Regarding the feasability of life without a state

[Universe Prince]

If you have some time to spare today or in the next few days perhaps, I invite you to take a read of a pair of articles. “Society without a State”, by Murray Rothbard, is long at about 6500 words. “Trading on Reputation”, by Christopher Faille, is considerably shorter at only about 1900 words.

When you've had a chance to read one or both of the articles, please feel free to come back and give me your reaction.

[Universe Prince]

No takers, eh? Oh well. Here are some excerpts.

From “Society without a State”, by Murray Rothbard:

In attempting to outline how a "society without a state" — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense  or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not "really" anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as "taxation"; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.

Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.

The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.

Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way "coercive." Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term "coercion" can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it "physical violence or the threat thereof," with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.

It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, "claims and exercises a monopoly of crime" over its territorial area.

The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists "assume that all people are good" and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.

A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are "good" in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the "nature of man," given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.

We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a "necessary evil" instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.

From “Trading on Reputation”, by Christopher Faille:

As Greif tells it, the Fatimids had a weak bureaucracy that saved itself administrative trouble by relying on community associations. If the newcomers wanted to govern their own affairs among themselves, they were welcome so to do. And they did. The émigrés developed a new identity. In time, they came to write casually of “our people, the Maghribis, the travelers.” These travelers proved very successful, claiming a niche of expertise in long-distance commerce. Greif gives an example of their influence when he describes how, around the year 1050, “the Muslim ruler of Sicily imposed a 10 percent tariff (instead of the 5 percent tariff specified by Islamic law) on goods imported to Sicily by the Maghribi traders. The traders responded by imposing an embargo and sending their goods to the rival trade center, Tunisia. The embargo was effective; after a year the Sicilian ruler removed the extra tariff.”

Some of the Maghribi traders’ success came from avoiding the judicial system of the Fatimids. The Maghribis had access to two legal systems, the Muslim or the Jewish. As residents of the Islamic world, they could sue within the Muslim legal system. Separately, the Fatimid caliphate recognized the Jewish legal system as having authority over those who chose to use it. But the Maghribi traders saw both as inefficient, uninformed, and time-consuming.

In a paper published in the American Economic Review 13 years ago, Greif elaborated more on this point than he does in his most recent book. That paper cited one of the rare occasions when Maghribis did invoke the courts. The original plaintiff’s grandchildren were still seeking redress on their grandfather’s behalf 50 years later. No wonder the Maghribis generally avoided such a Jarndycean fate, preferring what Greif calls an “informal code of conduct.” They relied, to put it simply, on each other’s handshakes.

[...]

Beyond the evidence of history, Greif offers a game theory argument that the Maghribi model isn’t replicable because it only works within a small community, one where everybody can know everyone else and have a sense of who deserves shunning, through a process akin to that of small-town gossip. As long as “the Maghribi traders coalition survived,” he writes, “its functioning crucially depended on maintaining an appropriate size.…[A] larger coalition implies a slower circulation of information and hence delayed punishment.” Any delay of punishment is a discount in its value and accordingly a decrease in its effectiveness. Even if the small town is spread out through much of the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to Asia Minor, it still retains its narrow demographic limits. Given those limits, it is inevitable that at some point any actual such coalition will be outflanked and outlasted.

But the considerations that require smallness of such a coalition, in Greif’s model, were quite specific to the period. They are technology-dependent. The speed of communication is an obvious example. An increase in the number of people on my email list doesn’t slow the speed with which I can communicate with all of them. Similarly, Greif tells us it was difficult for medieval parties to “retaliate collectively against a cheater not personally known to them…due to the challenge of describing him to those who were not cheated.” Does this amount to saying that the courts of a sovereign were necessary in a world without photography?

Furthermore, it obviously isn’t the case that Maghribi only did business with Maghribi. They only entered into agency relations (requiring promises and trust) with one another, and they dealt in cash on the barrelhead with the rest of the world. But common experience indicates that dealings of the latter sort can become dealings of the former sort, or at the very least that they could become sufficiently habitual and amicable to constitute the glue of a broader coalition. In some ways—some ways—you could compare the Maghribis with certain Anabaptist communities in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. Mennonites and the Amish typically have informal, “horizontal” relations with one another, enforce their internal norms through ostracism, and try to avoid outsiders’ court systems. These traits have not prevented them from fruitful interchange with the surrounding society. The Maghribis, of course, were much more outward-looking than the Amish.

Greif is an indefatigable researcher and a wonderfully acute thinker, and I recommend his work highly. But he may have erred in treating the Maghribi way as a road to nowhere. It might be better conceived as a road not taken.

Please feel free to offer your reactions. Like it? Don't like it? Think this is all crazy? Or do you just want to insult me for daring to bring up the very idea of society without a state? I don't care. Tell me what you think.

[Brassmask]

Well, I can't read the whole thing right now but I really want to because I don't understand how you could be interested in this article but give nothing but disdain and dismissal to all things RBE that I post.  What annoys me right off is that having read part of the first article, I find the author is proposing nothing short of a total destruction of the "way things work" right now in favor of a totally different system (a non-system, if you will) that is, at heart, an economic system.

When I propose the RBE, I am constantly bombarded with the assertion that an economic system can't change the way people are.  Yet here is this supposed scholar doing that very thing and I can only assume you agree with him.  What the heck, dude?

Here is a point I want to address specifically though.

This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: "We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other." I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of "who will guard the guardians?" becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.

No one would suggest such a thing as handing over all the power to settle disputes to one particular group.  We don't do that now.  In fact, as a group of customers, Americans pay people to be judges and policemen while at the same time, Americans can always settle disputes outside of a court of law.  In a democracy (like we allegedly live in), "watching the Watchmen" is the province of the likes of Internal Affairs and Congressional Oversight.  And so, who watches those Watchmen.  Well, guess what?  It's the voters.  You and me.  That's how its supposed to work.

If I imagine an anarchistic society, I see a world of people going without.  The middle class would be decimated because the rich would simply get richer because they would be able to buy the best lawyers and no one would consider that unfair or distasteful because everyone has to pay for everything.  The rich ride on the best roads.  The rich get the best healthcare.  The rich get the best police protection.  The rich will take whatever they want for a pittance because if you don't sell them what they want at the price they deem the best price, they will simply use their militia they picked up on militiasRus.com to take your stuff.  And who are you going to appeal to?   Their judge?  Their police force?  Your police force went in to bankruptcy and you haven't had the time or money to pay someone to go out and research which police force is the best you can get for your money.  You don't have the time or the money 'cause you gotta work 23 hours a day to make enough to pay for all the bare necessities of life.

I'll try to read this whole thing tonight and have a more cohesive response but I really don't see this idea being big with Joe and Suzie Q Public.  The state actually takes a lot of labor off of them and when they hear that they will now have to pay a police force or fire department directly and there are now going to be lots of private companies providing this stuff and they won't be adhering to any set of rules or regulations, Joe and Suzie are going to freak.

[Brassmask]

Wow, that lighthouse thing.

How amazing is it that a question that came to mind regarding that scenario of pre-paid lighthouse use is to wonder how do you stop other ships in the area from using the light that those who pre-paid are using?  I can't imagine that there is light that is only visible to people who have a receipt of some kind.

And that just leads to the inevitability of people wanting to prosecute someone for using the lighthouse's light without paying for it.  And doesn't that just sound crazy? 

And in a society where everyone is paying third party arbitrators to help reach decisions in disputes, I see rampant corruption and arbitration going in favor of the highest bidder.

And what then happens when someone is so convinced they are right in the dispute that the third party arbitration doesn't work for him?  In a global economy like we have now, when a guy can set up shop on Rhode Island do anything he wants, make money without laws or honor until arbitration catches up with him and they use ostracization as his punishment (which is simply a mamby pamby way of putting someone in jail in a statist society, in other words forcing him to "be good" or forcing him to "do the right thing" in regards to society's mores that have been adopted by all the anarchists that have taken over) and then move to Mexico and do the same thing all over again?  Nothing.  That's why you need states that keep records of crimes and such.

And so, what we've learned so far is that if you are for an anarchist society, you run into the same kind of questions that I run into with an RBE world but the difference is that everyone in the RBE is actually freed from the slavery of capitalism and in an anarchist world they sink into a tar pit of capitalism that puts every aspect of life in a show window with a price tag on it.

[Religious Dick]

And so, what we've learned so far is that if you are for an anarchist society, you run into the same kind of questions that I run into with an RBE world but the difference is that everyone in the RBE is actually freed from the slavery of capitalism and in an anarchist world they sink into a tar pit of capitalism that puts every aspect of life in a show window with a price tag on it.

Not exactly - there are examples of functioning anarchist societies:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html

http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bookchin/sp001642/toc.html

I still haven't seen a working example of RBE...

[Universe Prince]

Well, I can't read the whole thing right now but I really want to because I don't understand how you could be interested in this article but give nothing but disdain and dismissal to all things RBE that I post.

Obviously I agree more with Rothbard than I do with you.

What annoys me right off is that having read part of the first article, I find the author is proposing nothing short of a total destruction of the "way things work" right now in favor of a totally different system (a non-system, if you will) that is, at heart, an economic system.

Anarchy as proposed by people like Rothbard is at heart a social/political concept, not an economic one. And I'd say what Rothbard proposed is not a destruction of the way things work as much as a modification of the way things work.

When I propose the RBE, I am constantly bombarded with the assertion that an economic system can't change the way people are.  Yet here is this supposed scholar doing that very thing and I can only assume you agree with him.  What the heck, dude?

Rothbard did not at all suggest that an economic system can or should change the way people are. Rothbard did not suggest anything about changing the way people are. What he suggested was "that, given the 'nature of man,' given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad."

No one would suggest such a thing as handing over all the power to settle disputes to one particular group.  We don't do that now.  In fact, as a group of customers, Americans pay people to be judges and policemen while at the same time, Americans can always settle disputes outside of a court of law.

You're not the first person to point that out, but I would say that only gives credence to Rothbard's article and damages your insistence that Rothbard proposed a total destruction of the way things work.

In a democracy (like we allegedly live in), "watching the Watchmen" is the province of the likes of Internal Affairs and Congressional Oversight.  And so, who watches those Watchmen.  Well, guess what?  It's the voters.  You and me.  That's how its supposed to work.

I'm not sure if that is a joke or not. Mr. Conspiracy is telling me that the voters watch the watchers. And of course, you're also one of the people who tell me that customers have no influence on business and corporations. So I'm not sure how seriously to take you on this.

If I imagine an anarchistic society, I see a world of people going without.  The middle class would be decimated because the rich would simply get richer because they would be able to buy the best lawyers and no one would consider that unfair or distasteful because everyone has to pay for everything.  The rich ride on the best roads.  The rich get the best healthcare.  The rich get the best police protection.  The rich will take whatever they want for a pittance because if you don't sell them what they want at the price they deem the best price, they will simply use their militia they picked up on militiasRus.com to take your stuff.  And who are you going to appeal to?   Their judge?  Their police force?  Your police force went in to bankruptcy and you haven't had the time or money to pay someone to go out and research which police force is the best you can get for your money.  You don't have the time or the money 'cause you gotta work 23 hours a day to make enough to pay for all the bare necessities of life.

I have no idea why you think voters can keep government under control but somehow no one is going to stand in the way of super-rich people and corporations simply doing anything they please. This makes zero sense. Government, with the force of law and law enforcement to take and do anything it pleases is somehow at the mercy of voters, but consumers have no way to act against businesses or to protect themselves from the wealthy? Do you not see the complete absurdity of what you're suggesting?

I'll try to read this whole thing tonight and have a more cohesive response but I really don't see this idea being big with Joe and Suzie Q Public.  The state actually takes a lot of labor off of them and when they hear that they will now have to pay a police force or fire department directly and there are now going to be lots of private companies providing this stuff and they won't be adhering to any set of rules or regulations, Joe and Suzie are going to freak.

Your thinking in this matter seems extremely limited. I suggest you should attempt to apply some of the optimism for how people will respond to life in your RBE society to the ideas that Rothbard has put forth.

[Universe Prince]

Wow, that lighthouse thing.

How amazing is it that a question that came to mind regarding that scenario of pre-paid lighthouse use is to wonder how do you stop other ships in the area from using the light that those who pre-paid are using?

I don't know. Maybe there isn't a way. But maybe there is. Maybe it becomes not a matter of light, but of digital information fed to computers. I have no idea. I don't plan to have one. I expect those who deal with such issues to work it out.

And that just leads to the inevitability of people wanting to prosecute someone for using the lighthouse's light without paying for it.  And doesn't that just sound crazy?

No.

And in a society where everyone is paying third party arbitrators to help reach decisions in disputes, I see rampant corruption and arbitration going in favor of the highest bidder.

You're apparently assuming that such arbitration will be the only kind available and that people will never do anything to oppose it. Why you would assume this, I have no idea, because it is a really stupid assumption.

And what then happens when someone is so convinced they are right in the dispute that the third party arbitration doesn't work for him?

Read the whole article.

In a global economy like we have now, when a guy can set up shop on Rhode Island do anything he wants, make money without laws or honor until arbitration catches up with him and they use ostracization as his punishment (which is simply a mamby pamby way of putting someone in jail in a statist society, in other words forcing him to "be good" or forcing him to "do the right thing" in regards to society's mores that have been adopted by all the anarchists that have taken over) and then move to Mexico and do the same thing all over again?  Nothing.  That's why you need states that keep records of crimes and such.

What? Are you saying only governments can keep records of such things? No one else could possibly do it? Come on, Brass, I know you're not that stupid.

ostracization as his punishment (which is simply a mamby pamby way of putting someone in jail in a statist society, in other words forcing him to "be good" or forcing him to "do the right thing" in regards to society's mores that have been adopted by all the anarchists that have taken over)

It is not forcing him to do anything. It is simply the people not doing business with him. That's all. You seem to have a really twisted concept of what it means to force someone to do something.

And so, what we've learned so far is that if you are for an anarchist society, you run into the same kind of questions that I run into with an RBE world but the difference is that everyone in the RBE is actually freed from the slavery of capitalism and in an anarchist world they sink into a tar pit of capitalism that puts every aspect of life in a show window with a price tag on it.

Um, no. Not even close. One of your most obvious and ridiculous assumptions is that an anarchist society must wholly be capitalist. You're so busy trying to tie Rothbard's ideas on anarchy to the mostly unfounded notions you consider to be the worst of capitalism that you're missing the bigger picture. In an anarchist society, essentially no one is going to stop you from establishing a communist or RBE community. They might stop you from imposing your communist or RBE ideas on everyone else, but they would have no reason to stop you and others choosing for yourselves to make a community where no one uses any money. And then you could shine the glory of your RBE for all the world to see.

I have to say though, watching you defend government use of force on the one hand and denounce the "slavery" of capitalism on the other is really funny. Funny-ironic, yes, but funny-ha-ha as well. You apparently want to free people from the liberty of choosing their own lives by telling them all how to live. You have, it would seem, adopted "Freedom Is Slavery" and turned it into a genuine political philosophy. It really is quite funny.

[_JS]

(1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as "taxation"; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state.

A minor point, but I would argue that this is a limited definition of a state considering that it completely ignores any aspect of international recognition or sovereignty of the teritorial borders. Consider that this anarchist experiment means little if your neighboring despot decides he's bored and crushes your "non-state" and the rest of the world doesn't care.

On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.

Note that "coercive aggression" is narrowly defined here. It is left as primarily a purview of the now defunct state. Yet, what of Microsoft and Wal Mart? Will Microsoft's pushing of an inferior product (IE) be allowed to push other products out of the market, is that "aggression? Will Wal-Mart's inferior products at cheaper bulk rates be allowed to push small mom & pops out of the market? Is that aggression?

Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history.

Characteristics such as having a leader (or leaders, or board of executives), having a capitol, having a central building or location to meet are also "generally acknowledged" throughout history but that doesn't make it any less arbitrary.

The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction.

True, though historically that has not always been the case in all states.

But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways.

Very true. Two questions:

1. Who's to say that when police protection is supplied by a private company that they will not abuse their position? Who's to say they'll accept being relieved of duty once their contract is terminated or expired (after all, they have the weapons and the authority)?

2. What makes the currency that is minted worth anything? The current value of currency is based primarily on the collective consumer's belief that a dollar will buy a dollar's worth of goods or services (discounting notwithstanding). Much of that value is founded on the stability of the United States government. Where would you get that value from in your nely privately minted non-state currency?

Only the state can do so

Through a Lockian social contract agreement, the author is not being completely fair. The mafia can do it as well, but through a much different agreement.

Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term "coercion" can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it "physical violence or the threat thereof," with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument.

False dichotomy.

I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view.

Interesting because he later does indeed adopt a view very similar to this one [i.e. that anarchists believe man is basically good] and also this is the view of Naural Law given by Thomas Hobbes in perhaps one of the most famous political treatises ever written - Leviathon. I'd wager that the author does know where this view comes from and his simple denial is a poor defense considering the heavy intellectual weight he needs to counter in defending his theory against Hobbes. For my money he does a poor job here.

In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal.

How? And exactly how does focusing almost entirely on the individual create a society?

If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.

No explanation of how, just a nearly utopic statement that doing away with the state will somehow mollify nearly all criminal activity. The state is portrayed as the "engine of crime." And notice the very big "if" statement.

Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection.

Well, yeah. So?

The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.

It will? Why?

[fatman]

This is an interesting set of ideas Prince.  I have a very good friend who has argued the fact that a people can exist without a state, he has been advocating this idea for many years, even going so far at one point as to draw up a plan of how a foreign policy apparatus would function in such a non-state.  It was a very insightful paper and I wish to hell that I could find it now for you.  The basis of his thought (on the foreign policy issues) was a form of realpolitik melded with internationalism, a way to gain recognition for the non-state through neutrality (similar to that of the Swiss and Swedish, less like that of the Vatican).

As I was reading your articles, a thought occurred to me as to whether this would pose as an evolution of government or regression of it.  I think that most modern governments are the byproducts of monarchical systems, which have their origins in primeval strongmen.

Sadly, as much as I would like to the creation of a non-state, even with the resultant destabilization that would inevitably occur, I don't think that this nation would ever fall that way.  Can you imagine all the people screaming about Social Security and the lack of a social safety net, and, OMG, personal accountability?  Not going to happen here, though I think it could be possible in a small, modern, European backwater.

[Universe Prince]

A minor point, but I would argue that this is a limited definition of a state considering that it completely ignores any aspect of international recognition or sovereignty of the teritorial borders. Consider that this anarchist experiment means little if your neighboring despot decides he's bored and crushes your "non-state" and the rest of the world doesn't care.

I don't know for sure at this point, but I would guess that Rothbard would have made a distinction between a nation and a state. I guess also that it depends on whether or not one thinks a nation can exist without a government.

Note that "coercive aggression" is narrowly defined here. It is left as primarily a purview of the now defunct state. Yet, what of Microsoft and Wal Mart? Will Microsoft's pushing of an inferior product (IE) be allowed to push other products out of the market, is that "aggression? Will Wal-Mart's inferior products at cheaper bulk rates be allowed to push small mom & pops out of the market? Is that aggression?

Perhaps you could argue that it is aggression, but it is not coerced aggression. Rothbard did not say he was against aggression. Rothbard was specific. Taxation is, by Rothbard's definition, coerced aggression. Taxes are taken by force, with no choice on the part of the person taxed. Microsoft has no such power. It cannot stop you from using Netscape or Firefox or from buying products from companies in competition with Microsoft. It cannot stop you from getting free software or using open source products like Linux. Microsoft cannot confiscate your property if you do not buy from them or use their product. Likewise, Wal-Mart does not have thugs forcing you to shop at Wal-Mart. You are free to choose where you shop. And Wal-Mart does not force smaller stores out of business. It competes in the marketplace by offering lower prices. No one who does not like Wal-Mart is forced to shop there. My parents, for example, refuse to shop at Wal-Mart (because they dislike the experience, not the prices) and instead shop at Target and Publix. To date, no representative of Wal-Mart has arrived at their door demanding their property, or insisting that they will either shop at Wal-mart or be forcibly punished. The government, on the other hand, does not provide anyone with a choice about paying for government services. Either one pays, or one gets jail-time and/or property confiscated. Which is what Rothbard has called coerced aggression. The distinction is not insignificant.

Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history.

Characteristics such as having a leader (or leaders, or board of executives), having a capitol, having a central building or location to meet are also "generally acknowledged" throughout history but that doesn't make it any less arbitrary.

Having a leader? You mean, like a CEO? Or maybe a Board of Directors? Having a central building or location? You mean like Microsoft being headquartered in Redmond, Washington? Yet, Microsoft is not a state.

Who's to say that when police protection is supplied by a private company that they will not abuse their position? Who's to say they'll accept being relieved of duty once their contract is terminated or expired (after all, they have the weapons and the authority)?

There is no more likelihood of a private company abusing its position than there is of a government run police force from abusing its position. And we both know that can happen. With privately owned companies, however, there is such a thing as competition, and if the customer doesn't like Company A, he can go to Company B or C or D if he so choses. Or he can simply withdraw and give none of them his business. But there is also another scenario, of insurance companies rather than individuals dealing directly with private police protection companies. But I don't want to chase that tangent just now. Suffice it to say for now that there is more than one way to handle the situation.

What makes the currency that is minted worth anything? The current value of currency is based primarily on the collective consumer's belief that a dollar will buy a dollar's worth of goods or services (discounting notwithstanding). Much of that value is founded on the stability of the United States government. Where would you get that value from in your nely privately minted non-state currency?

Where money in the past got its value. From precious metals. For example, the Liberty Dollar.

Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term "coercion" can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it "physical violence or the threat thereof," with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument.

False dichotomy.

Why?

I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view.

Interesting because he later does indeed adopt a view very similar to this one [i.e. that anarchists believe man is basically good] and also this is the view of Naural Law given by Thomas Hobbes in perhaps one of the most famous political treatises ever written - Leviathon. I'd wager that the author does know where this view comes from and his simple denial is a poor defense considering the heavy intellectual weight he needs to counter in defending his theory against Hobbes. For my money he does a poor job here.

Whoa there. You're confusing believing that people are generally good with believing that all people are good. And you seem to be ignoring what he says later: "in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are 'good' in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos." Are you tossing that aside and by implication suggesting that is not the case? Are you suggesting most people are bad, are intent on assaulting and robbing their neighbors and are only held in check by the existence of a state with coercive power?

In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal.

How? And exactly how does focusing almost entirely on the individual create a society?

Who said anything about focusing almost entirely on the individual? Perhaps you missed the word 'cooperative'. Anyway, to your question of how an anarchist society maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal, the most basic answer (and that is all we have time and space for at the moment) is that it encourages and enables free cooperation and it delegitimizes and deters coercive aggression. How does it do that? By leaving people free from the coercion and over-regulation of the state. I'm oversimplifying, but perhaps we can go into more discussion on this specific topic another time. People have written books about this, I simply do not have the skill to distill it all down into a few sentences for this discussion.

If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.

No explanation of how, just a nearly utopic statement that doing away with the state will somehow mollify nearly all criminal activity. The state is portrayed as the "engine of crime." And notice the very big "if" statement.

You're doing a bang-up job of mischaracterizing what Rothbard said. He did not say the state was the engine of crime. He said referred to it as an engine of crime. And he did not say doing away with the state would somehow mollify nearly all criminal activity. What he said was that if the state was a source of crime on a massive scale, as the anarchist claims, then eliminating the state would be a good thing. This seems like a straightforward comment. And yes, please do notice the 'if'. It is a simple, logical statement. If he is right about the nature of the state, then his solution is desirable one. Even if you do not agree with him, it is still a logical statement.

Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection.

Well, yeah. So?

So "[t]he anarchist view holds that, given the 'nature of man,' given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society."

The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.

It will? Why?

That is something that Rothbard addresses, if only in part, with the rest of the article.

[Universe Prince]

The basis of his thought (on the foreign policy issues) was a form of realpolitik melded with internationalism, a way to gain recognition for the non-state through neutrality (similar to that of the Swiss and Swedish, less like that of the Vatican).

I have seen similar ideas before. Perhaps you could talk your friend into joining the discussion, or at least posting some of his ideas here.

Sadly, as much as I would like to the creation of a non-state, even with the resultant destabilization that would inevitably occur, I don't think that this nation would ever fall that way.  Can you imagine all the people screaming about Social Security and the lack of a social safety net, and, OMG, personal accountability?  Not going to happen here, though I think it could be possible in a small, modern, European backwater.

True, there are conceptions about our government operated "social safety net" that need to be countered. That will take time, but I think it can be done. By the way, have you heard about the Free State Project?

[fatman]

I've read up on the FSP Prince, and it is certainly a laudable objective.  My problem though, is that I would miss the woods and mountains of my native NW Washington State, and though the climate of NH is agreeable to me, the lack of wide open forests and mountains is not.  IF the FSP were centered in Maine, I would almost certainly go.

[Universe Prince]

Heh. Most people who like the FSP but object have the objection that they don't want to live in New Hampshire. It's too cold or too this or something. There is a similar project called Free State Wyoming, if you're interested. I am, unfortunately, not in a position where I am able to commit to either.

[_JS]

Likewise, Wal-Mart does not have thugs forcing you to shop at Wal-Mart. You are free to choose where you shop. And Wal-Mart does not force smaller stores out of business. It competes in the marketplace by offering lower prices. No one who does not like Wal-Mart is forced to shop there.

Who would prevent them from adopting such a model if we adopted your non-state? More to the point you illustrate examples of overt coercion. What about collusion? Monopolistic practices? If Target and Wal-Mart agree to divide up certain regions and force other companies (Kohl's, Penney's, etc) out then your choices are limited without the "gun to the head" model you've provided. Of course collusion and price-fixing agreements have taken place in business. For example there was a price fixing scandal among chemical companies that produced vitamin E.

With privately owned companies, however, there is such a thing as competition, and if the customer doesn't like Company A, he can go to Company B or C or D if he so choses. Or he can simply withdraw and give none of them his business. But there is also another scenario, of insurance companies rather than individuals dealing directly with private police protection companies.

Somehow throwing insurance companies in to replace elected city councilmen doesn't make me feel better UP. I think I could trust Bt to make honest decisions on my behalf and give me a straight answer or two when things don't go as planned. Can I trust an insurance company headquartered elsewhere with operators in India to make decisions and give me answers about my local police company? You honestly expect me to buy into that? And you fail to answer the question.

Who makes them stand down if they don't want to? Suppose the non-state hires Southern Defences LLC. to guard our border with Nutzonia. What prevents them from striking a hell of deal with Nutzonia that allows the Nutzonian military to walk right in and conquer our little utopic non-state? It isn't as if we have an elected assembly with even a token notion that the will of the people oppose such a move. Southern Defences LLC might become the new Nutzonian Imperial Guard or they might just want to take the non-state for themselves. Are we supposed to believe an insurance company is going to prevent that?

Where money in the past got its value. From precious metals. For example, the Liberty Dollar.

A pipe dream that does not reside in the economic reality of the 21st century. I don't mean that to be offensive, but the days of the gold standard and Bretton Woods are over. With the exception of a few ivory tower Austrian school folks and an occasional monetarist or two (why are they still around?) the idea of backing currency with gold (or another suitable metal) is just not a realistic notion. It is a bit like the Laffer Curve...only at least the gold standard did once exist and actually worked at one time.

Why?

The author presumes there are only two legitimate views of the situation when there are quite clearly more.

Whoa there. You're confusing believing that people are generally good with believing that all people are good.

No, I wasn't.

And you seem to be ignoring what he says later: "in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are 'good' in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos." Are you tossing that aside and by implication suggesting that is not the case? Are you suggesting most people are bad, are intent on assaulting and robbing their neighbors and are only held in check by the existence of a state with coercive power?

No. I'm saying that intellectually he offers a poor argument. Quite clearly there were two gigantic philosophical treatises on this issue (there were more, but two that stick out to most western people today) and those are the versions of Natural Law given by Locke and Hobbes. Instead of taking Hobbes on and acknowledging that the counterpoint to his view is quite clearly Hobbes and Leviathon he decided to say: "I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge."

My point UP is that his choice to do that here is academically weak. If anarchism is such a sure bet and clearly it is in this author's view, then take Hobbes on. You're accusing me of making a judgement. I'm not, I'm simply calling the author out for basically being an intellectual coward.

As for your last question, no. I think most people have the potential for good, but often refer to indifference. I think people have the ability to be devestatingly cruel and evil as well. If you'd like to discuss the Holocaust, the Dirty War, the murder of priests and nuns in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the Second Congolese Civil War, the Armenian Genocide, the Yugoslav Wars, the Rape of Nanking, the slave trade, the diamond trade (want to base your money on those?) and other ways humans can be evil to their fellow man, then let's do it. By all means, blame it all (or even most of it) on state institutions, but I bet I can provide some damn chilling examples of it having nothing to do with governments.

So "[t]he anarchist view holds that, given the 'nature of man,' given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society."

From where do anarchists derive their views on the "nature of man?"

[Plane]

Wern't early lighthouses built by citys that wanted to encourage trade?

Later ones too.

Thinking ofthe Ship as the counstomer is just half of the picture.