Anarchy is not the answer. - UPDATED

Anarchy (total freedom) is one end of a scale. The other end is tyranny (total subjugation). So which end of the scale works best, more freedom or more government? I think the history of the world suggests that the closer we live to anarchy, the better off we are and it has been periods of freedom that have brought about economic advance, more natural distribution of wealth and improvement in the human condition.

I think we at a point in history where most people have been conditioned to think that government is the answer to our problems. Instead of thinking of private security services, insurance, and private arbitration, many of us think that only government can provide us protection of our property. Yet the evidence is that government itself is the greatest threat to the security of our property.

I would say that the disease of collectivism has infected more than one mind, even among those who frequent this site.

Jesus de Soto makes a good case for the opposite in his recent Mises opinion. It's a good read:

http://mises.org/story/3791

Anarchy may be better than the rule of law as prescribed by our Constitution.

But Anarchy, in my opinion, is too big of a step for the sheeple to handle.

We got our hands full, just trying to convince the populace that the Constitution was written to restrain the government.

Baby steps my friend. Just as the elite take baby steps to erode our liberty, we must take baby steps to restore our liberty.

This is where my mind is at currently.

I welcome all points of view.

It is only by respectful conversation that we learn anything. And nobody ever learned anything by talking, you have to listen.

Thanks.

I am sympathetic to anarchy, I actually wouldn't mind seeing what it woud look like. But with this in mind, I offer this as food for thought, not as 'arguments' from the 'other side'. I offer them in the spirit of inspiring more questions than rebuttals.

Q1: Terry Anderson and Peter Hill's book The Not So Wild, Wild, West paints an interesting picture of the Western Territories in North America, prior to the Federal Government's establishment in these areas. In many areas The State was so far removed that people had to organize their own property rights regimes. Hence the creation of Cattlemen's Associations to define and enforce property rights for cattle grazing, or the development of the Prior Appropriation doctrine for water rights in the arid southwest, or gold mining camps that defined property rights for gold mining claims, and instituted their own common law, courts, and enforced their own rules, even handling thefts and murders.

When state laws were finally established in these areas they merely adopted the common customs developed by these private parties. In this regard it is interesting to ask:
Which comes first? Law or Justice? How is one to know if a law is just, if a sense of what is just is not already present within the customs of the society? Don't legislatures merely codify the customs of their peoples? When they codify law contrary to custom those laws are seen as unjust. Justice is not an invention of the State. As Cicero noted, The best interpretor of the law is custom

The Lex Mercatoria was an excellent illustration of this prinicpal. Merchants in the Middle Ages were wont for a system of arbitration that could settle disputes quickly, fairly, and without creating animosity between the involved parties (being able to resolve disputes this way is good for business). Unfortunately the commercial climate they operated in was one full of disparate feifdoms, kingdoms, and municipalities. It was costly, time-consuming, and often lead to acrimony between parties when disputes were taken to State courts (all bad for business). So the merchants created their own system.

Disputes were often tried before a panel of respected merchants, usually experts in the area, and familiar with its particular customs. Decisions were quick, inexpensive, and the enforcement mechanism operated through reputation and boycott. The Merchant Court could not force you to abide by its ruling. But it was adhered to because it was fair. And it was fair because it was a voluntary system: any sense that it was unfair would lead to its abandonment. The Lex Mercatoria survives to this day in organizations such as The Association for International Arbitration .

The absence of State legislated law does not imply an absence of order. It is often argued that law, justice, roads, schools, etc are 'public goods' that the market cannot provide and therefore the State must do so. That people must be coerced in their own best interest.

However, if these services are so essential, and indeed they are, it is to be expected that people would organize these things for themselves. Their provision by the State merely preempts them from doing so, and what's more, would-be competitors in the provision of these goods are prosecuted.

The absence of the State does not mean an absence of organization or governance. The State does not equal governance.

Interestingly, the man accredited with the formation of the modern Welfare State, Otto von Bismarck (profiled on the Social Security Administration's website) had this to say about the Nation State: 'The goal of this task is to nurture among the unpropertied classes of the population, which are the most numerous as well as the least informed, the view that the state is not only a necessary but also a beneficent institution.' quoted from American Health Care, edited by RD Feldman

Bismarck unified hundreds, if not thousands, of small local municipalities into a centralized nation state. He found putting people on the dole a useful way to buy their allegience. It is interesting to note that he viewed his task as not only to paint the Nation State as 'beneficent' but even that it was 'necessary' at all.

Anarchy is merely the organization of society along commercial and customary lines. Something that happens anyway alongside a legislated order. Removal of the legislated order would simply mean people continue to organize themselves.
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(With regard to your second question it is somewhat unclear. It seems as though it could be taken that because the absence of the State would benefit the State we should therefore have a State? Of course this is an erroneous proposition and I do not intend to attribute it to you, nor set up a strawman. But let me turn to an important issue I think it brings up: the essential character of this 'debate' and how it is to be taken by the armchair political scientist and the 'sheeple' at large):

Now with regard to violence, let us be clear. No 'side' in this debate can claim utopia. There is violence in the world. People organizing themselves would not eliminate violence or coercion. The question, however is this: Does it therefore follow that the best approach is to centralize and monopolize the use of coercion? To concentrate it? and grant that concentration an aire of legitimacy?

On that note I'll share some of the work by Robert Higgs (author of Against Leviathan: Goverment Power and a Free Soceity. :

Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme, I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse, indeed much worse, because, first, the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state (Hayek 1944, 134-52; Bailey 1988; Higgs 2004, 33-56) and, second, by virtue of this control over the state’s powerful engines of death and destruction, they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state (Higgs 2004, 101-05). It is unfortunate that some individuals commit crimes, but it is stunningly worse when such criminally inclined individuals wield state powers.

(excerpted from his latest article at the Independent Institute, If Men were Angels: The basic analytics of the State versus Self-Government http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1982)

Consider that if you assume the worst of human nature in your evaluation of a theoretical anarchy, you must hold that assumption constant when evaluating the alternative of the State. Those same pirates, theives, murders, thugs, vagrants, and libertines which permeate the worst case scenario under anarchy, are still present in the alternative order of the State, and likely, as Robert Higgs points out, they control it.

R.J. Rummel estimates that States killed 260 million of their own citizens in the 20th century not including international conflicts. Are we really to suppose that people without the concentrated use of force known as the State could have done any worse, even if they tried?

It is difficult to imagine anarchy. All any of us have every known is the State. I am sympathetic to anarchy, but I cannot describe what it would look like. We have reason to believe however (history being our guide) that we couldn't do much worse without a State. Be aware of premature conclusions. Be aware of the character of the logic leveled against anarchy. Your intellectual opposition is not those sympathetic with anarchy, it is the conceptual box we live inside, the box that has been handed to us, the outside of which none of us know.

I don't worry about the other 'sheeple'. I conentrate on me. How do I live? Do I live in a box? How much of what one may consider to be organized by the State is actually organized by freely associating people?

And consider as Alfred Cuzan has (http://mises.org/journals/jls/3_2/3_2_3.pdf) the question: Do we every really get out of anarchy?
Consider what in your household is influenced by the State. Likely what is, is not wished to be there. Yet, the State is considered desirable for what is has presumably prevented from manifesting.
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Consider then, the nature of these propositions. Propositions in favor of the State are arguing on the basis of negative events. Events that never happen. A proposition that is unfalsifiable. Propositions against the State are made using positive events, events that have happened, ie. the historical record.

What 'the anarchist' points out is that murder, theft, crime, etc happen on the State's watch and he proposes a theory that implicates the mechanism of the Sate as making these situations worse. The historical record appears to bear this theory out. It is suggested these events would be reduced without a State, and importantly this argument is falsifiable given the opportunity to do so.

Again, it is crucial to realize that propositions that favor the State because of what it prevents are claiming something unfalsifiable. It does nothing to advance the discourse.

I would in turn, put forward a positive challenge: The challenge to thoroughly demonstrate where an instance of the State has effectively reduced murder, theft, rape, vulgarity, etc. I think one would be hard-pressed to do so for States are merely organized and legitimated coercion. If one were found, however, we could then compare that with some of the examples I and others have provided as evidence of functional, voluntary orders.

It is not then, that without the State there would be no violence. It is that without violence, there would be no State. Violence is the sine qua non of the State. A world without violence, of course, is not an option. Thus, in considering the spectrum of unsatisfactory options how shall we evaluate them?

Again, Robert Higgs:

...we might well apply the precautionary principle, which has been much discussed (and nearly always misapplied) in recent years in relation to environmental policy. This principle holds that if an action or policy might cause great irreparable harm, then, notwithstanding a lack of scientific consensus, those who support the action or policy should shoulder the burden of proof. In applying this principle to the state’s establishment and operation, the state’s supporters would appear to stagger under a burden of proof they cannot support with either logic or evidence. Everyone can see the immense harm the state causes day in and day out, not to mention its periodic orgies of mass death and destruction.

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The lesson of the precautionary principle is plain: because people are vile and corruptible, the state, which holds by far the greatest potential for harm and tends to be captured by the worst of the worst, is much too risky for anyone to justify its continuation. To tolerate it is not simply to play with fire, but to chance the total destruction of the human race.

As I conclude, take this as all food for thought. 'Anarchy' is not the bogeymen. It is the dark recesses of our own minds that cannot imagine what life is like outside the box we've always lived in. Of what it would mean to actually be free. To consider what it would be like if we agreed that no man had legitimate power over another.

The world would not be perfect under 'anarchy' but it's not perfect to begin with. The question is should we, therefore, then centralize coercion? Does this make it better?

And remember, 'anarchy' is merely the free market write large, being familiar with it will hone your free-market rhetoric when you debate the leftists.

I hope these thoughts contribute fruitfully to the discourse of a civil society.