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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Many Wake County residents (and plenty of other folks) may be interested in knowing that the Wake County Public School System has recently implemented something called the Adopt-a-School Initiative, which seeks to partner every school in the system with a “faith-based organization” in order (ostensibly) to mentor problem students. To begin with, it turns out that not all “faith-based organizations” appear to be welcome. The program is headed by Assistant Superintendent of Student Support Services, Dr. Marvin Connelly, who also happens to be a Baptist pastor and is active in the Wake Baptist Missionary Association. At last check, hundreds of local Protestant churches had been notified of this program–no Catholic churches, and no non-Christian religious organizations. Very interesting.

And it gets even better. The “training” for participating individuals has been farmed out to a hardcore Protestant group called Another Step Forward Ministries. Their training brochure says the Adopt-a-School Initiative “links faith in God and good works for the improvement of life and the lives of others” and “seeks to build strong individuals, families, faith-based organizations, business and communities from a Kingdom perspective.” Really? This somehow didn’t seem problematic to the WCPSS Board?

This is almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, as well as objectively immoral since it involves the public school system that is funded with our tax dollars.  It was Thomas Jefferson who said, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

[I submitted basically what you see above as a letter to the editor of the News & Observer.]

These kinds of problems are inherent in a government school system and just another reason to abolish it and prevent government from having anything to do with education. Then people could simply send their kids to whatever private schools best suit them. But in the meantime, the only fair solution is to not allow mingling of government and religion.

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Well, the government is up to its old tricks, this time in my own back yard. A divorce court judge in Wake County is apparently ordering a divorcing couple’s kids into government schools after having been home schooled by their mother for the past few years. The mother’s curriculum seems to be based on the Biblical teachings of some kind of fundamentalist Christian sect, and the father is opposed to such education (as is the judge, it would seem).

Now I’m certainly no fan of religious education and all its attendant absurdities. It’s always disheartening to know that there are people out there teaching their children that many of the foundations of modern science are wrong, that two of every living thing on the planet were carried around in a big boat while the whole planet was underwater, that long-extinct creatures (like dinosaurs) were included in that big boat party, that people were healed and raised from the dead and walked on water through some supernatural means, that an ancient book of history combined with mythology (that has had its inherent absurdity compounded by being thoroughly garbled by a multitude of poor translations and intentional additions, deletions, and redactions) is the infallible word of an apparently schizophrenic supreme being, and that they will be tortured forever after they die if they break any number of ridiculous rules.

Nevertheless, it’s every parent’s inherent natural right, as the trustee of their dependent children, to determine how and whether their children are educated. Disagreements between parents on the issue should be settled through private, voluntary means—not compulsory action by others (i.e. the state). The state is committing a gross violation of natural rights by making and enforcing laws that require children to be educated, using force to cause the vast majority of children to go to the state’s institutions where they are then taught for years on end to view the compulsion foisted on them by the government in a positive light and to not attempt to reject it or defend themselves against it, and by funding all these actions through funds taken by force from all of us.

If someone wants their kids to worship Yahweh, Zeus, Odin, or the great and powerful Tom Cruise, we should perhaps feel sorry for them but should never use the illegitimate power of the state to force them to do otherwise. Hell, we probably have less to fear from people who worship mythological characters (with a few notable exceptions) than we do from people who worship the very real and very dangerous state.

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