Libertarians
who criticize the United States government are sometimes told "If you
don’t like it here, leave." Sir Walter Scott’s lines are a
poetic reply:
"Breathes
there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land?
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand?"
Even
the patriotic song "This Is My Country" at least begins well with
"This
is my country! Land of my birth!
This is my country! Grandest on earth!"
before
it veers off into a pledge of allegiance, which is, however, to America, and
not to the United States of America, which is America’s federal
government.
One’s
native land and country are not the government. America is not the United
States of America, which is a government. One’s land and country are
not the Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service, the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the Transportation Security
Administration. Emotion felt toward one’s country is different than
emotion felt toward the government of one’s country.
Why
connect one’s consent or non-consent to government (one’s loving
it or not) to staying in the country or leaving it? Why connect consent to
location? If one does not consent to a government, why is exit from the
country thought to be a necessary implication? Why not simply end one’s
relations with that government and remain in the country?
The
government won’t let you. That’s why.
A
little background first.
Libertarians
stand for freedom and against undesirable government coercion, which is
coercion that is aggressive in nature and not defensive; or coercion that
attacks freedom rather than protects it.
Libertarians
are not necessarily anarchists. Anarchists either prefer no government at all
for themselves or else are comfortable with a voluntary form of
self-government. Some libertarians are anarchists, while others desire various
forms of government. Both libertarians and anarchists do not want others to
impose their governments on them. Panarchists
are persons who desire that all persons, right down to the individual, have
the freedom to choose their own governments within one’s native
land and country. This means that one country could contain many possible
governments. As this freedom increases, it means that territoriality of
government diminishes or even ceases.
Libertarians,
anarchists and panarchists, whatever may be these shades of difference, all
would be happy if other people would leave them to their own devices and not
coerce them via governments.
Fred
Reed recently expressed a degree of panarchist belief when he
separated living in a country from consent to its government:
"A
fruitful field of disengagement might be called domestic expatriation –
the recognition that living in a country makes you a resident, not a subscriber.
It is one thing to be loyal to a government that is loyal to you, another
thing entirely to continue that loyalty when the Brown Shirts march and the
government rejects everything that you believe in. While the phrase has
become unbearably pretentious, it is possible to regard oneself as a citizen
of the world rather than of the Reich."
This
passage refers to a given person residing in a country without
consenting (subscribing) to a government. This statement is consistent
with panarchism. It contrasts sharply with the exercise of the right of
revolution of an entire people that Jefferson proposes in the Declaration of
Independence:
"That
whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the
right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
government..."
Jefferson
reserved a right of revolution to an entire people. Panarchism
does not preclude this possibility, but this is really not how revolutions proceed.
Usually they are led by small groups that manage to install new and coercive
governments. By contrast, panarchism is brought into being by any size group,
from one person on up, that is able to release itself from coercive
government restrictions to any degree.
To
panarchists, the right to alter government is not a right only of "the
people" as a whole but of every single person. Freedom is at the level
of each person. It is not necessarily an idea belonging to an aggregate
called "the people". However, whatever person or group or people
can gain a freedom-expanding concession from government by removing some
coercion, even if others do not, is altering its relation to government. A
partial abolition of some facet of government occurs.
For
example, there are 564 Indian
tribes (nations) in America that currently have their own relations, as peoples,
with the U.S. government. This number is not fixed. The Amish do not have a
separate nation within a nation but their church officials led a campaign
that ended in 1965 with the Old Order Amish not having to pay
social security taxes. On the other hand, the government (through the
Food and Drug Administration) is enforcing
restrictions on Amish sales of unpasteurized milk to willing customers.
Lysander
Spooner criticized the Constitution as not being a contract among known
individuals who agreed to it and signed it. Spooner’s analysis of
consent reaches the point where he writes
"The
question, then, returns, what is implied in a government's resting on
consent?
"Manifestly
this one thing (to say nothing of the others) is necessarily implied in the
idea of a government's resting on consent, viz: the separate, individual
consent of every man who is required to contribute, either by taxation or
personal service, to the support of the government."
"Separate,
individual consent of every man" is the key conclusion of
any logical analysis of consent such as Spooner’s. This is the
panarchist view. Panarchists are aiming for each and every person to get out
from under a government that is not of their choice. Jefferson wrote
"That
to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed."
Panarchists
take this seriously. Consent of the governed does not mean consent of an
arbitrary group that someone designates as "a people" or as
"the people". It means individual consent.
It
is the case that some persons wish to be coerced by a government in certain
matters. They accept that government willingly and allow such coercion. In
this choice there is no diminishment of their freedom. But when that
government coerces other persons who do not accept that government’s
rule, then those involuntarily-coerced persons suffer a loss of freedom.
Those
people who want their governments to coerce them in certain activities or
want their goverments to have certain powers over them have a right to erect
such governments; but they do not have a right to erect their coercive
governments over other people who do not want them or choose them.
One
denies freedom to others when one denies them their right to consent to
coercive governments for themselves. Libertarians and anarchists
cannot make others free by abolishing their governments – not if those
people want them. Efforts to persuade others of the virtues of life without
government should not be misconstrued as attempts to infringe upon the right
to choose one’s government – even a coercive government at that.
Whoever
supports the most extensive freedom of every person cannot favor governments
that coerce people who do not wish to be coerced, but they can tolerate
governments whose subjects consent to them, as long as they keep their
coercion limited to those who consent.
The
loss of freedom today is very large because today’s governments
exercise extensive powers upon non-consenting persons as a routine matter.
Since these powers touch so very many aspects of people’s lives,
freedom of the person is vastly diminished. This would not be the case if
governments allowed exit or personal secession within the country;
but, to the contrary, they nearly always exclude the freedom of each person
to exit from a government’s rule while remaining in the country.
Governments punish attempts to exit. Governments punish attempts to live
under alternative rules and laws.
The
freedom to exit the oppressions of unwanted government is a long-sought
centuries-old goal, often accomplished through migration or physical exit
from a country. This goal is far from being a reality. Present-day
governments with constitutions would have us believe that all of us are free
because of various voting procedures or some semblance of rule of law, but of
course all of us are not free. Most of us can find many denials of freedom in
our lives.
Libertarian
calls for greater freedom and libertarian statements that many people in this
and other "free" countries lack freedom often meet with denial,
resentment and anger. Libertarians are sometimes told to pack up and leave if
they don’t like it. This suggestion only proves that the freedom to
exit is exactly that freedom which people do not currently possess, for
freedom to exit from a government means freedom to choose one’s
government where one lives.
It
is undeniably true that one may expatriate or emigrate as a means of seeking
greater freedom, but why should a person have to move? Being forced to move in
order to exit a government means that one is subject to a government’s
coercion. Moving should be voluntary. One’s country and one’s
land are not the same as the government that claims to rule that country and
the persons living in that land. Leaving the country, leaving one’s
land, and leaving one’s relations and relationships behind in order to
exit a government is not a solution consistent with full freedom. That action
is chosen by some only because the government coercively claims jurisdiction
over territory and all persons within that territory. Those who leave their
country are being involuntarily coerced into a second-best solution.
Panarchists
point out that territory is the heart of the matter. Territory is the device
by means of which governments inflict uniformity of law when what is required
for full freedom is non-uniformity of law within a given land. One
person’s government may wish to forbid drugs for its subscribers, but
another person’s government may not. One person’s government may wish
to coerce everyone into a health insurance policy while another
person’s may not. One person’s government may wish to tax its
subjects, arm some of them and attack Libya while another person’s
government may not. A high degree of freedom in a land or country cannot
occur when government is government by territory and when that government
possesses power over many facets of life and living.
All
of Spooner’s No Treason is worth reading carefully. Spooner
wrote of the Civil War
"The
principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men
may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they
do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and
criminals.
"No
principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false
than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom."
Majority
rule doesn’t determine right. Freely-given consent is the support of a
government of free persons:
"Majorities
and minorities cannot rightfully be taken at all into account in deciding
questions of justice. And all talk about them, in matters of government, is
mere absurdity. Men are dunces for uniting to sustain any government, or any
laws, except those in which they are all agreed. And nothing but force and
fraud compel men to sustain any other. To say that majorities, as such, have
a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and
ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow
them."
The
only way that persons can all agree to a set of laws and a government within
what we call a country like America is to abandon the idea that a government
must be territorial. A government of free people is not marked by borders and
territory imposed by government or arrived at by wile, treachery, seizure,
and warfare, but by people who freely consent or subscribe to it. Instead of
the territorial notion of government, or the notion that majority rules in a
given territory, government is properly thought of as something to which a
group of persons willingly subscribe, while leaving other groups to subscribe
to their preferred governments or none at all.
If
some persons form a government, what right do they have to govern, make laws
and tax everyone within a territory that their government claims, even those
who do not consent? None. Governments routinely rule out secession by their
claims to territory and their claims to rule over everyone within that
territory. They back up these claims by force, not right.
It
is when governments peacefully allow exceptions to their coercive laws for
some persons or groups, or recognize different laws for different groups
within their borders, or allow some lands to escape their jurisdiction, or
allow peoples to secede and form their own governments that we get movement
in the direction of greater freedom.
There
are many
separatist movements throughout the world. They struggle. This is because
governments and majorities refuse freedom to minorities. It is quite often
the case that groups seeking to end the domination of one government behave
no differently from the government they seek to replace or secede from. They
often believe in coercing those who may fall into its newly-won domain as
defined by a new set of borders. Even secessionists fail to recognize that
the principle of secession as a bulwark of freedom of the person can only be
applied consistently right down to the personal level.
The
right or freedom personally and individually to choose one’s government
goes largely unrecognized, unacknowledged and unsupported. It is not only not
taken seriously in today’s world by almost everyone, it is a freedom
that is denied by governments worldwide and denied with force of arms and
bloodshed.
Consent
of the governed should be a matter of clear, open and free choice of each
person. Consent of the governed cannot be inferred from a situation in which
government has the guns and individual persons obey, or in which citizens
must follow a set of highly complex voting procedures, determined by
governments and parties, within and bounded by bordered territories in which
governments reign without competition.
The
usual ways to alter this situation are unusual. They involve
revolutions, rebellions, and bloody secessionist movements; and they often
lead right back to governments that are territorial. The alternative is to
recognize the right to choose one’s government and that government need
not necessarily be territorial.
Across
the world, people are automatically placed beneath and under governments by
virtue of where they happen to live. The spot of territory where one happens
to be born or where one spends one’s life is the criterion that
governments use in order to identify, tag, monitor and coerce people. The
territorial principle that governments invoke is, with few exceptions, that
all those people within its borders are its subjects or citizens, regardless
of whether or not they willingly accept the coercions that such a government
entails. Governments at all levels do not allow people under them to opt out.
They do not allow secession down to the personal level, which is what freedom
to choose one’s government actually means.
Governments
fight tooth and nail against secession. The very existence of these
governments as territorially-coercive entities is why they fight secession,
and this resistance to secession is clear proof that today’s
governments are coercing people who do not want to be coerced.
Government
by territory and by coercion within territory cannot be reconciled with full
freedom of the person and consent of the governed. At the extremes, it is one
or the other. In between the extremes, which is life as we know it, there is
a constant struggle that moves us toward greater coercion or toward fuller
freedom of the person.
Who
has the gall to tell the Amish that if they do not like the
government’s milk regulations that they can jolly well pack up and
leave the country? The FDA does. The government does. This is the
government’s policy and if you live in this country, you shall obey.
Almost
every American today is the Amish. Everyone must obey all sorts of
objectionable uniform laws and regulations, without exception. Love it here
or leave. The reason for this connection is force, not justice. This is
coercive government by territory. It is not government by consent.
Michael S. Rozeff
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