No Coercion

I live in Durham County (NC), right next door to Wake County, which is in the midst of a heated debate over its notorious forced busing program that the new school board just declared its intention to end (they’ve been assigning children still trapped in the government school system to schools very far from their homes in order to achieve a “diversity” goal of no school having more than 40% of the children in the free or reduced lunch program–the result is lots of parents who otherwise would have had their kids in the local neighborhood school and who now have a much greater difficulty staying involved in their children’s education while the kids spend hours each day on the bus, sometimes force to go out to the bus stop before sunrise). I’ve been having a tough time, in a particular discussion forum, trying to explain the injustice of such a program to some statists, who already don’t understand the injustice of the government education system in the first place. My latest attempt is to compare the State to the Mafia, along the lines of thinkers like Spooner and Rothbard. After I typed it up I decided it would make a good blog post, so here’s what I posted in the forum (for clarification, my use of the phrase “propaganda language” is a reference to the use of that phrase by one of the statists in response to another libertarian’s referring to taxation as theft):

Here’s maybe a different way of looking at this busing issue (and really any issue involving compulsory government). Imagine it’s not the government that comes around to take some of your money to fund schools, but rather a Mafia enforcer. Imagine it’s not the government that threatens to lock you up if you don’t send your kids to school, but rather the Mafia enforcer. Imagine it’s not the government that then makes it harder for you to be involved in your children’s education by sending them to a school across town that you otherwise wouldn’t have chosen, but rather your friendly Mafia enforcer. Now, what we call theft (or armed robbery if you refuse to send in the money on your own), kidnapping, and general aggression when the Mafia does it, we call ‘democracy at work for the public good’ or some other such *ahem* propaganda language when the state does it.

Ah, you say, but it’s okay when the state engages in this kind of violence because “we’re a democracy” and “we can vote for our leaders.” Okay, then–let’s say the Mafia comes along and says, “You can vote for which Mafiosi you want to do the hiring of the enforcers! Woohoo! We won’t let you out of the violence we’re initiating, but YOU get to tell us who you want holding the gun! Aren’t we nice?”

Ah, you say, but it’s not really like that with the state because we’re all part of the “social contract” that allows the state its monopoly on justice and the legal initiation of violence. Well, alrighty–so the Mafia comes back and says, “Hey, whatcha fussin’ for, guy? Don’t you know what we’re doing is okay because of this special “social contract” we just came up with that we say you’re agreeing to?”

So here’s the deal. The difference–the SOLE difference–between the Mafia and the state is that the state has managed, through nonsense logic and “propaganda language,” to convince enough of you terrified children of its legitimacy that you allow it to go about its business of aggression without too much resistance.

Ending the busing program is a reduction in the level of aggression involved in education, a smaller reduction for some and a greater reduction for others.

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As a follow up to yesterday’s post, I want to say a few words about the old “complaining vs. solutions” thing. After reading my description of how government exists and acts by means of aggressing against people, a friend of mine said that I was pointing out problems but wasn’t discussing any solutions. I think it’s important to recognize the fact that having any sort of solution to a problem is in no way a prerequisite to pointing the problem out to people. Sure, we constantly hear things like, “stop complaining if you don’t have any solutions,” but that’s said by Democrats and Republicans to each other as a lazy way of attacking the other side. It’s been said so often and for so long that many of us have come to feel it’s a legitimate argument; but it’s not. If someone has no clue how to go about preventing rape and murder, should he refrain from pointing out that they’re wrong? Of course not. It’s the same for any other situation. Whether I have any solutions for the problem of the state has zero bearing on the importance of continually bringing the problem to my readers’ attention. Getting a critical mass of people to agree on the existence of a problem is a big step toward solving it.

Of course, I talk about my solution all the time, either directly or indirectly: abolition of the state. But what my friend wanted to know was exactly how I propose getting from state to stateless. The answer, I believe, is agorism.

From the web site,

Agorism is revolutionary market anarchism.

In a market anarchist society, law and security would be provided by market actors instead of political institutions. Agorists recognize that situation can not develop through political reform. Instead, it will arise as a result of market processes.

As the state is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of the criminal state by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and thus can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy – black and grey markets.

The state will never willingly cease to exist unless it becomes so small and weak compared to the free market that its case is hopeless (and even then it may resist violently at the end). The prospect for abolishing the state by “electing the right people” is beyond nil. Therefore, agorism proposes to steadily expand the domain of voluntary market forces and shrink the domain of the coercive, compulsory state. Crucial to this progression is helping more and more people to “take the red pill” and understand that the state is inherently unjust and that supporting it means that one is supporting the unjust initiation of force against his fellow man.

I’m doing my bit to create a culture of freedom and nonaggression.

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People across the U.S. today are celebrating Constitution Day (including many of my fellow libertarians). Personally, I’m not sure what there is to celebrate. I understand the argument that it was a document that, on its face, set up a somewhat limited government (especially by today’s standards), but that limited government was orders of magnitude more powerful (even on paper) than the previous one set up under the Articles of Confederation. And I understand that Madison and those guys came up with some seemingly very clever checks and balances that probably seemed really cool to people that were used to powerful monarchs, but all those checks and balances were functions of one single government. If the government wants to, there’s nothing to theoretically prevent it from doing whatever it wants. Even allowing voters the occasional choice of rulers is a largely meaningless check since nothing can be done between elections, and the majority of voters almost always vote for the candidate who promises them the biggest chunk of their neighbors’ money or the biggest expansion of government’s ability to make their neighbors behave the way they want.

The U.S. Constitution specifically gives the federal government 18 enumerated powers. To make matters worse, it contains vague language, like the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause, and the Necessary and Proper Clause, which have made it frighteningly easy for the government to continually interpret new powers into existence for itself. In fact, the only way the Federalists were even able to get the Constitution ratified was by including the Bill of Rights, which placed specific limits on government power. But even these, as we have seen over and over in our history, can be ignored with great impunity by Presidents and Congresses with a mind to do so.

Ah, you say, but we have the Supreme Court to check the other branches and make sure they don’t violate the Constitution. That’s a nice theory, but that’s not what usually happens. Who appoints the Supreme Court justices? The Executive, with Senate confirmation. There’s no inherent reason for one branch to fear (as Madison hoped) a growth in power by another branch and thus act to stop it. In fact, each branch has the most to gain if it can help the other branches gain more power. And this is exactly what we have seen in reality as each branch has grown ever more powerful and placed ever more severe limits on the ability of individuals to act and interact freely. And the propaganda that has been built up around the Constitution has most Americans mindlessly repeating quaint platitudes about “a blueprint for limited government” and “the Articles of Confederation just didn’t create a strong enough central government to hold the union together” (as if that should ever have been considered a legitimate end in the first place).

So the reality appears to be that the Constitution has had the perverse effect of advancing and legitimizing a perpetually expanding government while convincing the majority of people that it’s supposed to do the opposite.

No, I don’t believe I’ll be celebrating Constitution Day. But I certainly will tip my hat to the Anti-Federalists and supporters of the Bill of Rights, since they saw the Constitution for what it was.

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Stefan Molyneux, an anarchist philosopher, has written a handful of books (available for free), one of which is Practical Anarchy, in which he addresses many concerns that non-anarchists often put forward when we talk about abolishing the state. In one of my favorite passages, he brings up the very good point that we don’t often call for statist solutions to the problems we face in our personal and professional lives:

For instance, when you face a problem at work, I can’t imagine that you ever sit your team down and say:

“I’ve come up with the perfect solution to our problem – what we’re going to do, see, is pick two of us, give them guns, and then those two are going to force the rest of us to do whatever they want for the next few years, and then we are going to perhaps pick two other people who will get those guns, and then they’ll be able to force us to do whatever they want us to do for the next few years, and then we’ll start all over again…”

I have yet to see a business book with anything close to the title of: “Creating A Violent Internal Monopoly To Solve Your Customer Service Woes!”

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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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I heard a guest on a news program this morning discussing Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia and his hopes for a better Middle East. He said that Obama needs the help and support of many of the region’s autocratic leaders that oppress their own people and so will be unable to lecture them about changing their internal policies and institutions. He described this as the “conundrum” facing American foreign policy.

Now, the libertarian approach to the Middle East would be to follow George Washington’s advice and try to maintain friendly relationships with all the states in the region and ending any “entangling alliances” like the one with Israel. It’s not our place to be lecturing other countries about freedom and democracy, especially when our vaunted democratic process is currently doing so much to destroy our freedom. The best thing to do is to set a good example and try to keep trade and travel as open as possible so that the citizens of those other countries can see the benefits of a relatively freer and more open society first hand and be motivated to go back home to fight for their own freedom.

Isn’t it interesting how using the libertarian approach eliminates the supposed “conundrum” and would even allow us to get rid of probably hundreds of State Department employees currently being employed in the complex machinations of our interventionist foreign policy?

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So, we’ve got ourselves a new ruler…er…president. I was sitting there this morning, half asleep, feeding the baby, and watching one of those CNN guys interview Colin Powell. The interviewer was musing about Obama’s “bipartisan” overtures and the implications for the way national politics is viewed and conducted, and he made some comment about politics being thought of as a zero-sum game in recent years, to which Powell replied, “I win, you lose. That’s all there is to it. But that’s not what the Founding Fathers had in mind, and that’s not what makes a democracy work.”

The weird thing is that politics is, by definition, a zero-sum game. It’s the antithesis of the economic process, which is not a zero-sum game. Politics, even in a democracy (or a democratic republic), is based on the use of force. It really can’t be anything other than a zero-sum game, because if all parties to a transaction were benefiting, it would be because no one was being coerced–it would be an economic process rather than a political one. Politics comes in to play when one or more individuals or groups decide to appropriate more power/wealth than they could acquire through voluntary market interactions. They use force to do this, whether they call it monarchy, despotism, communism, or democracy. And whenever coercion is involved, there are necessarily winners and losers, with the winners gaining at the expense of the losers.

Consider: when some people get together and decide to improve their community by organizing a voluntary campaign to get homeless people healthy, cleaned up, educated, and off the streets, everyone wins. Even if those doing this work give up their time and money, they’re doing it by choice, which means they’re better off than if they hadn’t done it (otherwise they wouldn’t do it). However, when a group of people get together, declare that they have the legitimate authority to initiate force, and then proceed to go door to door confiscating money from people under threat of violence for the same purpose of helping the poor (while also keeping some of the loot for their troubles, of course), there are necessarily winners and losers. The winners are most definitely those who do the looting (we know them as politicians), and, if they’re lucky, the homeless might get a portion, although without the strings of community pressure and encouragement attached (with the predictable result that many of them do little to move toward improving their situation). The losers, of course, are everyone who was looted at gunpoint. To make matters worse, the looters can claim that the lack of improvement in homelessness necessitates further action on their part, which means more looting and using part of that loot to hire more of their fellow community members out of their wealth-creating jobs in the free market and into the business of being looters, all for the supposedly noble purpose of the ‘public good’ or the ‘general welfare.’

But then it occurs to me that I’ve misunderstood what Powell and the news guy were getting at. They weren’t really saying that the political method of goal achievement–with looters gaining at the expense of the looted–was inappropriately regarded as zero-sum. No, I’m sure they must know that that’s a perfectly apt description. What they meant was that the looters of Party A and the looters of Party B should stop fighting amongst themselves in zero-sum fashion, realize they’re on the same team, and get their act together so they can unite to more effectively (and democratically?) loot the rest of us.

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So, Obama has won. America is going to have our first half black President. I could only shake my head as I watched his blubbering, vapid supporters crying their eyes out as he gave his victory speech. Now, it’s not lost on me that this a momentous occasion for race relations in our country and probably will do wonders for black kids’ self esteem and our perception around the world. But it’s also not lost on me that Obama is a statist and does not believe in protecting natural rights. He believes that it’s good and proper to rally part of the population together and use violence to aggress against the rest of the population. With a Democratic White House and Congress, we are likely to see an acceleration of oppression and socialism in America the likes of which we haven’t seen since FDR and the New Deal. I can only hope that it’s so swift and painful that the American people will finally see statism (both socialism and fascism) for the inhuman, destructive force it is and react against it so strongly that our country will be forever purged of the popular desire for such schemes as wealth redistribution, minimum wages, socialized health care, subsidies, regulations, central banking, and so many other terrible things that Obama ran on.

Democracy is how the rulers of a country make their subjects believe they’re not being oppressed. And the American people totally fell for it yet again.

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The farcical puppet show known as Election Day is upon us. As I’ve said before, if you’re going to participate in this charade that seems to have many people convinced that they are somehow living in a free country, at least take an actual stand for freedom by voting for Libertarians. No, they may not win this time around, but don’t be a short-term thinker. Even if you aren’t necessarily in love with the Libertarian Party (you know who you are), I’m sure you like the idea of political competition and having additional voices in the debate to keep the major parties from completely getting away with murder.

So think about these very awesome reasons to vote Libertarian today:

The more votes Libertarian candidates get, the more they’ll have to be given a voice by the media outlets. They won’t be so easy to ignore in news stories, debates, and polling. The conversation will be much richer and more focused.

The more votes Libertarian candidates get, the greater the chance that they’ll win next time or the time after that. There’s no need to mince words. Weaker-minded people prefer to vote for winners over the candidates they actually agree with and will be increasingly willing to vote for Libertarians as they see others doing so.

The more votes Libertarian candidates get, the harder it will be for state governments to keep them off the next ballot. In North Carolina, if we can just get 2% for our presidential or gubernatorial candidates (Barr and Munger, respectively), we’re automatically allowed on the ballot for the next election. There would be no need for us to spend our entire war chest just to collect petition signatures for ballot access.

And, of course, you should vote Libertarian because you believe in voting on principle rather than for the lesser of the two evils, and you agree with the Libertarian principle of not initiating force or fraud against others–the principle on which every plank of the Libertarian Party platform is built.

Now this appeal wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t also acknowledge and promote libertarian individuals who are running under the banner of another party and not competing directly with Libertarian Party candidates. To that end, most of the “Ron Paul Republicans” around the country are probably worth looking at. In the Triangle area of North Carolina, a really impressive guy trying to unseat ‘the great and powerful’ David Price in the U.S. House is B.J. Lawson. The guy is sharp, personable, and very libertarian (so much so that he has been thoroughly rejected by the local party establishment, whose big-government, neocon “Chosen One” Lawson soundly defeated in the primary). But you do have to be careful with some of the Ron Paul Republicans as their views on immigration, abortion, and gay rights can sometimes be rather unlibertarian. At any rate, B.J. Lawson and others like him could certainly shake things up in Washington and would likely garner increased attention to the libertarian philosophy that they mostly adhere to.

So as much as I feel that voting gives sanction to an inherently unjust system, as long as there are those of the libertarian philosophy on the ballot, I guess you should get out there and cast a vote for human freedom.

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It’s a guilty little pleasure of mine that, even though his blog is named after Hayek (whose theory of libertarian ethics was quite internally consistent), one of the first things I do each morning is scan through Don Boudreaux’s (and Russ Roberts’) thoughts on the daily Cafe Hayek feed that comes to my inbox. Don and Russ are great defenders of freedom and fierce enemies of the state.

One of Don’s entries posted over the weekend was this: Yet Another Reason I Dislike Politicians. In it he describes a seminar he took part in where North Carolina’s very own Congressman Brad Miller was also a participant. His thoughts on Miller are insightful, especially as they apply to most politicians.

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