No Coercion Exploring the idea of a stateless society.

Clearing up anarchism

After posting my last entry (Are you willing to hold the gun?) on a local news site's online community, I got quite a few comments on that site indicating a severe misunderstanding of anarchism on the part of many people. I've gotten similar responses on other explicitly anarchist blog entries in the past. I decided that I should take a little more time and try to clear up some of the confusion that many people seem to have about anarchism.

A common misconception about anarchism is that it's a philosophy completely opposed to rules and order. Anyone who believes that probably gets too large a proportion of their information from outlets like CNN and Fox News. The fact is that anarchism is a philosophy that opposes a coercive, non-consensual government, i.e., the state. Anarchists (except maybe those violent nut jobs I've mentioned before) are strong supporters of purely voluntary interaction and the organic rules and order that naturally flow from that (i.e., common law, social mores, contractual obligations, etc.). Rules are fine, as long as it's the result of voluntary interactions that don't violate natural rights. Anarchism rejects the initiation of force to create artificial rules and recognizes that any rules that have to be imposed by violence are probably contrary to natural law.

So, on to the anti-anarchists from the other day. One of the specific comments I received was this:

"...in a pure anarchy...who's going to stop somebody from holding a gun to your head and demanding all of your money anyway?"

In an anarchic society, there would be any number of ways available on the open market to stop that, whereas there is no real way to stop it when the state does it. This is actually a good topic for another blog post, so I won't go into it here.

Paraphrasing several related comments:

"How can you be an anarchist and support HOAs? They have rules and governance and stuff."

Yep, and they're a form of government--but they're private, consensual governments, just like the governments (i.e. Boards of Directors) that govern your local Rotary or Kiwanis clubs or any number of other private, voluntary associations. I often try to specifically use the word "state" as opposed to government (unless the context makes it unambiguous). Also, HOAs don't claim ownership of other people's property or kidnap or kill people who don't pay their dues. Of course, to the extent that HOAs are more predominant than they would be without coercive state regulations, I'm opposed to them. But I'm not opposed to them in principle.
Another paraphrasing of comments:

"Isn't Somalia an ideal anarchist society? Look how well statelessness has worked there!"

Actually, in many respects Somalia seems to have done decently well since the ousting of the government in 1991:
Somalia: Failed State, Economic Success?
Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It
The Anarchy Advantage in Somalia
Somali Anarchy is More Orderly than Somali Government

The continued violence by some factions appears to be a reaction to attempts by foreign powers to impose an unwanted central government: Are the Salad Days for Over Somalia?

To the extent that Somalia is anarchic, it's doing quite well (especially compared to it's previous, state-governed condition), and to the extent that it's NOT anarchic, it appears to be because of statist elements (i.e. U.S. and U.N. intervention, Ethiopian and Eritrean attacks and meddling, and the general authoritarianism of Sharia law under the Union of Islamic Courts).

Moreover, the actual conditions in Somalia--even if it was really an anarchistic society--would have nothing to do with the fundamental moral argument that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to aggress against another person or their property, whether you do it individually or as part of a group you call "the government."

Here's another interesting comment:

"Human nature would cause any society based on anarchy to fail. Human nature will cause the stronger to prey on the weaker."

This is important, because the commenter has it exactly backwards. It's human nature that makes anarchy absolutely necessary. It's true there are certain people who will prey on others. So why on Earth would it make sense to allow one particular group of predators to have all the most powerful weapons and a legal right to engage in predation against everyone else? Here's how Stefan Molyneux cogently puts it:

The logical error always made in the defense of the State is to imagine that any collective moral judgments being applied to any group of people is not also being applied to the group which rules over them. If 50% of citizens are evil, then at least 50% of the people ruling over them are also evil (and probably more, since evil people are always drawn to power). Thus the existence of evil can never justify the existence of the State. If there is no evil, the State is unnecessary. If evil exists, the State is far too dangerous to be allowed existence.

Well, that's enough for now. There were some other odd comments about how anarchic societies somehow wouldn't have banking or roads or would be full of friends robbing each other at gun point on a regular basis, but I think those were just kind of the last throes of some uninformed interlocutors being suffocated by the oppressive emptiness of their own arguments.

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Are you willing to hold the gun?

I often converse with people who are not anarchists (yes, I'm quite cultured). They are often conservatives or liberals who claim to sympathize with the idea of a limited government. Sometimes they are even my fellow libertarians (but of the minarchist variety). They say things like, "I understand where you're coming from, but I'm relatively happy with how things are right now with government providing roads, water, sewers, national defense, etc., and I don't want to end up in a Mad Max movie just to see how things would work out absent the state."

To such statements, I have to ask (as Stefan Molyneux does), "How badly do you really like your government roads and sewers? Are you willing to hold the gun to your neighbor's head if he refuses to pay taxes to fund those things?"Because that's how government works. A group of people get together and claim a monopoly on law-making and law enforcement and say that they're going to "protect you" and "do things for you," and then they come around with guns and ask everyone to "pay their fair share." If you don't pay, they attempt to abduct you (they use the word "arrest"). If you resist their abduction, they will kill you. Of course, they usually do end up providing some things and performing a certain degree of protection, but only enough so that they are not violently opposed en masse.

So if you support the legitimacy of the actions of this group of people, you must believe that their actions are just. So you must believe that you have a moral right to that government road such that it is legitimate to kill your neighbor for refusing to help pay for it. So would you be willing to hold the gun to your neighbor's head, ask him to pay his fair share, and shoot him if he refuses?

And if you're reluctant to embrace the stateless society as a goal because you're making out pretty well under the current system and you're having trouble imagining how we could all live together on a voluntary basis and enjoy all our modern conveniences, I would ask how you think that's different from slavery supporters in the 19th century who made the same arguments against ending slavery. In both situations, the defender of the current system is benefiting at others' expense through the organized, legal violence of the state.

Just something to think about.

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Yard sale licensing

A friend of mine recently commented on one of my libertarian-themed facebook posts, saying that he believed purely free markets only help "businessmen" and harm "labor or the middle and working class." He wanted to know what examples existed of free market success stories. While there are several issues that could be addressed here, I was a little short on time and limited myself to this response:

As for successes of the free market, pretty much every good or service you make use of in your life is a success story of the free market. The things that make our lives easier, healthier, more enjoyable--these things are the results of a multitude of individuals interacting voluntarily to produce things that people want. These accomplishments are DESPITE government control and regulations, not BECAUSE of them. Think about it on a micro scale. You want to have a yard sale to get rid of a bunch of things you no longer want. You'll sell them for dirt cheap to people who do want them who would otherwise have to pay a lot more or go without. But imagine if, in order to "protect the consumer," the government required you to get a state license (costing several hundred dollars and many months of licensing school) before you could hold your yard sale. This would likely prevent you from ever holding your yard sale. Those people who are really hurting for money would have far fewer options for obtaining the things they want, and there would emerge a small group of state-licensed yard sale specialists who would be able to charge much higher prices, thus making use of state violence to obtain a higher-than-market profit at the expense of the financially strapped yard sale customers. This is how government regulation works in EVERY area of the economy. Wealth creation between two parties is maximized when interference with their transaction is minimized. The amount of wealth that government violently destroys or prevents from ever even being created is truly staggering.

Of course, there's also the fundamental point (made implicitly above) that every transaction, by definition, benefits both parties---otherwise, the transaction simply would not occur. Wealth is created on both sides, because both sides are made better off by the exchange. What every form of government action (taxes, regulations, subsidies, prohibitions, licensing, etc.) does is either outright prevent transactions or distort the decision-making process, resulting either in transactions that would not have occurred in the absence of force (and are thus unproductive) or in the prevention of productive transactions that would have taken place. Either way, there is a destruction of wealth, and society is worse off. Usually, this is compounded by the fact that most government policies actually serve to transfer any wealth that is produced (again, a smaller amount than would be created in the absence of government) to politically favored constituencies, which is both massively unjust and serves to motivate those groups to continue and expand those government policies while everyone from whom that wealth is being transferred fail to launch an effective opposition since each individual policy only transfers a small amount from them.

And just to head off the "OMG we'll all die if the state doesn't license doctors and plumbers" contingent out there: relax, we'll be just fine. State licensing does not "protect" consumers as much as it prevents competition and raises the prices we have to pay for those licensed services. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't hire a service provider of any sort without the knowledge that the quality of their work is sufficient for my liking. And I don't get that information from the fact that these people have government licenses. I get it from places like Angie's List, brand identification, references, and general reputation. Just imagine all the ways a truly free market would devise to help us pick out the good doctors and plumbers and home builders. And even if such information is not totally free, think how much more money we'd have without the stifling taxes and wealth destruction of the state.

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9/11: What should we remember?

Blogs and opinion columns across the country and across the political spectrum (that is, the artificial conservative-liberal political spectrum) are no doubt calling for Americans to "remember 9/11" and similar robotic utterances. But what are we supposed to remember, exactly? Like most people, I was shocked at the 9/11 attacks and had the natural human urge to lash out at whoever committed those atrocities and anyone who might be vaguely related to them. Thus did I support the American invasion of Afghanistan, and thus did I proudly serve in the fourth troop rotation of Operation Enduring Freedom, stationed at Bagram Airfield with my National Guard unit.

But I've studied and learned a lot since that time and have since removed myself from the unhealthy nationalistic rage that previously clouded my faculties. The fact is that the United States attacked a country (yes, a country controlled by a primitive, violent, despicable regime...like many others around the world) that was not threatening American citizens. It's common knowledge that humans have a tendency to sort themselves into tribal divisions. The state has taken full advantage of that unfortunate evolutionary holdover and convinced a great many people from both of the state-sponsored parties that anyone who opposes the U.S. government or its totalitarian and interventionist policies actually opposes the American people and our "freedom." Yes, some of the Islamic fundamentalists probably oppose our freedom...but so do the Christian fundamentalists who live here among us! The main problem is our government, despite the wishes of most of the people it rules, has taken it upon itself to try to remake the world in its own image (which is especially contradictory and destructive since there are so many different ideas within the state apparatus of what the image actually is).

What it comes down to is:

1) The people who attacked us were murderous religious maniacs who happened to be using a particular country as a base of operations.

2) We had no right to invade either Afghanistan or (most certainly) Iraq (though the people who lost family members in the 9/11 attacks would, I think, be justified in hiring private security forces to seek out and capture or kill bin Laden and his co-conspirators).

3) Continuing the support of our presence in either country is not much different than supporting a mugger who has begun to beat and rob an innocent person based on the argument that this person, now confused and disoriented, is ripe for further mugging by others until we "stabilize" his situation.

In memory of the terrible events of 9/11/01, I suggest we call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American troops and other personnel and money from Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Human rights are property rights

In the current health care debate (as in all health care debates), many of those in favor of government involvement in health care (either the current level or increased involvement, which is being called "reform") insist that there is a positive right to health care---that having government pay for a certain (necessarily arbitrary) level of care is a basic human right. Of course, I and other libertarians and anarchists maintain that this is not logically possible. The only thing anyone has a right to with regard to health care is the negative right not to be prevented from engaging in voluntary interactions with others in order to obtain health care. And this right to not be interfered with (which also means that you have the right not to have a government confiscate your property to pay for others' health care) stems from the property right each of us has in our own body---the natural fact of self-ownership.

In his book, For a New Liberty, Murray Rothbard explains the false distinction between human rights and property rights:

The basic flaw in the liberal separation of “human rights” and “property rights” is that people are treated as ethereal abstractions. If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming resources; he must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he must use. In short, to sustain his “human right”—or his property rights in his own person—he must also have the property right in the material world, in the objects which he produces. Property rights are human rights, and are essential to the human rights which liberals attempt to maintain. The human right of a free press depends upon the human right of private property in newsprint.

In fact, there  are no  human rights that are separable from property rights. The human right of free speech is simply the property right to hire an assembly hall from the owners, or to own one oneself; the human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy. There is no extra “right of free speech” or free press beyond the property rights we can enumerate in any given case. And furthermore, discovering and identifying the property rights involved will resolve any apparent conflicts of rights that may crop up.

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Anarchic health care

In Practical Anarchy, Stephan Molyneux discusses how health care is provided under the current statist system and how it might be provided through the purely voluntary interactions of people in a stateless, anarchic society.

Anarchism recognizes the empirical reality of human corruption in a way that statism simply does not. Anarchists recognize that power corrupts, while statists forever believe that power is the cure for corruption. Anarchists understand that the only valid and proven way to oppose human corruption is through voluntarism and competition – statists believe that the only way to oppose human corruption is to create a monopoly of violent power.

Fundamentally, anarchists believe that virtue results from a marketplace of voluntary interactions – statists believe that virtue is a dictatorial compulsion, created and maintained at the point of a gun.

...

In statist health care systems, the doctor is paid per patient visit, not for a successful cure. Thus doctors do not make their money from curing patients, but rather from seeing patients – thus they have every economic incentive to keep consultations as short as possible, and to outsource any complicated “cures.”

Furthermore, in socialized medical systems in particular, it is actually illegal to collect and publish information about the quality and success rates of doctors. If I find out that I have prostate cancer, I cannot possibly find out which doctor has the greatest or best success rate in curing it. (More importantly, if I have a family history of prostate cancer, I cannot find out which doctor has been most successful in preventing it from occurring.)

When you sit back and really think about it, this is staggering – absolutely staggering!

It is illegal to sell a food item without publishing the nutritional information. It is illegal to run a public company without publishing your financial information. It is illegal to sell a car without publishing its fuel efficiency. Hell, it is illegal to sell an item of clothing without publishing where it was made.

Every stupid and irrelevant piece of information is required by law – but the success rates of doctors are not only not required, but you will actually go to jail for collecting and publishing this information!

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Imagine if I suggested the following as the solution to the problem of how to deliver healthcare in a stateless society:

The way that I see it working is this: one DRO [dispute resolution organization] should amass enough weaponry to violently drive all other medical DROs out of business. This DRO should then take about twenty percent of people’s income – and kidnap or shoot them if they do not give up their money – and then provide health care as it sees fit. This same DRO should also have complete control over how many doctors there are, and how a doctor should be trained, and how a doctor should be paid. Again, if anyone attempts to become a doctor without following the detailed and lengthy rules of this DRO, they can be kidnapped and/or shot. This DRO should pay doctors per patient visit, to ensure that doctors would see as many patients as possible in any given day – and it should make sure that doctors are neither paid for successful treatments, nor penalized for any unsuccessful treatments. Doctors should not make any money whatsoever by preventing illness, but rather should get paid for treating as many illnesses as possible, as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, this DRO monopoly should be able to shoot or kidnap anyone who dares to collect and publicize any information about the success rates of its doctors.

In order to ensure that citizen feedback is available to this DRO, every couple of years, citizens should be able to appoint a representative of their choice to the Board of Directors. Whoever they choose should be paid by the existing doctors that the DRO controls, or by the pharmaceutical companies…

We could continue with this example, but I think that you can see the ridiculousness of this “solution.” If I put this forward as my answer, I would receive an unbelievable tsunami of incredulous and contemptuous e-mails, wondering just what particular drugs I had been on when I described this as the best possible solution to the problem of providing health care.

Inevitably – and again, ludicrously – these same people will also deluge me with incredulous and contemptuous e-mails when I suggest privatizing the provision of health care.

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Ever since Blaise Pascal discovered the laws of probability, a singular human institution has arisen to help people deal with unpredictable risk – insurance.

Insurance is simply a way of playing the law of averages in order to create predictability. If one out of a hundred people is going to be randomly hit with a ten thousand dollar bill, it makes sense for everyone to have the option of paying a fixed amount of money in order to be insured against such a bill.

(Please note that in this section, I am talking about the free market insurance companies of the future, not the mercantilist semi-statist monsters of the present.)

The wonderful thing about insurance is that the interests of consumers are almost exactly aligned with the interests of providers, since both are directly motivated by the desire to decrease risk.

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(This is an enormous topic, but I would briefly like to mention that any discussion of free-market health-care provision – and insurance companies in particular – will doubtless draw comparisons to the existing system within the United States. This “system” has very little to do with the free market, in that more than fifty cents of every health care dollar is spent by the government, which violently protects a monopolistic doctor’s union called the American Medical Association, and also hyper-regulates the medical field with literally hundreds of thousands of laws, rules, directives and requirements. The incentive of private profit, combined with the corrupt largesse of a public purse, is technically called “fascism,” rather than freedom.)

In terms of health care, then, we can be sure that your insurance company wants to keep you as healthy as possible. The farmer who sells cows is interested in their long-term health, in a way that the butcher who disassembles them is not.

Due to this motivation, private insurance companies will be reasonably proactive in attempting to prevent health problems from developing, rather than merely curing them after they have occurred. They will be sure to pay doctors first for prevention, and then for successful cures, rather than for merely cycling as many patients through their offices as humanly possible.

In any situation where lifestyle choices can ameliorate health problems, those will be chosen in preference to endless medication. It does not cost the insurance company any money if you go for a walk or do some sit-ups; it does if you have to be on insulin for the rest of your life.

Conversely, medication is in general cheaper than surgery, all other things being equal, and so effective medications will be researched, developed and prescribed more often than invasive and dangerous surgery.

...

Spending money on a pricey doctor is probably about the most cost-effective investment you will ever make. The most effective doctors are those who cure the most efficiently – and for sure, most customers of health care insurance would also purchase life insurance from the same company, so that any disastrously failed “cures” would cost the company an enormous amount of money.

In this way, returning a customer to health not only guarantees future health care payments, but it also postpones the payment of death benefits. In this way, the self-interest of the insurance company is directly aligned with the self-interest of the customer, who doubtless does not prefer to be either sick, or dead. If the doctor is also paid to prevent, cure and keep alive, then all three parties have the same goal, which is the polar opposite of any statist system.

Thus whenever anyone starts evaluating which health care insurance company to go with, each company would be tripping over themselves to provide independently verified statistics about the long-term health of their customers – the number of ailments prevented, identified and cured; the average life expectancy, successful pregnancies and births and so on. These companies would be selling health to you, rather than inflicting repetitive treatments on you, which is the case with socialized medicine.

Thus, Molyneux makes an outstanding case that, rather than increase government involvement in health care (as the Democrats and their mostly well-intentioned supporters are calling for), we should get government OUT of health care entirely, ideally (though no time soon, I'm afraid) as part of the complete dissolution of the state in favor of a free, stateless society.

Of course, many of the aforementioned well-intentioned supporters of increased statism in health care recognize the essential truth of this line of reasoning, but are overwhelmed by their desire for the poor to not be left out. Of course, a stateless society would be so much wealthier that there would be a tiny fraction of truly poor individuals, and the competitive and pro-consumer health care system that would emerge under anarchy would produce quality health care for far better prices. But nevertheless, Molyneux addresses this particular concern:

We certainly want to help the unfortunate, but we do not wish to enable and subsidize bad decisions – this is only part of the complexity involved in helping others – which a statist society cannot distinguish or deal with at all.

If society gave everything that a poor person could possibly require in order to live comfortably, that would scarcely reduce the numbers of poor people, but would rather increase them considerably. On the other hand, the children of poor people are scarcely responsible for any bad decisions their parents may have made – however, if charities give a lot of money to poor people with children, more poor people will tend to have more children, which will only increase poverty.

This balancing act is one of the enormous and complex challenges of true charity – and yet another reason why a violent monopoly will never end up helping the poor in any substantive or permanent manner.

When it comes to health care, there is no doubt whatsoever that the majority of people care about the provision of health care for those who cannot afford it. At a hospital I visited recently, I saw a placard on the wall thanking the five thousand volunteers who helped run the place.

Doctors as a whole will always treat someone who comes with an immediate injury, whether they can pay or not. If we assume that medical treatments for the genuinely deserving and needy poor would consume about ten percent of general health care spending, then we can be completely certain that this amount of money would be donated by concerned individuals, either in time or money. We can be certain of this because we know of a large number of religious organizations that require ten percent of people’s total income – twenty percent in fact, since this is pretax income – and people are quite happy to pay that.

Thus the medical needs of the poor would be entirely taken care of in a free society through charity and pro bono work. Charities would also compete to provide the most effective care for the poor, in order to gain the most donations. I would certainly prefer to give my money to an organization that was best able to create and provide sustainable health practices and medical treatments for the poor.

In this way, not only would the self-interest of doctors, insurance companies and customers be aligned – but also the self-interest of donators, charities and the poor they serve.

In a stateless society, the poor will be genuinely served by a far better system, composed of those whose self-interest is directly aligned with the health of the poor.

As has been shown over and over again, throughout history and across the world, benevolent self-interest, enhanced by free association and voluntary competition, is the only way to create sustainable compassion within society.

I am aware that I have not answered all possible objections to the question of how health care is provided in a free society. I am also aware that the possibility always exists that people can “fall through the cracks,” or that charities could conceivably make mistakes, and either fund the wrong people, or fail to fund the right people.

Once more, this possibility of corruption and/or error is often considered to be an airtight argument against anarchy, when in fact it is an airtight argument for anarchy, and against statism.

Competition and voluntarism are the only known methodologies for repairing and opposing the inevitable errors and corruptions that constantly creep into human relations. The fact that human beings can make mistakes – and are always susceptible to corruption – is exactly why they should never be given a monopoly power of violence over others.

When an entrepreneur – whether charitable or for-profit – makes a mistake by failing to provide value – others will immediately rush in to provide the missing benefit. It is this constant process of challenge and competition that allows the best solutions to be consistently discovered and reinvented in an ever-changing world.

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On biting off of finger tips

By now everyone's heard about the incident at a MoveOn.org rally in favor of Obama/Pelosi/Marx/KennedyCare in which a "healthcare reform activist" (that's the media's term for what I like to refer to as "supporters of state violence") bit off a counter-demonstrator's finger tip. In addition to the hilariously inappropriate remark by a commenter on the LA Times blog that "at least we know there are still meat-eaters on the far-left," I think there are a couple of things of great interest here.

First, it seems fitting that such a vicious aggression would be committed by one of those who are advocating an escalation of the use of violence by the government to confiscate and redistribute wealth and inflict greater restrictions on the ability of individuals to engage in voluntary production and exchange in the area of health care (which they are hoping to do in order to increase their own power as the ruling political class, enrich the business interests allied with them, and appease a bunch of apoplectic voters with big hearts but a tenuous grasp of morality and basic economics).

Second, there was this:

“While we do not have any more facts about what happened than what we saw in press accounts, MoveOn condemns violence in all forms,” Hogue said.

All forms? Really? Your rally was in support of a gross initiation of violence by the state against the productive members of society. Your organization is one of the biggest advocates of the expansion of the state and the violence by which it works. I fear a basic failure to properly define terms has led a great many people to think as this man does--that violence, when committed by an entity with a monopoly on the legal use of force, is somehow not actually violence and not actually wrong.

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Obama the militarist

Barack Obama (I've decided to stop using terms of authority and respect for politicians of any party) is continuing to escalate the war in Afghanistan:
Obama aides see need for more troops in Afghanistan
Officials: US to Add 14,000 Combat Troops in Afghanistan

This is rich. A bunch of suckers (i.e. Democrats and anti-war independents) elected Obama thinking he would somehow stop U.S. military aggression (even though he had a half-hearted, long, drawn-out proposal for extricating us from Iraq and talked openly about invading Pakistan!), and now they are starting to see that he has exactly as much respect for peace and prosperity as Bush did.

Stefan Molyneux, in describing the multiple ways that governments lead to war in Practical Anarchy, finishes with this:

If the above is understood, then the hostility of anarchists towards the State should now be at least a little clearer. In the anarchist view, the State is a fundamental moral evil not only because it uses violence to achieve its ends, but also because it is the only social agency capable of making war economically advantageous to those with the power to declare it and profit from it. In other words, it is only through the governmental power of taxation that war can be subsidized to the point where it becomes profitable to certain sections of society. Destruction can only ever be profitable because the costs and risks of violence are shifted to the taxpayers, while the benefits accrue to the few who directly control or influence the State.

This violent distortion of costs, incentives and rewards cannot be controlled or alleviated, since an artificial imbalance of economic incentives will always self-perpetuate and escalate (at least, until the inevitable bankruptcy of the public purse). Or, to put it another way, as long as the State exists, we shall always live with the terror of war. To oppose war is to oppose the State. They can neither be examined in isolation nor opposed separately, since – much more than metaphorically – the State and war are two sides of the same bloody coin.

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