We must compel them to be free!

Arnold Kling writes, of Anthony De Jasay's essay in Cato Unbound:

He is concerned with a deep problem. Those of us who are "minarchists," meaning that we favor government that is limited to adjudicating conflict, have no reliable mechanism for restraining government.

His point is that government can use its rule-making power to remake any rules that were used to create it. Certainly, we have seen this in the United States, where I would say that the original Constitution lies in shreds.

He concludes that only irrational standards or taboos can constrain the power of government. I tend to agree. If there is no taboo against government interference with activity X, then as long as it is in the interests of the governing coalition to interfere with activity X, that will happen.

This really seems like a special case of a larger problem that anyone who favors any restraint of government has to deal with. I've heard basically this argument advanced in favor of anarcho-capitalism, but of course one of the biggest problems with any anarchism is that unless you can secure unanimity (in which case you had better not imagine a polity where n>1), some form of coercion seems to be required in order to prevent people from forming governments. Even with strong taboos, has there ever been a society that actually succeeded in controlling the size and shape of its government in the way that libertarians imagine?

Comments

Sadly, the answer is no. The United States, circa 1792, was the best attempt to date, but we can witness that outcome today and easily imagine the additional authoritarianism that is to come in the future from both parties. A revolution in the future may reset things, but a more likely outcome is the boot on the face forever. I don't like being a pessimist in this regard, but the unfortunate fact is that ordinary people seem to want to be told what to do by authority, and also delight in seeing contrarians bent to the will of that authority.

Posted by Yancey Ward | February 14, 2008 3:10 PM

All too true, Megan and Yancey, and in terms of Presidential power, it is likely that the last seeker of that office who had a healthy regard for his limitations is buried at Mt. Vernon.

Posted by Will Allen | February 14, 2008 3:24 PM

Surely you've heard about Iceland?

http://libertariannation.org/b/history.htm#ice

Posted by Christina | February 14, 2008 3:31 PM

I think the Bambuti might have succeeded. I don't think they will be adopted as the new model for libertarianism though.

Posted by Njorl | February 14, 2008 4:06 PM

Megan, one of the ideas in AC is that "people forming governments" is OK -- there are many governments. This is a feature, not a bug. Note that in a world of states, government formation is strictly disallowed, and thus is a problem when it is done. Thus, the fear of "militias", gangs, and other such groups competing with the state.

As for people forming states -- well, yes. That's a problem. Anarchists tend to think that it can be prevented by the system, namely, that when a protection agency evolves to the point where it threatens to turn state-like, two things will happen. First, its clients will desert in droves, to the extent that its stateliness is of the nasty kind but exit is still possible. Second, the other protection agencies will band together and go to war to annihilate it, if it tries any of the standard state tricks. This is analogous to balance of power politics in the anarchy of states. So long as there are many agencies, and no agency can gain power rapidly/secretly enough to overwhelm all the others before they can organize, then in theory it should work.

It's also worth pointing out, as I have discussed elsewhere, that most of the "nice state" tricks humanity has evolved to try to rein in the state, should work on any protection agency. (I discuss some of them here.) Think of ideas like human rights, institutional forms like separation of powers, and many other such things.

Christina offers the example of Iceland, which is good enough. Lasted several hundred years before being imbalanced by an outside state, which was in fact stronger. But they lacked modern technology, and modern ideology. I believe that anarchy could work now, and be stable. But it cannot start in a world of states.

As for the argument from "ever been an X", well, that's not very convincing to me. Lots of things may be possible that have never been tried.

Posted by Leonard | February 14, 2008 4:52 PM

Hi, my name is Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, the #1 philosophy show on the web, and I try to deal with these arguments in my free podcast series... Have a listen, and I hope that they are of some help in understanding how a stateless society can work! :)

Posted by Stefan Molyneux, MA | February 14, 2008 4:55 PM

Christina:

Saga era Iceland abolished freedom of religion, and then introduced a mandatory tithe, part of which provided welfare payments for the poor. Then they became vassals to a monarchy.

Posted by Will McLean | February 14, 2008 4:57 PM

Will,

You are right of course. But the problem wasn't that Commonwealth Iceland suffered from too much anarchy and devolved into chaos, but that it suffered because the checks and balances on power were reduced by the imposition of mandatory payments to the Christian priests. Unlike the mandatory payment system to chieftains, in which allegiance wasn't determined by location, but by choice, the mandatory tithes were tied to location, so there was no incentive for competition. So the chieftain families that controlled the houses of worship easily concentrated their power over time.

In any event, Commonwealth Iceland, primitive though it was, lasted longer than this experiment we've been running in America, and serves to strengthen Anthony de Jasay's point that limited constitutional government is more vulnerable to corruption than anarchy. Constitutional government relies on the government exercising self-restraint. Anarchy relies on private groups and individuals beating back would-be usurpers.

Posted by Christina | February 14, 2008 5:20 PM

I will also point out that reading Stefan Molyneux is also worthwhile if you are interested in the idea of stateless government. I don't usually agree with how it would actually work as a practical matter, but he at least lays out a possibility.

Posted by Yancey Ward | February 14, 2008 5:21 PM

Even with strong taboos, has there ever been a society that actually succeeded in controlling the size and shape of its government in the way that libertarians imagine?

To some extent, and in some ways, yes. There are certain statist notions that have become taboo for all but the farthest left in the U.S. These would include government ownership of industry, wage and price controls, and rent control (everywhere but NY). Incentives are widely considered on right and left to be superior way to control pollution that direct regulation. Even protectionism is widely understood to be a bad thing (which is why neo-protectionists use the weasel words 'fair trade').

What else? Well, Jane Jacobs is considered a saint on both right and left--both try to claim her, and both take a very dim view of large-scale, top-down urban planning. Similarly "Seeing Like A State" is a minor classic for lefties and righties -- both now dislike 'high modernism' but the lefties insist that corporations are potential sources of high modernist planning as well as the state.

In general (with medical care being the exception), competition is considered a good thing across the political spectrum. Few would want to return to the kind of regulated monopolies we used to have in the telephone and air travel businesses, for example. Also, with the exception of trade, there is general agreement that if a company or industry is in decline because of changes in the marketplace, government should not try to step in with subsidies to prevent this from happening. There is virtually nobody, for example, who thought government should have stepped in to protect the film and paper-based Kodak corporation from the digital revolution.

Yes, things could be a lot better for libertarians, but they could be (and have been) a lot worse.

Posted by Slocum | February 14, 2008 6:03 PM

Christina:

You are missing the larger point. The only thing stopping the Icelandic commonwealth from becoming more statist was the preferences of the legislators. As soon as they wanted the laws to reduce freedom to further an end they desired, they changed the laws.

Anarcho-capitalism has a similar path towards statehood. If most people want a state, their protection agencies will satisfy customer demand by merging until they are big enough to impose one.

The key design flaw in the Icelandic commonwealth wasn't that it wasn't anarchic enough, it was the seats in the legislature and local judiciary were tradable private property. That made it very rewarding for people with one seat to save up for the matching set of all the seats in their district. The system only lasted as long as it did because in that economy it took a while to accumulate the relevant resources.

Posted by Will McLean | February 14, 2008 7:36 PM

Will,

You are attributing too much power to the Icelandic legislature. Yes, it had the power to legislate, but there was no correlating central executive power to enforce. It relied on the individual chieftains to do that on a local basis.

I would also quibble with your claim that the underlying problem was the tradability of the chieftaincies. In fact the problem was the codified barrier to entry for new chieftains. The number was fixed, so there was no ability for new chieftains to arise and challenge those trying to aggregate and centralize power.

The problem with anarcho-capitalism is that inevitably most people don't like 'others' being free. They want to impose some sort of restrictions on behaviors that result in the collective will over-ruling the rights of individuals. In the case of Iceland, Norway sought to undermine Iceland's independence by sending brutal Christian missionaries. Inevitably the converted Christian Icelanders bought into the idea of forceable conversion for everyone else, and soon thereafter compulsory support for the Church.

As long as busybodies exist, anarcho-capitalism will remain nothing more than a utopian ideal for libertarians. Of course Anthony de Jasay's point is that anarcho-capitalism is still far more easily maintained than limited constitutional government, and given our own quick decline into a Leviathan state, I can't say I disagree.

The fact is, people don't want to be free if it means that people they don't like get to be free as well.

Posted by Christina | February 15, 2008 9:26 AM

Megan, one of the ideas in AC is that "people forming governments" is OK -- there are many governments.

Like Europe before the EU?

I think you really need to explain the distinction between nice "governments" and "protection agencies" and nasty "states".

Posted by ad | February 15, 2008 1:05 PM

Since 1792, the United States has abolished slavery, enfranchised women, greatly reduced the scope of protective tariffs and reduced government's interference in private sexual conduct. That doesn't sound like a quick decline to me.

Posted by Will McLean | February 15, 2008 1:30 PM

There is an astonishing amount of knowledge about centuries-old Iceland on display here.

But there is a certain lack of perspective, too; I'm not delighted about government spending and overregulation, but it's not like we aren't just about as free as anyone ever been in history in all kinds of very important ways. You can't make kids' PJs as flammable as you could in the good-ol' days of the Sagas, but things are pretty good, overall, and I'd be quite surprised if whisking away the Constitution in favor of the Blackwater state would improve them.

Posted by Rob Lyman | February 15, 2008 1:56 PM

Will, not one of the things you mentioned has reduced the power of the government.

Posted by ad | February 15, 2008 2:16 PM

Will McLean,

Yes, those were major advances for liberty, but they pale in comparison to all the other governmental encroachments that have taken place in the interim.

Had the Founding Fathers written a constitution that incorporated that understanding of liberty and equality, we would still be where we are today- with a growing, ever more intrusive government. No, it is not a rapid decline, but a decline nonetheless.

Posted by Yancey Ward | February 15, 2008 4:14 PM

Will,

You wrote:
>Anarcho-capitalism has a similar path towards statehood. If most people want a state, their protection agencies will satisfy customer demand by merging until they are big enough to impose one.

There may be diseconomies of scale – you should check out David Friedman’s writings on this.

Of course, if the vast majority of people in a given region are determined enough to have a state, that is what they will indeed get.

We “anarcho-capitalists” do not have any magic wand that can force our fellow human beings to behave rationally or decently, you know. Basically, we have two arguments:

1). At least in some situations, it is less likely that an anarcho-capitalist society will gradually and unwittingly and by a series of tiny steps slide in to a Leviathan type of statism. There are obvious institutional reasons why, if you start out with a large monopolistic institution (“the state”), even if it is somewhat limited initially, it will tend to expand in power. Even if anarcho-capitalism eventually decays into a state (as Iceland and medieval Ireland eventually did), it may take quite a while. That’s a good thing.

2). States tend to survive, prosper, and expand by lying, by manipulation, by propaganda, etc. Encourage people to see the state for what it is – simply a bunch of guys who get away with doing things in broad daylight that ordinary criminals tend to do under cover of darkness – and, while you may not succeed in abolishing the state, you may help strip it of a little bit of its legitimacy so that it cannot be quite as rapacious and murderous as it otherwise would be.

In a very real sense, “the state” does not exist – nobody here but us people! But some of those people have managed to convince most of the rest of us that they are “the state” and that they should therefore be allowed to get away with doing horrendous things that the rest of us would never get away with.

Repudiating that big lie, stripping away that mystification, is not an all-or-nothing issue. You do what you can. Convince a young kid not to sign up for the Army. Get someone to let a kid off for drug charges because he started thinking about “jury nullification.” Get someone to laugh at the idea of a “flag-burning” amendment or see the “Pledge of Allegiance” as a bizarre form of idolatry.

Perhaps this demystification of the state can succeed to the point that we will hang Dubya, Hillary, et al. from lampposts and institute “official” anarcho-capitalism. Perhaps, we will only succeed to the point of returning to the limited form of government envisioned in the Constitution (which is why I’ve sent a few bucks to Ron Paul). And, perhaps, the best we can do is to keep things from getting worse than they are now.

We anarcho-capitalists do the best we can do. Every little bit that can be done to de-legitimize the state helps a little bit.

Dave Miller in Sacramento

Posted by PhysicistDave | February 15, 2008 9:20 PM

Ad,

since you ask, a "government" is any organization which governs -- which changes how people act by its own actions. This may be good or bad. Obviously, the state is probably the most important government in our lives. But "government" is not the same thing as the state, even though they are often used synonymously. What other orgs govern us, right now? Well, when you are on private property you are governed by the rules of the owner. For example, while you have the right to stand on corners shouting racist imprecations, if you try the same thing in a mall you'll be quickly shown the exits, and forceably removed if you resist. That's government: your speech is governed in a mall.

A "protection agency" is a sort of term of art for anarcho capitalism, but its meaning should be clear. It is an organization which offers protection to clients. So it does a lot of what the state is supposed to do, but it is not territorial. To do this requires, defacto legitimized coercion. And since coercion is always a bit nasty, and sometimes very, protection agencies may be nice or nasty. The idea in anarchocapitalism is to have many of them competing for business nicely; if you get a process like that started, then they should stay nice, because any turn towards nastiness should result in people taking their business elsewhere.

States are agencies with a territorial monopoly on legitimized coercion. They can be nicer, or nastier, but they always contain the seeds for their own growth into large oppressive states, because there is no way to control them nor to opt out cheaply.

Posted by Leonard | February 18, 2008 3:03 PM

any turn towards nastiness should result in people taking their business elsewhere.

Why? Why shouldn't someone seeking "protection" pay extra for the kneecappers who really get the job done?

And out of curiosity, how are disputes between people with different protection agencies settled? I walk into a store and buy a defective DVD player. Later, I discover that it's defective, and I want my money back. The store refuses. What is the non-violent way that this gets settled when I employ Thugs-R-Us, with its proprietary dispute arbitration procedures, and the store employs Corleone Associates, with a different set of rules?

Posted by Rob Lyman | February 18, 2008 4:50 PM

Rob, that's exactly the kind of thinking that we ACs encourage. But you know, it's been done.

The proximate answer to your question is that Thugs-R-Us already has an agreement in place with Corleone Associates, as to how to deal with disputes of this particular nature. So, they do whatever it is that they've agreed to do in these cases, perhaps getting a judgment by an independent adjudication agency. And you either do, or do not, get your money back according to how that procedure works.

There are reasons why they would have an agreement about this sort of thing already done. I encourage you to consider that, with the following question in mind: what happens if you buy a defective DVD player in Canada, England, France, Russia, or China? Does this cause a nuclear war?

As for your first question: I realize I was not clear there. I meant nastiness in the common manner of states, which is almost all directed against their own "customers" (aka subjects or slaves). Sure, historically speaking there's usually a few powerful states at any given time which are nasty to non-citizens. But for the most part states prey only on their own subjects or slaves, not those of neighboring states. There's a reason: heavy predation against neighbors may trigger a war, and war is dangerous, risky, and expensive. Sometimes states lose wars, which results in the utter displacement or even physical annihilation of the ruling classes. Only very powerful states, in general, pick on citizens other than their own.

So, what I was saying was that if protection agencies are nasty to their own customers, those customers will take their business elsewhere. Certainly what you are suggesting -- that they'd compete to be nasty to non-customers -- is likely, outside of any outside restraint. Is there any? Yes, I think so. I leave what it is, as an exercise to the reader. Hint: the first three paras of this post.

Posted by Leonard | February 18, 2008 10:18 PM

I know a thing or two about disputes and judgments and their enforcement across state/international lines, and it's a huge pain in the ass against recalcitrant defendants. Our legal system works only because most people either 1) simply think they have to obey it or 2) our current "PA"--the state--is willing to turn on its "customers" and force them to pay up (i.e., my home state will force me to pay an out-of-state plaintiff if I lose in either local or out-of-state courts). Obviously 2) plays quite a role in causing 1).

But if I could freely change PAs, it would surprise me if the PA were willing to come after me for real (get "nasty"), which means somebody else's PA would have to come after me (and I'd expect defense from mine), or the system collapses. Alternatively, the PAs could collude to avoid having any one of them be overly pro-customer.

One way or another, somebody needs to use force on a losing defendant who refuses to cooperate. But that would seem to risk a literal civil war over a defective DVD player.

Posted by Rob Lyman | February 19, 2008 5:12 PM

I should add that suing in a foreign court over a defective DVD player is possible. But only because the foreign government will enforce the judgment if I win. So the willingness of the foreign state to get "nasty" against its own citizens for the benefit of foreigners is essential to the preservation of international peace; otherwise a letter of reprisal or war are the only options--and were indeed options in centuries past. This system works because it's hard to change states; make it as easy as changing your phone company and the system collapses.

Posted by Rob Lyman | February 19, 2008 5:18 PM