Comments Elsewhere

I am seriously suggesting that some people will be free riders if you let them.

The question is why you think that “people” have this problem but legislatures don’t (legislatures are, remember, made of people). Free-rider problems become more of a problem, not less, when the people making decisions about how money should spent bear no personal cost for how it is spent. If you’re seriously concerned about the free-rider problem, then you need to think harder if you think that externalizing costs for the decision-makers is the best solution to it.

As a further note on my brusque earlier reply.

Many of the common lines of criticism against anarchist theories succeed only by holding anarchy and anarchists to higher standards than the State or statists are held to. The line of how anarchists intend to stop tyrants (petty or grand) is one of them. Nobody in the world, anarchist or statist, has a perfect theory of how to resist oppression; democratic states, republican states, aristocratic states, constitutional monarchies, absolute monarchies, grand empires, humble city-states, stateless societies (medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland), etc. have all, at some time or another, fallen into tyranny or into civil war; have been conquered in war; have systematized and ritualized forms of violent oppression by one class or caste or sex over another. Revolutions fail; societies decay; things fall apart. Judging from the results of the late unlamented century, most of the powers that be don’t even have a good theory of how to stop that: hundreds of millions of people were murdered because major powers engaged in tyranny and imperial warfare, civil war, terror famines, and genocide, and because even when they were not actively doing these things themselves, they were either powerless or unwilling to do anything to stop the others. So while these are reasonable questions to ask of any theory of social life, a bit of recognition that the topic is hard and that it’s unfair to hold any theory to the standard of needing a complete solution to the problem of evil, would go a long way.

That said, here are some things that anarchists typically stress.

(1) For just about any form of successful oppression, it’s hard to see how introducing the State will dampen the problem rather than amplifying it. If there is a discernible ruling class then it’s a matter of course that they’ll have disproportionate power over the apparatus of the State; if you have a centralized Leviathan that is able to assert and enforce its claims to sole authority then that means a corresponding increase in the capacity of oppressors to violently enforce their will over the oppressed. Without a central state, there is no guarantee that the oppressed will be able to successfully resist the aggression of oppressors, but when a central state with unchallenged police power, military power, intelligence capabilities, etc. is systematically turned against them, the prospects are correspondingly much bleaker. You might say, “But look, what that means is that the oppressed should have access to state power so that they can defend themselves. Wouldn’t that be great?” But then you need to (1) figure out how they are going to get it (magic won’t do) and (2) how whatever means help them to get it (organizing, moral agitation, cultural change, nonviolent resistance, etc.) wouldn’t work just as well, or better, if it were focused on direct action rather than on trying to influence or take control of government decision-making bodies.

(2) As a strategy for resisting potential new forms of oppression, a Leviathan state also seems like a risky strategy at the very best. Tyrants very often solidify their tyranny by taking over centralized structures of power that were already in place; it’s much harder to build an effective tyranny from scratch than it is to consolidate power over existing police, intelligence, military, etc. forces and then to turn them to your ends. In anarchy, any projects or organizations for self-defense are voluntary, decentralized, and don’t claim a monopoly on legitimate authority; that means that if a tyrant tries to subvert the existing structures there aren’t institutional barriers to withdrawing from them and setting up new ones that aren’t subject to her or his will. Under territorial states, no such option is available: there’s only one target that needs to be seized, and once it’s seized, the subjects of the state can’t do much of anything about it. The “stability” of an organized power structure is only a virtue if that power structure is, on the whole, benevolent; if it’s malevolent then the last thing you want is for its hegemony to be stable and unchallenged. The problem is how to protect yourself from the malefactors once you’ve already ceded your ability to resist back when times were allegedly good. Actually existing states don’t have a very good record on this count.

(3) To be quite frank, nearly no State in all of recorded history (certainly not the United States, for one) could seriously be claimed to be a bunch of ordinary people banding together to protect themselves from marauders. The band of slavers and genocidaires who founded the U.S. government, to take one example, were pretty explicit that they aimed for the federal government to protect and systematize their own marauding against innocent Africans, African-Americans, and Indians not taxed. It’s not much different elsewhere — the people who oversee the formation of states are typically powerful and concentrated interests who hope to, and do, turn the newly-formed State to the pursuit of their own interests at the expense of the less powerful. The popular liberal myth of government by compact wouldn’t morally justify the State, even if it were true of actually existing governments; but it’s not true. The only “compacts” made have been pirate’s codes, and nothing more.

(4) The strategic question of how to create, sustain, and defend anarchy is an important one to ask, and a difficult one to answer. But it ought to be understood that it is not, actually, the primary issue involved in whether or not anarchism is true. The primary arguments for anarchism are not strategic arguments, but moral ones; it’s not that anarchy is valued because it’s useful to attaining some other goods, but rather because violent coercion is wrong, whatever its effects may be, and the princes, potentates, and presidents of the world make claims of authority over other people that can only be, and are, backed up by violent coercion. So demonstrating that there are tricky problems for anarchists to solve doesn’t mean that anarchy isn’t the right thing to aim for; it just means that what you ought to aim for might be tricky to hit. But nobody said that the right thing has to be easy, or that achieving it has to be effortless. The emancipation of women, civil rights, the abolition of slavery, religious toleration, democracy, etc. have all been difficult propositions, tricky to achieve and difficult to sustain in the face of coordinated and unrelenting resistance. That raises questions about strategy and tactics, but it doesn’t provide any reason for thinking that the goal itself ought to be abandoned.

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.