Comments Elsewhere

M. Sartre: Police, whether ‘good’ cops or ‘bad’ cops, tend to reply, when asked why they are spraying pepper spray in your face, beating you with a baton, or giving you a ticket for handing out free food, that they are only enforcing the law. So the fact that there is no law to be enforced in this case is actually very important.

If you want to think about this on the practical rather than the moral level (a bit odd, unless you are actually involved in the Brown’s case, but whatever), then I have to wonder whether you have ever succeeded in getting a pig not to pepper-spray, beat, or ticket you by getting out a law-book and showing him or her that it would be against the law to do so? Is this a strategy well justified by its success?

robfindlay: Even an anarchist must accept the social-compact on some level, i.e. a group of people decide to do X, Y and Z by some means.

If “a group of people” decide to X, Y, and Z by some means, then the group of people who decided to do it are welcome to get out their wallets and pay for it themselves. Or to find comrades who agree with them and persuade those comrades to pony up some of the costs, too. What they have no right to do is come up to me and demand that I pay for it, even though I never agreed to pay for it, was never even asked whether or not I wanted it, and was given no chance to opt out of it after they decided it should be done.

Anarchism means a consensual society, and consensus means that EVERYONE who is expected to pay for some project must have freely committed themselves to paying for it. Otherwise you don’t have anarchy; you have hierarchy being imposed from the barrel of a gun.