Separating theory from practice

Ok, so another common objection I hear is something along the lines of “Oh anarchism is nice in theory, but it just wouldn’t work in the real world”. This is the same thing that you hear spoken of Communism and Socialism, however there actually are problems with the theory in these, which will be a topic for another post. Likewise, I would expect you to be able to show me why the theory of anarchism is wrong.

There is no good ‘theory’ in the world that holds up in light of clear evidence to the contrary. If it doesn’t work in practice, that just means it wasn’t a good theory in the first place. Communism is not “good in theory, bad in practice”, it is actually bad in theory too!

It’s really stupid when people tell me that I’m being impractical, it borders on madness when they fail to realise that their ’solution’ to the problem is to actually take what makes the problem bad, and exacerbate it. When people propose government solutions to “stop the monopolies occurring”, they fail to realise that they are actually converting this monopoly that is voluntary, into a coercive monopoly (government). This is just madness, you don’t solve a problem by doing more of that same problem. Nobody says “Murder is bad, so in order to stop it, we should do 100 murders”.

There is no possible way that any criticism of human nature can be applied to only anarchism, that same human nature exists within people who work for the government too. Apples with apples please guys. If people within anarchy are going to be evil bastards who go around killing and stealing, well then government will necessarily be governed by the same thing, which only magnifies the problem millions of times by the immense violent power of the state. People don’t just magically become ‘good people’ once they start working for the government.

If you’re going to attack anarchism, show why something would otherwise be possible with government, that is impossible without. Don’t just say “Oh but there’ll be random axe murderers in anarchy” when random axe murderers exist now.

Argumentation Ethics by Hoppe

Here’s a summary of one example of the moral theory behind libertarianism, The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

“The mere fact that an individual argues presupposes that he owns himself and has a right to his own life and property.”

Any alternative to the private property ethic must necessarily contradict the demonstrated preference of the person making such a proposition. Just like how if I said “Your senses are not valid”, this would be contradictory because in order for you to hear and understand the statement, your senses must be valid.

Two essential insights:

1. In asserting a proposition, you are demonstrating a preference for willingness to rely on argumentative means – the content of the claim must also be compatible with the idea that that claim’s truth value can be determined via argumentative means.
2. It must be recognised that when you form an argument, you are employing some form of scarce means (such as your body), and that this form of means is private property.

When you argue with somebody, you are implicitly recognising that that person has a mutually exclusive property right in their own body. Arguing any kind of norm is presupposing that you have an exclusive right of control over your own body.

If we want to now extend property rights out to things external to our own body, this can be shown by the very fact that in order to stay alive, you have to appropriate other things for your use such as food, land, water etc. There must be some way to show a link between a person and some kind of resource. Not just this, but the first-user-first-owner rule of libertarianism (homesteading) must necessarily be the only way to claim ownership of resources.

Why must it necessarily be the first user? Because anything other than this would require a person to get the prior consent of all latecomers. If you think about this, you’ll realise that such a rule would mean that our ancestors, ourselves, and our children could never survive by such a rule.

Property rights could not be “timeless” and non-specific regarding people, and to argue against this is also self-contradictory because to argue is to presuppose one’s existence as an independent, decision-making moral agent at a given time.

 

‘Choosing’ Democracy

It’s interesting when I get thrown the question: “If people chose to opt-in to democracy, would you support this choice?”

It’s not like my answer is not predictable, my answer is an overwhelming yes. But asking this kind of question is still funny to me because it suggests (quite correctly) that it should be a choice in the first place. Caring about people’s right to opt-in to democracy would only make sense if they had the right to opt-out!

I think that once people actually did have the right to choose though, it’s very unlikely they would choose violent governance over peaceful and free society. This is not some kind of “Oh you’re just brainwashed so you’re wrong” argument, its just an argument based on the idea that people are yet to see/understand anarcho-capitalism. It’s just saying that once people have seen how well things can work without governments burdening us, it’s highly unlikely that they would voluntarily choose government.

Government by democracy really means being made to do things you don’t want to do. Why? Because if you wanted to do them in the first place, it wouldn’t need to be enforced by violence! So this is why it’s highly unlikely that people would willingly submit to government ownership of their lives via democracy, once they’ve experienced the society that works without arbitrary rulership over them.

It’s so simple, and yet so many people seem to be unable to get their heads around this. If something is “in the culture” of what people like to do, then why must it be forced at gunpoint? As long as all governments allow the right of secession down to the individual, there is no problem with this. The point with this whole blog, is the fact that at the moment, we don’t get to choose. We are born into the system (which apparently means we consent to the social contract), much like being born into slavery.

The paradox of democracy

I saw this on a forum, and it’s very well put:

The paradox is as follows: “the people” cannot be trusted to value some long term gain (e.g. maintaining “a vital ecosystem”) over a short term gain (e.g. “eating a hamburger that costs a buck less”) but they CAN be trusted to elect someone into power who does value the long term gain over the shorter term. Thats like saying I can’t trust myself to voluntarily go to the dentist, but I can trust myself to voluntarily hire someone to force me to go to the dentist – pure madness.

Democracy sucks.

Free Market National Defence

Free Market Defence: Anarchist Insurance will work best by Gareth Williams

Interested in how it works? Here’s a summary of this paper on how spontaneous economic interaction could generate the funding for national defence in an anarcho-capitalist society.

3 assumptions:

1. Other states will continue to exist outside the free society
2. These states will for whatever reason present a threat to the free market society
3. The individuals inside the free market society will be largely self-interested

To the extent that these assumptions are questionable (which they are in some ways), the defence would become easier to provide in the anarchist society.

2 more assumptions:

1. Taxation, regulation and oppression of civil liberties decrease property values within the society in which these practices exist
2. Those in charge of states which continue to exist, desire the continued existence of their own state.

The last assumption here suggests that no state would be willing to expend more resources invading another territory than it would actually gain by doing so, because no state would willingly follow a policy that leads to its own destruction. It is also important to note here that a free market society need not be able to resist the advance of the world’s most powerful state, since many states now are unable to do this. All that is needed, is for the free society to be able to inflict more damage to an invader than the invader would gain by invading.

Invasion Insurance

By the reverse of the 4th assumption, the fact that there will be less taxation, regulation and oppression of civil liberties would increase the value of property in the free society. It would be understood that if a state were to invade/impose itself on the society, the value of those resources would fall dramatically. Given that humans are generally risk averse, they would want to insure themselves against such a risk.

Insurance companies would wish to insure against the fall in property value following an invasion, and in a world where it is not that uncommon for a government to spend about 40% of GNP (as in the case with the UK and other Euro nations), the increase in property value would be immense.

Such a large liability would cause insurance companies to contract with other companies, committing to pay towards a fund to defend the territory in proportion to the level of liability faced. This way, their individual size wouldn’t matter, since they could just pay their proportion of the fee.

Defence – Not Aggression

If a conventional military is required to defend the society, then so be it. One important difference here though, is that this military would only care about defence, not aggression. This means the costs are going to be kept low. eg. This defence would not care about national prestige or anything like that. Two alternatives to a conventional military would include:

• Payments to a defensive alliance (like a NATO)
• Nuclear deterrents, such as submarines or warheads with the capacity to hit an invading country – note here that no country with nuclear weapons has ever been invaded by another country, which is evidence of the powerful deterrent effect that nuclear weapons can have.

Anarchism or death

Free market defence is not only possible, it is the only credible form of defence available to us. Why? Because the existence of a state promotes the development of a new threat to our safety: terrorism. Terrorist action is often driven by the desire to take control of government (an institution of violent coercion), and can often happen as a retaliatory strike based on the fact that there is government presence that is resented in an area.

When we view the problem of international terrorism controlled by fanatics prepared, and equipped to use WMDs we realise that our choice may soon be between the destruction of civilisation through nuclear holocaust, the destruction of civilsiation through a totalitarian police state, or the adoption of a spontaneous free market society devoid of the coercive instruments over which terrorists fight. The choice is: anarchism or death

Why it doesn’t even matter if I can’t give you a different solution

While I can completely understand why you would want to know how the alternative to governments (anarcho-capitalism) works before ‘jumping ship’ so to speak, allow me to explain why your changing over should not be contingent upon the solution that anarchists propose.

Back when slavery was still regarded as an acceptable practice, slave owners may well have argued that “No, don’t release the slaves, what if they can’t get jobs when they’re free? They’re better off staying slaves so at least they get fed”. Can you see how this is a stupid thing to say, and that regardless of whether slaves can get jobs when they’re free, it still makes sense to free them?

In the same way, the use of government violence cannot be justified by appealing to the idea that “If there were no government violence, we wouldn’t be able to do XYZ”, because governments are wrong in the first place, so it doesn’t matter!

If a problem cannot be solved in anarchy, there is even less chance that it could be solved with the use of violent force by governments. We’re better off not sugarcoating up the harsh realities of the world with governments. If we really couldn’t work together as a society, then lets at least be open about this, rather than pretending everything will be ok as long as we have governments to rule and own us.

A simple way of putting this is: Even if I couldn’t come up with a working alternative, would you still support the use of violence against me for refusing to participate in this immoral democratic system?

Do we have government food stores?

It’s funny how people think that “We need the government to have a hand in x”, but at the same time, they do not also argue for government interference in other areas.

This post is not necessarily targeted specifically at government run food stores, the point is that there are things that the government does not need to interfere with, and it can come across as inconsistent when statists argue that the government is needed in some areas, but not in others. Most people understand that the free market does just fine for delivering pizzas for example.

“Fine, well the government needs to take control of important things”

Well if this is what you think, then why don’t we have government food stores? Eating is pretty important right? And who gets to determine what ‘important things’ are? Should we have government redistribution of lobster too?

Generally you would agree with me when I say that when somebody knows that they can just force you to use their service, this person doesn’t exactly have a great incentive to actually do a good job for you right? Because they can get the same benefit (your money) for less service (less work for them). So why do people still argue that we need governments to monopolise things? Wouldn’t competing private business be more inclined to actually provide good service?

So it comes to this: there is no third way, you can either have free markets, or socialism. There is no in between, since any form of coercive government that monopolises services will automatically trend towards big government and no personal freedom. This is a perfectly predictable result of democracy and that’s why it sucks so much.

Free Domain Radio

I’d  like to draw your attention to Stefan Molyneux’s website: www.freedomainradio.com

I can’t stress the importance of the message it carries, it is a phenomenal series of podcasts that will blow your mind and the ideas it carries are what will set the world free. The podcasts are a discussion of philosophy, religion and politics, as well as personal freedom. It’s free to download, I really strongly recommend that you at least give this podcast series a shot.

Don’t be fooled by names

Don’t be fooled by names or ostensible purposes. It is so often that I see people (especially politicians and defenders of the state) argue in deceptive ways.

One particular immoral tactic that you might find being used is the one where they will assume that their method of doing something is the only way that something could be done. The fact that I hate socialised medicine with a passion does not mean that I do not support giving health care to the poor. It merely means I don’t support violence against people, forcing them to pay or provide health care to other people.

Another funny tactic used is to define the policy in such a positive sounding way that anyone disagreeing with it doesn’t agree with the “nominal goal”. To explain this, let’s look at “Free Trade Agreements”. Contrary as it may sound to my free marketeer position, I don’t support FTAs, I support Free trade. To say that because a person is not “for a free trade agreement”, that person is “against free trade” is wrong. All that is needed for free trade to occur, is removal of all trade barriers, there is no FTA required for this.

Another example of this is the way that people argue against the removal of “unfair dismissal laws” saying that if someone is for the abolishment of those laws, that that person is “for unfair dismissal” (Stephen Smith of the Labor Party argued this on Insight back when Work Choices was first brought in around 2004 iirc). What idiocy! My being against unfair dismissal laws stems from the fact that the state does not own individuals and so it should not be able to dictate how they go about their private business. Of course I don’t want people to be unfairly dismissed, it’s just that I wouldn’t support violence against an employer who did unfairly dismiss.

Anyone proposing a government solution to something is really proposing violence against people who disagree/don’t comply with ‘democratic decisions’. Compliance with democracy is not a requirement for morality, and democracy has absolutely nothing to do with the rights of the individual in the sense of natural law. Democracy sucks and nobody seems to understand or care.

A rational person will not allow the evil people to just morally posture themselves onto the higher ground. So don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes, see the evil for what it is. Point out that government (without the right to opt out) necessarily means violence, and that one could not rationally be against initiation of violence and be for the state at the same time.

In a sentence: Call them out for their violent propositions!

“But at least it’d be illegal”

I never cease to be astounded by the poor quality of defences for government involvement in our lives. This one is especially poor, because it’s generally used after it is demonstrated that government laws don’t necessarily achieve their ostensible purpose. Gun control laws don’t really stop more crime than they encourage, anti-drug laws tend to not actually help society, minimum wage laws tend to actually create more unemployment amongst the poor, the list goes on and on.

What kind of mentality is it where for something to be ‘discouraged enough’, it has to be enforced at gunpoint? Why must a bad deed (usually as judged by democracy, unjust as it is) always and necessarily require someone to get shot for it? Why does everyone forget about the fact that non-violent means could be used instead?

If you’d like an example of non-violent means, take a look at contract rating agencies for example. Their role could be expanded to cover individuals in other areas, and if you’d like a somewhat real-world example of this, look at Ebay and its rating system, which works very well. If the subject of private law interests you, check these out:

• The Possibility of Private Law by Robert Murphy
• Caging the Devils: The Stateless Society and Violent Crime by Stefan Molyneux
  
• Law and Courts archive at simplyanarchy.com

In a more logical society (like anarcho-capitalism), punishment/retribution is not the aim. Compensation is the aim, and this can be seen by the fact that the general idea is that if you commit a wrong you should try and bring the situation back to one that is more comparable to what it was like before you committed the crime. Yes, this is not always possible (eg. bring someone back from the dead), but lets not pretend the government can do this either shall we?

Market based solutions to the problem of interpersonal violence/wrongs will always be better than government ones, because they will tend to use the less resources and violence than governments to solve a problem. If you think that market based solutions would be violent, this could only really be because of human nature. If it is human nature that is at fault, then this is STILL not an argument for governments, since the government will still be subject to the very same flaw, and magnify it thousands of times. So really, if it is the case that we’re all just violent people who can’t get along, lets not sugarcoat it up with governments and pretend like the violence doesn’t exist.

Of course, I strongly doubt that the move towards anarcho-capitalism would result in increased violence and mayhem, because of a few simple ideas:

1. People generally find it hard to sleep at night if they’ve just spent the whole day sticking guns in other people’s ribs/killing/stealing. Don’t discount emotional discomfort as a big factor in the way people live their lives.
2. There must necessarily have been a sense of order for a government to even be able to establish itself, the order must have come before, not after governments.
3. People will generally find it in their own self-interest to play nice, because they know that they’d rather live in a civilised society. (“I scratch your back, you scratch mine”)
4. Anarchic societies have existed for hundreds of years with low violence levels.
5. Private defense agencies