This talk was delivered at the Costa Mesa Mises Circle
on Society Without the State, November 8, 2014.
The term “anarcho-capitalism” has, we might say, rather
an arresting quality. But while the term itself may jolt the newcomer, the
ideas it embodies are compelling and attractive, and represent the
culmination of a long development of thought.
If I had to boil it down to a handful of insights, they
would be these: (1) each human being, to use John Locke’s formulation, “has a
property in his own person”; (2) there ought to be a single moral code
binding all people, whether they are employed by the State or not; and (3)
society can run itself without central direction.
From the original property one enjoys in his own person
we can derive individual rights, including property rights. When taken to its
proper Rothbardian conclusion, this insight actually invalidates the State,
since the State functions and survives on the basis of systematic violation
of individual rights. Were it not to do so, it would cease to be the State.
In violating individual rights, the State tries to claim exemption from the
moral laws we take for granted in all other areas of life. What would be
called theft if carried out by a private individual is taxation for the
State. What would be called kidnapping is the military draft for the State.
What would be called mass murder for anyone else is war for the State. In
each case, the State gets away with moral enormities because the public has
been conditioned to believe that the State is a law unto itself, and can’t be
held to the same moral standards we apply to ourselves.
But it’s the third of these ideas I’d like to develop at
greater length. In those passages of their moral treatises dealing with
economics, the Late Scholastics, particularly in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, had been groping toward the idea of laws that govern
the social order. They discovered necessary cause-and-effect relationships.
There was a clear connection, for example, between the flow of precious
metals entering Spain from the New World on the one hand, and the phenomenon
of price inflation on the other. They began to understand that these social
regularities were brute facts that could not be defied by the political
authority.
This insight developed into fuller maturity with the
classical liberals of the eighteenth century, and the gradual emergence of
economics as a full-fledged, independent discipline. This, said Ludwig von
Mises, is why dictators hate the economists. True economists tell the ruler
that there are limits to what he can accomplish by his sheer force of will,
and that he cannot override economic law.
In the nineteenth century, Frederic Bastiat placed great
emphasis on this insight. If these laws exist, then we must study them and
understand them, but certainly not be so foolish as to defy them. Conversely,
he said, if there
are no such laws, then men are merely inert matter upon which the State will
be all too glad to impose its imprint. He wrote:
For if there are general laws that act independently of
written laws, and whose action needs merely to be regularized by the latter,
we must study these general laws; they can be the object of scientific
investigation, and therefore there is such a thing as the science of
political economy. If, on the contrary, society is a human invention, if men
are only inert matter to which a great genius, as Rousseau says, must impart
feeling and will, movement and life, then there is no such science as
political economy: there is only an indefinite number of possible and
contingent arrangements, and the fate of nations depends on the founding
fatherto whom chance has entrusted their destiny.
The next step in the development of what would later
become anarcho-capitalism was the radical one aken by Gustave de Molinari, in
his essay “The Private Production of Security.” Molinari asked if the
production of defense services, which even the classical liberals took for
granted had to be carried out by the State, might be accomplished by private
firms under market competition. Molinari made express reference to the
insight we have been developing thus far, that society operates according to
fixed, intelligible laws. If this is so, he said, then the provision of this
service ought to be subject to the same laws of free competition that govern
the production of all other goods. Wouldn’t the problems of monopoly exist
with any monopoly, even the State’s that we have been conditioned to believe
is unavoidable and benign?
It offends reason to believe that a well-established
natural law can admit of exceptions. A natural law must hold everywhere and
always, or be invalid. I cannot believe, for example, that the universal law
of gravitation, which governs the physical world, is ever suspended in any
instance or at any point of the universe. Now I consider economic laws
comparable to natural laws, and I have just as much faith in the
principle of the division of labor as I have in the universal law of
gravitation. I believe that while these principles can be disturbed,
they admit of no exceptions.
But, if this is the case, the production of security
should not be removed from the jurisdiction of free competition; and if it is
removed, society as a whole suffers a loss.
It was Murray N. Rothbard who developed the coherent,
consistent, and rigorous system of thought – out of classical liberalism,
American individualist anarchism, and Austrian economics – that he called
anarcho-capitalism. In a career of dozens of books and thousands of articles,
Rothbard subjected the State to an incisive, withering analysis, unlike
anything seen before. I dedicated Against the State to this great
pioneer, and dear friend.
But can it work? It is all very well to raise moral and
philosophical objections to the State, but we are going to need a plausible
scenario by which society regulates itself in the absence of the State, even
in the areas of law and defense. These are serious and difficult questions,
and glib answers will naturally be inadequate, but I want to propose at least
a few suggestive ideas.
The conventional wisdom, of course, is that without a
monopoly provider of these services, we will revert to the Hobbesian state of
nature, in which everyone is at war with everyone else and life is “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” A ceaseless series of assaults of one
person against another ensues, and society sinks ever deeper into barbarism.
For one thing, it’s not even clear that the logic behind
Thomas Hobbes’s fears really makes any sense. As Michael Huemer points out,
Hobbes posits a rough equality among human beings in that none of us is
totally
invulnerable. We are all potential murder victims at the hands of anyone
else, he says. He likewise insists that human beings are motivated by, and
indeed altogether obsessed with, self-interest.
Now suppose that were true: all we care about is our own
self-interest, our own well-being, our own security. Would it make sense for
us to rush out and attack other people, if we have a 50 percent chance of
being killed ourselves? Even if we happen to be skilled in battle, there is
still a significant chance that any attack we launch will end in our death.
How does this advance our self-interest?
Hobbes likewise speaks of pre-emptive attacks, that
people will attack others out of a fear that those others may first attack
them. If this is true, then it’s even more irrational for people to go around
attacking others: if their fellows are inclined to preemptively attack people
they fear, whom would they fear more than people who go around
indiscriminately attacking people? In other words, the more you attack
people, the more you open yourself up to preemptive attacks by others. So
here we see another reason that it makes no sense, from the point of view of
the very self-interest Hobbes insists everyone is motivated by, for people to
behave the way he insists they must.
As for law, history affords an abundance of examples of
what we might call trickle-up law, in which legal norms develop through the
course of normal human interaction and the accumulation of a body of general
principles. We are inclined to think of law as by nature a top-down
institution, because we confuse law with the modern phenomenon of
legislation. Every year the world’s legislative bodies pour forth a
staggering number of new rules, regulations, and prohibitions. We have come
to accept this as normal, when in fact it is, historically speaking, an
anomaly.
It was once common to conceive of law as something discovered rather
than made. In other words, the principles that constitute justice and by
which people live harmoniously together are derived from a combination of
reflection on eternal principles and the practical application of those
principles to particular cases. The idea that a legislative body could
overturn the laws of contract and declare that, say, a landlord had to limit
rents to amounts deemed acceptable by the State, would have seemed
incredible.
The English common law, for example, was a bottom-up
system. In the Middle Ages, merchant law developed without the State
at all. And in the US today, private arbitration services have exploded as
people and firms seek out alternatives to a government court system, staffed
in many cases by political appointees, that everyone knows to be inefficient,
time-consuming, and frequently unjust.
PayPal is an excellent example of how the private, entrepreneurial sector
devises creative ways around the State’s incompetence in guaranteeing the
inviolability of property and contract. For a long time, PayPal had to deal
with anonymous perpetrators of fraud all over the world. The company would
track down the wrongdoers and report them to the FBI. And nothing ever
happened.
Despairing of any government solution, PayPal came up with an ingenious
approach: it devised a system for preemptively determining whether a given
transaction was likely to be fraudulent. This way, there would be no bad guys
to be tracked down, since their criminal activity would be prevented before
it could do any harm.
Small miracles like this take place all the time in the free sector of
society, not that we’re encouraged to learn much about them. Recall that as
the Centers for Disease Control issued false statements and inadequate
protocols for dealing with Ebola, it was a Firestone company town in Liberia
that did more than any public authority in Africa to provide safety and
health for the local population.
There is a great deal more to be said about law and defense provision in a
free society, and I discuss some of this literature at the end of Against
the State. But the reason we focus on these issues in the first place
is that we realize the State cannot be reformed. The State is a monopolist of
aggressive violence and a massive wealth-transfer mechanism, and it is doing
precisely what is in its nature to do. The utopian dream of “limited
government” cannot be realized, since government has no interest in remaining
limited. A smaller version of what we have now, while preferable, cannot be a
stable, long-term solution. So we need to conceive of how we could live
without the State or its parasitism at all.
The point of this book is to speak frankly – at times
perhaps even shockingly so – in order to jolt readers out of the intellectual
torpor in which the ruling class and its system of youth indoctrination have
lulled them. We might have a fighting chance if most people were aware of the
ideas in this book, and in our intellectual tradition generally. They would
never fall for the State’s propaganda line, its apologias, its moral double
standards. They would be insulted by these distortions and
dissimulations.
And that’s what we do at the Mises Institute. We don’t publish “policy
reports” in the vain hope that Congress will defy its own nature and pursue
freedom. Every one of those policy reports winds up in the trash can. They
are used to dupe the gullible into thinking the Washington think-tanks they
support have influence in Washington.
Instead, we set forth the truth about the State without compromise or
apology. The reason Ron Paul attracted so many young people was that they
could see he was speaking to them in plain English, not politicalese. He was
speaking frankly and truthfully, without regard for the lectures and
hectoring he’d get for it at the hands of the media.
We’ve tried to emulate Ron’s approach – and of course,
we’ve been delighted to have Ron as a Distinguished Counselor to the
Institute since its inception, and as a member of our board as well. The
stakes are too high for us to do anything other than speak frankly and
directly about what we know to be true. It’s easy to publish toothless essays
about public policy. It is harder to focus on war, the Federal Reserve, and the
true nature of the State itself. But that is the path we have willingly
chosen.
We hope you’ll join us.
