Robert: Pragmatism? Left libertarians…
Pragmatism? Left libertarians know that they’re not going to get their wish. (Well, we all know we’re not going to get our wish, but lefties more than most folk.) They have absolutely no expectation of having to govern (or to not-govern) so they can be intellectually pure at no cost.
Robert, that’s may be a good explanation for a number of the “small government conservatives”-cum-libertarians who have drifted in and out of the movement over the past 20 years; but it’s complicated by the fact that most of those folks don’t accept the intellectual arguments for anarchism, either, so if pragmatic considerations are figuring into their beliefs it has to be on a subconscious rather than explicit level.
Objectivists, on the other hand, are both stridently opposed to anarchism and also at least as pessimistic about electoral politics as most left libertarians are, so it doesn’t seem like this explanation will cover the whole field, anyway.
Why would I vote any money for national defense when I can vote for a new construction project in my district instead?
Please. Are you seriously suggesting that submitting the question to the legislature serves to curtail pork-barrel spending? Have you examined the riders on any major spending bill lately? The problems you cite are problems inherent in any system whatsoever in which people have to decide how to allocate money to public goods, including systems in which those people are legislators with constituents to bribe. Making it so that the issue is decided by people who bear none of the costs of their decisions makes it more likely, not less likely, that useless or destructive pork will be put through.
And that’s fine, as far as it goes. But if you want to be free to pursue your interests unperturbed by your neighbor, things get trickier. For that purpose, a state can be really handy.
You need to be clearer about your terminology here. Anarchist libertarians aren’t concerned with whether or not you can “pursue your interests unperturbed by your neighbor.” They’re interested in whether or not you can peacefully pursue your interests without coercive interference from your neighbors. A stateless society can exist peacefully with or without internal hierarchies (in the church, in neighborhoods, in families, etc.), as long as those hierarchies are not violently enforced on peaceful dissenters. I’m a member of the anti-authoritarian left wing of anarchism, so I happen to think that most of those hierarchies ought to be undermined (because they are bad in their own right and also because I think authoritarian cultural structures tend to encourage coercion, even if they don’t entail it). But you don’t have to agree with me about that to be an anarchist; you just need to agree that people ought to be free from the violent enforcement of social hierarchies so long as their “disobedience” isn’t violating anyone else’s rights.
This is not an entirely philosophical proposition, because we can make observations. In real states of nature, real primates tend to live in more or less hierarchical groups. Similarly, we can study how humans live in the absence of functioning governments. Consider Beirut during the long civil war, or Bagdad today, or life outside the walls of medieval villages, or on the high seas or deserts or in the arctic before the days of air travel and radio. To be sure, social norms can arise prescribing a measure of hospitality to strangers even in the absence of governmental enforcement; indeed, both the Inuit and the Bedouin are famous for this. But these norms are insufficient to keep some percentage of the population from taking advantage of the vulnerable. And this fact depresses social interaction and investment to a huge degree.
You could, and people have, used exactly the same kinds of lazy arguments to try to prove that patriarchy, xenophobia, war, rape, torture, etc. are all “natural” and “inevitable” rather than products of specific cultural and political orders. I do not accept those arguments there, and I do not accept them here. Even if you think that there are good ethological or evolutionary reasons to believe that humans are naturally predisposed towards coercive hierarchies (I don’t, but that’s neither here nor there) that does not prove that cultural changes can’t overcome whatever natural predispositions you think that we’re born with, and it doesn’t prove either that we don’t have a moral duty to make those cultural changes. If we were all predisposed to rape or burn down other people’s houses whenever we could get away with it, we’d have a moral obligation to do whatever we need to to counteract that tendency, not just pass it off as the commandment of Nature.
Where anarchy exists, it’s expensive. Yeah, pirates added a lot of drama to the world of shipping, but have you checked out how much shipping has increased as piracy has declined?
You’re aware that a substantial number of pirates during the 17th and 18th centuries were commissioned government agents, aren’t you?
As for the rest, it can be summed up in two rules:
Statist Rule #1: if there are coercive hierarchies in a society, the people at the top of those hierarchies will tend to disproportionately dominate the State apparatus just as they do all the other social power structures. Thus, giving a monopoly on physical force to the State tends to amplify oppression and immunize it from criticism, not to curtail it. Whatever vices and follies you think most people are prone to, there is no reason (other than various theories of “natural aristocracy,” “divine right,” etc., which I doubt you’re ready to endorse) for you to think that those vices and follies won’t show up at least as often in the people who exercise effective control over the government as they do in the general run of the populace. And if they are invested with a monopoly on territorial power, the bad effects of their vices and follies will be magnified in proportion to the size, power, and reach of the government.
Statist rule #2: if you have multiple warring governments vying for control of a territory, you have civil war, not anarchy. Anarchists don’t want multiple warring pretenders to State power; they want no pretenders to State power at all. However, trying to pass off creatures of the State as if they were “anarchy” is often an effective way to discredit anarchism to those who aren’t paying attention, so you can expect statists to do this as often as possible.
Anticopyright.