, that they will not be forced to do similar things in the state’s absence.

The Advantage of Being Able to Bypass the Need to Delineate Lines of Causal Responsibility in Dealing with Environmental Problems?

One final reason that might be advanced for adopting the view that the state was better positioned to deal with certain kinds of environmental problems than free people engaged in peaceful cooperation is the difficulty of identifying relevant causal connections between particular actions and environmental harms. If something like tort law is to be used to compensate victims of harms (as many anarchists suppose it should be) and if the prospect of compensation is expected to play a key role in deterring violators, but if there is no clear way of identifying the actual cause of a harm, will numerous harms go undeterred and uncompensated?

Suppose, for instance, that anthropogenic global warming is occurring and poses a serious hazard to present and future generations. Suppose, too, that we can be reasonably sure that certain classes of human actions contribute in a general way to AGW. It is hard to see how we might identify particular actors as liable for causing particular AGW-related harms, so it’s unclear how an ordinary tort regime would help here.

There are, I think, at least three non-exclusive possibilities open to us here. First, something like an expanded class action lawsuit could be permitted exclusively in such cases, in which classes of plaintiffs could sue classes of potential perpetrators. It would still be necessary to demonstrate a causal connection between a class of actions and a class of harms, and to demonstrate the extent of the harms. Second, while a full-blown tort regime treating environmental pollution and similar phenomena as common-law nuisances, combined with specific property rights in particular regions and ecosystems now claimed en masse by the state, might not (if the first option just mentioned were ruled out as unjust) provide compensation for past harms, it could perfectly well make possible a thoroughgoing system of restraint on pollutants imposed by newly empowered property owners. Third, a thoroughgoing system of social norms could limit the activity of polluters and secure compensation for victims (especially in cases in which harm was clear but causation impossible clearly to demonstrate, but in which demonstrating causation was required for legal liability. Thus, if there was widespread agreement on the reality and causes of AGW, or any other environmental harm, people freely and peacefully cooperating could identify ways of stopping or slowing the occurrence of the relevant causes and compensating victims.

In short, any good thing the state can do, we can do better. What we do will be done more efficiently, because we can draw on bottom-up knowledge. And we will also spend our resources efficiently because the decision whether to employ them at all will be ours, not that of a group of economic and political elites who can externalize the costs of satisfying their preferences onto ordinary people.

Large-Scale Environmental Disaster in a Stateless Society

How could people in a stateless society deal with challenges like those caused by the BP disaster?

The Importance of Property Rights or Their Equivalent

The first thing to do, clearly, is to assign responsibility—to assign particular places to particular people. This needn’t mean assigning those rights to individuals for commercial exploitation; it just means that something like the Gulf—a place, a region, an ecosystem—needs to be in someone’s hands. Someone might be seeking to develop the region commercially. But someone might just as well be interested in preserving it, planning to limit or entirely prohibit commercial use. Whatever the projected use, an individual, cooperate, partnership, non-profit, or business firm with ownership rights can be expected to care for the owned space.

To be sure, there’s no guarantee that the allocation of rights to, say, the Gulf (on the basis of active homesteading or prior customary possession or something similar—certainly not on the basis of allocation by the state, which has no title to anything and is all too likely to favor its cronies) will result in its being put to the predetermined use preferred by any group, noncommercial or commercial. There is good reason to believe that, as a general rule, if people own things, they will care for those things, but their objectives may vary (though of course there may be a general consensus that can be enforced through ordinary social norm maintenance mechanisms).

Just as groups like the Nature Conservancy buy up currently privately held property in the US, they would likely be willing to homestead unowned property in the Gulf. I’d expect a fair amount of this sort of thing, though it would obviously be important to figure out ways of preventing title from being established just by announcement while also not requiring commercial cultivation if that’s not what someone wants.

And commercial homesteading certainly could and would occur, too. A stateless society would doubtless feature a mixture of both. But, in any case, if there were specific property owners to whom liability would be owed in the case of spills, rather than politicians often indebted precisely to the entities doing the spilling, things would surely be different to some extent, whatever the nature of the property-owners’ interests in the property.

Mechanisms for Protecting the Interests of Nonhuman Sentients

If your goal is protecting, not geographically fixed spaces, but rather mobile organisms, say, within those spaces (sea turtles, for instance), then enabling anyone to take on a case (for, e.g., a sea turtle) and recoup salary and expenses when successful in court (thus functioning as something like what is today called a “private attorney general”) would do the trick. Whether this option would or should be available would depend, obviously, on the existence of a social consensus regarding non-humans. If most people don’t think sea turtles—individually or collectively—ought to be protected, they won’t be. If they are to be protected, though, it’s easy to envision the kinds of mechanisms a stateless society could use to protect them.

Protection of Ecosystems by Property Owners

Whether individual owners were responsible, or whether those—for instance—along the shoreline controlled the Gulf (or any other ecosystem) as common property, or whatever, specific owners not in the pockets of oil companies would have to decide to allow drilling to take place, and they could obviously take whatever preventive measures they wanted, including prohibiting drilling, requiring performance bonds, requiring on-site inspections, etc.

Is the State a Desirable Alternative, Even Absent Optimal Protection by Private Owners?

If particular individuals or groups didn’t control a particular ecosystem, the alternative would seem to be some sort of state-like entity. Any institution capable of forcibly implementing ex ante environmental regulations on unowned property or on the property of others (however property ought to be handled in this and other cases) would seem to be altogether too much like a state, and its creation and maintenance highly dangerous, and likely unjust.

Regulating Ecosystems without the State

If there is a property regime in a given ecosystem, specific owners—individuals, for-profit firms, or non-profits—could preempt or regulate conduct that might be environmentally harmful as they liked (and would be liable if spills moved beyond their property to that of others). And if there is no such regime, one is likely to emerge. The alternative is a state, or something like it; we have no good reason to want that, and a regime of voluntary cooperation in which people use their individual or group property interests to protect ecosystems seems perfectly workable. Environmental challenges can be satisfactorily addressed by a combination of voluntary, peaceful cooperation and robust tort liability. Statist and quasi-statist alternatives are neither necessary nor appealing.

Raimondo on “Airtight Borders”

2010-04-29T12:46:00.001-07:00

AntiWar.Com is arguably the libertarian movement’s single most valuable contribution to political debate around the world. I am proud to be a donor to and occasional copywriter for the site.

And Justin Raimondo’s unapologetically libertarian columns for the site are among its most obvious assets. Justin is consistently hard-hitting, well-informed, and willing to take on sacred cows with little hesitation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his books about the life and thought of Murray Rothbard and, even though I’m a leftist, the anti-imperialist heritage of American conservatism. I’m a big fan of Justin and his work.

But I wish he hadn’t taken the position he did in his recent column, “South of the Border,” available here. (Raimondo’s AntiWar.Com colleagues respond here.) Addressing the problem of drug-related violence along the US-Mexico border, he fails to discuss the obvious and crucial role of drug prohibition in creating and exacerbating this violence. And he treats the state as a legitimate entity with responsibilities and rightful claims to authority. He writes: “Okay, you might ask, so what’s your solution to the problem, Mr. Smarty-pants? A logical question, with an inescapably logical answer: stop trying to protect Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and start protecting our own border with Mexico. Make the border airtight. In short, start using the resources of the federal government to carry out its one-and-only legitimate function: securing and protecting our borders.”

I’m not convinced.

1. In accounting for border violence, Raimondo fails to focus on the central factor—the criminalization of the drug trade. This matters, of course, because criminalization creates and sustains oligopolistic privileges for drug dealers—and for their political cronies in both Mexico and the United States. Those privileges drive up prices dramatically and so boost incentives for people to use violence to obtain drug profits. In addition, by locating the drug industry outside the law, criminalization makes it impossible for people involved in the industry to resolve intra-industry disputes using the legal system and disposes them to resort to violence to do so instead. Further, because the legal system and associated cultural norms frame participants in the industry as criminals, they will be more inclined to behave as criminals are expected to behave: while there is no necessary connection between selling drugs on the one hand and violently attacking persons or property on the other, if both are treated as criminal in nature—and, indeed, if engaging in the drug trade is treated as among the most vile of crimes—it is hardly surprising if violence by participants in the trade is viewed as normal not only outside but also inside the trade.

It is not a lack of immigration controls that accounts for violence along the border. It is, instead, the existence and operation of violent organizations whose existence and predisposition to violence are inexplicable without the activity of the state.

Replying to a critic, Raimondo says that mafia violence persisted after the end of Prohibition, implying that it is unreasonable to think that drug legalization would end border violence. However, the end of Prohibition was not accompanied by an end to cartelizing laws and regulations that enabled organized crime to profit from involvement in industries other than alcohol production and distribution, including gambling, prostitution, and the creation and sale of non-alcoholic dugs, so the American experience with Prohibition can only provide limited insights into what would happen in the absence of the regulations responsible for birthing and nourishing the drug trade in northern Mexico.

2. It is certainly true that organizations involved in the drug trade might seek to engage in other sorts of crime were drugs legalized. But Raimondo fails to emphasize that the fact that drug cartels are violent tells us nothing about whether ordinary people should be treated as likely participants in violence. The need to protect peaceful people from cartel-related violence does not justify the actual or threatened use of force against people who are behaving non-violently.

3. The failure to discriminate between protecting the peaceful from criminal violence and regulating the behavior of those who are themselves peaceful reflects a more deep-seated problem with Raimondo’s column: it treats the state, an organ of institutionalized violence, as legitimate and its claims to govern the territory it claims as reasonable. There are no justifications for doing either. And it is especially odd to find Raimondo, a founder of the Libertarian Radical Caucus, reasoning this way. An entity that violently asserts and maintains a monopoly over the use of force and the determination of legal rights is not entitled to exist and has no necessary responsibilities.

4. There is an integral connection between opposition to war and opposition to the power of the state. So there is something odd about serving as editorial director of AntiWar.Com while favoring state violence. I oppose the statist violence of war because of a deeper opposition to aggression—purposefully attacking their minds and bodies, or infringing on their property when I would resent their doing the same to me. But the force employed to prevent unauthorized immigrants from entering the United States is aggressive, provided their entry takes place on state property, which is properly treated as unowned or as generally accessible, or on the private property of people who are willing to receive them. And this is doubly so of such force used to prevent them from remaining or working here once they have arrived. In such cases, force is unjustly used to impede voluntary, consensual relationships between contracting partners. Opposing the unjust use of force in war is inconsistent with favoring its use to attack peaceful people seeking work or fleeing violence.

The drug trade, not peaceful migration, lies behind border violence. And state action is largely responsible for the violent quality of the drug trade. The state has no right to exist and no legitimate function. And opposition to state violence in war leads naturally to opposition to state violence more generally, including state violence used to repel or eject peaceful migrants or to penalize them for seeking work or others for providing them with work. Raimondo’s call for “airtight” border controls is both unnecessary and unjust.

More on Machan

2010-04-26T21:11:00.000-07:00

Even as I beg to differ with Tibor Machan regarding benefit corporations, I think he's done quite a fine job of responding to Ted Honderich's charge that a libertarian society would be morally abominable here.

In essence, Honderich moves much too quickly from the claim that, in a libertarian society, it would not be viewed as just for the state (or any other entity) to take responsibility for redistributing income to economically vulnerable people to the conclusion that no one would in such a society would acknowledge any moral obligation to redistribute income to economically vulnerable people. It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the impermissibility of the use of force here would seem trivial and irrelevant to Honderich, an occasional apologist for political violence. It is disappointing, however, that Honderich, a capable philosopher, can’t see the difference between “I am morally obligated to perform action action A (or one of a class of actions of which A is a member)” and “Physical force may be used to compel me to perform action A.” Machan seems to me to be correct that

it is quite often morally wrong for many who know of such a case [of great deprivation] to fail to provide help. (If, however, they had more vital goals to pursue, say attending to their children’s medical needs, this wouldn’t be so.) Lack of generosity, compassion, or support for those who deserve it would be morally wrong. Indeed, it could well be true of many that they ought to help anyone in such dire straits and very wrong for them not to do so.

I would only add that responding to economic vulnerability in a stateless society is not just a matter of personal solidarity, valuable as this is, but also of ending privileges that make and keep some people poor and of effecting reparations for past acts of large-scale theft and land engrossment.

Machan on Benefit Corporations

2010-04-25T08:38:00.000-07:00

I confess some puzzlement.

In a recent column, Tibor Machan voices his dismay at the fact that “in several states across the U.S.A.—among them California, Vermont, Maryland and others—politicians have created, by legislation, “benefit corporations” in which managers may proceed to do pro bono work without having to answer to shareholders whose resources are being used for this.” He goes on:

Normally if managers mis-allocate company resources, they could be sued by the owners for malpractice but with this law they will become immune. The only recourse by shareholders will be to sell their stocks and of course these stocks will have lost a goodly portion of their value given that the company isn’t committed to making a profit any longer; nor does the management have to answer to the owners for abandoning this task.

Then, he offers a parade of horribles—doctors who ignore their patients in favor of non-paying clients, teachers who fail to grade students’ papers because they “must provide service to people in the neighborhood” and “will be in violation of the law” if they do not.

The benefit corporation as Machan has described it is a legal form available to contracting parties. Those parties can opt for this form or for a more familiar alternative. Nothing Machan says suggests either that the availability of the more familiar corporate form has been eliminated by legislation in the states he mentions or that existing corporations are being or will be transformed without investors’ knowledge or consent into benefit corporations.

Rather, it appears that, on the facts he presents, people who want to do so can choose, if they wish, to create, work for, and invest in corporations legally structured in particular ways. This seems suspiciously like what could be expected to happen in a freed market in which patterns of business association were determined not by state-created templates but by voluntary agreement.

Is attachment to a particular vision of the corporation and of investor behavior so great that the voluntary nature of the transactions contemplated here is invisible?

Stossel’s Myths

2010-04-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

Nathan Goodman called my attention to this recent piece by John Stossel: “Myths about Capitalism: Confronting the Biggest Lies about American Business.” I can’t resist commenting.

1. Capitalism is mostly cruel and unfair

Notice that the subtitle of Stossel’s article suggests that “capitalism” is synonymous with “American business.” Genuinely freed markets are not mostly cruel and unfair. But I think it’s a stretch to assume that the same is true of big businesses that operate with all sorts of privileges from the state and that benefit from a long history of injustice and dispossession. Big business in America does not enjoy its power and privilege in virtue of a freed market, and there is no reason to think business leaders desire a freed market. The cruelty and unfairness of big business—at home and abroad—may have little to do with free(d) markets, but they’re systemic features of “capitalism”—if by that term is meant “rule by capitalists” or “the economic system we have now.”

2. When the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

In a genuinely freed market, no. A truly freed market would tend to eat the rich, as Jeremy Weiland has suggested. But in a market distorted by privilege, in which people get rich not exclusively or primarily because they provide goods and services people want, in which increased wealth is not necessarily a reflection of genuine wealth creation, I suspect it’s much more likely that some people are despoiled to the advantage of others.

3. Government is more fair and reliable than business.

This is clearly a myth. But that’s hardly reason to take a trusting attitude toward big business, which happily utilizes state-secured privilege to the detriment of consumers and workers. And I suspect that Stossel may be rather too fond of the related myth that government and big business are adversaries rather than, as seems more likely, competitive and sometimes hostile allies.

4. The current downturn means the death of capitalism.

Nope, it doesn’t. Stossel’s right. But not for the reasons he thinks. He’s right, in fact, because capitalism is marked by privilege and cronyism, which lay behind the current crisis and which have featured rather too prominently in efforts purportedly intended to address it. In any case, the partnership between the business elite and the political elite will doubtless continue as long as there’s anything like the current economic and political order. The occasional crisis won’t be enough to end that order, I fear.

It’s hard not to see Stossel and Michael Medved, his conversation partner in the segment he discusses in the article, as exhibiting just the uncritical equation of the contemporary economic order with a genuinely freed market that Kevin Carson rightly lampoons as “vulgar libertarianism.”

Libertarians for Redistribution

2010-03-20T12:14:00.000-07:00

Libertarianism is a redistributive project. That’s another way in which radical market anarchism is rightly seen as part of the socialist tradition.

Statists on both the left and the right favor the redistribution of wealth. Libertarians, by contrast, are often assumed to be dead-set against all varieties of redistribution. But it’s important to see that whether this is really the case or not depends on how we answer several questions:

Agent: who effects the redistribution?
Rationale: what justifies the redistribution?
Means: how is the redistribution accomplished?

Statist Redistribution

For statists, the agent of redistribution is the state. The rationales for redistribution are primarily consequentialist—it’s seen as designed to bring about some favored end-state—though it may also be used to punish the putatively undeserving and to reward the arguably virtuous. The means? The creation of monopolies, the enactment of regulations, the confiscation of property via eminent domain, or the transfer of resources acquired via taxation.

Thus, both kinds of statists shift wealth from those who produce it to politically favored elites. They may also, of course, shift resources to the economically vulnerable, but the prime beneficiaries of these programs are various groups of politically influential people.

Statist redistribution is unjust because it employs aggressive means and because it is undertaken by the state—an aggressive monopolist. It is indefensible to the extent that its viability depends on the coherence of consequentialism. And it is undesirable because it serves the interests of the power elite at the expense of the well being of ordinary people.

Solidaristic Redistribution

Many libertarians acknowledge the importance of voluntary, solidaristic redistribution, undertaken by people using their own resources for the purpose of aiding victims of accident or disaster or those experiencing economic insecurity and not coercively mandated by the state. It is, indeed, perfectly consistent with libertarian principles to maintain that, while it is not just to use force to effect solidaristic redistribution, engaging in it may nonetheless be an “imperfect” duty: something one has a responsibility to do, but which one doesn’t owe to any specific person, and which can reasonably be fulfilled in multiple ways—and which cannot therefore be claimed by anyone in particular as a right. The agent of such redistribution is the individual, using her own resources and operating independently or through a voluntary association. The rationale is the importance (however understood) of helping those who need assistance. The means—all voluntary—might include contributions to worthwhile projects, providing unemployment for those unable to secure work, various kinds of investments, and direct gifts to economically vulnerable people.

Transactional and Rectificational Redistribution

But this is hardly the only kind of redistribution libertarians can and should favor. Libertarians also have good reason to recognize the importance of two other kinds of redistribution: redistribution understood as the predictable and desirable outcome of the maintenance of a freed market, and redistribution as a matter of corrective justice.. We can call these kinds of redistribution transactional and rectificational.

Transactional Redistribution

Transactional redistribution is just a description of what happens in a genuinely freed market. Markets undermine privilege. Without the protection afforded by monopoly privileges (including patents and copyrights), subsidies, tariffs, restrictions on union organizing, protections for long-term ownership of uncultivated property, and so forth, members of the power elite, forced to participate along with everyone else in the process of voluntary cooperation that is the freed market, will tend to lose ill-gotten gains. They will retain wealth only if they actually serve the needs of other market participants. And they will be unable to use the legal system to protect their wealth from squatters (by enabling them to maintain uncultivated land indefinitely) or to limit vigorous bargaining by workers (both because workers will be freer to organize without statist restrictions and because the absence of such restrictions will give workers options other than paid employment that will improve their negotiating positions).

While unfettered competition obviously will not create mathematical equality, it will make it much harder for vast disparities of wealth to persist than at present. The state props up the power elite, using the threat of aggression to shift wealth to the politically favored. Removing the privileges of the power elite will lead, through the operation of the market, to the widespread dispersion of wealth members of the power elite are able to retain at present in virtue of the protection they receive from the political order.

The means of transactional redistribution is the market. The direct agents are ordinary market actors, while those responsible for the elimination of statist privileges that distort the market and prop up the wealth of the power elite are the indirect agents. The rationales for transactional redistribution include the value of freedom and the injustice of the privileges transactional redistribution corrects.

Rectificational Redistribution

Eliminating privilege and creating a freed market will tend to foster the widespread sharing of wealth. But it will not on its own be sufficient to make up for the effects of systematic aggression by the members of the power elite and their allies. That’s why rectificational redistribution is also important.

Massive injustice lies at the root of much of the contemporary distribution of wealth. Land theft is the most obvious example. But other kinds of aggression—the internal passport system implemented in eighteenth-century England, for instance, or the engrossment of unowned land by state fiat—have also served to deprive ordinary people of resources and opportunities. The beneficiaries of this kind of aggression have varied to some extent, but they have consistently belonged to politically favored groups—they’ve been either members of the power elite or their associates.

People deserve compensation for the losses they have suffered at the hands of those who prefer the political to the economic means of acquiring wealth. It is obviously not possible to correct all historical injustices. But when those injustices have systematically benefited some identifiable groups at the expense of others, radical correction is possible and entirely warranted. That’s why Murray Rothbard argued that slaves should be entitled to the plantation land on which they worked: their putative “owners” had not used their own labor, or the labor of free people cooperating with them, to cultivate the land; rather, those who cultivated it for the members of the plantocracy did so at gunpoint. Thus, the land was reasonably regarded as unowned prior to the cultivating work of the slaves, who should have been treated as, in effect, homesteading it—and who obviously deserved compensation for the theft of their labor by their “owners.”

In the same way, independent farmers turned into serfs by violence deserved, Rothbard believed, to receive title to the land on which they worked, while the aristocratic proprietors of the latifundia on which they worked deserved precisely nothing in compensation for land to which they weren’t entitled in the first place. Military contractors, research universities, and other entities largely supported by the state’s theft of land and resources might well, he and Karl Hess suggested, be treated as unowned and capable of being homestead by their workers or others. And it would be easy to argue along similar lines that those prevented from homesteading unowned land by means of its legal engrossment should be allowed to claim it. And so forth.

The means of rectificational redistribution is the reallocation of unjustly acquired or retained property titles. The direct agents are the people who homestead property newly acknowledged to be unowned or who claim property unjustly taken from or denied to them or their predecessors in interest, while those who work to ensure the denial of recognition or protection to unjust titles are the indirect agents. The rationales for rectificational redistribution include both the injustices of the titles to the property rectificational redistribution reallocates and the claims to compensation of those deprived of title to their own property or unjustly prevented for claiming unowned property by the power elite. While it is not a source of independent justification for reallocating title, the greater dispersion of wealth this kind of redistribution effects can be welcomed by libertarians both in virtue of the benefits it confers on economically vulnerable people and because of its contribution to greater social stability.

Libertarianism as a Redistributive Project

Libertarian redistribution is just because it employs voluntary or rectificatory means and because it is undertaken by non-state actors. It does not require any sort of global consequentialist justification. And it serves to empower ordinary people and compensate them for injustice.

Statists might reflexively dismiss libertarian redistribution because it isn’t undertaken by the state. But, if they did, they would owe us an explanation: why should they be concerned primarily about means? Statists ordinarily argue for redistribution either as a means of reducing economic vulnerability or as a way of fostering economic equality, understood as valuable in its own right. But libertarian redistribution would certainly achieve the former goal and would likely promote the latter, too. So statists opposed to libertarian redistribution would seem to have fetishized statist means—and to care more about these means than about the purported ends of statist policies.

Libertarians rightly reject statist redistribution as a variety of slavery. But they have every reason to embrace solidaristic, transactional, and rectificational redistribution. A libertarian commitment to redistribution helps clearly to identify libertarianism as a species of genuine radicalism that challenges the status quo, undermines hierarchy, exclusion, and poverty, and fosters authentic empowerment.

Terrorism?

2010-03-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald's blog features a fascinating discussion about the history of uses of the word “terrorism." Greenwald highlights the fact that there is no international consensus regarding the use of “terrorism.”

I'd like to suggest simple definitions for "terrorism” and a new term, “quasi-terrorism.” I'd welcome your feedback.

1. "Terrorism": the purposeful use of force against non-combatants to achieve political ends, broadly defined.

2. "Quasi-terrorism": the use of force against combatants to achieve political ends in a way that involves indiscriminate harm to non-combatants, with minimal effort to limit such harm.

Wanted: An Anarchist PI

2010-03-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

No, as far as I know, I don't need a gumshoe personally.

But I think the anarchist movement does.

The most fun and cost-effective exercise in anarchist consciousness-raising I can imagine (at least at this point in the morning, before breakfast) would be the creation of a set of PI novels set in a stateless society.

Genre-crossing is already all the rage in crime fiction. Think Laurell Hamilton's early Anita Blake novels (the ones before sex became the central point of each story), which combined fantasy, horror, and romance with elements of the traditional police procedural. Or Hamilton's Merry Gentry novels, which combine fantasy, detective work, and politics. Or Jim Butcher's novels that blend the traditional PI story with fantasy (and occasionally horror). Or Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, which often mix fantasy with politics and detection.

But this isn't, of course, a feature exclusively or primarily of fantasy fiction. A prime function of today's PI novel seems to be to introduce readers to unfamiliar worlds. Peter Spiegelman's really excellent novels concerned with the New York financial world come immediately to mind. So does the whole sub-genre of mysteries set in ancient Rome (of which Lindsey Davis's Falco stories are, on balance, I think, the best examples).

So: why not a series that integrates SF and politics with the Chandleresque PI story, offering the reader a window into the diverse sorts of communities that would doubtless figure in a stateless society through the eyes of a shamus?

Fiction about radically different social alternatives runs a serious risk of being boring and self-righteous if its primary purpose is explain what's wrong with current society while highlighting the advantages of an alternative. It's likely to be heavy on philosophical dialogue and exposition.

The need to write a good PI story, with no more exposition than you'd get in any piece of detective fiction or SF introducing readers to an unfamiliar environment, would make the boring and self-righteousness less likely (you can never rule out the possibility of either entirely, of course).

The series would be a great opportunity to put different anarchic options on display and to do what fiction of this sort always does: show how the sausages are made by revealing a society's seamy under-side. Thus, it would facilitate self-critical reflection by anarchists on their various projects. But, more importantly, it would help to normalize anarchism in the minds of an ordinary reader just interested in picking up something different in the mystery or SF section of her local bookstore.

I'm not volunteering—just proposing. I'd love to see volunteers come forward, so we could rally around them. But if you just want to debate my suggestion, that's OK, too.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Exchange with Probable “419” Scammer

2010-03-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in front of my computer on the afternoon of March 6, 2010, when I got a Facebook instant message purporting to be from “Emma” (not her real name)—who is, it will be useful to note, in her mid-sixties and relatively conservative (as well as being a native and capable speaker of English). It quickly became clear that the real Emma’s Facebook account had been hacked. Apart from changing the purported sender’s name (and my wife’s), I’ve reproduced the conversation just as it occurred.

2:50pm Emma

Hi,how are you?

2:50pm Gary

Good afternoon, Emma.

It's a pleasure to see you on FB.

2:51pm Emma

thanks

2:51pm Gary

How are you?

2:51pm Emma

but am not good at the moment..

2:51pm Gary

I wondered how APC would impact turnout at SS today. We had a relatively big group, but one composed entirely of regulars or semi-regulars.

Oh, my--what's the matter?

2:52pm Emma

am stuck in London with my family..

2:52pm Gary

London, where it's, what, 10:50 at night?

Doesn't sound fun at all.

Flight canceled?

On stand-by?

2:54pm Emma

we got mugged at gun point last night,

2:54pm Gary

So what's happened?

2:54pm Emma

they took all our cash,credit cards,and cellphones

it was so scary

2:55pm Gary

Oh, my . . . .

Any trip insurance?

2:56pm Emma

reported to the police,and canceled all cards,and bank accounts for now

all we have left are just our passports,and return tickets.

2:57pm Gary

Can your credit card companies get you substitute cards?

2:57pm Emma

that will be till I get back

but we need some money to settle the hotel bills,and then get a cab to the airport.

I need your help please!!

2:59pm Gary

OK--what can I do?

2:59pm Emma

I need you to loan me some money,

3:00pm Gary

What's the best way to handle that?

3:00pm Emma

I'll def refund you as soon as am back.

western union.

all you do is have it wired on my name,and location.

3:02pm Gary

How long have you been in London? That's just awful.

3:02pm Emma

just visited for a short vac

do you have any western union office nearby ?

3:03pm Gary

Hmmm . . . .

3:05pm Emma

???

3:07pm Gary

Trying to think

3:08pm Gary

Just sent you $250 to your PayPal account.

3:08pm Emma

I can't get that for now

guess it will be better with western union

I still have my passport for identification at western union.

3:10pm Gary

Where's the Western Union?

It may be near someone I know in London who could get you the money.

3:11pm Emma

you can google to find one nearby,

3:12pm Gary

No, I'm asking where the one is at which you'll be getting the money, to see if it's near where my friend lives.

3:12pm Emma

or you can have it done online with your credit card.

that is lavender hill

3:12pm Gary

Which hotel are you at? I can simply have my friend drop by with the money. That will be simplest. She can pay the hotel bill and give you some cash.

3:13pm Emma

I have limited time down here

that is why i ASKED YOU TO HAVE THE $250 wired on my name,and location via western union.

3:14pm Gary

Well, she can be there in half an hour.

3:15pm Emma

my flight might have left by then.

3:15pm Gary

Emma, because it's an emergency, I'm happy to try to help you, but after what you did I'm really kind of surprised you'd choose me to contact.

3:16pm Emma

as it seems at the moment,

3:17pm Emma

am really sorry if

3:21pm Emma

are you theree?

there?

3:24pm Gary

Are you going to keep your hands off my wife the next time you see her?

3:25pm Emma

please I promise I'll do anything you need.

3:26pm Gary

Carla is still in therapy because of what you did at that party.

3:46pm Emma

are you there?

are you still helping me out?

3:46pm Gary

Have you checked out of your hotel yet?

3:47pm Emma

need to settle the bills,before we leave.

3:47pm Gary

OK, what's the hotel?

3:48pm Emma

sunderland hotel

3:49pm Gary

But which Sunderland? I can arrange for the money to be at the desk in five to ten minutes.

3:53pm Emma

can you just help me out here?

3:53pm Gary

Yes, I can, as I said to you: I can have cold hard cash in your hands at the desk in five to ten minutes. But I first need to know which hotel you're at.

Please understand how angry Carla will be with me even for thinking of giving money to you.

If I wire money to London, she'll know.

But if I have Rowena drop it off for you, we can handle it under the table.

3:55pm Emma

how will she know?if you don't tell her?

3:55pm Gary

Because wiring it means using my credit card, and she reviews every credit card bill.

3:55pm Emma

just help me out if you can

3:55pm Gary

Look, are you at the Sunderland in Gosford Park?

3:55pm Emma

3:55pm Gary

I know that's where you stayed last time.

OK, which one?

3:56pm Emma

please enough of the questions and get me off here

okay?

3:56pm Gary

Emma, you're asking me to take a big risk with my wife, and I'm not sure why I should help someone who's behaved the way you have. Just stop being cagey and tell me which hotel you're at. Is it because you're there with Peter?

Is that why you don't want to tell me?

Poverty without the State

2010-03-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

Statists on the right are perhaps most likely to oppose anarchism because they fear that the institutions of a stateless society would be unable to maintain order and resolve disputes peacefully. Statists on the left, by contrast, may object to anarchism because they are concerned that economically vulnerable people would suffer without the state to provide them with economic support and vital services. All of the following points (in making which I draw on insights gleaned from Roderick T. Long, Charles Johnson, Kevin Carson, David Friedman, and others) ought to figure, I think, in an anarchist response to this objection:

States don’t treat recipients of their aid well. It’s important to avoid comparing idealized state practice with imaginary worst-case practice in a stateless society. If we focus on actual state practice, we find that poor people are not served particularly well by the state, and that states routinely intrude into the lives of recipients of state assistance, violating people’s privacy and seeking to regulate their behavior. The state’s performance sets a very low standard.
States actively make and keep people poor. Licensing laws, zoning regulations, and similar restrictions make it hard for poor people to enter particular job markets and to operate businesses out of their homes. Without the state to put these kinds of restrictions in place, people would be less likely to be poor.
States raise the cost of being poor. Building codes and zoning regulations raise the cost of housing, and so make it harder for people to find inexpensive homes. Some people are forced to live without permanent housing at all, while others must spend much larger fractions of their incomes on housing than they otherwise would. Agricultural tariffs raise the cost of food, the most significant portion of anyone’s budget. Without the state to make meeting their basic needs unnecessarily expensive, poor people would have more disposable income and would be more economically secure.
States actively take money from poor people. Many poor people pay more in taxes than they get back in services under the state's rule. These people would have more resources, net, in the absence of the state's demand for tax money.
Support for poverty relief doesn’t just come from tax funds now, and there’s no reason to think no one would support poverty relief efforts absent the state. People give money to charitable causes over and above their tax bills today, despite the huge sums the state claims. There's no reason to think they wouldn't do so in a stateless society. It is naïve to suppose that the wealthy and powerful are opposed to state funding for services to the poor at present; the poor have far less clout than do the wealthy and powerful, and yet the state provides minimal services for poor people. There is no reason to suppose that wealthy and well connected people willing to see the state spend their tax money to support services for the poor would be dramatically less willing to contribute to the support of such services without the state. (Why do people give money to good causes, including voluntary programs that help the poor? Why do wealthy and well connected people endorse state spending on programs that provide services to poor people. Presumably for a combination of reasons, including [in no particular order] compassion, social norms, the desire for good reputations, the desire to avoid bad reputations, and the desire to avoid social disorder. All of these reasons would be operative in a stateless society.)
In a stateless society, less money would be spent obtaining key services. Without the state, there wouldn't be taxes, and what are now state-provided services would be available on the market and thus in most cases less expensively. The state does a range of things (notably requiring professional licenses, hospital accreditation, and prescriptions and enforcing drug and medical device patents, and other restraints on trade) to make particular services, like health care services, especially expensive. Without state interference, basic services would be less expensive and more available. In addition, some services (think a bloated military) wouldn't be part of the picture at all. So people would have more disposable income than at present. This means both that people with limited incomes would be better off and that people with more money would have bigger disposable incomes from which to give to support good causes (recall, again, that lots of people do this today even while paying taxes).
The absence of the state would make everyone richer. The state's subsidies and regulations drive down the overall productivity of the economy. So, again, there's good reason to believe that, in its absence, people, including members of the working poor, would be wealthier on average than they are today. Again, this means both that poor people would have more money and that those in a position to help them would, too.
Mutual aid networks could provide many of the services well intentioned statists want the state to offer. Societies in which people pooled risk and provided pensions, health care, and other services functioned effectively before the rise of state social services, and there's no reason to think they couldn't again without the state—and, indeed, wouldn’t function much better given that people would have access to more resources and that the state wasn’t on-hand to regulate them out of existence.
Rectification for state-committed and state-sanctioned wrong-doing would significantly decrease poverty. Politically privileged elites have stolen land and resources from poor, working class, and middle class people. To the extent that land and other resources were made available for homesteading or returned to those from whom they were taken, there would be a significant shift of income to people currently limited in resources.
Structural changes would make poverty less likely. Rules that made it harder for absentee landlords to sit on undeveloped, uncultivated land would open up this land for homesteading by people with limited resources and thus provide them an avenue to greater economic security. Eliminating props for hierarchical corporations would increase the likelihood that people could enjoy the job security associated with working for themselves (with less risk than accompanies being an independent contractor in a less healthy economy) or in partnerships or cooperatives and that, when they did work for others, they could bargain successfully for better compensation.
Social norms could ensure predictable, consistent support of community-wide aid programs without taxation. General acceptance of a social norm entailing regular contributions to a community income support fund, or leaving the edges of fields available (as in Leviticus) for gleaning, could ensure that poor people who needed it could rely on community assistance.

What additions to the list do readers think would be appropriate?

Natural Law and the Non-Aggression Principle

2010-02-22T17:37:00.001-08:00

The strand of libertarian thinking anchored in the work of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand gives pride of place, as far as political ethics are concerned, to the non-aggression principle (NAP), which holds that no one may initiate force against another person. As commonly read in libertarian circles, the principle precludes the initiation of force against someone else’s property as well as her person. (For convenience, we can call these the person-aspect and the property-aspect of the NAP.) Leonard Read (who did not, perhaps, take it quite seriously enough) famously summed up this principle by observing that it was compatible with “anything that’s peaceful.” In this post, I want to ask whether an important expositions of the natural law tradition in which Rothbard and Rand were both rooted can ground something like the NAP.

Rothbard emphasized in The Ethics of Liberty that the natural law theory he offered there was a theory of politics, that is, as he put it, of “the just use of force.” He did not intend to propose a general theory of ethics, and he stressed that serious moral questions extended well beyond questions about when force was appropriate. At the same time, he seems plausibly to have believed, it's most important to get clear on the moral limits of violence. As long as rejecting aggression was accepted as a ground-rule, people could get along satisfactorily even if their views on other moral questions differed. That didn't mean that all moral stances compatible with a commitment to non-aggression were equally good.

By rooting his position in the natural law tradition, Rothbard plausibly implied that political ethics was a subset of natural law ethics more broadly construed. On this view, natural law political ethics wouldn't be seen as free-standing; rather, natural law convictions about proper limits on the use of force would flow from natural law ethics more generally. This way of thinking about the relationship between political ethics and general ethics doesn't follow strictly, of course; perhaps there are moral principles that are concerned exclusively with the use of force and don't depend on more general principles. But it seems more economical and elegant to suppose that, if there are more general natural law principles of ethics, principles of political ethics are intelligible and justifiable in light of those more general principles.

There are obviously multiple strands in the natural law tradition. Rothbard was especially fond of the Spanish Scholastics, whom he saw as in many ways the precursors of the Austro-libertarians. But their own thought was grounded in the earlier work of Aquinas and Aristotle. And subsequent descendants of Aquinas have reworked the Aristotelian tradition to which he was a major contributor in ways quite different from those of the Scholastics so dear to Rothbard.

The position of the contemporary “new classical natural law” theorists is an obvious example. It reflects the influence of the post-World War II analytic tradition in English-language philosophy, and is particularly dependent on the work of the late G. E. M. Anscombe. My purpose here is not to consider all of its intricacies but to consider how closely the conclusions supported by this particular variety of natural law thinking can be brought to resemble Rothbard’s in one specific way. My question is: to what extent can a plausible version of NCNL theory support something like a Rothbardian version of the non-aggression principle?

NCNL theory features two key components: basic goods and basic practical principles.

The goods are aspects of human welfare. They include life, speculative knowledge, practical reasonableness, friendship, religion, self-integration, æsthetic experience, and play. (Some heterodox NCNL thinkers—I’m one—have been inclined to include more subjective aspects of welfare, like sensory pleasure and peace of mind [thanks to Mark Murphy for the latter] on the list, and I’ve argued, too briefly, that there is good reason not to include self-integration. The details aren’t crucial.) What matters, in general, is not just what counts as a basic aspect or dimension of welfare or well being. What’s significant, instead, is that these aspects of welfare aren’t reducible to anything else (either a substantive good like pleasure or felt satisfaction, or a formal good like preference-satisfaction) and that each category and each instance of each category is incommensurable and non-fungible.

It is possible, the NCNL theorists emphasize, to choose among instances of various aspects of welfare in various combinations. And our choices are constrained by reason in two ways—to be reasonable, they must be for real goods rather than illusory ones (like emotional satisfaction untethered to objectively satisfactory states of affairs in the real world) and they must be consistent with the principles of practical reasonableness (about which more anon). But provided a choice is a choice for a real good and is otherwise consistent with the demands of practical reasonableness, there will be no objective way to rank one choice as “better” or “worse” than another (except in terms of the actor’s own prior commitments).

This basic fact of incommensurability and non-fungibility renders consequentialism a non-starter. For standard consequentialism, at least, depends on the ability to rank-order states of affairs incorporating many different aspects of welfare. And if there is no rationally inescapable way to combine all of the goods realized in a given state of affairs—as one cannot if the assignment of weights to different instances of different goods must be a matter of choice rather than of rational necessity—then there will be, can be, no objectively required ranking of states of affairs in the standard consequentialism demands. (Classical utilitarianism offers the possibility of objective ranking by focusing on the amount of pleasure embodied each possibility to be ranked; but as early as Mill it was becoming apparent that this sort of Benthamite project was inattentive to crucial aspects of the human experiences of valuation and moral judgment.)

This same fact of incommensurability grounds what we might see as a first approximation of the NAP framed in terms of NCNL theory: the Pauline Principle. The term “Pauline Principle” reflects St. Paul’s exasperated rejection (in Romans 3:8) of the notion that we might reasonably do evil to bring about good. The twist in the NCNL version of this principle, though, is that the principle is not seen as dependent on previously specified deontic norms. The idea behind the principle is often cashed in something like this way: a set of rules (say, the Ten Commandments) is treated as given; and the Pauline Principle is understood as stipulating that the rules should be treated as exceptionless, so that they may not be violated even in pursuit of particularly good consequences.

Framed this way, the principle appears unavoidably arbitrary. Why should I accept the relevant moral rules in the first place? And what reason, exactly, does the Pauline Principle give me to treat them as exceptionless?

Thus the strength of the NCNL version. The NCNL theorists don’t offer a version of the Pauline Principle that begins with a set of specific moral rules treated as givens. Rather, they derive it in large part simply from the idea that there are objective aspects of human welfare.

Their version of the Principle can be framed like this: don’t purposefully or instrumentally cause harm to any basic aspect of a moral subject’s welfare.

Now, consider someone contemplating an attack on someone else’s welfare. How might the attacker reason? If her action is to be reasonable, she will need to act in order to participate in some aspect of well being or in order to foster someone else’s participation in some dimension of welfare. Presuming she correctly understands what she is doing as an attack on some aspect of someone else’s good, then she needs to see her attack as justified in virtue of the good she seeks to realize or pursue. It can’t, ex hypothesi, be because the good she’s attacking is valueless. But the good she’s attempting to realize doesn’t, couldn’t, outweigh the good she’s attacking: it’s not commensurable with it. So any purposeful attack on an acknowledged basic good in the service of another acknowledged basic good will be unreasonable, because it will involve treating a genuine good as if it weren’t a genuine good, or as if it could be rationally subordinated to another genuine good when it can’t.

Another way the point is sometimes made by NCNL theorists is to say that attacking a basic good directly amounts to the choice to make being an attacker of basic goods part of one’s identity. Thus, Grisez talks about treating oneself as giver of life and death when one chooses to attack someone’s life.

There’s obviously more to be said about this argument, and my purpose here is not to spell out all of its ramifications or to defend it against all possible objections. The point of this post is to talk about the degree to which the NCNL approach to natural law theory might be able to justify something similar to a Rothbardian NAP. But I wanted to outline the basis an NCNL theorist might offer for the Pauline Principle so it would be clear how the NCNL version differs from other versions of “Don’t do evil to bring about good.” No detailed moral principles are presupposed: all the argument needs to get off the ground is the recognition that certain aspects of welfare are, indeed, aspects of welfare and that they’re incommensurable and non-fungible.

There are multiple princples of practical reasonableness, according to the NCNL theorists. The other one that matters most for our purposes here is the Golden Rule. As the NCNLs formulate it, it amounts to: don’t make arbitrary distinctions among persons. In particular, (a) one shouldn’t make distinctions among persons except when in reasonable pursuit of intelligible aspects of human flourishing (friendship, for instance, requires distinctions between friends and non-friends) and (b) one shouldn’t, in any case, treat others—even when in otherwise reasonable pursuit of an intelligible aspect of welfare—in a way such that one would be resentful if one were treated that way oneself.

This principle, and the other practical principles that needn’t concern us here, are all, on the NCNL view, absolute and exceptionless. That is, there is never a time when it is reasonable to ignore the Golden Rule or the Pauline Principle. But there’s one fairly obvious difference between the two. The Pauline Principle rules out certain generically specifiable action-types absolutely. For example: any instance of targeting noncombatants in war-time is fairly clearly going to be an instance of purposefully causing harm to one or more basic aspects of well being. So it’s possible to be quite clear in general terms about various sorts of conduct that will always be inconsistent with the Pauline Principle. And this means, in turn, that someone potentially on the receiving end of such conduct will have an absolute right not to be subjected to the ill effects of that conduct.

Note that the Pauline Principle is quite compatible with causing unintended but foreseen harm, harm as an anticipated but unsought by-product or side-effect of action intended to realize or pursue a genuine good. (Thus, it can allow for the use of force to defend oneself or others: one’s purpose in this case needn’t be to cause harm, but simply to repel or resist an attack.) But the fact that the harm isn’t purposeful or instrumental doesn’t mean it’s automatically permissible. There will be multiple constraints on bringing about unintended harms. But the most important will be the Golden Rule (to which I’ll come in a moment): one may not impose a risk of unintended but anticipated harm on someone else if one would resent the imposition of a similar risk, in comparable circumstances, on oneself or one’s loved ones.

It’s clear that the Pauline Principle provides very solid grounding for the person-aspect of the NAP. Any purposeful or instrumental violence against a person’s body, mental health, or peace of mind will clearly be ruled out by the Pauline Principle; using force to defend oneself or others will be permissible, but imposing unreasonable risks of harm on others won’t.

It’s not as clear, though, that NCNL theory can ground the property-aspect of the NAP. That’s because property rights, from the NCNL perspective, are rooted in the Golden Rule.

Just as there’s an absolute right not to be treated in a manner inconsistent with the Pauline Principle, while there’s also an absolute right not to be treated in a manner inconsistent with the Golden Rule. But what the Golden Rule requires will vary far more from situation to situation than what the Pauline Principle requires. Thus, mid-level general norms that flow from the Golden Rule—like Keep promises or Avoid rudeness—may admit of a variety of exceptions.

The NCNL theorists begin from what they see as essentially Aristotle’s point of view: everything in principle belongs to everyone, but there are good reasons to give responsibility for each thing to someone or some group of people in particular, for the benefit of all. Their view, in effect, is that property rights flow primarily from the Golden Rule. This basic principle fairness, along with some contingent but persisten facts about human nature and the human situation, impose some limits on what might count as a just property regime. Finnis focuses primarily on three (the labels are mine):

incentivization: in general, a just property system will be one that facilitates people’s contribution to the productivity of a community’s economy through the use of incentives; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would incentivize people to engage in productive activity as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
stewardship: in general, a just property system will facilitate stewardship—taking good care of property, cultivating and developing it responsibly, and preventing it from falling into disrepair; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would likely foster the effective stewardship of property as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
autonomy: in general, a just property system will be one that facilitates people’s autonomy—their freedom to determine the contours of their own lives and major life choices without intrusion by others; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would hep people to be autonomous as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.

Each of these rationales is plausible and persuasive, but I suggest that several others might also be relevant, too (thanks to a variety of philosophers and social theorists for suggesting these to me):

generosity: in general, a just property system will be one that makes it possible for people to be generous; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would enable people to be generous as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
reliability: in general, a just property system will enable people to rely on their expectations that otherwise just property rules will continue in force, that decisions made about individual claims in light of such rules will be respected, and that otherwise just property titles will be respected; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would honor people’s past expectations or enable them to depend on their expectations in the future as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
productivity: in general, a just property system will be one that ensures that property is put to its most productive use; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would ensure that property was put to its most productive use as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
compensation: in general, a just property system will be one that makes it possible for people to receive, and likely that they will receive, compensation for the goods and services they provide to others; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would enable people to be compensated for providing goods and services as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
identity: in general, a just property system will take reasonable account of people’s identity-constitutive attachments to pieces of property; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would protect people’s identity-constitutive attachment to pieces of property as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
simplicity: in general, a just property system will be one that features rules that are simple—that are easy to formulate, articulate, learn, and apply; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule is simple as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
peacemaking: in general, a just property system will be one that features rules that minimize conflict—notably by clearly allocating responsibility for particular things to particular people; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would be conflict-minimizing as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
coordination: in general, a just property system will be one that coordinates people’s interactions by making possible the aggregation of information about their interests and needs and the determination of appropriate production patterns and distribution levels for goods and services; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would foster this kind of coordination as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.

These additional concerns (1) add to the support for a system of private property provided by the considerations adduced by the NCNL theorists and (2) further constrain the kind of systems that could reasonably count as just.

But notice what they don’t do:

They don’t, I think, leave reasonable people with a single option as regards property rules as regards either (a) acquisition or (b) the extent of control. (Thus, to take an obvious example, while I think they do count against at least radical versions of Georgism, they don’t seem to provide one for a definitive basis for deciding between Lockean and occupancy-and-use views, and they certainly leave open, say, the length of time property might need to be abandoned before title might pass to a homesteader.) They point to considerations that ought to matter when, say, a defense association or agency in a stateless society is determining which property rules to enforce, but they leave open the question just what option is finally chosen. (And this seems perfectly reasonable to me: first, some empirical facts and some implications of particular ideas are unclear and need still to be discovered or understood more fully, and experimentation among different property rules, within the constraints of justice, will facilitate greater understanding; second, different people’s personalities will obviously vary, and some people will simply be more comfortable with some rules than other people will be—and there seems no reason why they shouldn’t be able to proceed accordingly.)
Then, there’s the separate point that, whatever general rules are compatible with the Golden Rule in light of these considerations, these rules won’t be exceptionless. To take an obvious example: both Aquinas and Locke explicitly acknowledged that emergencies justified violating otherwise stable, reliable property rights. Aquinas maintains that when a need is “so manifest and urgent, that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand (for instance when a persion is in some imminent danger, and there is no other possible remedy) then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property by taking it either openly or secretly, not is this properly speaking theft or robbery.” Aquinas fairly clearly has in mind here primarily cases like the impending avalance example David Friedman floats in The Machinery of Freedom. But Locke, so far from being the exemplar of “possessive individualism” Macpherson and others claimed him to be, is if anything more expansive in this regard. He writes: “charity gives every man a title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise” (his focus isn’t on the casuistry of emergencies, and it’s not clear to me whether he thought this norm ought to be enforceable via self-help). Locke and Aquinas both seem to see property rules as fuzzy in just the way one might expect them to be if they were rooted in a general principle of fairness like the Golden Rule.

Despite these qualifiers, it’s clear that a given legal system (say, the set of legal rules articulated and enforced by a given protective association or defense agency) could and should provide for just the sort of space for individual freedom Rothbard and others want. It’s also clear, though, that a set of property rights grounded in the Golden Rule wouldn’t yield the property-aspect of the NAP, at least if the property-aspect is understood to require acceptance of Lockean rules regarding the acquisition and maintenance of property title and to preclude any violation of an owner’s right to exercise unqualified exclusive dominion over her justly acquired property.

To put it another way: the NAP seems to imply that a person’s property in material realities external to her person should be treated as equivalent to her person, as an extension of her body. Just as it would be wrong to attack a person’s body, on this view, it would be equally wrong, and wrong for the same basic reason, to attack her property.

This is often defended by noting that justly acquired and maintained property is acquired either through the owner’s labor or as a gift from someone with ownership rights rooted in acquisition through labor. Thus, to commandeer someone’s property is in effect to commandeer her labor, and thus to make her a slave.

There’s something intuitively appealing about this equation of person and property, but it also leads to some implausible conclusions. I would be unlikely to judge that breaking into my mountain cottage to escape an avalanche was equivalent to enslaving me. I am inclined to suspect, though I won’t argue the point here, that this is because, while some objects are integrated into our identities, most are not.

In any event, the NCNL theorists clearly demarcate body and property quite clearly. They would be inclined, I think, to treat regarding one’s property as an extension of oneself as an instance of fetishization. That doesn’t mean, though, that they couldn’t come to endorsing something like the property-aspect of the NAP. Several aspects of the NCNL view are relevant to this conclusion.

The basic fairness considerations embodied in the Golden Rule will count against the cost shifting represented by many of the property regulations the NAP is rightly seen as attacking. Most people will resent being asked to pay for the realization of other people’s æsthetic or cultural preferences or to pay for services they could obtain more inexpensively on the market; and, if they do, they will be unreasonable if they ask other people to to do so. More generally, whatever judgments people tend to make about their own property rights will be judgments fairness will demand that they accept when reaching conclusions about others’.
Our participation in basic goods will characteristically involve the use of property. Attacks on someone’s property will sometimes be ruled out precisely because they are also purposeful or instrumental attacks on basic goods.
Similarly, people often protect their property using their bodies, and attacks on their property will thus sometimes be inappropriate precisely because it involves using force purposefully or instrumentally in ways that harm people’s bodies.
Acting out of hostility toward someone by harming her or his property will obviously be ruled out.
As I have suggested, the overlapping considerations I have adduced in support of a property rights regime tend to tilt in the same direction, and so to provide strong justification for largely undisturbed property rights. Someone who may quite reasonably not resent one sort of imposition on her property may well resent another, and so be precluded from engaging in or supporting a similar sort of imposition on someone else’s.

These considerations seem clearly to support a set of robust property rights, even if they are likely to prove consistent with a broader range of rights than those characteristically defended by Rothbardians. Adding strength to the protections they seem likely to afford is the fact that, as I’ve already noted, the NCNL theorists offer a set of rock-solid arguments against classical utilitarianism and its various consequentialist cousins: global consequentialism is, they show persuasively, incoherent. That doesn’t mean, of course, that expected consequences are never relevant to deliberation about reasonable action; but their reasonableness is to be guaged in light of the Golden Rule rather than in terms of a putatively objective metric that allows a “best overall state of affairs” to be identified. Lots of different options are consistent with the demands of reason.

For the NCNLs, however, this very open-endedness provides a justification for the existence of the state, and so for some restraints on property. The coordination of the actions of people in a situation in which there is no single best choice requires, they maintain, that someone articulate and enforce ground-rules, and people are obligated to obey whoever seems most likely to be able to do this effectively. Because—according to the NCNLs—people are responsible for contributing to worthwhile causes and helping others, the state is free to make them do so when they do not seem inclined to do so themselves.

In effect, the NCNLs seem to argue, the Golden Rule that justifies respect for property also justifies its limitation by the state (since it is largely the Golden Rule that is seen as lying behind the state’s claim to authority).

The NCNLs are very clear that there is no natural right to rule. No one is inherently in charge of anyone else. However, their concern for order leads them to believe that it is reasonable for some people to accept the authority of others, and so for some people to assert authority over others, to ensure that social interaction is stable and appropriately structured.

The rejection of a natural right to rule places a very large question mark against the claims of any authority figure. So, too, does the Golden Rule, insofar as most people do not relish subjection to others’ authority, and so act unreasonably when they assert authority over others, and insofar as state-made law would seem frequently to interfere with the property rights that flow from the operation of rules reasonably reflective of the considerations I adduced earlier in support of a property system, rules the Golden Rule would give most people in most situations good reason to endorse.

The success of the NCNLs’ argument for state authority depends, in short, on the implicit view that the state is needed to preserve social order and coordinate social interaction. But there is ample evidence that people can organize themselves peacefully without the state’s supervision, and ample theoretical support from economists and biologists for the view that we should expect them to be able to do so. So it is difficult to see why endorsing the Golden Rule should require support for the existence and operation of any state.

In addition, there is also ample evidence that states are profoundly wasteful—costing far more than non-state actors performing similar tasks would cost—and destructive—causing enormous human loss through war and repression. There are also excellent reasons to expect generally bad behavior on the part of states in light of the probability that those most likely to come to occupy leadership positions in states will be ambitious and power-hungry; that even decent people will readily be corrupted both by the opportunities power presents and by special interests able to concentrate on wooing them; and that even those who lack their integrity will be unable to match the distributed intelligence of free people engaged in voluntary cooperation.

Finally, the NCNLs’ argument for the state seems limited insofar as it presumes that the state is well-equipped to determine how much people ought to give to worthwhile projects, and to which projects they ought to give. Since the relevant duty is, in the Kantian sense, imperfect—that is, it is precise neither as to quantity nor as to recipient—there is something deeply arbitrary about the state’s presuming to enforce particular ways of fulfilling it. And attempts to enforce particular ways of fulfilling seem unavoidably likely to prompt a struggle for the largesse the state proposes to dispense that will only increase the odds of corruption.

In short, the Golden Rule need not be seen as providing any support for the authority of the state, once it is apparent that alternatives to the state are readily conceivable and that the state is a source of enormous mischief.

My own heterodox version of NCNL theory, as articulated here in contrast to the version defended by the orthodox NCNL theorists, does not yield a simple, straightforward version of the NAP or a simple, straightforward argument for anarchism. NCNL theory gives pride of place to an account of human flourishing and a set of basic practical principles. Taking human welfare seriously and acting on the practical principles does lead to respect for a robust, if not fully determinate, set of property rights and provides, contrary to the NCNL theorists’ own evident view, little reason to approve of the existence and operation of an entity with the authority to attack people’s bodies or take their property.

Floor Fees and Thick Libertarianism

2010-02-21T10:38:00.000-08:00

Readers of this blog, especially those who have long since concluded that partisan politics is useless or worse, can be pardoned if they’ve avoided reading about or participating in the ongoing dispute over the tentative decision to charge a floor fee to delegates participating in the 2010 Libertarian National Convention.

I think the debate is worth attending to, though, for anyone who cares about the conversation focused on “thick” or “cultural” libertarianism.

That’s because more than one participant in the floor fee debate has clearly emphasized that certain kinds of practices in voluntary organizations don’t seem to fit comfortably with libertarian principles.

Typically, proponents of “plumb-line” libertarianism maintain that any conduct that is consistent with the non-aggression principle is unexceptionable from a libertarian standpoint, even if there may be good reason to object to it on other grounds. Some go even farther, seeming to dismiss objections to conduct that is consistent with the NAP as reflective of essentially arbitrary cultural or æsthetic preferences.

Comments made in the course of the floor fee debate suggest that thoughtful libertarians instinctively disagree.

Thus, for instance, David Nolan observes that he believes “there’s a strong INVERSE correlation between a person’s eagerness to cite Robert’s Rules of Order and their gut-level devotion to liberty. RR is a procedural manual, devised to maintain order at large and otherwise unwieldy meetings. It is not a code of law, and I instinctively distrust anyone who revels in its minutiae.”

Obviously, any voluntary organization should be free to adopt and follow Robert’s Rules of Order. And a critic of thick libertarianism might well say that nothing else really needed saying. But Nolan’s comment suggests that he thinks caring about freedom means caring about more than just the baseline question whether disputes are resolved at gunpoint. Perhaps this is because it’s hard, psychically, to care about freedom from aggression if one doesn’t care about freedom from arbitrary impositions by voluntary organizations, so that cultivating the habit of resisting such impositions is a necessary preparation for resisting aggressions. Or perhaps a preference for freedom of movement within a voluntary organization flows from the same moral principle or sensibility that grounds opposition to aggression. Or perhaps the explanation lies elsewhere. The point is that, as Nolan rightly sees, being a friend of freedom means more than just being an opponent of aggression.

Or consider this set of observations from Carolyn Marbry: “Does anyone else find it ironic to the point of tragedy that the LIBERTARIAN party is so rule bound and governed to death that it’s being held hostage by professional registered parliamentarian high priests on this point . . . ? What could possibly be the problem with leaving this rather important deviation from precedent to be decided by the delegates in St. Louis, rather than ramming it down the throats of the party under the guise of appeal to authority? Wasn’t this the same group of folks who said that what was done to Lee Wrights was legitimate before the party’s own judicial committee tossed it out? These people are NOT Libertarians (which, I understand, is why they were consulted in the first place), they’re apparently NOT familiar with our philosophy (e.g., opposing taxes and favoring SMALLER government with LESS POWER, power concentrated at the lower eschelons of government if not entirely with the governed rather than at the top…) . . . .”

Again: not being “rule bound and governed to death” is, Marbry rightly emphasizes, a problem in a voluntary organization, as is “ramming . . . [a decision] down . . . [people’s] throats . . . under the guise of appeal to authority.” The basic libertarian political conviction that what matters is “SMALLER government with LESS POWER, power concentrated at the lower eschelons of government if not entirely with the governed rather than at the top” is obviously relevant, Marbry realizes, to the ways in which a purely voluntary society operates. That’s because, I would argue, an underlying philosophy of freedom comes to expression both in opposition to aggressive violence and in a commitment to giving people in any context as much opportunity as possible to make the decisions that affect their lives, rather than being subject to decisions made by others.

The same point is made repeatedly in related contexts. One proponent of the floor fee has argued that “pay as you go” and “don’t subsidize” are basic libertarian principles—not just limits on the behavior of the state. And another libertarian stressed to me recently that commitment to a style of party organization reflective of support for Lenin’s “democratic centralism” is itself un-libertarian.

What this admittedly unscientific sample suggests to me is that thick libertarianism is not an exercise in leftist subterfuge: it’s the common sense of many libertarians, who see no reason to isolate their more narrowly political convictions from their sense of fairness more broadly.

Being a libertarian means more (though never less) than being opposed to settling disputes with guns. It means caring about freedom, and freedom can be suppressed within voluntary organizations and relationships. Libertarians who aren’t radicals clearly understand that there’s a non-arbitrary consonance, something that extends beyond mere æsthetic or cultural preference, between libertarian politics and concern for freedom even when it’s not being infringed on violently. The point that people snarkily dismiss “thickists” for making seems intuitively obvious to ordinary libertarians (if there are such creatures) who don’t spend most of their free time reading Charles Johnson or Kevin Carson or even Kerry Howley. I think that’s a good sign.

And Most of the Rest of the Republicans?

2010-02-18T07:58:00.000-08:00

I was puzzled to get a note from a friend today referring to “the libertarians, and most of the rest of the republicans.”

If this comment means that libertarianism is a sub-set of republicanism, that seems to me somewhat unlikely, since, in the history of political thought, “republicanism” is frequently used to name a quasi-communitarian tendency that is directly at odds with the classical liberalism that is at the root of modern libertarianism.

OK, that may have been a cheap shot.

But if my friend means that libertarians or Libertarians are Republicans, that seems like a cheap shot, too. First, of course, there are aggressive left-libertarians, in whose successes I have more than one vested interest, who would be inclined to oppose not only Republican militarism but also Republican support for corporate privilege and hierarchy and Republican social conservatism. Second, even the right-libertarians like the Lew Rockwell crowd, would unequivocally oppose the Republicans on war and corporate privilege, and, while many of them are social conseratives, would oppose using force to impose their preferences on others, in stark contrast to the Republican right.

I’d suggest that far more Libertarians (as in participants in the Libertarian party) are right- or left-libertarians of this sort than are “pot-smoking Republicans.” There are some of the latter, of course—some Catoids may fall into this camp, for instance. And perhaps there’s some argument for labeling some (not all) of the “liberventionists” (inside and outside the Libertarian Party) who favor some anti-peace military policies as quasi-Republicans. But I think the principled small-l libertarians—committed (whether they’re on the right or the left) to peace, social tolerance, and the abolition of the privileges that give corporations and economically favored elites their power—who make up the bulk of the Libertarian party and the bulk of the libertarian movement (which includes lots of people outside the party), need to be distinguished very sharply from the Republican-lite crowd.

Justin Raimondo (AntiWar.Com seems to have been a principal focus of my friend’s comment) is surely in the former camp, not the latter: he’s a self-confessed conservative (see his book on the American conservative movement), but also an anarchist, and so fundamentally different in orientation from anything resembling the Cold War and post-Cold War American Republican party. As a supporter of and occasional copywriter for AntiWar.Com, I think it’s crucial to emphasize how far the AWC crowd (like most real libertarians and Libertarians) is from anything remotely Republican.

A Gem from the Late C. Wright Mills

2010-02-17T01:49:00.000-08:00

“You’ve asked me, ‘What might you be?’ Now I answer you: ‘I am a Wobbly.’ I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation than to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat. […] I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It’s a kind of spiritual condition. […] A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He’s also a man who’s often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn’t made up himself. He doesn’t like bosses—capitalistic or communistic—they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom.”

—C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings, ed. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, intro. Dan Wakefield (Berkeley: University of California P 2000.) 25.

We could get distracted by Mills’s use of “capitalism.” But for now, can I stipulate (whether or not this is historically accurate—though of course I’m interested in Mills’s own thinking) that by “capitalism” he doesn’t mean “free markets” but, rather, something closer to “social dominance by capitalists”? With that stipulation in place: what’s your instinctive reaction to the sentiment he expresses?

Suppose he had written this:

“You’ve asked me, ‘What might you be?’ Now I answer you: ‘I am a lover of freedom.’ I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation than to political ethos, and I take ‘freedom-lover’ to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat. I am a freedom-lover, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a freedom-lover is? It’s a kind of spiritual condition. A freedom-lover is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He’s also a man who’s often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn’t made up himself. He doesn’t like bosses—corporate or political—they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is the kind of freedom I love.”

Would the slight changes in wording make any difference?

Rothbard and the Free Spirits

2010-01-31T21:42:00.000-08:00

Murray Rothbard was one of the first people whose work I read, along with Hayek and Nozick and Milton Friedman and RAW, when I first began to engage with libertarian ideas as an adolescent. The creativity and range of his thought have always impressed me enormously, and it's certainly shaped my perception of what a credible libertarianism might amount to.

But I am not, for all that, a Rothbardian, and I find the growing affection for the Right that marked Rothbard’s later years unfortunate. My reaction is hardly unique among left libertarians, and will surprise no regular reader of this blog. Still, I couldn’t resist commenting on the following passage from a 1986 letter, which struck me as particularly troubling:

"It seems to me that a lot of our literature is geared to 'free spirits,' to people who don't want to push other people around, and who don't want to be pushed around themselves. In short, the bulk of Americans might well be tight-assed conformists, who want to stamp out drugs in their vicinity, kick out people with strange dress habits, etc. And, if so, we won't win if we make our pitch exclusively to a minority of free spirits whom we ourselves may culturally or esthetically agree with, and thereby lose the right-assed majority."

—Murray N. Rothbard, letter to David Bergland, June 5, 1986, qtd. Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus 2000) 263-4.

In this paragraph, Rothbard appears at best to be trivializing as a matter of aesthetic or cultural preference what I would regard as the moral center of libertarianism. I don't much want to be part of a movement made up of people who want to push others around. Why would he?

I don’t pose this rhetorical question to prompt a flood of responses from people who want to detail Rothbard’s strategic posture in the mid-’80s. I just want to register my own conviction that the desire to avoid being pushed around, and to avoid pushing others around, is at the heart of what it means to value freedom. Of course, what matters most is the absence of violence. But while “anything peaceful” may be (surely is) better than “anything aggressive,” aggression-free relationships can still involve a lot of pushing around. And the same concern to avoid being pushed around at gun-point rightly animates the desire not to be pushed around by HOAs and corporate bosses. The sort of counter-cultural free-spiritedness from which Rothbard wished (at least in 1986) to distance libertarians seems to me to be one of the things that matters most about the libertarian movement. I hope that, without damning Rothbard or seeking to bury him, we can opt, not to dismiss it but to nourish and celebrate it.

Zinn and the Libertarians

2010-01-31T19:38:00.000-08:00

I am puzzled and disturbed by the reactions of some libertarians to the work of Howard Zinn, on which a lot of attention is obviously being focused just now because of his death last week.

Zinn was an anarchist. He opposed war and imperial violence. He rejected corporate privilege. He highlighted the absurdity and injustice of telling the story of a society from the vantage point of the people atop its pyramid of power.

Libertarians should have no time for the view that history ought to be narrated from the perspective of kings and presidents and generals and their aristocratic and corporate compatriots. One need not agree with every aspect of Zinn’s reading of history to agree that those who employ “the political means” of acquiring wealth, those Comte and Dunoyer and Rothbard and Long and Konkin would all, in their different ways, have identified as the members of the power elite, are not history’s heroes, and that glorifying the American state with triumphalistic tales of its emergence and prowess is no task for lovers of freedom.

Zinn was not infallible. He seems to have exhibited some of the same naïveté about some political regimes as the great libertarian hero, Karl Hess (who was, for instance, surprisingly sanguine about Mao’s China in the mid-’70s). Despite being an anarchist, he seems to have affirmed the New Deal, which represented a dramatic increase in statism and corporatism.

But, whatever his errors, he was right about what mattered most: the destructiveness of war, the injustice of colonialism and conquest.

The threat of violence backs up all of the state’s commands. But the organized, large-scale violence of war and conquest is the worst thing the state does, the thing that makes the state far too dangerous to be tolerated.

Anyone who opposes aggression, anyone who claims to sign on to the Non-Aggression Principle, must see opposition to war and violent conquest as absolutely central to her or his political commitments. That point was thoroughly clear to Murray Rothbard, whose opposition to militarism never wavered even as his political alliances changed: to be a libertarian, to be an anarchist, was about this if it was about anything.

So I don’t know what to make of libertarians who, disagreeing with Zinn about economic theory or objecting to what they take to be his views of some illiberal regimes, ignore his commitment to the most important, the most central principle of all.

Hyper-Minimal States vs. Protective Agencies

2010-01-17T11:18:00.000-08:00

So, consider this a continuation of the conversation I began a few months ago about the “state-anarchy continuum.”

Begin with what I'll call a “hyper-minimal state.”

It claims a continguous territory, but the territory for which it is responsible is very small: perhaps between 50 and 2,000 sq. km.
There are no restrictions on emigration or immigration.
Anyone whose property is contiguous with the border may secede at will.
The state performs only two functions: it operates a police force and a court system, with the latter responsible only for resolving property, tort, and contract disputes.
One of the state's courts will hear a case regarding a property, tort, or contract dispute only when the parties have already obtained a decision from a private arbitration/conciliation/mediation entity regarding the dispute and wish to appeal it.
The only role of any of the state's courts with respect to an appeal from a private entity's decision regarding a dispute is to determine whether the parties consented to the jurisdiction of the entity, intended that it be final, and received a clear decision from the entity consistent with the substantive and procedural rules regarding which the parties agreed when entering the dispute.
The only role of the state's police agency will be to prevent or end the use of force associated with the attempt to resist a judgment by a private arbitrator/mediator/conciliator or to protect someone's person or property against an attack not carried out under the color of law.
There is no system of taxation. The police force and the court system are operated using a combination of user fees, donations, and volunteer work.
There are private for-profit, not-for-profit, and volunteer security providers with whose operation the state ordinarily does not interfere.

The interesting question, I think, is, In what does this putative's state's identify as a state consist?

It's not in the limitation on the right to secede. After all, if there were nothing that qualified on other grounds as a state in operation in a given territory, it's not clear what secession would mean: there would be nothing from which to secede.

So: is this putative state a state? Would it qualify as a Randian “final arbiter”? Is it ultimately different from a protective agency and, if so, how?

I have some instincts about this, but before articulating them I'd like to know how readers react.

Anarchists and HOAs

2010-01-01T15:04:00.001-08:00

A number of broadly libertarian thinkers, including Gordon Tullock and Spencer Heath McCallum, have suggested that private owners—condominium owners linked by interlocking agreements (Tullock) or developers leasing property to residential or commercial tenants—could regulate land-use and related matters in the absence of the state’s heavy hand.

I found myself thinking about these issues again in connection with a conversation that erupted on my Facebook page today. The focus was this article, brought to my attention by Radley Balko. One very thoughtful friend raised the question of crafting a specifically libertarian response to the problem posed by the ongoing conflict described by the article.

For me, the story serves as a very pointed reminder of why I don’t think HOAs and similar arrangements as optimal ways of organizing social relations without the state’s intervention. I wouldn’t wish the stresses associated with dealing with an HOA on anyone else. Surely anarchists can come up with more creative ways of structuring our lives together.

In any event, it strikes me that a libertarian response might include one or more of the following elements:

1. Non-Enforcement Under the Title-Transfer Theory? I’m not a particular fan of Rothbard’s title transfer theory of contract, but it occurs to me that there is perhaps an argument to be made that, on this theory (depending on whether one judges that there is any sort of title transfer in an HOA), the relevant sort of contract wouldn’t be enforceable at all (on the part of a court committed to Rothbardian principles, at any rate).

2. Money Damages Rather than Specific Performance as the Appropriate Remedy? Even if one does think the contract ought to be enforceable, I think it’s worth asking what sort of remedy ought to be available. It’s not obvious, at any rate, that the right remedy here is specific performance—perhaps it’s money damages. Certainly, I’d vote for this option over specific performance.

3. Non-Enforcement Per a Protective Agency’s Contract? It seems to me to be perfectly consistent with even a strictly Rothbardian anarchism (one different, therefore, from my own variety in a number of ways) for my own protective agency to decide in a situation like this that it wouldn’t provide enforcement services—provided its contract with users specified that its court system reserved the right to engage in the development of rules in common law fashion in the service of equity (no doubt the situation would be different if its contract specified that would it provide enforcement services in any and all cases, but [a] it seems unlikely that any credible agency would bind itself in this way and [b] “enforcement” still needn’t mean requiring specific performance, but might instead mean securing money damages).

4. Non-Violent Protest? A further libertarian response here might obviously involve non-aggressive protest, boycotting, shunning, etc. Someone engaging in this sort of response wouldn’t be arguing for a change in general legal rules related to the enforcement of contracts, but would be asking that the HOA reconsider its own rules, something any non-violent objector presumably has the right to do.

I’d be interested in readers’ reactions both to this specific story and to the broader questions it raises about the organization of social life and the resolution of conflict in a stateless society.

Can a Libertarian Also Be a Conservative?

2009-12-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

For interested readers, here’s the text of my (unsuccessful) submission to this year’s Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize essay contest.

* * * * *

Depending on the meaning of conservative, it may be that a libertarian should be a conservative, that a libertarian might be a conservative, or that a libertarian should not be a conservative.

A libertarian, I take it, is someone who is for liberty and against aggression. The libertarian doesn’t like to be pushed around, and doesn’t like to see other people pushed around, either. The libertarian will likely affirm some version of what I will call the libertarian principle, and will have good reason as well to embrace the libertarian ideal.

In its strongest form, the libertarian principle holds that someone may rightly use force against the person or property of another only to prevent or end an unjust attack or to secure compensation for the damage done by such an attack. On weaker versions, the initiation of force, while infrequently permissible, must meet very demanding requirements.

The libertarian ideal calls for real freedom in all aspects of life. The libertarian need not, and likely will not, suppose that just any action that does not involve the misuse of force is morally reasonable. Conduct that is not aggressive can, and frequently does, amount to the mistreatment of others. Often, this mistreatment will reduce their freedom to make choices about their own lives. Someone motivated by the libertarian ideal will challenge such mistreatment even while granting that it may be narrowly consistent with the libertarian principle and may not reasonably be met with the use of force.

Whether a libertarian can or should be a conservative will depend on what a conservative is. I consider ten sorts of conservative here—the traditionalist, the organicist, the fallibilist, the localist, the hierarchicalist, the culturalist, the fundamentalist, the constable, the marketeer, and the warrior.

For the traditionalist, reasoned discourse is embedded in a tradition. We all start somewhere; we’re always already on the way. There is no way to avoid beginning with the intellectual inheritance we receive from parents and teachers, friends and neighbors, churches and synagogues, books and films. And there is, in addition, good reason to take it seriously: inherited convictions have already been sifted; there has been considerable opportunity to assess their significance and implications. Being a traditionalist doesn’t mean ignoring challenges to tradition, nor does it require the unrealistic assumption that traditions are hermetically sealed and clearly demarcated. The traditionalist can perfectly well engage in potentially transformative critique. But the traditionalist’s critique won’t proceed from the assumption that intellectual activity can avoid beginning somewhere.

By an organicist, I mean someone who thinks that a society or community is more like an organism than it is like a machine and who is consequently doubtful that societal problems can reasonably be understood as engineering puzzles to be resolved using technical expertise. The organicist is deeply suspicious of the view that deliberate planning is an effective way to promote a community’s flourishing, doubting that any rational decision-maker possesses, or could possess, the knowledge and skill required to do a better job at structuring social institutions than the generations of people who have slowly shaped and reshaped those institutions. The organicist maintains that the social world created by the winnowed wisdom of the past deserves far more respect than any utopia constructed by the deracinated intellect of a would-be rational planner.

The fallibilist’s emphasis is not on the preservation of hallowed social institutions but on the value of distributed knowledge. The fallibilist doubts that any one actor knows or could know all the things known by all the members of a society. Like the organicist, the fallibilist emphasizes the planner’s fallibility—but, in this case, not as a reason to preserve, say, the church or the monarchy, but rather as a reason to leave people’s voluntary interactions alone.

For the localist, a sense of place is a vital component of human flourishing. The kind of intimate knowledge of one’s roots and one’s companions offered by links with a particular place enables one to live a genuinely human life. And local institutions operate on a human scale, permitting people to make decisions about matters they actually have some chance of comprehending and allowing individual voices to be heard and to make a difference.

The hierarchicalist supposes that people flourish in ordered relationships of authority, deference, and mutual responsibility. On the hierarchicalist’s view, the existence and maintenance of social rank acknowledges the differences in ability, temperament, and training that actually obtain among people in any society. Everyone benefits when those equipped to command do so and when those suited to be followers understand and accept their places in the order of things.

The culturalist believes in the objective superiority of the intellectual, scientific, literary, æsthetic, and political convictions and products of a particular cultural tradition—practically speaking, almost always his or her own. People in all cultures ought to acknowledge the preeminence of these convictions and products, and attempts to downplay their importance—by arguing for the influence of gender bias on science, urging the inclusion of texts by authors from marginalized groups in the literary canon, or seeking to render educational curricula multicultural—should be rejected as prejudiced attacks on reason and objective value.

The fundamentalist seeks to preserve a set of religiously inspired norms of right conduct. These often concern family, gender, and sexuality, but they may also have to do with criminal punishment, military strength, or existing patterns of ownership which are thought to enjoy divine sanction. From the perspective of the fundamentalist, these norms are worth conserving through the use of force and social pressure because their value has been revealed (and perhaps because respecting them has been commanded) by God (or an equivalent source of supernatural sanction).

The constable is horrified by the sense that the bonds and norms sustaining a civilized society are rapidly dissolving, and thus aggressively supports the maintenance of ‘law and order’. Fearing disorder, the constable is quite prepared to use whatever means seem necessary to suppress rioters and the violent, but also those whose unconventional behavior—drug use, say, or sexual non-conformity—seems to threaten established boundaries and practices. The constable rejects as naïve and sentimental the attempt to explain misconduct as the result of social rather than individual pathology and challenges as unfair to actual and potential victims, and to all those supportive of social order, attempts to refashion the criminal justice system in ways that enhance the legal rights of criminal suspects. The constable is suspicious of individual rights of self-defense because they undercut the power of the authorities to maintain order. And the constable insists on the merits of retribution and deterrence as central goals of the legal system.

The marketeer seeks to conserve a sphere of economic life that is free from the intrusion of the state, one in which hard work is rewarded and the strong and capable are acknowledged for their skills and gifts. The marketeer resents the state’s incursion into a formerly autonomous region of society and regards much of this incursion not only as inept and restrictive of freedom but as involving the objectionable coddling of the weak and lazy.

The warrior’s primary concern is the establishment and maintenance of strong internal and external defenses against threatened attacks by alien forces. The enemies with whom the warrior is concerned may vary: they may be Communists or jihadists, for instance. Whoever they are, however, the warrior is committed both to deterring and defeating them militarily and to preventing their insidious infiltration and subversion from undermining the institutions of the warrior’s society. This commitment characteristically entails support not only for substantial military spending by the state (and often the active employment of military force to threaten or attack the foe of the day) but also for the use of heightened surveillance, limitations on the procedural protections available to those suspected of terrorism or espionage, the use of torture, restraints on speech and assembly, and other changes in law and policy the warrior regards as necessary to defeat the enemy.

III

No doubt one person may be both a localist and a constable, a traditionalist and a warrior. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these categories. But it is useful to distinguish diverse strands of conservatism, some of which are, and some of which are not, compatible with the libertarian principle and the libertarian ideal.

The libertarian can quite comfortably identify as a traditionalist. Traditionalism is essentially a thesis about epistemology, and accepting the libertarian principle and the libertarian ideal is surely quite compatible with endorsing this thesis: the libertarian can (but need not) maintain without contradiction or tension that a rational argument must begin from within some tradition or other.

The libertarian can also be an organicist. Support for established social institutions can be quite consistent with the libertarian principle, provided they do not maintain themselves using aggression. Whether it is also compatible with the libertarian ideal is another matter. The ideal will obviously be incompatible with support for established institutions that restrict freedom in one way or another without using force—that limit people’s employment opportunities because of ethnicity or sexual orientation, that constrain marriage partners on the basis of religion. But it will pose no barrier to accepting others which do not limit freedom or which enhance it.

The libertarian certainly may, and almost certainly should, be a fallibilist. The truth of fallibilism provides one of the strongest arguments for the libertarian principle and the libertarian ideal alike.

Localism is certainly consistent with both the libertarian principle and the libertarian ideal. There is nothing about supporting geographically localized institutions and communities that violates the principle. And support for such institutions and communities need not run counter to the ideal—indeed, it can help to foster freedom by safeguarding and extending structures that make it easier for people to control their own lives. But a larger, more cosmopolitan, anonymous environment may offer some people much greater freedom to shape their own identities and relationships than a relatively self-contained community in which behavior is closely monitored and conformity is enforced. The libertarian ideal does not rule out localism, but it disposes the libertarian who embraces it to regard some varieties of localism, which value small-scale communities precisely because they can (or without regard to the fact that they do) enforce conformity and exclude or regulate various sorts of minority groups, with well-deserved suspicion.

Purely voluntary social hierarchies are narrowly compatible with the libertarian principle: if people want to defer to others, the libertarian will say, no one has any business using force to stop them from doing so. But preserving the constraints on freedom created by hierarchies will be inconsistent with the libertarian ideal; people who own this ideal cannot be hierarchicalists.

In addition, though it does not justify regarding genuinely voluntary hierarchies themselves as unjust, the libertarian principle will certainly provide good reason to challenge injustices that leave people with few choices in the real world apart from the acceptance of hierarchical conditions. The violent dispossession of smallholders and the arbitrary use of state power to provide land grants to hierarchs or their ancestors create conditions in which force may or may not currently be necessary to sustain hierarchical institutions and behavior patterns; but the forcible nature of the events making possible those institutions and patterns clearly calls into question the justice of current conditions, and thus their compatibility with the libertarian principle. Of course, it is doubtful that many, if any, actually existing hierarchical societies are even currently voluntary: the threat of state and private violence clearly helps to maintain deferential attitudes and behaviors; the libertarian principle certainly calls for libertarians to reject hierarchicalism in these societies.

The libertarian principle is compatible in principle with culturalism. Libertarians are not cultural relativists, and they rightly emphasize the significance of particular cultural traditions for the emergence of libertarian ideas in the West. On the other hand, while the libertarian principle might permit someone to be a culturalist, libertarians could have good reasons for questioning culturalism, including evidence for the independent emergence of libertarian ideas elsewhere. And the libertarian ideal will prompt the libertarian to resist varieties of culturalism that not only challenge particular ideas but that also lead to the effective silencing and exclusion of particular people—or, indeed, that seem in some way to legitimate aggression against them. Culturalism need not be racist or sexist, but the libertarian, aware of its potential to be both, will embrace it tentatively at best.

To the extent that the fundamentalist employs state power—as through the criminal law—to punish (say) the sexual non-conformist, the libertarian must clearly object: such a use of force is paradigmatically aggressive, undoubtedly in violation of the libertarian principle. And even when the fundamentalist does not employ force to suppress dissent, but uses less overt varieties of social pressure to penalize harmless behavior, the libertarian ideal must surely lead libertarians to disapprove. Libertarians may certainly be religious; but it is hard to see how they could be fundamentalists in the sense considered here.

The libertarian has every reason to value the security of person and property. But the constable often appears to favor the use of force to maintain established social boundaries and conventions, and to value order more than liberty; conflicts with the libertarian principle are almost inevitable. The constable’s dismissal of procedural safeguards for criminal suspects may not itself be aggressive, and need not be inconsistent with the libertarian principle. However, the libertarian, instinctively suspicious that state power can be abused, will be inclined to favor its persistent limitation. Certainly, the libertarian principle will rule out the use of the ‘third degree’ and of torture in the course of interrogating prisoners.

While the libertarian will surely welcome the deterrent effects of the legal consequences suffered by those who harm others, the libertarian principle likely rules out deterrence as an independent justification for the imposition of those consequences. Whether retribution is consistent with the libertarian principle is subject to debate, but it is clear that libertarians have often tended to regard the tort law system as providing a more satisfactory means of dealing with harm to others than the criminal law, not least because the former, unlike the latter, can impose liability only when real harm has occurred and must (ordinarily) proportion damages to the actual extent of the harm. By contrast, the criminal law the constable seeks to enforce can penalize people for conduct whether or not it involves demonstrable harm and whether or not the penalties the law imposes reflect the magnitude of any actually occurring harm.

The libertarian principle is clearly inconsistent with imposing criminal penalties on people for the victimless offense of keeping and using weapons to defend themselves and others. And the constable’s concern to maintain the capacity of the authorities forcibly to secure order seems inconsistent with the libertarian ideal; the libertarian as such has no brief for the preservation of existing structures of authority. Finally, the defence of social order which the constable sees as a crucial objective will often appear to the advocate of liberty as a means of suppressing welcome variety and of enforcing conformity with arbitrary norms. The consistent libertarian will have little or no reason to regard being a constable as appropriate or desirable.

The libertarian is, of course, an enthusiast for markets. For an authentically free market is a prime example of a pattern of social interaction characterized by the absence of aggression. So the libertarian will often have good reason to make common cause with the marketeer. At the same time, however, the libertarian will want to emphasize that in no political environment in today’s world is there anything remotely like a free market. This is both because of ongoing state intervention on behalf of privileged elites and other favored groups and because the conditions of the playing field on which economic actors meet reflect the effects of past injustices that have consistently and violently benefited some groups of people at the expense of others.

The marketeer will often resist interference with the current distribution of property rights in a given society, whatever its origin; but the libertarian will be much more likely to favor potentially radical measures designed to rectify past injustices. In addition, the libertarian has no particular reason to endorse the marketeer’s moralizing about market conditions; and the libertarian who acknowledges the libertarian ideal as an essential component of libertarianism will surely want to emphasize that some economic conditions that do not involve the misuse of force are nonetheless objectionable because they minimize freedom and reduce people’s effective capacities for responsible action. The libertarian will sometimes find the marketeer a useful ally; but the libertarian should not, I think, want to be a marketeer except when being a marketeer does not involve accepting naïve beliefs about the origin or dynamics of actually existing markets.

The libertarian certainly need not be a pacifist. But the libertarian principle counts very strongly against participation in or support for almost all of the wars in which states engage, because they are frequently pursued for unjust ends and are almost always conducted using unjust means. The libertarian principle also counts against torture and interference with civil liberties. And the libertarian ideal militates against the endorsement of a stance whose underlying purpose seems often to be to maintain the power and prestige of the state.

In some cases, libertarians should be conservatives; in others, they may be; in others, they should not be. Libertarians should be fallibilists. And doubtless they should be traditionalists if traditionalism makes sense philosophically. They ought to embrace truly free markets, but they should be marketeers only if doing so is compatible with rejecting assumptions that some marketeers embrace. They may, but need not, be organicists or localists—provided they reject approaches to social life that enforce conformity and suppress dissent. They might be culturalists, but they should be thoroughly wary about some of culturalism’s associations. They have good reasons not to be hierarchicalists, and overwhelming reasons not to be constables, fundamentalists, or warriors.

MakerBot and Deletionism

2009-09-27T18:29:00.001-07:00

I had never heard of desktop manufacturing before I began reading the on-line drafts of Kevin Carson’s bracing Organization Theory. But when I read Kevin’s discussion of the concept, I was floored—and very excited.

MakerBot is a new (at least to me) addition to the industry. And for anyone interested in a decentralized manufacturing model, its arrival on the scene ought to be of some interest for its own sake.

But I want to use its appearance as an occasion for a rant on another topic.

A few minutes ago, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a Facebook status update alerting people to MakerBot’s existence. He wrote that he was surprised by the absence of a Wikipedia article about the company, which struck him (surely rightly) as doing exciting things.

I decided to look on Wikipedia for an article on MakerBot. Not surprisingly, someone who’s Wales’s friend on Facebook (or, perhaps, if his status updates also appear on Twitter, one of his Twitter follower) created a stub regarding the company in short order—no one would have had time to respond by writing a full-length article. And, equally unsurprisingly, someone flagged this micro-article for immediate deletion.

I’m a passionate inclusionist: I just don’t see who loses if an article someone wants incorporated in Wikipedia stays (as long, of course, as its not shown to be factually in error and uncorrectable). I hope this one does.