No Coercion

I recently discovered a facebook group called Soldiers Are Not Heroes. I ran across it a few days ago when a friend joined it, and, glancing at it briefly I figured I probably pretty much agreed with it. But I didn’t bother joining it until I saw people start joining a petition to demand that facebook remove the group. Upon closer inspection, it seems to have a bit of a pacifist bent to it (which I reject), but I stand 100% behind its mission “to question the perpetrated illusion that a man becomes a hero by wearing a uniform.”

Soldiers (by which they clearly mean not just soldiers but troops from all branches of the military) don’t get a free pass to hero-land just because they happen to think they’re doing something good and noble. Psychopaths and cult leaders often sincerely believe they’re doing something good by murdering or subjugating people, but we don’t call them heroes. Maybe not a perfect analogy, but you get the point.

There are several reasons to reject the blind honoring of military personnel:

1. Troops are paid out of funds taken by force from the people they claim to be protecting (same as the Mafia).

2. The military is a part of compulsory nation-state governments, which violently suppress competing defense agencies (same as the Mafia).

3. Unless troops are literally defending a country’s borders (or the territory inside those borders) from a current or impending attack, they are not engaging in legitimate defense but rather illegitimate aggression.

4. Troops engaging in aggression in other countries under the justification that they’re protecting our rights are terribly mistaken since military engagement is always one of the chief rationales for the expansion of government at home and infringement of rights.

5. Troops claiming that it’s necessary to fight overseas in order to keep us safe are again sorely mistaken since their actions are well known to actually increase anger against their country and create more extremists intent on killing the troops and the troops’ fellow countrymen.

To be clear, I sympathize with the troops and their families since I fully understand that most of them have the absolute best of intentions and have never really thought through the implications of what they’re doing, and they may indeed act heroically in specific instances and in other areas of their lives, but there is nothing heroic about giving yourself over to do the State’s bidding in military matters.

And the fact that there’s a huge movement on facebook to ban “Soldiers Are Not Heroes” betrays a sad epidemic of unthinking rally-round-the-flag nationalism (which these same people rightly ridicule when they see it happening in other countries). As Murray Rothbard says in For a New Liberty,

 War is the great excuse for mobilizing all the energies and resources of the nation, in the name of patriotic rhetoric, under the aegis and dictation of the State apparatus. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morals—as the libertarian Albert Jay Nock once phrased it—of an “army on the march.”

     It is particularly ironic that war always enables the State to rally the energies of its citizens under the slogan of helping it to defend the country against some bestial outside menace. For the root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects. The facts, however, are precisely the reverse. For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only “die” by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes its subjects to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting to defend them.

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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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