As libertarians attempt to persuade others of their
position, they encounter an interesting paradox. On the one hand, the
libertarian message is simple. It involves moral premises and intuitions that
in principle are shared by virtually everyone, including children. Do not
hurt anyone. Do not steal from anyone. Mind your own business.
A child will say, “I had it first.” There is an intuitive
sense according to which the first user of a previously unowned good holds
moral priority over latecomers. This, too, is a central aspect of libertarian
theory.
Following Locke, Murray Rothbard, and other libertarian
philosophers sought to establish a morally and philosophically defensible
account of how property comes to be owned. Locke held the goods of the earth
to have been owned in common at the beginning, while Rothbard more plausibly
held all goods to have been initially unowned, but this difference does not
affect their analysis. Locke is looking to justify how someone may remove a
good from common ownership for his individual use, and Rothbard is interested
in how someone may take an unowned good and claim it for his individual use.
Locke’s answer will be familiar. He noted, first of all,
that “every man has a property in his own person.” By extension, everyone
justly holds as his own property those goods with which he has mixed his
labor. Cultivating land, picking an apple – whatever the case may be, we say
that the first person to homestead property that had previously sat in the
state of nature without an individual owner could call himself its owner.
Once a good that was previously in the state of nature has been homesteaded,
its owner need not continue to work on or transform it in order to maintain
his ownership title. Once the initial homesteading process has taken place,
future owners can acquire the property not by mixing their labor with it –
which at this point would be trespassing – but by purchasing it or receiving
it as a gift from the legitimate owner.
As I’ve said, we sense intuitively the justice at the
heart of this rule. If the individual does not own himself, then what other
human being does? If the individual who transforms some good that
previously lacked specific ownership title does not have a right to that
good, then what other person should?
In addition to being just, this rule also minimizes conflict. It is a rule
everyone can understand, based on a principle that applies to all people
equally. It does not say that only members of a particular race or level of
intelligence may own property. And it is a rule that definitively stakes out
ownership claims in ways that anyone can grasp, and which will keep disputes
to a minimum.
Alternatives to this first user, first homesteader principle are few and
unhelpful. If not the first user, then who? The fourth user? The twelfth
user? But if only the fourth or twelfth user is the rightful owner, then only
the fourth or twelfth user has the right to do anything with the good. That
is what ownership is: the ability to dispose of a good however one wishes,
provided that in doing so the owner does not harm anyone else. Assigning
property title through a method like verbal declaration, say, would do
nothing to minimize conflict; people would shout vainly at each other, each
claiming ownership of the good in question, and peaceful resolution of the
resulting conflict seems impossible.
These principles are easy to grasp, and as I’ve said, they involve moral
insights which practically everyone claims to share.
And here is the libertarian paradox. Libertarians begin with these basic,
commonly shared principles, and seek only to apply them consistently and
equally to all people. But even though people claim to support these
principles, and even though most people claim to believe in equality – which
is what the libertarian is upholding by applying moral principles to everyone
without exception – the libertarian message suddenly becomes extreme,
unreasonable, and unacceptable.
Why is it so difficult to persuade people of what they implicitly believe
already?
The reason is not difficult to find. Most people inherit an intellectual
schizophrenia from the state that educates them, the media that amuses them,
and the intellectuals who propagandize them.
This is what Murray Rothbard was driving at when he described the
relationship between the state and the intellectuals. “The ruling elite,” he
wrote,
whether it be the monarchs of yore or the Communist parties of today, are
in desperate need of intellectual elites to weave apologias for
state power. The state rules by divine edict; the state insures the common
good or the general welfare; the state protects us from the bad guys over the
mountain; the state guarantees full employment; the state activates the
multiplier effect; the state insures social justice, and on and on. The apologias differ
over the centuries; the effect is always the same.
Why, in turn, do the intellectuals provide the state this service? Why are
they so eager to defend, legitimate, and make excuses for the corridors of
power?
Rothbard had an answer:
We can see what the state rulers get out of their alliance with the
intellectuals; but what do the intellectuals get out of it? Intellectuals are
the sort of people who believe that, in the free market, they are getting
paid far less than their wisdom requires. Now the state is willing to pay
them salaries, both for apologizing for state power, and in the modern state,
for staffing the myriad jobs in the welfare, regulatory state apparatus.
In addition to this, the intellectual class we are dealing with wants to
impose its vision, its pattern, on society. Frederic Bastiat spends much of
his classic little book The Law on this very impulse: the conception
of the intellectual and the politician as the sculptors, and the human race
as so much clay.
What we are taught, therefore, from all official channels, is something
like the following. For the sake of mankind’s well-being and improvement,
some individuals need to exercise power over others. On our own, we would
have little if any philanthropic instinct. We would commit the vilest of
crimes. Commerce would grind to a halt, innovation would cease, and the arts
and sciences would be neglected. The human race would descend to a condition
too degraded and appalling to contemplate.
Therefore, a single institution needs a monopoly on the initiation of
physical force and on the ability to expropriate individuals. That
institution will ensure that society is molded according to the proper pattern,
that “social justice” is achieved, and that mankind’s deepest aspirations
have some chance of fulfillment.
So entrenched in our minds are these ideas that it would hardly occur to
most people even to think of them as propaganda. This is simply the truth
about the world, people assume. It is the way things are. They cannot be
otherwise.
But what if they can? What if there really is another way to live? What if
the sphere of freedom need not be so confined after all, but may expand
without limit? What if the general presumption against monopoly applies to
government just as much as it does to anything else? What if the free market,
the most extraordinary creator of wealth and innovation ever known, and the
most reliable and efficient allocation mechanism of scarce resources, is also
better at producing the goods for which we have been told we must rely on
government? And what if the state, the greatest mass-murderer in history, the
great drag on economic progress, and the institution that pits us against
each other in a zero-sum game of mutual plunder, is retarding rather than
advancing human welfare?
Just how liberating this political philosophy is becomes clear when we
realize some of its implications.
It means that taxation is a moral outrage, since it involves the violent
expropriation of peaceful individuals.
It means that military conscription is a fancy term for official
kidnapping.
It means that the state’s wars are cases of mass murder, and that the
suspension of normal moral rules that the state’s officials insist on during
wartime is a transparent attempt to divert the normal kinds of moral
inquiries that might occur to someone unschooled in government propaganda.
And it means the state is not the glorious guarantor of the public good,
but is instead, a parasite on the individuals it rules. The left-anarchists
were grotesquely wrong to condemn the state as the protector of private
property. The state could not survive absent its aggression against private
property. It produces nothing of its own, and can survive only because of the
productive work of those it expropriates.
The state is the very opposite of the free market in its ethics and in its
behavior, and yet so few supporters of the market bother to examine their premises.
They continue to believe the following:
(1) The best social system is one in which private property is respected,
people are free to exchange with each other, and coercion is not used.
(2) That is, until the production of certain goods is in question. Then we
need monopoly, coercion, expropriation, bureaucratic decisionmaking – in
other words, the most egregious contradiction of the principles we
claim to uphold.
To be sure, it may not be so easy at first to imagine the free-market provision
of certain goods. And anyway, don’t we need someone “in charge”?
But by the same token, it should be just as difficult to imagine the
success of the free market itself: without someone in charge of production
decisions, how can we expect private actors to produce what people want,
especially when faced with a virtually infinite number of possible
combinations of resources, each of which is demanded in varying degrees of
intensity by an unimaginable number of possible production processes? Yet that
is exactly what happens on the market, without fanfare, every day.
I’ve been surprised not only by the spread of anarcho-capitalism – quite a
surprising development, since it runs counter to everything people are taught
to take for granted – but also by the attacks on it. You’d think, since we’re
still a tiny minority, no important periodical would bother going after us.
And yet they have. The reason? Because they realize, as you and I do, what
these ideas mean.
Libertarians have put forth the most radical critique of the state ever
posed. The Marxists claimed to favor the withering away of the state, it is
true, but this can hardly be taken seriously. The coercive power of the state
plays a central role in the Marxist transition from capitalism to socialism.
As Rothbard put it, “It is absurd to try to reach statelessness via the
absolute maximization of state power in a totalitarian dictatorship of the
proletariat (or more realistically a select vanguard of the said
proletariat). The result can only be maximum statism and hence maximum
slavery….”
And without private property, how would production decisions be made? By a
state, of course. The Marxists just wouldn’t call it a state. Again Rothbard:
With private property mysteriously abolished, then, the elimination of the
state under communism…would necessarily be a mere camouflage for a new state
that would emerge to control and make decisions for communally owned
resources. Except that the state would not be called such, but rather renamed
something like a “people’s statistical bureau”…. It will be small
consolation to future victims, incarcerated or shot for
committing “capitalist acts between consenting adults” (to cite a
phrase made popular by Robert Nozick), that their oppressors will no longer
be the state but only a people’s statistical bureau. The state under any
other name will smell as acrid.
“Limited-government” conservatives, in turn – who in practice favor an
enormous government footprint, but for the sake of argument we’ll give them
the benefit of the doubt – want to reform the system. If we try this or that,
they say, we can transform a monopoly on violence and expropriation into the
fountainhead of order and civilization.
We libertarians are a million miles removed from either of these views. We
do not view government officials as “public servants.” How sad to hear naïve
conservatives speak of returning to a time when government is responsive to
the people, whose elected officials in turn pursue the public good. The
situation we face now, contrary to what these conservatives try to believe,
is not an unfortunate aberration. It is the dismal norm.
There are two, and only two, versions of the story of liberty and power.
One looks to power, as manifested in the state, as the source of progress,
prosperity, and order. The other credits liberty with these good things,
along with commerce, invention, prosperity, the arts and sciences, the
conquering of disease and destitution, and much else. For us liberty truly is
the mother, not the daughter, of order.
Some will protest that a third option is available: a judicious
combination of the state and liberty, it may be said, is necessary to human
flourishing. But this is merely an apologia for the state, since it takes for
granted precisely what we libertarians dispute: that the state is the
indispensable source of order, within which liberty flourishes. To the
contrary, liberty flourishes despite the state, and the fruits of liberty
that we observe around us would be all the more abundant were it not for the state’s
dead hand.
We can find precursors of anarcho-capitalism here and there in Western
intellectual history – Gustave de Molinari, for example, and in the United
States Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and a handful of others. But no one
developed it fully, followed it consistently, or assembled it in a coherent
system before Rothbard. It was Rothbard who made a sweeping and systematic
case for private-property anarchism, based on economics, philosophy, and
history.
Very few people have either the courage or the originality to break
radically with existing systems of thought, much less to develop their own.
Courage and originality were Rothbard’s trademarks. Had Murray been content
to repeat the state’s propaganda, a man of his genius could have taught wherever
he wanted, and enjoyed the prestige and privilege of the top tier of
academia. He refused to do it. Instead, he labored, often thanklessly, to
bequeath to us an elegant – and massive – system of scholarship from which we
can learn and to which we can add as we press forward toward Murray’s
lifelong goal of a truly free society.
We can be thankful that we live in an age in which the work of Rothbard –
despised, resisted, and suppressed by the purveyors of official opinion – is
readily available.
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And here is another side to the libertarian paradox:
although our philosophy derives from a single proposition, the nonaggression
principle, the development of and elaborations on that principle provide an
inexhaustible source of intellectual pleasure, as we explore how the
interlocking features of human society can work together harmoniously in the
absence of coercion.
The intellectual class has its task and we have ours. Theirs is to confuse
and obscure; ours is to clarify and explain. Theirs is to darken the mind;
ours is to enlighten it. Theirs is to subject man to the domination of those
who violate the moral principles all civilized people claim to cherish. Ours
is to emancipate him from that subjection.
I will leave you with the final libertarian paradox, which is this: while
on the one hand we are teachers of the philosophy of freedom, as long as we
love and cherish these great ideas, we shall always be students as well.
Continue to explore and discover, to read and to write, to discuss and to
persuade. Violence is the tool of the state. Knowledge and the mind are the
tools of free people.