Comments Elsewhere

Robert:

For an individual or minority group which disagrees with those laws to demand that they not be enforced is for that group to de-legitimize the state.

What my argument “de-legitimizes” is the government inflicting injustice upon innocent third parties, even if it should scribble down a permission slip for itself to commit the injustice, and call it a “Law.” If the state can carry out its policies without doing injustice to innocent third parties, then more power to it. If the state cannot do its business without invading the rights of innocent people, however, then its business had jolly well better be left undone. This has nothing to do with whether a faction of one or more people “disagree” with the law; it has to do with whether or not the law violates innocent people’s rights (that is, whether or not it involves pushing around people who aren’t doing any violence themselves).

Robert:

The legislature can point to a big chunk of people who affirmatively chose to give them power; you can’t.

I don’t give a damn. Might does not make right, whether from the force of arms or from the force of numbers. The rights of drug users to be let alone to make their own decisions does not depend on permission from the powerful, or from the majority.

La Lubu: Rad geek, the argument you present privileges wealthier drug users. Because let’s face it, most heroin addicts are not going to be capable of holding down an average, everyday job.

La Lubu, I’m not suggesting that heroin addiction is a good idea, or that it’s not a problem. I’m denying that heroin addicts should not be thrown in prison for using heroin. If people claim to be concerned about the welfare of addicts then they should not suggest restraining them and locking them in a cage with a population of violent criminals. If people claim to be concerned about the welfare of people other than the addicts (e.g. victims of street crime, or victims of violence or neglect in the home, or whatever), then the issue for the legal system to address is theft, battery, neglect, etc., not the drug use.

It’s certainly true that many people cannot afford rehab on their own. That’s a damn shame, but it is not a justification for forcing rehab on them against their will. It’s a good reason to try to make it available to poor people (through financial aid, sliding-scale programs, etc.). It’s not a good reason to (a) lock them in prison or (b) threaten to lock them in prison unless they participate.

Your suggestion that I’m unfamiliar with the violence involved in drug trafficking, or with the the way that people are victimized by drug users in their family, is unfounded, and it’s frankly shitty of you to presume otherwise without any knowledge of me or my family. I’m well aware of the former, and my own family has far too much personal experience with neglect, abandonment, and physical abuse that was tied to alcoholism and other drug addictions. I’ve nowhere claimed that irresponsible drug use isn’t a problem; what I’ve claimed is that the massive government violence involved in drug prohibition isn’t a reasonable response to those problem.

Robert:

Nonsense. They have legitimate authority through the assent of the governed, not because of some intangible (and empirically unprovable) characteristic of their policies.

The “assent” of an electoral majority is certainly not sufficient for legitimacy. Even if the majority of the electorate approved of, say, the Nuremberg Laws, or the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that would be absolutely no argument for the legitimacy of the Nuremberg Laws or the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. And it would be no argument for enforcing either of them. Unless you are willing to accept a totalitarian theory of political authority, then you are, I’m afraid, stuck with recognizing that there are in principle some limits on what a government can enact, even if that government is backed by a majority of the electorate. (It does not matter whether the authority consists of 535 legislators, or of 50%+1 of the voting public; the point is that there are things that nobody at all has the right to do to other people.)

Now, you could claim, if you wanted, that some policies are more monstrously unjust than others, and only the really really monstrous ones should be refused on the grounds of their injustice. But then you’ll have to give some argument for why the massive violence involved in drug prohibition (including the violence of arrest and incarceration, and also the violence that results from driving the market underground) is only on “merely unjust” rather than “monstrously unjust” side of the ledger. Or you could claim, if you wanted, that any atrocity that’s backed up by an electoral majority under a democratic constitution really is legitimate, no matter how unjust it is. But if you want to argue that, then you’ll have to explain where you think that electoral majorities get the right to treat dissenters that way.

Me:

Demanding that “the people,” or the government, stop imposing their will on nonviolent drug users, does not involve overriding the decisions that they have made for themselves. It involves overriding the decisions that they have forced on innocent third parties, but those are “decisions” that neither “the people” nor the government had any right to make.

Robert:

But it does. They decided to elect a certain set of representatives, and those representatives made certain laws, …. And so saying drug laws are invalid because we find them unjust — when the populace disagrees — is an attempt to override the legitimate choices of other people.

You’ve missed the point. You’ve also seriously misunderstood, or misrepresented, my position.

Your rhetoric about overriding the decisions of others is plausible only insofar as you’re referring to the decisions that people make concerning themselves. It would be, for example, presumptuous of me to try to override your decisions about what sort of education you should get, or where you should work, or what size of a family you should have, or how you should decorate your living room. I have no business making you change your plans about these things against your will, even if you would end up with a better education, or a better job, or a more rewarding family life, or a more attractive living room, as a result. But I have every right to “override” decisions that you are trying to make for me: if you are trying to force me to go to the college that you prefer for me, or take the job that you prefer for me, or decorate my living room the way you want me to decorate it, then I have every bloody right to “override” that decision, because you have no right to make the decision for me.

You cannot sensibly posture as wanting to let people alone to make their own decisions here while also endorsing the enforcement of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition just means interfering, by the use or threat of physical force, with people’s decisions about how to spend their own time and what to put into their own bodies. When I suggest that drug laws should not be enforced, the only decisions I am “overriding” are the decisions that the governing majority wants to impose on peaceful third parties against their will. And I don’t give a damn about whether or not the governing majority is left alone to push innocent third parties around. That’s not something they have the right to expect.

Further, I’d like to note that I did not claim that any law is void because “we” find it unjust. The claim is that laws are void if they are actually unjust, whether or not anyone finds them so. If I thikn the laws against slavery are unjust, and so defy them by enslaving my neighbors, that does not mean that the laws are void, and does not making enforcing them illegitimate. It just makes me monstrously wrong about the moral status of the laws in question. The issue has to do with how a law actually treats the people subjected to it, not how third parties look on happen to react to that treatment.

Robert:

The point is that among the population of drug users who are also criminals (other than the “crimes” they commit in the ordinary process of getting and having their drugs), there is a big chunk who don’t want to stop using. For this group, sending them to rehabilitation (the point of this thread) is worse than useless – not only do they not want to be there, not only are they going to interfere with the progress of the people who do want to be there, but they are going to go out and commit more crimes while they’re in/around the non-lockup rehab process. For this group, locking them up is the only interventionist approach that makes any sense. The reason we need to lock them up rather than rehab them is that if we put them in rehab, they will continue hurting people outside the system.

Yes, Robert, but that’s a reason to lock them up for theft, or robbery or whatever crimes against person or property that they have been committing. It has nothing at all to do with the proper punishment (if any) for drug use.

But it’s punishments inflicted for drug use that Amp was addressing in his cartoon. I can’t find any plausible reading of the cartoon on which it would be suggesting that you shouldn’t imprison thieves or robbers who also happen to be drug addicts.

Robert,

Certainly there is: to maintain the validity of our system of government.

A system of government is not more important than millions of innocent people’s lives and livelihoods. If maintaining the “validity” of the former requires destroying the latter, then the system of government deserves to be ignored, altered or abolished.

If democratically-elected legislatures pass laws, and those laws are not odious to the constitution under which they operate, then the laws should be enforced regardless of whether they are reasonable or just.

Why?

Enforcing an unjust law means using violence against innocent people in order to secure an aim that is unworthy of securing. Neither electoral majorities nor Constitutions have total authority over the people subject to them, and if they have legitimate authority it is only because of the justice of the policies they endorse. Laws or constitutions that endorse unjust violence against innocent people have stepped outside of the boundaries of their legitimate authority, and are no more legitimately binding than criminal compacts or pirates’ codes.

To do otherwise is to imbue some unelected body with the power to override the decisions of the legislature on matters specifically entrusted to the legislature.

It’s not a matter of an “unelected body” having some kind of special authority to veto the acts of the legislature. It’s a matter of the legislature not having any special authority to commit injustice against the innocent. Everybody — not as a “body,” but as free individuals — has the right to ignore or defy so-called laws that the legislature has no legitimate authority to enact: an “unjust law” is no law at all, and the idea that anyone is obliged to carry out an admitted injustice against innocent people is an affront to conscience.

I consider myself smarter and more informed than you. What decisions do you make for yourself, that I should get to override and change in your life, on the basis that I think your decisions are unreasonable?

Is this some kind of joke?

You have things exactly backward. Drug prohibition is founded on the premise that one group of people, who consider themselves smarter and more informed (the government, and perhaps the electoral majority behind them) are entitled to override the decisions of another group of people (drug users), on the grounds that the drug users’ decisions are unreasonable. Not only do they claim to be entitled to override drug users’ decisions about their own lives; they claim to be entitled to force drug users to comply with their judgments.

Demanding that “the people,” or the government, stop imposing their will on nonviolent drug users, does not involve overriding the decisions that they have made for themselves. It involves overriding the decisions that they have forced on innocent third parties, but those are “decisions” that neither “the people” nor the government had any right to make.

Robert:

I generally agree that drug use ought not be illegal.

But since it is, then the justice system needs to treat it like other things that are crimes.

Why?

There is no virtue in rigorously enforcing laws admittedly unreasonable or unjust. Hypocrisy may be a vice, but that doesn’t mean that consistency in evil is a virtue. It is merely relentlessness.

Robert:

Locking them up for the individual petty or not-so-petty crimes they commit to support their habit isn’t really practical; those crimes are the symptom, not the problem.

Drugs don’t rob people. Robbers rob people.

If the existing laws against robbery are not strong enough to stop the robbers, then the thing to do is try to strengthen the laws against robbery, not to enforce a blanket prohibition against any use of addictive drugs. Some drug addicts steal to support their habit, and others don’t; if someone isn’t stealing to support her habit then the government has absolutely no business restraining and imprisoning her for the unrelated crimes committed by other drug users. That’s nothing more than collective punishment being inflicted on peaceful people who have done nothing to deserve it.

Dr. O’Skonsky:

You can’t force anyone to change, but while confined a person gets time to reevaluate their direction in life and remember just what their aspirations were before they got addicted.

It is not appropriate to imprison people as a means of career counseling. Those addicts who see that they have a problem have every right to seek treatment for themselves, and I hope it does them a lot of good. But if they are not interested in seeking help right now, the government has no legitimate right to force them participate in it against their will, or to lock them in a cage in order to try to reform their souls.

Dianne: Not to hijack the thread too much, but then there’s the associated question of why we would jail drug users who are not addicts?

For that matter, why should the government jail drug users who are addicts?

If it’s in the interest of protecting other people from crimes committed by addicts, there are (as you mention above to Robert) already laws against those crimes, without adding drug prohibition on top of it. If it’s in the interest of helping the addicts stop hurting themselves, troubled people stop hurting themselves, then restraining them and locking them in a cage with a bunch of violent criminals seems like a strange way of looking out for their welfare.

Amp,

You’re right about the foolishness of imprisoning drug users. But government-forced “treatment” (which is, in the last resort, always backed up with the threat of prison) is not much better. The whole system of drug prohibition, as such, whether enforced through coercive psychotherapy or through simple imprisonment, is institutionalized sadism against innocent people, being passed off as “for their own good.”

Phil,

The reason you would get banned is because you would be acting like a dick on computers that don’t belong to you. That’s not an appropriate way to deal with WP having policies that you don’t like: don’t disrupt Wikipedia to make a point.

Of course, that leaves open your other question, as to why WP has the policies that it does have, and whether it should have those policies or not. I think the short answer is that WikiPedia, like any other encyclopedia or print source, aims at providing information to its users, not at making the lives of its subjects easier. “Openness and responsiveness” are virtues insofar as they make it so that the stuff WikiPedia says can be audited by readers. They have nothing to do with giving some special control to the subject over what other people say about her or him.

“To those admirers of the minimal state, perhaps now is a good time to ponder the puzzling thrill we get from the current union, a government that we long ago deemed morally impermissible …”

Is this a royal “we”? I, for one, certainly don’t get a thrill from the current union or the (perfectly revolting) theo-nationalist humbug perpetrated on its behalf. Of course, I am not a minimal statist, so maybe I’m not the target audience of this post.

I would note, though, that this is simply looking at the problem the wrong way.

If the question is one of risking your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor in the name of another fucking government, then it’s perfectly reasonable that nobody’s going to be very interested in doing so without layering a bunch of superstition and theo-nationalist humbug on top of the State apparatus.

However, if the question is one of risking your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor in defense of your own freedom against the menace of a would-be tyrant, then I hear sometimes people do get pretty excited about that, even when there’s no crown or flag or bureaucratic apparat involved.

Anonymous,

Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually read anything by Nozick or by Rothbard from beginning to end?

Rothbard does not conclude that children are chattel of their parents. See The Ethics of Liberty, chapter 14: “We must therefore state that, even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a ‘trustee’ or guardianship kind. In short, every baby as soon as it is born and is therefore no longer contained within his [sic] mother’s body possesses the right of self-ownership by virtue of being a separate entity and a potential adult.” Rothbard concludes that children have enforceable rights not to be physically abused, or coerced by their parents in certain ways. He also holds that children and adolescents have an inalienable right to emancipate themselves from their parents at their pleasure, and either grant custody to any other adults who will take them in, or else assume self-ownership by making a living independently. (Since his position both rules out the use of physical coercion to force children to work, and demands that children be allowed to leave neglectful or callous parents at any time, the comments on his position on child labor are simply irrelevant; there is no way under Rothbard’s system that parents can legitimately enforce a demand that a child work for pay.)

On the inalienability of the will, see Ethics of Liberty, chapter 19. Rothbard does not claim that workers can alienate their liberty even in part, or for the number of hours on the schedule. He denies that enforceable labor contracts are based on alienation of liberty at all. He explicitly argues that anyone who signs a labor contract can legitimately stop working at any time — because a mere promise to work is not an enforceable contract; and no-one can transfer title over their body and will — and cannot be forced to pay damages for the lost services that their employer expected. They can only be required to pay back (1) any advance wages they received for services that they did not end up performing, and (2) any “performance bond” that the worker agreed to put up as a conditional substitute if they declined to perform the service. On Rothbard’s theory workers alienate labor power at the moment of actual labor (by using their body and will to transform goods), but not liberty; they retain the right at any time to refuse to do any work, even if they earlier promised that they would do the work, and the boss has no enforceable claims on them whatever beyond the recovery of any money that was conditional on performance of the undone work.

Does the unconditional right to strike or quit guarantee that work will be meaningful, humane, rewarding, etc.? No, of course not, and particularly not under the conditions imposed by State-backed monopolies and anti-worker labor controls. But a bad job that you’re better off not leaving is not the same thing as enforceable slavery, and even if you do think it amounts to something you could call “slavery,” Rothbard makes it quite clear that he’s referring to the latter and not to the former when he discusses slavery and inalienability. Rothbard is clear about his target and adduces reasons, coherent with his thoroughgoing revision of contract theory, for his position. The claim that he is being muddy, inconsistent, or dishonest here is simply not defensible in light of the text.

You may think that some of his positions are wrong (I, for one, certainly do think that some of them are). You may even think that they are crazy. But you do have an obligation to honestly represent what his positions are, not to distort them beyond recognition in order to score polemical points against the top-hatted and monocled cartoons of your ideological opponents. The chief reason I view the Anarchist FAQ negatively is precisely because it engages in this kind of polemical misrepresentation in the frankly pointless attempt to write anarcho-capitalism out of the extension of the word “anarchism.” They would be on much stronger ground if their criticisms were based on a careful attempt to delineate the position and a systematic understanding of the arguments, rather than on the attempt to provide a set of social anarchist talking points against anarcho-capitalists.

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.