No Coercion

As I was working the booth for the Libertarian Party of North Carolina at the Festival for the Eno on Friday, I was approached by a woman who proclaimed, inexplicably, that since she was a biological scientist she knew that a libertarian society could never work. I asked her if she could explain what she meant, and she said that she has “just seen too much bullshit, you know?” She then made a few more vague generalizations (that could just as easily have been applied to her feelings about pizza or gardening) before finally making herself clear by stating her belief that you could only do away with government if everyone in the society was good and never tried to harm or take advantage of anyone else. Ahh, now I see (although what it had to do with being a biological scientist I’ll never know).

So, what we have is a recurring argument against the idea of a free, stateless society: that libertarianism is utopian and can’t work in the real world of flawed, and sometimes evil, human beings.

I believe that argument has things completely backwards. One of the great things about libertarianism is that it accepts that we live in an imperfect world and that it works just fine when you include flawed humans in the mix. It’s self-regulating and at the same time involves no top-down goal for creating a perfect world.

The majority of market participants always want to minimize violence and maximize protection of person and property, so market mechanisms will always tend to arise (as long as there is not a state to get in the way) to accomplish those goals. Even with the government in the way, the market attempts to do that in the form of various private security agencies, private arbitration agreements and businesses, charities that work with at-risk kids, even neighbors who organize to watch out for one another.

In addition, despite oppressive and destructive government regulations on nearly every conceivable consumer good and service and entire agencies designed to restrict things like food and medicine, there are rating companies and organizations that evaluate goods and services and provide the information through the voluntary processes of the market. You could get rid of the FDA and state licensing laws, and such companies would stand ready to obtain and disseminate information to consumers at various levels of detail and prices points, with the added benefit that no one would be using violence (as is currently done) to prevent you from getting a certain medicine or using a real estate agent, plumber, or hairdresser not approved by the state.

It seems the real utopians are those who claim that government can solve problems. Instead of accepting that the world is imperfect and allowing people the freedom to interact voluntarily in an attempt to make the best of it, believers in government want to try to “fix” various problems by force in order to create a more perfect world (or their idea of it). And I think it’s especially utopian to believe that you can set up a “limited” government and expect it to stay that way when you’ve given it a monopoly on the use of force within its territory (I’m talking to you, Founding Fathers). Government supporters seem to think that a group of people who are given the power to legitimately (so to speak) coerce others will somehow not be subject to the same human flaws as the rest of us. For some reason, once someone is a government official he’s supposed to be a selfless servant of “the people,” a concept particularly popular among supporters of democracy since they believe that being nominally answerable to the voters is some kind of special restraint on abuse of power (they seem oddly unaware of over 200 years of history here in America and in other represenative democracies).

So on one side you have libertarianism, which (in its undiluted form) holds that life is not perfect and that the best we can do is live in the most just way possible by abolishing government. And on the other side you have statism, which holds that it’s possible to forcibly correct the imperfections of life.

Maybe I’m wrong, but which one sounds more utopian to you?

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