Comments Elsewhere

Anonymous,

You need to read Section F.2.2 more carefully. They explicitly state that “Libertarian-capitalists support slavery”; they then mention some minarchist libertarians who accepted the legitimacy of enforcing slavery contracts (Nozick and Locke), and then claim that even though Rothbard explicitly rejects their view he has no consistent grounds for doing so. The reasons they give are roughly those I outline above, along with some egregious misrepresentations of Rothbard’s view on children (he did not hold that parents owned them as chattel, but rather that parents “own” children only as trustees for the children’s own eventual self-ownership). The point that you emphasize here (“if there is a demand for enforceable slavery contracts then it would produce a supply for them”) is only a subsidiary response to a point attributed to an anonymous group of “Some of the ‘anarcho’-capitalist type,” to the effect that even if slavery contracts were made, they would be difficult to enforce. The main lines of argument concerning Rothbard are the ones that I mentioned, not the one that you have emphasized here.

Of course it’s true that if there were widespread demands for the enforcement of slavery contracts then there might very well arise agencies that would meet those demands in return for payment. If there were widespread demands for murdering political opponents, or kidnapping, or piracy, then there might very well arise hitmen or gangs to meet those demands for pay. So what? In any society where enough people with enough power want to coerce other people — including in societies with communist, mutualist, or other economic forms, they will find a way to get away with it. But all such agencies are clearly criminal under Rothbard’s theory. Since there is no such thing as the “market freedom” to violate other people’s rights, it is no limitation on freedom to resist such agencies, and it is no restriction of the freedom of contract to treat their “contracts” as completely null and void.

The efforts to show that Rothbard would be inconsistent to reject them show no understanding whatsoever of his contract theory (which does not allow any compulsion of specific performance, and which does not regard mere promises to serve as enforceable), or of his position on the inalienability of the will (which rules out the possibility of selling oneself into slavery by making all contracts for labor service contingent on the contractee’s ongoing consent). They are, frankly, uncharitable to the point of being dishonest. Perhaps Rothbard is wrong about any number of these topics, but the authors have nowhere shown that his theory is inconsistent, or that it is “It is of course [!] simply embarassment” that prevents Rothbard from saying he endorses enforceable slavery contracts.

This is only one of many substantive problems with the discussion of anarcho-capitalist and individualist-anarchist views (mostly in Sections F and G, but also scattered throughout the rest of the FAQ). The complete lack of understanding of Rothbard’s theory of class, or his view of the history of mercantile capitalism (hint: he’s not unaware of the role of State intervention in creating the plutocratic class system), is particularly galling, just to take one example.

Kevin,

I agree that there is a lot of useful stuff in the FAQ and that a lot of useful work has gone into many of the sections. However, it happens to present a picture of individualist anarchism that has been substantially distorted for polemical purposes, and a “discussion” of anarcho-capitalism that basically amounts to a useless rant stitched together with superficial selective quotation. Since individualist anarchism is the form of anarchism I’m most interested in and sympathetic to, and since I think that the polemical assault on anarcho-capitalism, besides being uncharitable and regrettable in its own right, also infects the discussion of individualist anarchism, that tends to give me a pretty negative view of the Gestalt. I do appreciate the work that went into many of the other sections, however.