Charles: How, under anarchist principles, do you prevent the rise of tyrants?

Shoot them. Jesus.

If your objection to anarchism is that it does not provide magic wands for resisting evil, then anarchism stands guilty as charged. But so does statism: magic wands like that don’t exist, and given the abattoir that was the 20th century, I hardly think that the State has a very good historical record of providing people with the means to stop relentless tyrants.

I loved the movie, but Evey’s character was definitely slighted, to say the very least.

Evey was aged up (at the opening of the book she’s only 16), given a somewhat less dismal life, and portrayed as much less bewildered and dependent on V. I’m sure that in doing this they thought they were providing the film with a Stronger Female Character. The problem is that in the book strength is something that Evey gains over the course of the plot, and so the changes end up destroying about half of her character development.

‘Given today’s high rate of violence against gays, and given that Roy Moore — then an Alabama state judge, and still today one of the most popular political figures in Alabama — wrote a judicial opinion urging the use of “the power of the sword,” up to and including “confinement and even execution,” against gays, the notion that gays face no threat in the current political climate strikes me as bizarre.’

Well, moreover, the society pictured in V is England under an openly fascist regime. Whatever Huebert thinks about the condition of gay men and lesbians today, historical fascist regimes have historically done things like, well, sending gay men and lesbians off to concentration camps, it seems pretty tin-eared to complain when V for Vendetta has its fictional fascist regime do the same thing.

Robert:

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.

nobody.really:

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

Radgeek, since you’re willing to be here doing Left Libertarian 101 for us, I hope you won’t mind answering a couple of questions: Do you think there should be a government at all? And if so, how should that government be financed?

Amp, I’m an anarchist, so the answers are “No,” and “N/A.”

Minarchist libertarians do exist, usually either (a) favor some very low level of taxation and try to come up with an excuse for it, or else (b) favor various kinds of schemes for voluntary government funding (donations, lotteries, voluntary “contract fees,” etc.). I think that (a) simply means being inconsistent (because there aren’t any good excuses under consistent libertarian principles), and (b) solves one problem with governments but not others (it makes the funding non-coercive, but not the activities that are being funded; the governments imagined by minarchists still exercise a coercive monopoly over the legal authority to exercise defensive force). In principle there could be minarchist left libertarians (I guess the folks at Freedom Democrats qualify), but as it happens most of the other left libertarians I know (Roderick, Kevin Carson, MDM, et al.) happen to be anarchists too. I’m not entirely sure what the reasons for the disproportionate anarchist tilt is, although I suspect it has something to do with the Left’s greater historical willingness to turn its skepticism towards the cops, the military, and other supposed forces of Law & Order, which means knocking the last leg out from under the minarchist state.

Robert:

… Taxpayers, as part of doing their return, put down the departments they wish to fund with their taxes that year, on a percentage basis.

Well, that would be better than what we have, in that it gives people more power over how their money is used and would serve as a powerful roadblock to sustaining unpopular and expensive programs. I think that the standard moral objections would still apply: people have a moral right to refuse to have any of their money committed to any government project, if they want, because the government hasn’t got the right to take it. But if there were a realistic political proposal on the table for moving from our current system to one like this, which is less invasive and lets people choose less destructive uses for their money, then I’d support that as a provisional step along the way towards freedom. (I feel the same way about other reformist measures that give people more control over the gov’t, such as term limits, voter initiatives, etc.)

Brandon:

I don’t like theft any more than you do, but we both know they don’t take that coin here.

My reason for stressing the moral illegitimacy of theft over arguments based on judgments about the recipients, is that it’s true, not that it’s agreed-upon. That said, if you’re really interested in strategically attuning your argument to the audience, I think you’re mistaken if you suppose that you’re going to have an easier time convincing people here to share your views about the poor than you would just trying to convince them that they shouldn’t force people to support their poverty relief programs — even if those programs are noble and valuable. Moreover, the rewards are greater: if you can make a case there, you’ll also have made a case for libertarian politics as a whole; whereas if you make your case based on the qualities of the recipients you haven’t made any case against other forms of forced redistribution, most of which are just as bad if not worse.

As far as the statistical wonkery goes, you cited federal entitlement programs as a reason to believe that “monied interests” aren’t exercising a heavy influence over politics. But you can’t count Social Security and Medicare spending as examples of the greater influence of the poor and middle class over the government unless they actually tend to financially benefit the poor and middle class at the expense of “monied interests.” But they don’t; if anything fact they are paid out disproportionately to the rich. Of course middle class people are most of the recipients, because nearly everyone is a recipient and most people are middle class. But the higher your annual income (up to the cap, currently about $90,000 / year) the more money is paid out to you, and richer people tend to live longer than poorer people, so the money ends up being disproportionately paid out to well-off people as compared with the elderly paupers the system was allegedly designed to serve. In any case, since the program is a more-or-less universal entitlement program, it can’t be passed off as a class redistribution scheme; the main redistribution of wealth involved is (1) from young people to old people, and (2) from ordinary people to the government.

Jake Squid:

I trust the government more than the unfettered free market to allocate resources for the poor because there can be laws requiring allocating resources to the poor in a government whereas, by definition, you can’t have those laws in an unfettered free market.

Why do you trust the people in the government to make the right laws for tackling poverty, if you don’t trust people outside of the government to make the right decisions of their own accord? Is there any evidence that elected politicians have some kind of special knowledge or virtue that the rest of us don’t when it comes to poverty and the people facing it?

Also, government spending is not decided by individuals. Senator X can’t decide that he is putting his percentage of the budget towards building a spaceport on his own. He needs approval of the rest of the Senate & the House to get that done. In Libertarian utopia, Senator X (who would determine only how he spends his own money) could decide to use all his capital towards building Senator X spaceport.

I consider this a virtue of libertarianism, not a vice. If somebody wants to sink their own money into a spaceport, I see no reason why he or she shouldn’t. What I object to is my money being sunk into foolish and destructive projects — or even noble and constructive ones — without my permission.

As a practical matter, Senators and Representatives get funding for all kinds of outrageous pet projects all the time; most of their colleagues don’t care about the projects that the tax money is going to, but they don’t see any reason to object, since it’s not their money that’s being wasted, and since by logrolling you can get support for your own pet projects in return. If you think that individual people are inclined to do all kinds of stupid things with their own money, why would you think that they are going to be more responsible with other people’s money, when they need only the approval of a few score of like-minded and similarly self-interested colleagues to sink it into any damnfool project they dream up?

SemiPundit, I’m not claiming that G.W. hasn’t been a very bad President and indeed a rotten person. He has.

I’m asking for some historical perspective. Several of our early Presidents were personally slaveholders and fought politically for the advancement, protection, and perpetuation of chattel slavery. Several engaged in direct campaigns of genocide against various Indian nations during the early, middle, and late decades of the 19th century. James K. Polk, a large-scale slaveholder and leading fighter for the Slave Power, also fabricated a war of aggression with Mexico on grounds no less destructive and duplicitous than Mr. Bush’s war on Iraq, which ended with the conquest of half their territory. Woodrow Wilson, a militant white supremacist who instituted Jim Crow in the federal government and imprisoned and deported political opponents (including feminists, anarchists, civil libertarians, draft opponents, etc.), dragged us into one of the worst wars in world history after running as a peace candidate in 1916.

Acting like Bush’s (genuinely rotten) tenure could even plausibly qualify as the worst, compared to slavers, genocidaires, and the rest, either displays remarkable myopia, or else trivializes what can only be described as crimes against humanity.

Worse than Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder and the perpetrator of genocides against the Seminole and the Cherokee?

Worse than Franklin D. Roosevelt, the four-term President who built concentration camps on American soil?

Worse than Harry S. Truman, the only President to engage in nuclear warfare?

Worse than Dick Nixon, the race-baiting, domestic-spying, nearly-impeached, bomb-dropping butcher of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia?

George W. Bush is only even a plausible candidate for the worst President in history if history only goes back about 20 to 22 years. Perspective, please.

Brandon Berg:

Whether poverty is the result of bad luck or bad behavior is a very important factor in deciding how to deal with it.

Of course it’s true that how you should treat poor people depends partly on the reasons that they are poor — just as the way you should treat anyone depends partly on their virutes and vices. What I deny is (1) that there’s any reason why, if people are poor because they are foolish or bad or failures, we shouldn’t try to provide for some forms of relief for them anyway (because I don’t think that anyone deserves to suffer like that); and (2) that believing (1) or not believing (1) has any bearing at all on the libertarian arguments against the legitimacy of Social Security, TANF, etc.

If the poor aren’t responsible for their lot—if the only difference between them and us is luck—then maybe income redistribution isn’t such a bad idea. On the moral side, it’s not their fault. And on the practical side, there’s not much moral hazard. It’s not as though subsidizing bad luck is going to encourage people to be less lucky.

Brandon, this only follows if you think that moral hazard, incentive structures, moral desert, etc. are the only reasons that you shouldn’t rob one person in order to help out another. But I don’t think that: I think that robbing one person in order to help out another is immoral. Not because I have any opinion at all about the virtues or vices or the right way to treat the recipient, but rather because of the way that treats the victim. That’s the essential libertarian case against government “welfare” programs. The rest, whether true or false, is a bunch of policy wonkery, and secondary to the moral question of whether or not you can legitimately force people to go along with your favorite social programs. Isn’t it?

First, if everything is controlled by moneyed interests, then why do we still have a corporate income tax, and why do the rich still pay the highest personal tax rates?

Brandon, you are aware that there are forms of taxes other than the personal income tax, aren’t you?

Why does something like 70% of the Federal budget go towards giving money away to the lower and middle classes?

… It doesn’t.

About 19% of the broader budget goes directly to military spending (not counting legacy spending such as veterans’ benefits) and about 9% to repayment of interest on the federal debt. Unless you intend to claim that the rest of the broader budget not devoted to “giving money away to the lower and middle classes” constitutes 2% of the broader budget, it’s not mathematically possible for the Feds to be spending 70% on that.

It’s worth noting here that the two (by far) largest entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare, at 21% and 14%) that the government maintains are not means-tested and are funded by the regressive FICA tax. Characterizing either program as “giving money away to the lower and middle classes” would be a serious error.

Jake Squid:

Brandon Berg is a perfect example about why I fear (even more than currently) for the poor under a free market system. People can’t avoid making moral judgements about others and inevitably people will want to see the poor as at fault for their own poverty (we don’t like to believe that it could happen to us, therefore the poor are morally bad or stupid or whatever). That being the case, you wind up with far fewer resources dedicated to alleviating poverty.

Jake, if you think “people” (I’m not sure whom or how many you intend to include) “can’t avoid making moral judgments about others,” and that “inevitably,” “people” “will want to see the poor as at fault for their own poverty,” then why do you trust the government to responsibly and adequately provide for respectful, helpful poverty relief?

The government’s made of people, too, isn’t it?

Jake Squid: Have there been any real world examples of this?

I’m not sure what you’re asking for. Real world examples of government intervention and ossified structural poverty hurting poor people and aiding the rich? Sure, lots. Kleptocratic government is a pretty well-known phenomenon, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Or real world examples of the benefits of free markets for the worst-off? Well, sure; but it’s harder here because there are so many different cases to consider and because there isn’t any way to quantitatively compare actual state-distorted markets with counterfactual free markets under otherwise equivalent circumstances, or actual free markets with counterfactual state-distorted markets under otherwise equivalent circumstances. But here are some examples of ways in which freer markets would help the worst-off more than the better off: by ending the “War on Drugs” (which imprisons and destroys the lives of lots of people, usually the worst-off people, because the best-off people rarely take the fall); by stopping police harassment of women in prostitution; by ending agricultural subsidies that systematically subsidize huge planters and agribusiness to the detriment of the rural poor; by drastically reducing food prices currently inflated by those same agriculture subsidies and price floors (which matter more to the worst-off than to the best-off); by repealing the (regressive) payroll tax, thus directly increasing poor people’s income by a greater percentage than rich people’s; by removing regulations and red tape that systematically constrain small competitors against established corporate players; etc. There’s a lot of different ways in which government intervention harms the poor, and a lot of different ways in which prosperous free markets tend to help the worst-off most of all (N.B.: as opposed to pseudo-prosperous mercantilist markets of the sort that bond traders and politicians like to promote). I realize this hasn’t clarified very much but I’d really probably need a more specific question to give a better illustration or explanation.