Assume a group of people, aware of the possibility of conflicts; and then someone proposes, as a solution to this eternal human problem, that he (someone) be made the ultimate arbiter in any such case of conflict, including those conflicts in which he is involved. I am confident that he will be considered either a joker or mentally unstable and yet this is precisely what all statists propose.
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe
(Source: laliberty)
When a consumer buys a product on the market, he can compare alternative brands. … When you elect a politician, you buy nothing but promises. You may know how one politician ran the [government] for the past four years, but not how his competitor might have run it. You can compare 1968 Fords, Chryslers, and Volkswagens, but nobody will ever be able to compare the Nixon administration of 1968 with the Humphrey and Wallace administrations of the same year. It is as if we had only Fords from 1920 to 1928, Chryslers from 1928 to 1936, and then had to decide what firm would make a better car for the next four years…. Not only does a consumer have better information than a voter, it is of more use to him. If I investigate alternative brands of cars …, decide which is best for me, and buy it, I get it. If I investigate alternative politicians and vote accordingly, I get what the majority votes for. The chance that my vote will be the deciding factor is negligible. Imagine buying cars the way we buy governments. Ten thousand people would get together and agree to vote, each for the car he preferred. Whichever car won, each of the ten thousand would have to buy it. It would not pay any of us to make any serious effort to find out which car was best; whatever I decide, my car is being picked for me by the other members of the group. Under such institutions, the quality of cars would decline. This is how I must buy products on the political marketplace. I not only cannot compare the alternative products, it would not be worth my while to do so even if I could. …
— David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
There’s no way to keep governments limited to what Constitutions say. … There is this fundamental problem with Constitutions: they’re just pieces of paper. They don’t grow fangs when governments violate them. … The problem is, how do you enforce [promises and limitations] made at ratifying conventions? And it’s because of [this] problem that we are ultimately reduced to wondering whether written Constitutions can, in the long run, limit governments after all.
—
Related: Lysander Spooner - No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
You can’t have it both ways…
Many statists see the Constitution as an anachronism unfit to set restrains on the modern state. They view those who advocate against federal usurpation of what should be, at most, local concerns as obstructionists to their grand plans.
But as I’ve previously stated: the Constitutional federalism that many libertarians promote is based on the understanding that because the Constitution is the reason the federal government ostensibly has any authority to begin with, and the Constitution is clear that the states which compose the union have only bestowed limited authority to the federal government, then we must at the very least recognize those limitations in power or conclude that the Constitution, and thus the federal government itself, is illegitimate.
So which is it?
Either acknowledge the Constitutional limitations on the federal government’s powers and authority, or trash the Constitution and the federal government with it.
Personally, I’m down with the latter… but we must at minimum get back to the former.
On the Illegitimacy of Democracy
Well, yes, I may have a problem with that (not that I would necessarily interfere, were I an outsider…).
Democracy as a decision-making process can be a legitimate way for group decisions to be made in certain circumstances. For example, a voluntary association - a club, a business, a commune, etc. - may make certain internal organizational decisions based on popular vote or a democratic vote of a chosen few such as a board of directors.
And such uses of the democratic process are valid for the very ways in which they differ from political democracy.
First, agreement is implicit. When one joins a club or invests in a business or moves to a commune, the relinquishing of some of that decision-making power is contractual. No one was forced to join. No one’s membership or participation was required simply for existing, and disassociation/non-participation does not involve having one’s property, liberty, and life violated (fees, taxes, jail, deportation, leaving the country). Unlike living within the arbitrary borders of a government’s declared geography, the individual has a choice as to whether or not to participate and cede such decisions to a majority.
Second, and related to the first, the initial agreement is unanimous. You cannot establish democratic decision-making through a democratic process. In other words, for a group to legitimately use a democratic process to make a decision, all parties must first agree to do so unanimously. So when you say “a country prefers to be a democracy,” such preference must be made by all those who are involved. After all, what is a “country” but a group of individuals (or, less legitimate still, a circumlocution for a government that lords over said individuals)? And, as such, any individual who objects - or, more precisely, does not consent - cannot be bound by the desires of others against his will.
Third, and also related to the first two, only those who agree to participate are bound by the policies of participation: subsequent generations are not automatically beholden to the decisions of whichever ancestor agreed to democratic terms. Everyone who agreed to the creation of the “United States of America” is long dead, yet somehow we are all tied to not only their constructs but the ensuing (and, due to their internal incongruity, even less legitimate) agreements and constructs of later generations. (Which is putting aside the fact that even at the creation of the United States, there were multitudes who not only objected but didn’t even have a say in the matter - women, slaves, natives, among others.)
Fourth, none of the decisions may violate self-ownership in areas that were not specifically surrendered - and even in those cases there must be a just way for consent to be withdrawn. In other words, an individual’s rights and free will may not be violated through a democratic process. Although people may certainly turn over their claims on property or speech or association or whatever if they so wish - they, perhaps through some (again) explicitly agreed-upon penalty or compensation for breach of contract, retain their ability to reclaim use of such rights. As I analyzed in my post on “Alienable Rights”: while one’s ownership is absolute to the point in which any part of one’s self may be sold, traded, gifted, or destroyed so long as such an action does not violate another’s self-ownership, “the nature of the will [is] such that it can only exist in the absolute present and thus no one can voluntarily forsake a future consideration with regards to life and liberty for a past one.”
So, as I stated a few days ago:
Why is “democracy” legitimate? Subset A has more numbers than Subset B or Subset C, ergo all must abide by the wishes of Subset A? That’s tyranny of the majority. That’s a lynch mob. That’s, as the old adage with the unknown originator goes, two wolves and a lamb deciding on what’s for dinner. There is no minority smaller than the individual, and no majority can usurp the individual’s fundamental claims to his self-ownership, his rights to life, liberty, and property.
Political democracy, then, is absolutely illegitimate: how individuals wish to live their lives should not be subject to majority opinion. And it would be majority opinion in the best of cases. Often, voter turnout is such that even Subsets A, B, and C add up to far less than the total affected population. Democracy, as Hoppe explained, “has nothing to do with freedom.”
Wall Street, Anarchy, and Uneasy Alliances
Anarchy may be difficult for some to grasp in the details, and may have manifold variations, but conceptually it is simple: no state. All voluntary associations that emerge from this straightforward pre-condition should thus be allowed.
The collectivist-anarchists add to the abolition of the state a second pre-condition: the abolition of private property. They have consequently aligned themselves with leftist statists, notably in the recent (current?) “Occupy Wall Street” protests, in attacking what I consider to be the symptom instead of the disease:
Unfortunately those most likely to participate in this protest on Wall Street have no interest in understanding the root cause. They would rather address the symptom because to acknowledge the disease would mean a dismantling of their worldview… a worldview in which the state is the great patron, just master, and wise equalizer of all things. In other words, to accept the truth is to rightly acknowledge the state as the evil, bumbling monopolizer of force and destroyer of prosperity and peace that lords over each and every one of our lives.
Uneasy alliances are of course sometimes useful for achieving a greater goal. I’ve been deemed hypocritical for simultaneously championing against statism while participating in active support for Ron Paul. The difference is, however, that unlike the state-expanding leftists whom the collectivist-anarchists align themselves with, Ron Paul actually would make practical changes in shrinking and minimizing the state. In other words, my alliance carries us in the right direction: less state not more. As a father, I have an urgency to pursue all avenues of dismantling the state - from within and without - that I can. Further, Ron Paul serves as a facilitator of educating the masses on individual liberty and self-reliance - a sine qua non to establishing the voluntaryist ideal. Ron Paul is not the solution, of course; no one person is. A voluntary “society” of self-owning, self-governing, sovereign individuals is the goal, and as long as the state persists, liberty remains curbed. As I’ve said: “Ron Paul [is] the next best thing to smashing the state.”
Such alliances aside, the solutions some communal-property (or objective-value) anarchists propose merely replace the state with some other leviathan, some other forceful entity demanding non-subjective offsets to some perceived negative reciprocity. And an anarchy that has a foundational premise as “you may do what you wish, except trade your time in a manner of your choosing” (ie. keep the fruits of your labor) must, then, establish an enforcer of this inherently unnatural condition.
I’ve written about this previously:
“[While] anarcho-syndicalists,” “anarcho-communists,” “anarcho-socialists” [and other such] anarchists may genuinely advocate statelessness, they do not concern themselves with absolute self-ownership. If aggression comes from the collective (instead of a state), then it may be permissible. They demand - and will enforce - certain obligations and reciprocity. These anarchists oppose voluntary associations when they don’t fit a certain ideal (such as employer/employee, or investor/laborer) - and are willing to quash them if necessary.
The bottom line is this: Anarchy simply means “without rulers,” or widely understood simply as “no state.” The extension of this should be that if none of us are ruled - or owned - by anyone else, then we rule and own ourselves. If we own ourselves, no one else has authority to aggress against us. Not only is this a peaceful idea, it promotes progress, self-reliance, efficiency, innovation, wealth-creation, happiness through meeting demands, etc. Anarchy is statelessness, not lawlessness. Anarchy is not chaos, it is emergent, consensual, non-centrally-planned order. And not having “rulers” doesn’t mean we don’t have bosses or other hierarchical sociological structures, it simply means that all associations must be voluntarily consented to by all parties. This is what I believe as an anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist…
So the protests on Wall Street are illustrative of this disconnect. The protesters are right, of course, to deplore much of Wall Street and the myriad ways it uses force to achieve its goals without our voluntary consent, the ways it uses us to protect themselves from their own failures. But Wall Street cannot do any of this without its protector, the state, using its monopoly on force. And if these anarchists truly wish to smash the state yet focus their attention only on the wards of the state (eg. Wall Street) - they’re doing it wrong. They eschew logic when they ignore the true state-crony power structure. Wall Street can only get away with the atrocities it does because the state allows and compels it to.
After explaining voluntaryism/anarcho-capitalism...
Moron: So, then... does that mean you are officially an anarchist?
Me: "Officially"? How, exactly, would one go about making that official?
Moron: I mean, did you, like, write in "anarchist" on your voter registration?
Me: ...
Anarchy without Adjectives?
Well, first, I have a semantic quibble. Though adjectives are grammatical descriptors of nouns, what most actually mean - since the branches of anarchy are typically refered to as “anarcho-communism” or “anarcho-capitalism” and so on - is ‘Anarachy without Suffixes,’ but that doesn’t quite have the same assonant ring to it.
As to the question: I have no problem with those who wish to find ideological anti-state purity through identifying themselves this way. Problem is, the suffixes (or adjectives) are necessary to avert confusion.
“Anarchy” has an unfortunate negative connotation of chaos. Most think of people like the current rioters in London, who are simply criminals and have no philosophical connection to the ideology. Often, these so-called anarchists who tend to wreak havoc at G20 events and the like cry out for more state involvement in their lives through wealth distribution, ecological concerns, union protections, etc. Also, these miscreants promote the idea - through their actions - that anarchy is violence, when truly it should simply mean peace (freedom from state aggression). So, if educating the ignorant masses matters, then omitting qualifiers could make such advances difficult.
For example, capitalism has two separate, legitimate meanings that have little to do with one another. So when I discuss “capitalism,” I specify either “crony capitalism” / “state capitalism” / “corporatism” or “laissez faire” / “free-market capitalism.” Language matters, and to not specify allows people to attach an unintended meaning.
Relatedly, to most who don’t simply shrug off “anarchy” as chaos, “anarchy” typically tends to imply “anarcho-syndicalism” or “anarcho-communism” or “anarcho-socialism.” And while these anarchists may genuinely advocate statelessness, they do not concern themselves with absolute self-ownership. If aggression comes from the collective (instead of a state), then it may be permissible. They demand - and will enforce - certain obligations and reciprocity. These anarchists oppose voluntary associations when they don’t fit a certain ideal (such as employer/employee, or investor/laborer) - and are willing to quash them if necessary.
The bottom line is this: Anarchy simply means “without rulers,” or widely understood simply as “no state.” The extension of this should be that if none of us are ruled - or owned - by anyone else, then we rule and own ourselves. If we own ourselves, no one else has authority to aggress against us. Not only is this a peaceful idea, it promotes progress, self-reliance, efficiency, innovation, wealth-creation, happiness through meeting demands, etc. Anarchy is statelessness, not lawlessness. Anarchy is not chaos, it is emergent, consensual, non-centrally-planned order. And not having “rulers” doesn’t mean we don’t have bosses or other hierarchical sociological structures, it simply means that all associations must be voluntarily consented to by all parties. This is what I believe as an anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist - but alas none of this is what comes to mind when most people hear the word “anarchist.”
I’ve touched on this perceived etymological taint before:
[N]o term is perfectly clean. … “Anarchist” has a number of meanings, some of them directly contradictory. Murray Rothbard, the quintessential anarcho-capitalist, even offered up “nonarchist” as an alternative.
This is why my blog’s subhead is “A Libertarian in Leftywood.” Not only do I admittedly succumb to alliteration, I feel that, to the average person, “libertarian” better reflects my views than “anarchist” (even though I am indeed an anti-statist). Reason being: it makes more sense to be ideologically aligned with the range of libertarians (“voluntaryists/anarcho-capitalists” on one side and “minarchists”/”classical liberals” on the other) than with non-suffixed anarchists whom most deny human nature by advocating collectivism, waging “class warfare,” and subscribing to the labor theory of value. Plus, if the “libertarian” label is good enough for Lew Rockwell, whom no one would confuse with a statist, then it’s good enough for me.
