The Withering Away of the State

Damn. Now everyone thinks I hate on the libertarians. I don't, really. Libertarians have many principled, coherent arguments to offer in a piecemeal way. I even agree with quite a few: I don't think there should be subsidies or tariffs; I think people should be able to own guns; I think drugs should be decriminalized. Hell, I think that people ought to be able to practice gay polygamy. 'Do your own thing, man, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else', as that one hippie guy in your undergraduate philosophy classes used to say. I'm perfectly willing to listen to arguments about how the state is performing some function badly and at a loss which someone else could perform better and at a profit. Up with private space exploration! Let's sell the moon to random technopreneurs!

Nonetheless, I also think it's fair to point out when people go off the rails. The proposed end-state of all this state-trimming can't just be no government at all. Minarchist libertarians, people who just wish the US government was 50% of its current size, (or 15%) -- fine. I'm sure we can have many fruitful arguments. Anarcho-libertarians are fruitcakes, though, and many of the things they believe seem to contradict some of the more compelling arguments for things libertarians hold dear. For example, I have been convinced that strong property rights are a good thing. Countries with weak property rights and a lack of contract enforcement languish economically and can't unleash their full potential -- people can't borrow against their farm land to buy fertilizer, commerce is restricted to trust-based, small scale operations. So, I'm afraid we need the government to enforce contracts and guard against violations of property rights, otherwise everything will go to hell.

Finally, I know that libertarians are sick of hearing about the Wild West (or the eastern Congo), but if you propose a model of rights enforcement whose nearest analogue seems to be the Clint Eastwood movie "A Fistful of Dollars", then you just have to suck it up. It can hardly be irrelevant or illegitimate to point out that in our world, which my people call "Earth", there already exist places where people must band together for self-defense and form militia-like organizations for private rights enforcement. In all these places, some bastard gets in charge of it and starts treating everyone like shit. Quis custodiet, etc. How do I fire my private-rights enforcement group again?

It's important not to fetishize the right of self-defense out of all proportion. I could be as heavily armed as I like, but I have to sleep sometime, and if I'm home alone with my children and fifty armed guys show up, I'm still screwed. Personally, I'd like to be able to call 911 and have the cops show up (I figure I could hold even 50 guys off that long, with a defensible position and a sniper rifle). In the libertarian utopia, those guys outside would be the cops. I know that there are places in the world where the cops are the bad guys. But this is a problem which we know, empirically, can be fixed. It seems to me there are insuperable, structural difficulties in proposing that private organizations take over all the functions of the state, which have to do with human nature. People will be bastards if you give them a chance. Stipulating this feature away does not make for good political practice. See: communism, passim.

Comments

[Steve Snyder]

The libertarians also face a dilemma, or a reductio ad absurdum. Who decides how to privatize? The government!
Now, the more hardcore (read: "nutbar") among the libertarian set might call for referenda on what operations to privatize, minimum bids, etc., but that just ain't gonna work. And the other alternative is the Clints or the Eastern Congolese actually knocking at the door of Federal Agency XYZ and saying "hasta la vista, baby."

[Micha Ghertner]

Belle,

I consider myself an anarchist libertarian, yet, unsurprisingly, I don't consider myself a fruitcake. Now there certainly are many anarchist fruitcakes, as radical political positions tend to attract fruitcakes like... well, like fruitcakes attract flies.

But before rejecting all of us as completely nuts, I would suggest people read what we actually have to say in defense of our positions. Randy Barnett and David Friedman are a damn good place to start.

Others include Bruce Benson and Bryan Caplan. Caplan's Anarchist Theory FAQ is arguably the best introduction to anarcho-capitalism available online.

[Belle Waring]

OK, sure, Micha. I'll take you up on it. I have to admit that from what I've read from Barnett already, he does strike me as moderately studded with fruits and nuts, but it wouldn't be fair to judge people on the basis of short throw-away pieces, and so...

PS Sorry for calling you a fruitcake, then. I mean it in the nicest possible way.

[Andrew Lawrence]

Why judge political ideologies based on their visions of utopia? In a society with competing political ideologies, you're unlikely to reach any one ideology's end game. I like to think of them as vectors that can be applied to the current system in the hopes of nudging it in a better direction. In that sense, I think libertarian philosophy has much to offer.

[Michael Duff]

Andrew makes a great point up there. Why don't we consider all the ideologies in terms of their end game?

If we consider our Republican and Democratic parties as watered-down representations of more radical philosophies, they become just a ludicrous as the libertarian version.

I hate to see all libertarians judged in terms of the anarchists.

If you want to see what mainstream libertarians think about stuff, judge them in terms of the Cato Institute. The Cato guys may be radical, but at least their proposals start on planet Earth.

[Micha Ghertner]

Belle, you're killing me with kindness. I don't take it personally when people call me loony for being an anarchist - it goes with the territory.

I am a little disappointed when people dismiss anarchist arguments without taking them seriously enough to even bother responding, but I can understand why they don't, since we all have a limited amount of time and we can't spend all day refuting the deranged theories of every online crank.

It's just that, in my experience, and I'm obviously biased, Barnett and Friedman represent the serious side of anarchism. I'm genuinly curious why other people find Barnett and Friedman nuts, apart from their obviously radical positions. If nothing else, I want to check to see if my own personal biases are not blinding me from seeing a very obvious flaw in their writings.

And Andrew's "vector" metaphor is a good one, but not really useful for this particular debate. Epstein, Barnett and Friedman all agree about which direction the vector should be pointing; they just disagree over the endpoint. Of course, since we are so far away from the endpoint, the practical difference between their two positions is negligible. Which is why anarchist libertarians and minarchist libertarians generally get along very well. And all the anarchist libertarians I have ever read or been exposed to did not advocate overnight revolution, but would be better described as "fabian" anarchist libertarians. Take it each small step at a time, see what works and see what doesn't work. This is another reason why the difference between the two kinds of libertarians is not that large. Indeed, I wouldn't be all that surprised if a few anarchist libertarians happen to be working for Cato as we speak (a few names come to mind).

[bryan]

In our new world order we won't call it a government cause that's a bad word - we'll call it a private right-enforcement organization.

[Rich Puchalsky]

If you want to pay enough attention to David Friedman to critique him seriously, there is a special set of critiques of his work at

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html

In general, one shouldn't assume that because some libertarian ideas are out of the mainstream, that no one has put thought into refuting them. Also, give Friedman *some* credit for seriousness -- he has indeed thought of the objection that private rights enforcement organizations will be bad, and though his answer to that may not be good, he does have one.

[Timothy Burke]

People who make a selling point of their end game deserve to be judged on it. The kind of libertarianism that Belle's talking about (not minarchist) is almost invariably end-game focused, and asserts that every step in between is justified in terms of the end-game utopia.

If a libertarian doesn't care much for the end-game and just wants to be judged on the rationality of particular state-reduction plans, then they're just minarchist utilitarians. Like Belle, I'm perfectly fine with that, and find a goodly amount of it appealing. We can talk about any given idea of that sort on its merits. I actually think that moderate libertarianism has enormous virtues and is one of the most quintessentially American political styles I can think of.

But once utopia swims into view, then the utopians have to be able to defend both the idealized picture they're sketching and the actually existing examples that seem to conform to that utopia--not just the Wild West and Russia, as I'd add some parts of the West African coast in the 18th Century, where states held minimal sway and everything, including human beings, could be traded for. Utopian libertarians usually have the same style of whistling past that graveyard that socialists had (still have) of explaining away "actually existing socialisms" as something else than the utopia they had in mind.

As do utopians in general. Belle is basically confirming for me that all utopianisms--communism, anarcho-libertarianism, "deep ecology" environmentalism--are morally and politically dangerous in some fashion: they will always ignore ominous precedents that contradict their visions. And if they get their way, the path to their future is always paved in blood and torture.

[Micha Ghertner]

Timothy,

I completely agree with you that anarcho-capitalists should not shy away from their end game. Indeed, they are defined by their end game.

But I think you may be attacking a straw man here. The only libertarians I have heard complaining about being judged by the end-game are the minarchists, who don't share the same end-game as their anarchist counterparts.

I don't think its entirely fair to characterize the anarcho-capitalist end-game as a "utopia," as anarcho-capitalists tend to explicitly reject any utopian view of society. The Randy Barnetts and the David Friedmans of the world are more than willing to acknowledge the potential flaws and imperfections of their desired end-game; the end-game of anarchism, despite these flaws, is only desirable to them because the imperfections of the alternatives are even worse. This is definitely not a perfect vision of society, but a least-bad approach.

Also, your last sentence couldn't be more wrong: no libertarian I have ever met or read has advocated violating rights as a means to achieving desireable political ends. The very difference that separates libertarians from socialists is the reason why this particular criticism is absurd. This is not to say that other criticisms are not valid--perhaps anarchism would be so unstable that a vicious tyrant would rise to power, and insofar as this was a direct and inevitable result of anarchism, the moral blame must rest on the anarchists (as well as on the tyrant himself). But that is a different criticism then the claim that because anarcho-capitalism is a radical political ideology, libertarians will justify the unjustifiable in their path to achieve their desired goals, in the way that radical socialists have done. There can be no "guilt by association" in that regard.

[Timothy Burke]

Micha: At least some anarcho-libertarians propose an indifference to some classes of rights-violations on the way to an end-state (here I reference what has always struck me as an odd indifference to collective, institutional or social forms of illiberal power originating from non-state entities), but more importantly, are indifferent to the rights-violations that I take to be endemic (not merely possible) to the desired end state of anarcho-libertarians. The difference here, then, might be that anarcho-libertarians save the blood-spilling and torture for the end-state, rather than accounting them as the necessary toll to be paid on the road to utopia. That's a difference to me that makes no difference. That Barnett and Friedman refuse to call this end-state utopia is also a mere nicety, if it is viewed systematically in every respect as more desirable than the present dispensation, and thus the solitary legitimate goal of the political in the here and now. That's as close to utopia as makes no difference: it discards evaluating every choice as it comes to you, with no teleological presumption, in favor of keeping eyes on a distant prize and evaluating every choice in terms of its correspondence with that shiny new era.

[jholbo]

Micha,

No communist ever advocated sacrificing the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run. But, plausibly, it came to that. So the fact that no libertarian advocates violating rights is not a very convincing argument for why this sort of utopianism enjoys an advantage over the communist variety. Road to hell paved with good intentions, all that. There are many roads, but if you think it comes to the same in the end, it doesn't make a difference. (And I realize you say you are not a utopian, but I have to agree with Timothy that this seems to be a terminological nicety. Suppose communist rhetoric were tailored a little. Instead of claiming that the communist end state would be a workers' paradise, it was only claimed that it would be clearly better than the alternatives. I think this is still dangerously utopian, don't you?)

[TomD]

By the way, there seems to be a Leap Year Bug in the date stamp. It's March 7, isn't it? (well, it is now. Sunday. Greek General Election day.)

There may be a problem with definitions here. A situation in which vigilante groups are the law is clearly not "anarchy", except in the sense of lack of a *state* law-enforcement operation.

The question is, is the contract- and self-defence-based "anarchy" contemplated by libertarians *stable* against the development of a force against which an individual cannot defend him or herself? History suggests that greater powers will not omit to impose themselves on lesser ones, if there is advantage to be had thereby.

Suppose everyone individually has equal fighting power. Then, if someone can persuade X people to act together, they can exert power over every individual and every other collection of Y people, for Y less than X. Eventually there may exist a collection Z such that no-one can prevail over Z: Z is a power in the land. In many circumstances Z is a large proportion of the entire country. If we adjust for the unequal distribution of fighting power, Z is usually the state.

The process of aggregation of power must stop, however, when the benefit of exercising power is outweighed by the costs. This suggests that the way to maintain Z very small (which is presumably what libertarians prefer) one must have really *devastating* and *effective* self-defences. One gun isn't going to cut it. It's hard to see what kind of self-defence can really work.

You require an asymmetric kind of situation where the bad consequences of X trying to exert power over one individual *far* outweigh any benefit the X might obtain.

If the individual had a panic button which could detonate a proportionate number of lethal, precisely-targeted weapons at a place of his or her choosing, that might do it. As I said, Pop's rifle doesn't fit this specification. And of course, the X people would have the buttons too. In case the individual was squeamish about the lethal weapons, there would be the option of various other non-lethal incapacitating agents.

A stable anarchy through mutually assured destruction? Could be.

[Micha Ghertner]

Timothy,

Before I accept your claim that some anarcho-capitalists are indifferent to rights-violations even as a means to a desirable goal, I would have to see some evidence. I would find such an indifference quite puzzling, as it would contradict nearly everything that libertarians are all about. If anything, modern libertarianism is a response to the kind of grand societal engineering that has led to so much death and destruction in recent years.

That Barnett and Friedman refuse to call this end-state utopia is also a mere nicety, if it is viewed systematically in every respect as more desirable than the present dispensation.

But it is clearly not viewed in every respect as more desirable than the present state of affairs. This belies an extreme lack of familiarity with Barnett and Friedman's writings, which exude an ever present sense of skepticism, even aimed at themselves. To wit, Barnett's short piece is titled "The Lesser Evil: Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease." Clearly, he doesn't see his solution as perfect or systematically superior. Other statements by Barnett which exhibit skepticism, not absolute confidence in his position:

"Authorizing force in defense of individual rights is a necessary evil to address the problem of compliance when persons put their own interests ahead of respect for the rights of others -- rights that are themselves necessary, on consequentialist grounds, to solve the pervasive problems of knowledge and interest. Caution should be our guide in pursuit of better consequences than properly defined individual rights provide."

"...On this, I have always had my doubts."

"...I am not sure anyone can prove that these alternatives to takings and taxation will definitely increase aggregate social welfare. But I am certain no one can prove the opposite either."

"...Epstein is convinced. I am not. I would prefer to jump off that bridge if and when we ever come to it, and only after the alternatives are thoroughly explored."

Friedman also stresses skepticism over confidence:

"Epstein hopes to prevent this outcome by better institutional design. Perhaps that is the best we can do. But there are at least two other alternatives worth serious consideration."

"The first is the extreme version of the libertarian state: no coercion beyond a monopoly on retaliatory force. Such a state will do less well for us than a state that initiates coercion in the rare circumstances where doing so produces large benefits. But it might do considerably better than the realistic alternative..."

"The second alternative is to eliminate state coercion by eliminating the state. In that world, some coordination problems will go unsolved, making the result worse than the world that would be produced by a state run by perfectly wise and virtuous libertarians. But eliminating the state also eliminates the largest coordination problem of all: the problem of controlling the state. Given the record so far, that is a more serious problem than how to build roads without the power of eminent domain."

Emphasis mine. Both Friedman and Barnett are weighing the costs and benefits of alternative regimes and concluding that while an elimination of the state may involve serious problems, it will also solve many of the problems that inevitably plague any state: namely, the public good of keeping that state properly restrained. Under any reasonable definition of utopianism, this is not it.

[Micha Ghertner]

John,

No communist ever advocated sacrificing the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.

This is simply not true. Communists advocated such sacrifices all the time. Here are but a few terrifying examples:

"We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education, and his profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of red terror."

- M. Y. Latsis, senior official in CHEKA

"The scientific concept, dictatorship, means neither more nor less than unlimited power resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restrained by any laws or any absolute rules. Nothing else but that."

- V.I. Lenin

"These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers, growing richer the more the workers starved in the cities and factories. The vampires have gathered and continue to gather in their hands the lands of landlords, enslaving, time and time again, the poor peasants. Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them!"

- Lenin, regarding the peasants who refused to sell food to the state for a pittance.

"[S]o long as other classes continue to exist, the capitalist class in particular, the proletariat fights it (for with the coming of the proletariat to power, its enemies will not yet have disappeared, the old organization of society will not yet have disappeared), it must still use a measure of force, hence governmental measures; if it itself still remains a class and the economic conditions on which the class struggle and the existence of classes have not yet disappeared, they must be forcibly removed or transformed, and the process of their transformation must be forcibly accelerated."

-Karl Marx, After the Revolution

"[T]he three classes of modern society, the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, each have a morality of their own... [W]e can only draw the one conclusion: that men, consciously or unconsciously, derive their ethical ideas in the last resort from the practical relations on which their class position is based... We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and forever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations."

- Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring

“Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”

—Che Guevara (message to the Tricontinental; 1967)

And so on and so forth. Communists made it very clear what they were willing to sacrifice in order to achieve their goals. They were willing to sacrifice people.

[Timothy Burke]

Sorry, Micha. I'm with John on this one. Utopia may be the end-state which dare not speak its name in their claims, but they're advocating massive, systemic, radical departures from the status quo (indeed, almost all previous human status quos save those few that anarcho-libertarians claim are not actually the ones that they aim to produce, e.g., most of the actually existing non-state society examples we have) in the name of solving a problem that they claim is both unsolveable within the context of the current dispensation and which trumps all other existing classes of problems by definition. They're much more polite and reserved and qualified in this view that your average pursuer of utopia (or as Barnett puts it in one instance, the "ideal end state") but utopians nevertheless. Anyone who argues for the complete structural transformation of life as we know it in favor of a systematically new dispensation that they *reason* will be superior because it *must* be superior is a utopian of some kind or another. It's to their credit that they're smarter and more reserved about it than most, but then, so were many socialists and communists and so are some "deep ecology" environmentalists today.

[Micha Ghertner]

TomD,

Your argument is very similar to the arguments economists like David Friedman and Bryan Caplan use to explain why private security agencies would be relatively stable. War is costly for for-profit firms when they have to foot the bill themselves. War is not quite as costly for politicians, who have a willing tax-base from which to take funds. And yet, even an anarchy of states, which is what we have now (i.e., we lack a world government; all sovereign governments are in a state of anarchy with respect to each other) is relatively stable.

[Micha Ghertner]

Timothy,

Indeed, if your definition of the word "utopia" is merely a society that has never existed, a society that may be radically different from our own, then I certainly agree with you that anarcho-capitalism is utopian. But if the term "utopia" means an ideally perfect society, then anarcho-capitalism is not.

Also consider that at certain points in human history, the establishment of a liberal democratic state and the abolition of slavery were considered utopian pipe-dreams as well. I'm sure most people living at those times considered advocates of democracy and abolition to be utopian daydreamers, yet aren't we glad that those with a progressive vision were willing to challenge the status quo?

[Micha Ghertner]

In response to the charge of utopianism, David Friedman wrote,

"There is at least one important sense in which libertarianism is less utopian than modern liberalism. Liberal political rhetoric often assumes that the existence of any bad outcomes--someone who is poor, some child who is not educated--is a strong argument for government intervention to fix the problem. Implicit in that is the utopian assumption that if only we had the right institutions, nothing really bad would ever happen. Most libertarians take it for granted that even under the best of institutions, some bad outcomes will happen--although, of course, they expect fewer bad outcomes to happen under their preferred institutions."

[Chun the Unavoidable]

Is the path towards neoliberalist utopia (or status quo, whatever you want to call it) paved with blood and torture? 'Cause it sure as hell has been up to this point. The blood and torture objection just doesn't have any legs at all, I'm afraid.

This does not mean that I don't think that American libertarianism is very dangerous.

[bryan]

'But if the term "utopia" means an ideally perfect society, then anarcho-capitalism is not'
It seems evident enough that the term utopia in this case refers to a society closer to a state of perfection than any that has preceded it.

[Classic Liberal]

Every time I think about starting a blog, I come across drivel like the above posting by Belle. She asks "How do I fire my private-rights enforcement group again?" You stop paying them, that's how. How do I fire my government rights enforcement group? The answer is, you can't. If you're lucky, once a year you get to cast one vote out of a thousand or more to change sheriffs and if they decide to shoot an innocent person (which democratically elected governments do sometimes), well, tough, right? Better that than anarchy, eh?

[Jonathan Wilde]

Much of the criticisms of Barnett and Friedman raised in this thread reflect deep unfamiliarity with their works. They are both thoughtful and questioning of their own beliefs, even to the point of true skepticism. If you really know that you are correct and what Friedman and Barnett believe is 'utopian', the least you can do is actually read their arguments in their original form to prove to yourselves they are indeed wrong.

Next, I see the charge of 'utopian' thrown around a lot without it ever being defined. Does 'utopian' mean a condition that has been rare in the world? Does 'utopian' mean something incompatible with human nature?

If it means the former, I suggest that 'utopian' is not a good criteria for evaluating any particular philosophy. After all, in the 17th century, the classical liberals were also utopians - "What do you mean you want to get rid of the king? What do you mean by 'rights'? How can you have law without a monarch? Surely individuals cannot be trusted to decide for themselves their own ways of living!"

In the 18th century, the early abolitionists were also utopians, as slavery had existed for thousands of years, and that's how it was always going to be. "But slavery is necessary for the well-being of society. Slavery may be evil; I grant that. But it is a necessary evil. No society has ever existed without slavery."

In the 19th century, the womens' suffrage movements were also utopian - "We can't have women voting! Women don't have the capacity to vote."

If 'utopia' simply means a condition that has not existed before, or has existed only rarely, then anyone who proposes progress is a 'utopian'; yet that label is a compliment not an insult. Without the utopian, there can be no progress in human civilization.

If on the other hand, 'utopian' means a condition incompatible with human nature, then I agree - the utopian serves no purpose. But I submit that if you are agreeable to minarchist libertarian views, i.e., you believe that for most things free markets and individual rights are superior to central planning and rights violations, any exploration of using the free-market to provide law enforcement, adjudication, and personal security is not 'utopian' but rather a fidelity to principles.

(If you don't find free-markets and individual rights agreeable, you would also likely find the latter disagreeable. But that's a different topic for a different day.)

But it is simply inconsistent to say that minarchist libertarians can be taken seriously but that anarcholibertarians are 'fruitcakes' and 'utopians'. The latter simply try to extend the same principles to their natural conclusions.

[Timothy Burke]

That's a great working definition of utopians, Jonathan: people who insist on extending principles to their "natural" conclusions, and equally insist that anything short of that is inadequate and unacceptable.

[Jonathan Wilde]

That's a great working definition of utopians, Jonathan: people who insist on extending principles to their "natural" conclusions, and equally insist that anything short of that is inadequate and unacceptable.

Well, does that mean that if the principle of "each man owns himself" should be naturally extended to cover all races, that is 'utopian'? Would anything short of all races being free of slavery be acceptable? Are there any principles that should not be violated, ever?

Either way, that definition does not fit either Friedman or Barnett. They see a tradeoff between a minimal state that cannot be restrained from inevitable growth vs competing private security services which while imperfect like everything else in life, have better incentives to not engage in war and democide. They hesitatingly prefer the latter as a potentially better system than the former based on utilitarian economic arguments.