the anarchist gets his back up

On Thursday, I somehow stumbled onto the site of The Two Percent Company (hereinafter “2%Co”), “an informal group of folks who are concerned about the current direction of our country and our world.” Maybe I followed a mysterious link, maybe I was searching for something else; at any rate, the page I found was a critique of the Libertarian Party’s platform. (2%Co rightly point out that the LP contradicts itself on family matters, a subject from which I recuse myself, as I’m unlikely ever to be a father.)

On several points, 2%Co said in effect “this is just plain stupid” without giving any hint of argument. So I wrote:

Have you ever tried *asking* a libertarian why they don’t expect disaster to result from implementing their platform? Or do you just assume that none of them have ever thought beyond the sound-bite?

2%Co’s reply said in part,

Assuming for a moment that you are a Libertarian (we could be wrong, since you haven’t told us that you are), . . . .

I gave a summary of my history with the Party (1990-6), adding:

On principle I’m an anarchist, because otherwise I’d advocate coercing others to actively support (at least through taxes) schemes that they may find repugnant, and that revolts me. But in practice I imagine I’d be comfortable with a “meso-libertarian” regime.

Their mail also led me indirectly to their blog entry on the same subject, and I posted four brief comments there. Rather than respond to my specific remarks on gun control, medicine, devolution, neutrality, immigration and transportation, 2%Co chose to make an issue of my anarchism (which I had not mentioned there); and like an ass I took the bait. In an attempt to bring that thread back on topic, I’ll confine further remarks on anarchism to my own blog. Most of you will likely find it dreary reading.

. . . you’re just making the same freaking mistakes over and over and over again. Namely, you harbor the misguided belief that a world without any government can somehow enforce rules (though you give no indication of how this would work), you seem to think that all people are capable of behaving benevolently and wisely (despite what we experience from and read about these same people every day), and you make the illogical leap that when one facet of one law is being abused the answer is the absence of all government. No, no, and no. All wrong. And yet, these three themes are repeated throughout just about every statement you have made.

I admit to the first of the three “mistakes”: I do indeed believe that the state (which is not the only kind of government, even in a statist world) is not necessary: that (with very few exceptions) whatever the state does either ought not to be done at all or can be done at least as well without it.

I deny that my vision depends (any more than statism does) on an unrealistic faith in people’s benevolence and wisdom. If I believed that “all people are capable of [consistently] behaving benevolently and wisely,” I’d have less objection to letting them set up vast organizations based on violence. Indeed I had already said in my mail to 2%Co, “Just about any political scheme assumes that we can wave a magic wand and make the regulators all-wise and the politicians free of self-interest. One advantage of libertarianism is that it doesn’t count on the state to remain virtuous.” They have not yet responded to that.

The charge that my anarchism is a reaction to “one facet of one law” is ludicrous on its face. I wonder what facet 2%Co had in mind. They seem to be saying: You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because of the drugwar. You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because of eminent domain. You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because of the Great Depression. You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because US foreign policy invites murderous resentment against Americans. You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because you’re suspicious of the uses to which gun registrations might be put. You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because it has made medicine far more costly and bureaucratic than it need be. You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because of the suffering caused by restrictions on immigration. You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because of debasement of the currency. You’re foolish to want to smash the state just because a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce you under absolute despotism.

For example, you say:

When I say “anarchy” or “anarchism” I mean only the literal sense: absence of rulers, which is not the same as absence of rules.

If you have rules but no rulers — no one to conceive of, enforce, or arbitrate those rules — then there are no rules. This is just the same old Libertarian crap all over again.

2%Co evidently understand the word “rulers” much more broadly than I meant it — they’d apparently include a passerby who intervenes to stop a crime in progress, as well as an arbitrator appointed by a private contract. By “rulers” I mean a class above the law, i.e. whose official acts are not subject to the ethical principles that are otherwise universally recognized.

That there are no rules without specialists in making and enforcing them (let alone a monopoly in that specialty) is clearly wrong. For a petty example, who enforces the rules of a private game of poker? Every society has customs, older and deeper than the state, whose violation brings social sanction; legislation often merely codifies such customs.

A system of private courts would generate precedents in the common-law tradition, tending to converge with each other — not because precedent is sacred, but because a coherent system of precedents helps make solid ground for contracts (express and implied). Where the process produces a badly skewed rule, contracts will tend to contain express provisions overriding that rule, until a better rule becomes the norm.

I would guess that a significant share of an anarcho-jurist’s time would be spent on resolving claims between insurance companies and the like, i.e. institutional proxies for the original parties; such entities have an obvious interest in clarity and consistency.

If you have no one in charge, then there really aren’t any rules, and you do have a ruleless society — because the only rule is: “If I can kick the shit out of you, I win.”

Whereas if there is someone in charge, the fundamental rule is the same — as the quip goes, annoying a cop is always a crime, and frightening a cop is always a capital crime — and all other rules are subject to change at the boss monkey’s convenience.

That’s not a particularly “utopian” society in our opinion. It’s the same boring Libertarian idiocy that expects people to act with mutual beneficence and to respect others’ rights automatically.

Libertarianism expects no such thing — but statism does. Or rather, the statist expects that when one group is given the power to impose rules on the rest of us, to exempt its agents from the consequences of their actions, that group will automatically become more benevolent and scrupulous than the rest of us (or, under the “mandate of heaven” theory, that their holding power is evidence that God recognizes their superior character). The democrat has an answer to that, but it’s still rather mad to suppose that an official who abuses the few will automatically be voted out by the many.

The human race has pretty fucking firmly established that they aren’t capable of that on a large scale, or, hell, even on a small scale in many cases. That is why the Libertarian Party platform is laughable [ . . . ]

The existence of peaceful stateless societies argues otherwise. Such societies now exist only in marginal places like the mountains of New Guinea, because they happen to be weak in war; I hope technology can change that.

But somehow I doubt 2%Co will be swayed by those examples. How about the empirical behavior of people in a natural disaster? The rumors of rape and murder in New Orleans appear to be false; even if they’re all true, they’re probably outnumbered by the volunteers who ran into official obstruction when they tried to help, not to mention the men in uniform dragging residents away in cuffs and stealing their property.

Yes, life in anarchy depends largely on the honesty and goodwill of one’s neighbors. So does life in any society whatsoever, even a prison (guards notoriously are either unable or unwilling to prevent violence between inmates). Much crime would be impossible if not for the presumption that most people are honest, and that presumption would vanish in a hurry if it weren’t broadly accurate.

See also some old remarks of mine.

Yes, we know that you think there is a civil court in the Libertarian world, but that’s just one more instance in which the Libertarian platform (and your take on it) makes no sense. [ . . . ]

Again, I’m not motivated to repeat what has been written elsewhere by better writers and thinkers than me. Unfortunately I don’t know offhand where to find such material on the Web; searching for polycentric law might do the trick. Suffice for now to say that 2%Co here are not the first to point out the flaws in the most naïve conception of anarcho-jurisprudence and, yes, anarchists have given some thought to building institutions to avoid those flaws.

Robin Hanson, who is not an ideological libertarian, wrote a proposal to give criminals control of private law enforcement. I haven’t read it in ages (and I don’t seem to have a good way to parse PostScript on my new computer), but I assume it’s meant as a gedankenexperiment or existence proof, much as H.H.Hoppe (some kind of anarchist) argues that monarchy could outdo democracy in providing most of the features of liberal government.

If you’re saying that I agree with you that such policies would lead to the collapse of civilization, and the only disagreement is that you fear such an outcome while I welcome it — well, thanks for reinforcing my first impression of you as shallow and intellectually irresponsible.

Thanks for reinforcing our first impression of you as a severely deluded, pompous asshole. And no, that’s not what we’re saying.

(Why “pompous”?) Okay then, we seem to agree that appearances can deceive.

We’re saying that both we and you seem to see the Libertarian policies leading to anarchy, and we feel that such anarchy is the collapse of civilization, while you don’t seem to share that opinion of anarchy itself. […]

I’m happy to agree-to-disagree. Anything that will let us get back to discussing 2%Co’s unsupported claims about specific policies.

Without what the LP calls “the cult of the omnipotent state” there would be no drug-gangs, no organized fanatics with a grudge against “America”, no Great Depression, no Permanent Healthcare Crisis.

You know what else? Without laws making recreational drugs illegal, there would be no drug gangs. You know what we favor? Legalizing drugs.

But meanwhile 2%Co explicitly oppose deregulating medicine. So if I want to stock up on a drug that has worked for me in the past but prefer not to take the time to jump hoops for a prescription, do I sign a form affirming that my purpose is recreational rather than therapeutic? Or would recreational drugs also be available only by prescription, and if so, with what indications?

2%Co’s front page says, “In short, we believe that people have the right to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the rights of others.” I wonder how many other exceptions hide under that phrase In short, and whether any coherent principle unites them.

See how we can solve this problem without eradicating all vestiges of government? That’s what we’re talking about here, Anton. From where we’re standing, you’re trying to kill a cockroach in your house by demolishing your entire town. It’s massive overkill — just grab a can o’ Raid and have at it. Isn’t that easier, more effective, and less destructive?

A key difference between us is that 2%Co apparently see each problem in isolation: one problem, one patch. (Patches on patches is how we get an ever-growing burden of regulation and subsidies, as Hayek said.) I see all four of these symptoms (do 2%Co have answers for the other three?) as products of the same institutional hubris that says the state ought to do every good thing that it imagines it can do — and never backs down when its efforts make a problem worse (or create one where there had been none). If 2%Co can propose a way to stamp out that tendency, I’m all ears. Clearly the incentives inherent in democracy as we know it are less effective at discouraging such adventures than the Framers imagined.

I’m not proposing to “kill a cockroach by demolishing the entire town,” I’m looking to rebuild my house in such a way that roaches no longer find it hospitable.

I just don’t agree that a monopolistic territorial state is a good form of government: other models could be more benign and more effective.

Dude…we obviously agree that there are big problems with the current government since much of our website is about coming up with different solutions than the bullshit ones already in place, which have been fucking up our world for longer than we’ve been a part of it. Are you so blinded by the fact that we think the Libertarian platform is silly that you didn’t bother to notice that?

I confess I haven’t looked at the rest of 2%Co’s site. If their criticisms of the LP contained any links . . . .

And just because the current government in place today has problems, it doesn’t follow that the answer is the removal of all government. We disagree completely with that assertion.

That’s fine with me, because it isn’t my assertion: I don’t propose to remove all government (only the coercive and monopolistic kind), nor is my anarchism based on the transient flaws of one particular state.

We believe that applying rational changes to the current government is a far better solution than wiping it out and freeballing for the rest of time. Are our solutions perfect? Hell, no, but to us there’s no question that they’re better than having no government at all.

I don’t mind agreeing to disagree.

[big snip]

It’s not obvious how the little old ladies who have lost their homes to eminent domain, or been shot in their beds by narcs who got the wrong address from a junkie, or whose doctor has been jailed for providing effective doses of pain drugs, would be worse off in an anarchy where their savings had not been eaten away by taxes and inflation, where they had not been deliberately discouraged from acquiring the tools and training to defend themselves, where the cost of medicine had not been driven sky-high by subsidies.

Okay, really: little old ladies?! Talk about your alarmist, slippery slope nonsense! But, since you brought it up,

It was 2%Co who said: “. . . for us, one of the most important points of government is to protect those who [unlike big scary-looking dudes like Anton] can’t take care of themselves.” Is their objection that I chose someone too helpless for my example? Should I confine my concern to those only moderately helpless?

oh, yes, little old ladies — those bastions of physical power, celerity, and uncompromising force of will — would certainly thrive in a world with no centralized law or law enforcement to protect their safety and their interests.

Why “centralized”? The freedoms that we in the West take for granted grew in a context of overlapping and competing legal systems (royal, manorial, ecclesiastical etc), and are being eroded as law becomes more centralized in sovereign states. The Federalist Papers count on a tension between Federal and State authority to protect the citizen’s liberty; that tension was gone by 1865.

David Friedman calculated in 1989 that the apparatus of law enforcement at all levels costs each US citizen $40 per year; might not our little old lady be better off spending her share on a crime insurance policy that (a) employs patrols to look out for her safety rather than spending most of their time looking for dope and (b) at least gives her a refund when it fails?

What are they saving without taxes and inflation? The cowry shells they’ve earned from doing laundry and giving hummers to desperate old men?

Do 2%Co imagine that’s the only productive activity there would be without the welfare state?

Since they raise the question of how granny can support herself — remember boarding-houses? Neither do I, but apparently they were once a common way for widows to make a living, when they no longer needed a big house for their own family. Then along came zoning, which says that a single-family residence is a single-family residence and a business is a business and never the twain shall meet, lest a neighborhood’s character change over time. Yet another example of the systemic hubris.

That ought to come in handy, if their homes are suddenly invaded by arts and crafts teachers who can be bought off.

I hope I may be forgiven for thinking granny might have some concerns other than crime.

The bottom line is that we oppose stupid legislation as it comes up instead of deciding to toss out the entire government when one law has one bad effect.

The trouble is that the battle must be fought over and over again, and uphill, because in public life the Invisible Hand works backward. Why not give some consideration to changing the structural incentives?

For example, we oppose abuses of eminent domain and believe that the Supreme Court ruling was misguided and dangerous. We do not therefore advocate the removal of all government powers, and we have no fucking clue why you think there’s a logical connection there.

I agree that 2%Co have no fucking clue. (Surely you didn’t expect me to pass that one up?) They see every bad policy in isolation, as a separate illness to be cured before moving on to the next. I see them as symptoms of the same fundamental error.

In addition — and this is the really important part, Anton — who is abusing this clear legislative loophole in the eminent domain regulations to the detriment of the hypothetical little old ladies you are so worried about? The answer: the very fucking same private enterprises that you feel should be trusted with so much more power in your brave new world.

A generation before it became fashionable to seize land for the greater glory of Wal-Mart, eminent domain was widely used to replace cheap housing with more upscale housing (whence the phrase “Urban Renewal is Negro Removal”), and justified in the name of combatting “blight”. Even when it was confined to its “proper” purpose, somehow highways had a habit of going through poor neighborhoods a lot more often than through rich ones.

Eminent domain is inherently destructive of those rights for whose preservation governments are (purportedly) instituted. And it is unnecessary, yea even unto the construction of highways.

No matter who benefits from such robbery, I want to take away the weapon.

Wake up — corporations and private enterprises are no better equipped than the government to run things. What the fuck is it about their past behaviors that would make you think any different?

The fact that none of them has ever started a war, for one thing.

It’s not that I think the managers of private firms are more virtuous than public bureaucrats, it’s that I don’t need them to be. If one serves me ill, I turn to another — right away, not two years from now, and without straining to persuade half of my neighbors.

Part of the difference is cultural: people tend to accept that whatever the state does is right (or at least that resistance is futile); it’s unlikely that a private firm could command that kind of habitual deference, particularly when it has competitors.

Yes, we know, you aren’t suggesting that private enterprises have any power. Nor should the government, in your fantasy land. This despite your assertions that there are still, for example, civil courts which need to be run by someone. If it isn’t the government, and it isn’t a private enterprise, then who is it? No answer from the Libertarians there, huh? This is what we mean when we say that the platform is exceedingly vague, Anton.

Well, I won’t say 2%Co are wrong in that.

At any rate, with no rulers, there can be no enforceable rules. Guess what — that’s anarchy! You seem to be saying that you favor that approach (your words, not ours), and we have clearly established that we do not. We know what anarchy is and we’re not over-inflating the term — we’re not assuming it’s the mass hysteria of dogs and cats living together — and to us, an anarchist state is not a good thing. That is the basic cause of our disagreement — you believe that in the absence of all rulers there can still be enforceable rules. We don’t see how that’s a rational assumption, as we’ve said above. That is why we don’t think that continuing this discussion makes much sense.

Agreed. Thus I would like to drag it back to the points I initially raised, which do not depend on the question of anarchism.

In short, while you were busy taking pot shots at the specific issues we took aim at in the LP platform, you completely missed the larger point which underlies our entire stance on the platform — namely, that it is impossible to implement in the real world. Literally impossible. Not going to happen. Period. Why? Because it is vague, and contradictory, and it relies on the basic benevolence and wisdom of a population that has proven itself to be neither benevolent nor wise. All three of these issues render it fucking useless in the real world. That is why we say it simply won’t work. In all your feverish, unrealistic pontification about old ladies and phantom civil courts, you haven’t offered us any reason to think otherwise.

How has the population failed to prove itself vastly more benevolent and wise than those who presume to rule it?