Comments Elsewhere

You wrote: Libertarian anarchists complain that the Katrina disaster was “caused by” the existence of the State (principally the federal government, but really the State as such). This criticism, however, is radically incomplete in the absence of a worked-out account of how things would have been better in the absence of the State.

What, precisely, is it that you are criticizing here? The causal claim, the use of that causal claim as grounds for a criticism of governments as such, the use of such criticism as a negative reason in favor of libertarian politics over the alternatives, or all of the above?

If your complaint includes a complaint against the causal claim, then what has the lack of blueprints for a alternative libertarian solution got to do with whether the evidence for the causal claim is complete or not? (X can be rightly listed among the actual causes of Y even if Z would have caused Y anyway in some remote possible world.) To justify the claim that the structure of government as such contributed to the disaster as it actually happened, you just need to provide evidence from the facts on the ground and some theory connecting those facts with the sort of incentive problems and knowledge problems that government officials have. (Of course you could disagree on the claims about the facts or on the theory; but that’s not the same as saying that the account is incomplete.)

If your complaint is directed against the use of the causal connections to criticize government as such, then it might seem like you have a stronger case; but it only seems that way because it’s easy to mix the criticism up with the use of that criticism to defend anarchy over government. In fact if you’ve succeeded in justifying the causal claim you’ve already done most of the work you need to do in establishing grounds for blame. (Even if it turned out that anarchist responses would fail just as badly — although I don’t think they would; see below — that doesn’t undermine the criticism of the structure of government. If Anytus, Meletus, et al. hadn’t accused Socrates, somebody else probably would have done so anyway; but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be blamed for what they did.)

On the other hand, if your complaint is directed against the use of the causal connections to justify radical libertarian politics over competitors, you’re right that anarchists do need to give some reason to believe that a government-free response to the disaster would have been better than the actual government response (and probably some other government responses that plausibly could have happened). That’s fine; but why in the world do those reasons have to take the specific form of a detailed blueprint that demonstrates a superior, practical response to the situation in an anarchist society? I mean, certainly that would be handy for demonstrating the point. But if there are reasons to believe, from general principles (e.g., general laws of economics or historical or sociological generalizations) that government-free disaster responses are likely to be better, and unlikely to be worse, than government responses, then I see no reason at all why the specific detailed blueprint is necessary to keep the criticism from being “radically incomplete.” (I don’t know how to spell out, in detail, how a medical researcher could go about developing an effective HIV vaccine — if I did I might be a contender for a Nobel Prize — but I do know that you are more likely to find it by doing scientific research than by reading chicken entrails or praying for relief from Heaven.)

Again, you can argue that the anarchists’ are wrong about the general principles that support their claim that free market responses would tend to be better than government responses. But again, that’s arguing that the explanation is wrong, not that it’s incomplete.

You also wrote: I so far have not seen an adequate libertarian-anarchist discussion of that topic.

Just out of curiosity, have you seen an adequate non-libertarian-anarchist discussion of how to appropriately respond to disasters such as Katrina? Do you think that proponents of the State have some kind of leg up here, or just that anarchists don’t have the leg up they think they have?