Communism, Anarchism, and Counter-Examples

By On September 19, 2011 · 113 Comments · In Left-libertarianism, Libertarianism

Suppose there was a political ideology that promised to liberate the working masses from the evils of alienation and exploitation, and deliver them instead unto a social order characterized by superabundant material wealth and both social and political equality.  But every single time some society tries to put this ideology into practice, the result is almost precisely the opposite of what is promised.  Instead of superabundance and freedom, the working masses are subject to grinding poverty and tyrannical oppression.

Would this be a good reason to reject the ideology?  My guess is that most libertarians think it would be, at least in the specific case of communism.  After all, it’s not just that we can find one or two counterexamples to the ideology’s promises.  It’s that

  1. Every example is a counterexample – there are no cases in which the ideology’s promises hold true.
  2. We have good sociological, economic, and political explanations of why the ideology generates the results it actually does when put into practice, and why it fails to deliver on its promises.

So here’s my question.  If this kind of reasoning is a good argument against communism as a political ideology, is it also a good argument against anarchism?

It is, after all, exceedingly difficult to find a good example of a successful anarchist society.  Yes, I know about Medieval Iceland.  And about the surprising relative success of a stateless Somalia.  And I agree with my anarchist friends that people tend to underestimate the ability of individuals to form peaceful, voluntary solutions to a variety of social problems.

But still, it’s a striking fact that virtually every living person on the planet falls under the authority of some state.  And that every historical instance of a stateless society has evolved (degenerated?) into a state-governed one.  Moreover, it seems like (as in the case of communism) we have good theoretical reasons for expecting precisely this result.  Anarchist societies face a well-known difficulty in overcoming the collective action problems inherent in defending themselves against external aggression and predation.  From this perspective, it would hardly be surprising if we found that stateless societies tend to be conquered by state-governed ones.  And this, of course, is precisely what we find.  Whatever else can be said about them, anarchist societies are, as an empirical matter, clearly unstable.  So how much does this count against anarchism as a normative political theory?

Can a similar argument be run against minimal state libertarianism?  This is another bird examples of which are notoriously hard to come by.  Either they don’t exist at all, or they tend to evolve (degenerate?) into (at best) a more moderate kind of classical liberal regime or (at worst) into a corporatist monstrosity in which the powers of the state are captured and expanded by powerful economic interests.  And don’t we have good theoretical reasons for expecting precisely this result, too?

HT Erik Kain, whose own skeptical musings on anarchism got me thinking about this problem again.

Update: Several commentators have made an argument that I find puzzling.  The argument is that because the theory of anarcho-capitalism is relatively new, we can’t really say that anarchism has been tried yet, and so therefore cannot say that any anarchist experiments have failed.  I find this puzzling because much of want anarcho-capitalist theories contribute is <i>descriptive</I> in nature.  They tell us that people are better able to provide for their needs through specialization and voluntary exchange, for instance, than we might otherwise be inclined to think, and that as a result services usually thought to be the exclusive function of government like defense and lawmaking, can actually be performed on the market.  But if descriptive claims like this are true, weren’t they also true before the theory of anarcho-capitalism was developed (just like diseases were always spread by germs even before the germ theory of disease)?  And so if people in stateless societies were in fact unable to provide for their needs (including the need of collective defense against predatory states), doesn’t this undermine the anarchist theory, whether it happened before or after the development and articulation of that theory?

Tagged with: •
 
  • Aeon Skoble

    “Whatever else can be said about them, anarchist societies are, as an empirical matter, clearly unstable.  So how much does this count against anarchism as a normative political theory?”    One way to answer this is that it doesn’t – anarchism tells us that there’s no justification for the state, or that it’s not necessary.  Assume that’s correct, it still doesn’t mean that enough people will buy it that the state can be deleted.  As long as lots of people think there should be one, there will be, regardless of what the philosophers say.  Note this is true of all philosophical positions.

    • Anonymous

      Hi Aeon. I took Matt’s point to be a version of ought implies can.  Am I right, Matt?

      • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

        I certainly believe that dictum, but I want to say a bit more than just that.  In response to Aeon, I think there are two ways of reading the anarchist’s claims.  One way has them saying simply that the state is not justified or necessary.  The other has them saying that we should try to move toward a stateless society.  Those claims are certainly related, but distinct.  

        Perhaps my comments about stability aren’t relevant to the first claim – a state might be inevitable, but not be morally justifiable or necessary.  But I do think the stability issue is relevant to the second claim.  Stability is a desirable feature of social orders.  If it is inevitable, or even just highly likely, that an anarchist society will turn into a state-governed one, then that is one reason not to try to move toward an anarchist society.  

        • Aeon Skoble

          Depends on what you mean by stable.  And also, stability is not a desirable feature of _bad_ social orders.  There was great stability in the social orders of the Persian Empire, Imperial Rome, each dynasty in Chinese history, the plantation south in America, and, on a smaller time slice, communism.  In any case, I would argue that Barnettian anarchism would in fact be stable, for just the same reasons that Equifax and AAA are.

  • Hyena

    I think these empirical rejections should make us seriously reconsider the propositions. If a communist society is one run such that NP problems are solved in polynomial time, then such a society is impossible even in theory. Even if that’s not the case, a showing that it will always take strictly more computational power than that same society could harness would show that it is impossible even in theory.

    Anarchist societies may also face a problem at the theoretical level. An anarchy would disappear as soon as it “formed” because each social link represents a step away from that state. If that were the case, then anarchic societies cannot exist because they cannot be both anarchic and social.

    • Georgian Tutuianu

      Why do you think that anarchic societies cannot be social ones? Theoretically I would assume a society can exist in which a state does not.

      • Hyena

        Pardon my drunken reply.

        The anarchist argument assumes that the sate or government is a distinct thing. But at a fundamental level, it’s just a well-described way of interacting with others and so regulating behavior. All social systems exhibit that property. Even if we insist that the government is the highest such authority, then all we’ve done is decreased the territory it rules: your social group, with its rules, now becomes the government you have.

  • Aeon Skoble

    But there are counterexamples to all the things anti-anarchists think are counter-examples (counter-counter-examples?).   There’s no one thing that statists think is impossible under anarchism that anarchists don’t have both theoretical and historical references for.  Look at the Stringham anthology Matt linked to, and the work of Bruce Benson especially, and Anderson & Hill, and David Beito.  Poor relief?  Check.  Social safety net?  Check.  Stable system of publicly-recognized property rights?  Check.  Generally known and accepted system for resolving disputes relatively peacefully?  Check. 

    • Damien S.

      Effective national defense?  Regulation of widespread long-distance pollution like acid rain?

      • Aeon Skoble

        RE the former, yes, they discuss those, and there’s also some discusson of it in Machan and Rasmussen, eds., Liberty for the 21st Century.  RE the latter, how is the state doing on that?

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=520901360 Gene Callahan

      “There’s no one thing that statists think is impossible under anarchism
      that anarchists don’t have both theoretical and historical references
      for. ”

      Not one of these counter-examples points to a system even vaguely like anarcho-capitalism. Sure, you don’t need a state — if you have total social consensus on a highly regulatative tribal morality (and no neighbors with states). As long as you want to stone adulterers and exile anyone who gets too uppity you can get by fine without a state.

      • Angus MacAskill

        No one can out-troll Gene Callahan. No one.

        • gcallah

           Wow, I point out a really salient objection to ancapistan, and all Angus can do is accuse me of “trolling” — no cogent response at all.

          Very telling.

  • J Storrs Hall

    You appear to be conflating the claims 

    1. an anarchocapitalistic society wouldn’t work and deliver to its people what its proponents claim, and 

    2. an anarchy isn’t stable, and would be taken over by surrounding states or homegrown warlords.

    I think that the evidence for 2 is much stronger than for 1.

    • http://twitter.com/TheOtherChuckD Charles D.

      A form of political organization can’t deliver to its people what its proponents claim if it isn’t stable and is doomed to takeover by hostile forces…

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Those are distinct, I agree, but I think (2) is usually part of (1).  Stability, or at least the ability not to be easily conquered by predatory states, is certainly something people want out of a society.  And it’s probably something they should want.  If anarchist societies can’t deliver this, then they are failing to work in a very important sense.

      • Anonymous

        That’s a very double edged sword. Any state able to defend itself against external threats will likely have plenty of power to suppress and oppress its citizenry. The same arguments that we can use to explain why a libertarian society seems to fail suggest the powerful state devolves into various forms of totalitarianism.

        • Anonymous

          Agree. Collective action, and coercion of dissenters to be part of the collective action (whether that coercion take the form of compulsory military service, taxation, etc.), is a prerequisite to the type of societal survival that Matt is discussing. Which is why an anarchist state must fail, as Matt says, in  a very important sense. 

  • Anonymous

    It depends on the causes.  If it is an inherent feature of man qua man, then perhaps we should reconsinder.  If, however, it is not a necessary condition of man and the instability, etc., is caused by the actions of the few evil men, perhaps certain ideals should not be adjusted.

    Also, from the perspective of all theories, the ideal is empirically unstable.  This is evident from the fact that no state or political society has ever come close to the ideal, e.g., distributional requirements or legitimating framework (e.g., voluntary association).

    • Damien S.

      It’s possible that an ideal could be stable but have a high activation energy to achieve.  So gradualist attempts would fail, but somehow tunneling through would reach an equally stable condition.

      Or with the ratchet metaphor, it might be hard to turn the wheel, but even harder to turn it back.

  • Fernando Teson

    Just a minor point: the objections against communism are not just empirical. The very stated goals and methods of the doctrine are objectionable. I don’t buy the cliché that communism “is great in theory, but fails in practice.”  Communism is bad in theory, too, for a number of well-known reasons, not the least of which are mistaken economics and contempt for freedom.
    I don’t find anarchism equally objectionable in theory; on the contrary. Maybe the problem here is its inherent instability, as Matt suggests. 

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Happy to agree that communism’s tendency to fail by the lights of its own proponents is not the only reason to oppose it.

    • http://twitter.com/VelizCF CFV

      Wait a minute: full communism is equal to (non-capitalist) anarchism.

      • Anonymous

        I think that’s a very debatable claim. There are a number of forms of communism that are non-capitalistic (I assume you mean no private ownership of capital here) that would fail to meet the criteria of anarchy.

        • http://twitter.com/VelizCF CFV

          I don’t think it is a “very debatable claim”. I presume you are familiar with Marx & Engels references to the “withering away of the state” in the superior stage of socialism: communism. Thus, in THEORY, communism is equal to (non-capitalist) anarchism.

          Maybe you want to say that all the known socialist experiments failed in practice to achieve anarchy, but then you are saying something rather different  (in fact, the opposite) than Professor Tesón has already said: “is great in theory, but it fails in practice.”

          • Anonymous

            I think you’re offering one form of communism as the only form people might attempt to implement. As for the reference to marx and engles, they appear to have thought the state existed only because capital interests needed it. Even without that particular form of state, the one supporting capitalistic interest and structures, withers away it’s not clear that anarchism follows.

          • http://twitter.com/VelizCF CFV

            ???

  • http://iandavis.com/ Ian Davis

    Its possible that we haven’t previously reached a level of wealth, education or technological advancement to make anarchism successful.

  • Anonymous

    If ordered anarchy and minimal state libertarianism are desirable as poltical ideals, but unachievable in practice due to human nature, I don’t think this counts against them as an ideal. I don’t find instability in the real world to be much of an objection, because this objection would also seem to work against things we know to be desirable, i.e. not to be subject to theft, rape and murder. Without the coercive power of the state or protective agenecies (in ordered anarchy) people would transgress far more than they do, but this fact about human beings does not invalidate the moral law. On the other hand, communism, as Fernando points out, is undesirable even as a goal.

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Well, yes and no.  I think whether we should aim at an unachievable ideal depends on what the costs are, right?  So, suppose we grant that completely eliminating theft in society is an unachievable ideal.  Should we nevertheless aim at it?  I think not.  Rather, we should aim at reducing theft to an acceptable level.  We could go beyond this, and keep spending more and more money, and hiring more and more police officers, to try to completely eliminate it.  But this seems like it would be a mistake.
      So maybe stipulating that anarchy is unstable is not enough to make the argument work.  Maybe we need to say something about the costs that would be involved in trying to make it work.

      • Anonymous

        I agree with you about having to consider the costs of realizing any putative political ideal. But I think that this conclusion raises an interesting question, for which I do not claim to have a pat answer. In making this calculation, to what extent should we regard human nature as an immutable given, and to what extent do we view it as subject to “improvement”? Maybe most people reject ordered anarchy or minimal state libertarianism because they so not understand the moral arguments supporting them or falsely extrapolate from the scant historical record. Until relatively recently in our history most people were not outraged by slavery. But then along came “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the abolitionist movement, and attitudes changed. So, even if these political ideals are impractical now, does this disqualify them? 

        • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

          Yes, that’s a valid and important question. I do worry, though, that we’re more likely to regard human nature as mutable when doing so serves our own ideological interests. Much of what you say in response to your own question, for instance, could be and has been said on behalf of communism too. You and I probably find that response quite unpersuasive. And maybe we have good non-ideologically-biased reasons for making a distinction there. But given what we know about the way bias works, I think there’s good reason to be a little cautious.

  • http://profiles.google.com/troycamplin Troy Camplin

    Chimpanzee troops are controlled by the most powerful, charismatic  male chimpanzee in the troop. It is important for him to be charismatic, because he has to have a firm coalition to retain power. Should a stronger coalition form around another male, the first male is likely to lose his position.

    This is the foundation of human government as well. Humans in tribal settings have a similar political structure. As we expand our tribes and develop more complex social structures, we see that political power (typically) being dissipated. But the fact is that humans started out as governed. Thus, we should not be surprised to find government everywhere. However, what is appropriate at an organizational level and in an organizational hierarchy — some form of leadership — is not appropriate for scale-free spontaneous order networks. It may, in fact, be the case that as more and more social orders become independent spontaneous orders that we become more and more suited for anarchy. This coincides well with both scale-free network structures and the fact that as our societies become more complex, we tend to dissipate power more and more (the two are not even remotely coincidental — I really just said the same exact thing in two different ways).

    Thus, we are talking about two different things. It is one thing to argue that our societies, as we gain in population, density, and complexity, will necessarily evolve away from organizations and into orders. It is another thing to argue that our complex, dense, numerous spontaneous orders ought to be turned into organizations (as communism argues).

    • Damien S.

      Humans aren’t chimpanzees.  All my anthropology reading has indicated that “primitive” tribes tend to be pretty egalitarian, often including in gender power as well.  It’s with the development of settled agriculture and surplus — or for the Pacific Northwest, settlement in a rich food supply — that you get powerful chiefs and later priests and kings.  More complex social structure typically means more political power being concentrated and projected over a larger area.  Arguably still true today, we’ve just managed to democratize that power somewhat and use it for public interests rather than purely for elite profit.

      (I’ve been reading histories of India recently.  Tax rates on the peasants were typically in the 40-50% range.  This on income levels even the US would be giving earned income tax credit to.  And mostly not funding anything benefiting those peasants. That’s what real “taxation is theft” looks like.)

      • http://profiles.google.com/troycamplin Troy Camplin

        Yeah, that’s been the standard interpretation — and it’s wrong. It’s been known to be wrong for a while now. Rousseauianism dominate anthropology for far too long, and needs to be thrown out. Romanticism has no business in science. There is more “egalitarianism” — among everyone but the chief and religious authority. And gender power is hardly egalitarian. Not even close.

        Actually, humans are chimpanzees. Go learn about their ethology. We act like chimpanzees to a much greater extent than we like to admit. Bonobos act a more egalitarian than we do at our most egalitarian, but our behaviors are far closer to chimpanzee than bonobo behaviors.

        • Damien S.

          I’m not talking about Margaret Meadism or Romanticism, I’m talking about much more recent real anthropological studies which I’ve read in anthropology class, of e.g. the Mbuti pygmies or the Aka.  So I think you’re simply wrong.

          And no, we’re not chimps.  Our last common ancestor with chimps and bonobos — who split later — was about 7.5 million years ago.  Yes, there are similarities.  There are also big differences, especially in the variation among human societies.

          • Anonymous

            “All my anthropology reading has indicated that “primitive” tribes tend to be pretty egalitarian, often including in gender power as well.”

            I need to brush up on my Malinowski :) , but I’m pretty sure the point is that there is nothing “natural” either way.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=557851952 Jimmy Ardis

    How would the arguments in this post apply to other human institutions, say slavery? Let’s say we were in a point in time where slavery was present and ubiquitous, and was also the historical norm.

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Well, I guess there are two things to say about that.  First, I think the argument I run only establishes a presumptive case against a theory, not a decisive one.  Even though there are no current or past examples of communism that don’t go very very badly, it’s possible that one could pop up some day.  It just seems unlikely.
      Second, while I believe that stability is a necessary feature of a good social order, it’s certainly not a sufficient one.  There are almost certainly a variety of stable equilibria that we ought to choose between on other grounds e.g. justice.  
      So I guess I don’t think that the argument applies to the slavery case very well at all. 

      • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=557851952 Jimmy Ardis

        Thanks Matt. Those are good points. I agree you weren’t attempting to make a decisive case. 

        I don’t think I fully comprehend the second point. I thought I did at first, but something isn’t clicking for me. Would you mind expanding that point?

        I haven’t worked through all of the technical implications of the slavery comparison; it was an intuitive response. That said, it still intuitively feels relevant to this conversation. 

        Maybe it’s better discussed elsewhere, but if you’d indulge me, I think it would be beneficial (for me at least) to hear how you would respond to the hypothetical I proposed above: 

        You exist in a time where slavery is the contemporary and historical norm and arguments for continuing slavery are being made on grounds of precedent (it’s like this everywhere and it always been) and that there sociological, economic, and political explanations for why freedom will end badly. 

        For the sake of this hypothetical, I concede up front that my original slavery argument or your response has no bearing on your original post.

        *Btw, been following this blog since day one it’s fantastic. 

        • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

          Hey Jimmy,

          Well first off, thanks for the kind words about the blog!

          My second point was just this: stability isn’t enough to make a social order good.  But it does seem to be a necessary component of a good social order.  What we want is a social order that is stable and good in other ways: just, efficient, and so on.  But a stable order that is just and efficient but highly unstable has a serious flaw.

          Your hypothetical is tough to answer, in a way.  What would I be likely to think in such a situation?  Well, given what we know about the propensity for status quo bias and various forms of rationalization, there’s a good chance I’d think slavery was morally acceptable – perhaps inevitable, in some way.  So I agree with what I think may have been your point in raising this example – we can make mistakes, on the basis of insufficient evidence or other flaws in reasoning, about what social institutions are really stable.  In reality, of course, this argument wouldn’t have justified slavery in the United States, since counterexamples were widespread at the time.  I’m not a historian, but I suspect you’d have to go back pretty far to find a time and place where this condition was met.  But as for the hypothetical, I concede that the (hypothetical) stability of slavery does not make it just or desirable.

  • GaffiGubbi

    The comparison between communism and anarchism is invalid. For communism to be implemented, it requires a relatively submissive populace, institutions of political hierarchy (be they democratic elections, parliament, legislative and executive branches or anything similar) and a radical vanguard group with just enough support to get their platform started (and enough firepower to suppress dissent). Anarchism rejects all of these things – it’s an anti-political ideology, and it’s always bottom-up. You can’t just remove the state apparatus, ceteris paribus, and call it anarchism any more than you can destroy churches and call it atheism.

    I think the reason why most people live under political (and other) authorities is because power is a kind of virus in human societies: it transforms institutions into parasitical ones and has a way of finding relatively stable equilibria (for example liberal parliamentary democracies) over time. As a result, people have become accustomed to authority to a varying extent, but there are islands of anti-authoritarianism all around (Catalonia 1939, Paris 1848, New Hampshire 20??) that are formed whenever people with a strong sense of liberty, justice and mutual respect come together.

    The task libertarians and anarchists face is expanding those islands – don’t demand anti-authoritarianism from top-down, be a convincing anti-authoritarian and others will follow. When these islands are big enough, they become continents, and political authority will be an exception rather than a rule. That way we don’t have to worry about power vacuums and foreign invasions, because 1. there will be less people trying to rule and oppress others and 2. the anti-authoritarians, who will constitute the masses, will revolt at anybody who tries to rule them.

    Maybe I’m an idealistic fool for chanting “Let’s all get along!” and expecting it to work, but the fact that there are more libertarians today than ever before should be an optimistic sign. Maybe I have the right to say what Marxist-Leninists don’t: anarchism really hasn’t been tried properly.

    PS. I sometimes use the words anarchism, anti-authoritarianism and libertarianism interchangeably, but I realize that they are overlapping terms. Apologies for any confusion.

  • http://www.facebook.com/mark.lebar1 Mark LeBar

    I am attracted to a response that is a hybrid of Jimmy’s and GaffiGubbi’s. The moral argument against the state is a comparatively recent one in human history. It certainly does not have a broad grip on people’s hearts and minds, and so far as I can see for anarchism to be practicable (in a sense which made stability possible), it would have to have such a grip. Part of that is a matter of moral imagination, and here Jimmy’s point strikes me as important: 400 years ago, how viable would the proposal that you have a society that eschews slavery be? Where was the empirical evidence that such a society could exist, let alone thrive? Very difficult to find, until the moral imperative that we find a way to live without treating others in this way took broad sway. That’s something like what I conceive of as necessary for anarchism to be practicable, if it can be. Those conditions have never before been realized broadly, so history really is not much of an indicator here.

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Interesting, Mark.  But if anarchism requires that kind of consensus on moral issues, that seems to me to be further evidence against its feasibility.  The more disagreement a social order can tolerate, the moral stable it is.  And ideally, you’d want anarchism to work well even for people who don’t buy its moral foundations (in the way that, say, a liberal capitalist state delivers the goods it promises even to people who reject its moral foundations).  We might not have much good historical evidence about what happens when everyone buys the anarchist argument, but we do have good historical evidence about the difficulty of achieving consensus of that sort.

      • http://www.facebook.com/mark.lebar1 Mark LeBar

        Some sort of consensus, yes. But if you take the moral argument for anarchism seriously, it is not a matter of consensus at the margins, but as to minimally decent moral relations between human beings. In that light, the right induction is from the rejection of the divine right of kings, slavery, and the subordination of women. All of those are diagnoses of deeply morally defective social relations that were once just about universally accepted and now are just about the opposite. None are cases where we think we need to tolerate disagreement in order to achieve stable societies; quite the opposite! I grant such a consensus is not imminent, but it seems to me inevitable if you accept the idea that there is any general moral progress at all

      • http://blog.monstuff.com Julien Couvreur

        That seems an argument in favor of anarchy, as it requires much less agreement that other societies (NAP is minimal). I think most people actually agree with the NAP already, but have failed to realize that government is incompatible with it. 
        That said, I have some concerns myself over stability. It is sometimes cheaper to pay the ransom than fight the kidnapping crime, which means people may over time become accustomed to some crime and accept it in some way (thinking it is inevitable). There is a cultural slippery slope. Given that some crime remains and is too small or expensive to prevent, how does the NAP remain culturally strong?

  • John Kindley

    I think Albert Jay Nock’s distinction between “government,” the purpose of which is to secure rights and which is probably not only necessary but good, and “the State,” the purpose of which is to secure the exploitation of the productive class by the political class and which is probably not only unnecessary but evil, is useful. (Note that Nock considered himself an anarchist.) There are two prominent threads of Nock’s thought which seem to go hand in hand with this distinction: first, his Georgism; and second, his approval of the extreme decentralized “republicanism” Thomas Jefferson espoused late in life, wherein political authority proceeds not from the federal government downward but from “ward republics” upward. Imagine two neighboring clans, approximately equal in numbers and power, one of which dwells on a gold mine and one of which dwells on a silver mine. The clan which dwells on the silver mine would understandably prefer to dwell on the gold mine, and its envy would be justified, because the earth belongs to all of its inhabitants equally. The clans could go to war. This is the origination of “the State.” Or, for the sake of not only peace but justice, the clan dwelling on the gold mine could pay to the clan dwelling on the silver mine the difference in value of their respective holdings. Or both clans could agree that these payments will instead be used for a militia to defend both clans from other neighboring clans dwelling on copper mines. Or better yet, for the sake of not only peace but justice, both clans could agree that these payments will instead be used to pay the clans dwelling on the copper mines the difference in value of their respective holdings. And so on. This is the origination of “government.” A One World Government would not be incompatible with anarchism, so long as that Government was composed of freely associating organizations of approximately balanced power, which in turn were composed of smaller freely associating organizations of approximately balanced power. And so on, down to the ward republics, which are composed of freely associating individuals who are able to directly participate in the public affairs and direction of their ward, and the place of their ward in whatever larger organizations they might deem it in their interest to be a part of. The hallmark of anarchism is, along with the denial of the authority, the distribution and dispersal of power, as opposed to its concentration.    

  • Anonymous

    You’re posing an interesting question. I’d like to rephrase it a bit. To what extent do communism and anarchies fail from internal structural failings and to what event to external forces incompatible with the political systems order?

    I’d also ask if the existence of government is sufficient to claim anarchy does not exist. Basically the global setting has been anarchy for recorded world history. From that point of view one might ask, at least regarding anarchy, what direction is the form and structure of government moving — towards or away from anarchy?

  • Damien S.

    The global anarchy of governments also involve a lot of warfare between those governments.  Not a promising argument for anarchy. Now things are more peaceful, due to some mixture of peacekeeping hegemons, supergovernmental ties, and lack of enthusiasm for or profitability of between-industrial violence.  In Africa, closer to the historical norm, wars continue briskly…

    One big caveat is that commmunism and anarchism are both vague or multivalent terms.  The anarchists of the Spanish Civil War are not anarcho-capitalists whether Icelandic or futurist.  The Communism of Marxist-Leninist parties is not democratic socialism or social democracy, and wasn’t ‘communism’ even by its own lights; the point of Communist parties was to lead countries through socialism into communism, which is theoretically in its final form, anarchism.

    The Alaska Permanent Fund and dividend, or Texas oil taxes funding state universities, are pretty much light socialist policies, yet oddly never decried as examples of the failure of socialism…

    • Anonymous

      That’s a true observation but you need to look at how well it’s accepted by the general populations of the states waging the wars. I suspect that few of the wars actually have popular support of the average person — meaning they would actually go fight for the real goal of the war.

  • Anonymous

    Support of minarchism is a selective abandonment of economic reasoning.  Pound for pound– and this is the only reasonable form of comparing different systems– an anarcho-capitalist form of anarchy is better organized for defense than any statist forms. States represent the vitiation or outright eclipse of economic calculation. It is this insurmountable problem that will always render the political means inferior to market.

    It is useless to resort to history in answering Matt Z.’s question. Economic concepts used for identifying and analysing historical events must pre-exist as tools for understanding events in the first place. Is it any wonder that Matt Z. engages in historical determinism, one of the many ways of ignoring economic logic, to support his case?

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Sorry, just about every sentence in that comment seems like the undefended assertion of a very controversial point. Some of them, rather bizarre. How exactly do you get historical determinism out of what I wrote?

      • Anonymous

        Are you unfamiliar with the economic calculation argument and that is why it seems “bizarre” to you? Or is it that you have no answer for it so you must resort to disparagement? Because so far you offer no return argument.  

        “But still, it’s a striking fact that virtually every living person on the planet falls under the authority of some state.  And that every historical instance of a stateless society has evolved (degenerated?) into a state-governed one.  Moreover, it seems like (as in the case of communism) we have good theoretical reasons for expecting precisely this result.”

        And what are your theoretical reasons but based in a determinism that ignores economics and denies free will?

        On history. Human experience is that of complex phenomena. The concepts that give meaning to human action must exist prior to action or else the past, e.g., would be unrecognizable in terms of meaning in the first place.

        • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

          Yes, I’m familiar with the economic calculation argument.  But if you think it somehow undermines the claims I made in the post above, then I think you’ve misunderstood it in a way that I probably will be unable to correct in a forum such as this.  

          As for my theoretical reasons, I still don’t see how you think they entail determinism of any sort, or the denial of economics (do you think determinism is incompatible with the economics, somehow?).  My claim is that the fact that we have zero examples of functioning, stable anarchist societies is good though not dispositive reason for doubting the plausibility of anarchism as a normative political philosophy, and that the fact that anarchist societies face serious collective action problems adds to this reason.  Do you think my invocation of collective action problems denies free will, or economics?

          As for your last paragraph, I see that you’re attempting to invoke a Misesian understanding of the relationship between theory and history, but again, I think you’ve misundertsood Mises’ insights in a way that I will probably be unable to correct.

          So I guess I’ll leave it at that.

          • Anonymous

            It is a cop out for you to shirk setting me straight on Mises’ Theory and History. I bet I have Mises right and that you have no clue! 

            Did Mises reject empiricism (and historicism) or not?

            “collective action problems”.  Here is the crux. Just because you state this as “fact” does not make it so, either from a historical or theoretical angle.  When was there a free market, ideologically informed, situation in the anarchic past? There wasn’t one. Anarcho-capitalism as a concept has only recently come into being.

            Determinism is a fundamental law of the universe yet, uniquely, humans cannot be treated as mere physical objects. Economics deals with thinking, valuing actors using means to attain ends.  I think you at least border on claiming historical determinism for all attempts at anarchy-  since you (almost) project the past into the future. But further yet, it is only your misconception of the past being projected.

            If you do not apply economics to this past– then what can be said of the quality in your understanding? Or is that you reject econ as Mises understood it? But here again– the argument is not over data– but the theoretical framework that you are using to identify and understand events. Square one, hello.

            The calculation argument, taken to its logical conclusion, and building on Mises, shows that anarchy is superior to minarchism from a logical standpoint. It is very likely that you will not address this directly because you are still trapped in the Hobbesian Fallacy. The HF meaning that you believe that there must be a final monopoly of authority in order to have society. Of course, that’s the plague of utopianism. Prof. Long, Chartier and Hoppe have all schooled you on this already, I am sure.

          • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=520901360 Gene Callahan

            “Or is that you reject econ as Mises understood it?

            Gee, mfallon, Mises thought the State was an important and necessary institution. So perhaps *you* reject econ as Mises understood it.

          • Anonymous

            I said ‘building on Mises’ now, didn’t I?  Even Mises did not see the full implications of his discoveries and clarifications.

          • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

            Yes, sorry, I’m sure it does seem like a cop out to you. It’s just that, in my experience, trying to convince people who’ve accused me of “the selective abandonment of economic reasoning” and “having no clue” in the context of an internet forum tends to be rather disappointing in its results. It seems to me that our disagreements about what Mises meant, what the economic calculation debate showed, and how economic science should be understood are very, very deep. So it’s probably best for us just to agree to disagree.

          • Anonymous

            You started it, Matt. “Bizarre” without explanation. Then on to asserting I do not understand Theory and History- and you give no effort at explaining yourself. What kind of teacher are you, then?

          • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

            One with better things to do with his time.

          • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=520901360 Gene Callahan

            “As for my theoretical reasons, I still don’t see how you think they entail determinism of any sort, or the denial of economics…”

            Of course they don’t, Matt. dfallon is showing us how an ideology defends itself against massive counter-evidence.

          • Anonymous

            Gene, as someone who claims to understnd Mises, as you do, you would know that supposed historical “evidence” does not refute economic logic, right? Rather, it is economic reasoning that helps shape was is even considered quality history. So your charge of “ideology” is rubbish. Have you become like Marx when faced with his economist detractors and having no recourse in reason, resorts to ad hom?

        • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=520901360 Gene Callahan

          “Are you unfamiliar with the economic calculation argument and that is why it seems “bizarre” to you?”

          Mises and Hayek had some familiarity with that argument. And neither of them reached your (bizarre) conclusions.

          • Anonymous

            And what “bizarre conclusions” are they, Gene?  Care to explain anything you say- or are you content to declare victory and consider it a trump argument?

  • http://anarchyofproduction.wordpress.com/ Michael Wiebe

    Some thoughts:

    Yes, the absence of good historical evidence for anarchism should make you less confident in anarchism as a political system.

    The fact that every land mass is controlled by a government is not a strong argument against anarchism, since the same general argument would have worked against democracy in the 17th century. Moreover, there are different kinds of anarchism, and proponents of market anarchism are advocating something very different than anarchy à la Somalia or Medieval Iceland.

    What examples of minimal states are you thinking of?

  • Anonymous

    I have not read all of the comments, so forgive me if this ground has been covered.  Matt, what is the historical reality re: the consequences of political authority?  In other words, what does empirical research suggest vis-a-vis the nature of man in relation to the concentration of political ”right”?  As I was wondering above, is it the nature of man qua man or the nature of man qua evil men?  So this discussion reminds me something said by Isaiah Berlin:

    “The ideas of every philosopher concerned with human affairs in the end rest on his conception of what man is and can be. To understand such thinkers, it is more important to grasp this central notion or image (which may be implicit, but determines their picture of the world) than even the most forceful arguments with which they defended their views and refute actual and possible objections.”

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=520901360 Gene Callahan

      “Matt, what is the historical reality re: the consequences of political
      authority?  In other words, what does empirical
      research suggest vis-a-vis the nature of man in relation to
      the concentration of political ”right”?”

      It has reduced violence considerably.

      • Anonymous

        And yet I wonder if this is the narrative one must settle
        upon, ignoring e.g., wars increased in scale, imperialism, battles for the
        throne, embedded privilege, exploitation, corruption, the “war on drugs,” thousands
        of years of “royalty,” divinity (traces back to Egyptians) and the “right to
        rule.”  So the question in response to
        your answer is, reduced violence considerably for whom and compared to what? 

         

        If you propose to alter the playing field of normative
        debate, to change the ends of the morally legitimate, assertions of “stability”
        based on empirical evidence better take into account every possible feature of
        the situation.  I am extremely
        uncomfortable with Matt’s line of thought vis-à-vis what is morally
        desirable.  At one point or another, most
        of present society that we find appealing was believed to be an impossibility
        (e.g., a world without slavery) or complete folly (e.g., woman’s suffrage).

         

        To be clear, this is not a defense of an anarchist society
        or a minimal state libertarianism.  Such
        societies may still be morally unjustifiable in theory and morally illegitimate
        in implementation (e.g., there is reasonable disagreement over, say, the
        content of one’s natural rights; what legitimizes a protection agency enforcing
        a particular conception against a supposed violator with a different
        conception?)  My worries are Matt’s theoretical
        constraints on what is morally justifiable and morally legitimate based on ambiguous
        empirical evidence.

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Hi Hume, I guess I’m not totally clear on what you’re asking. I’m not a historian, so I doubt I have much specialized knowledge here that you don’t already have yourself. But it seems to me that the consequences of political authority have been a mixed bag, but mostly positive. Yes, we get totalitarian regimes and large scale massively-destructive wars. But we also get quite a lot of very stable democratic regimes that allow people to live peaceful and productive lives. Is that kind of what you were asking?

      • Anonymous

        All democratic regimes end up in ruins, the United States is next.

        State democracy is the majority ruling over the minority. Stealing from another group simply because your group is bigger is immoral.

        Taxation is theft, albeit an institutionalized one; it is still theft.

        Statism is a means of “organizing” (controlling) society through theft, violence. Anarchism (anarcho-capitalism) is the rejection of violence as a means to organize society.

        • Damien S.

          ” All democratic regimes end up in ruins, the United States is next.”

          What’s your evidence for believing that?

          (Leaving aside just how democratic the US actually is.)

          • Anonymous

            All democracy is mob rule, eventually the minority gets crushed.

  • Anonymous

    “But we also get quite a lot of very stable democratic regimes that
    allow people to live peaceful and productive lives.”

    I think I would say, stable for some, not so stable for others (think of the destruction caused by the war on drugs). And because it is such a mixed bag, I am uncomfortable with your suggestion that we ought to change our moral ideals.  So my foundational question is, to what extent do the actions of bad men change the content of a moral ideal?  This is why I wonder if the empirical evidence of instability is the result of man qua man or man qua evil men (or perhaps they are one in the same).

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Right, it’s a good question, and not one that I have a definitive answer to.  Maybe, and this is just a thought, it depends on what holding something as a moral ideal means, in practice.  If we think anarchy, or communism, is a moral ideal but impractical for now because of the moral failings of men, and all we mean by holding them as moral ideals is that we kind of hope that they come about at some point in the future, then I guess I don’t see much harm.  But if holding them as moral ideals means that we try to act in ways that bring them about, then it might be harmful indeed.  It depends on what those actions are, and what their costs are.    

      • Anonymous

        I agree with much of what you say here and is something that I have thought a bit about.  A moral ideal says very little about how to get there , especially in light of how awful things have been (and currently are) in relation to that ideal. 

        One additional thought: you say “But if holding them as moral ideals means that we try to act in ways that bring them about, then it might be harmful indeed.”   A small consolation is “try to change the minds of men in regards to what is right.”  I expect to see very little in my lifetime in terms of reaching an ideal, but as a (hopeful) academic, all I can try to do is discern the right and hope others eventually agree.  This still leaves unanswered how to get there, but perhaps “knowing (where to go) is half the battle” (yup, I just quoted the cartoon G.I. Joe).

  • Anonymous

    “Minarchists, who may recognize quite clearly the danger that their minimal state will not stick to its contractual limits and instead grow like Topsy, often propose vigilance as the answer. However, there is something contradictory about such a solution. The idea that the people can rise up and depose their subjugator implies that people could solve the problem of trusting each other without the state, for certainly the state will not enforce the contract people signed to overthrow it! In other words, minarchists hold that we need the state to solve the problems presented by not being able to trust each other when undertaking collective action. But then they tell us that, should the state get out of hand, we can collectively agree to overthrow it, and trust each other to adhere to that agreement. So, is there a problem with collective action or isn’t there?”

    Author: Gene Callahan

  • Anonymous

    Another similarity: collective action and collective ownership both get harder as the social order in question becomes larger and more complex. In fact, if you take communists at their word that they wanted the state to wither away, both are anarchic ideals, and neither may work on a scale larger than a medium-sized firm (when you no longer know everyone’s name…)

    To the question of stability and invasion – it depends upon the assumption that the ideal of a small state society is assumed to be better than the state which invades or replaces the anarchic order (probably a good assumption – at least unless the minarchist society is doomed to become corporatist).

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=40505194 Chris Burfield

    Forgive me if this has already been covered in the comments, I have not read them all, but I find it curious that you would point to Somalia as a success story. The famine in that area is a well known story http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/famine/index.html . 
    Now I don’t know enough to say whether or not the famine has been caused by government interference or by anarchism but it seems to me that just the existence of a famine is something that needs to be mentioned and addressed if Somalia is be used as a successful example of anarchism.

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Hi Chris,

      This isn’t something I have much expertise on, but both Peter Leeson and Ben Powell have written a few things on the subject.  The general idea seems to be: yes, life in Somalia is very bad compared to life in the United States.  But that’s not the relevant comparison.  The relevant comparison is how Somalia is doing without a state compared to how it would likely be doing with a state.  And on that measure, Leeson argues, it seems to be doing pretty well.  I don’t have the expertise to evaluate the argument, but it’s at least facially plausible.
      There was a news story in the popular press that made a similar kind of point, in the last 6 months or so I think.  Can’t seem to find it now.

  • Anonymous

    The main concerns about anarchism seem to be about its “instability” and that its society ends up being conquered by state-governed societies.

    Zwolinski acknowledges the successfully stable and peaceful anarchy in Medieval Iceland, but dismisses anarchy on the premise that eventually Iceland, over 300 years later, got conquered by the surrounding states.

    But the same line of argument can be done against statism. All states throughout world history eventually came crashing down under their own weight of oppression and economic insanity. They all had to restart anew, always. And the next major state implosion is probably the United States.

    State-governed societies are just as unstable and eventually end with a violent revolution, an economic collapse or end up being conquered themselves.

    • Damien S.

      William Ian Muller wrote Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, a book on Icelandic  law that convinced one libertarian that David Friedman was wrong about Iceland being an anarchy.  I don’t know anything else about it.

      IIRC, even on Friedman’s account Iceland wasn’t conquered from outside, so much as growing economic inequality caused a social collapse, with Norway invited in to restore order.  Iceland had been relatively egalitarian, at least among the rights-holding farmers (set aside their thralls); when people were rich enough to pay fines with impunity, or get away with not paying fines… not so good.

      Even if everything collapses, there’s a question of “how long does it take”.  If the best example of ‘anarchy’ is a small homogenous semi-egalitarian society on an island on the edge of the world, that doesn’t promise much relevance for a 308 million person society with worldwide economic ties and people who earn 30,000 as much as the average worker and have more wealth than millions of people.

      And the most immediate threat to US stability is politicians who claim that government can’t work.  Sabotage, not structural weakness.

      • Anonymous

        It is not enough for a society to thrive being simply anarchic. Other conditions must be met in order for an anarchic society to flourish. It needs to be libertarian, preferably austro-libertarian. In a nutshell, it is a society that lives by the non-aggression principle and that  understands the Austrian perspective of economics.

        We have yet to see an austro-libertarian (anarchic) society come to fruition. Austro-libertarian ideas are only a couple hundred years old; very young in other words.

  • Roger Parker

    Great post Matt,

    I agree that the absence of evidence supporting the theory should count against anarchism. I think it is possible that it either will not work, or at least that it has not yet been tried in a way that will work.

    This is of course different from socialism, which has been tried hundreds of times in various ways and has led to the opposite of the intended result — indeed it has often been disastrous.

    I agree that Austrian anarchism is a relatively new idea that has not been experimented with enough. As long as experiments are bottoms up and voluntary, I see no reason to discourage them. Perhaps it never will work. Perhaps it will always devolve to a liberal state (not necessarily a bad thing if this is as good as it gets). Perhaps we just don’t have the institutional knowledge yet. 

    • Damien S.

      Hundreds of times?  There were hardly that many socialist countries ever in existence.  And are we now not counting Western Europe and universal health care as socialist?  One can hardly call them disastrous, after all.

      I note that while government-operated businesses are quite common, and somewhat heavily command economies somewhat common, socialism as defined by socialists is generally about democratic/worker control of the economy and means of production, which has been fully tried not very often at all, especially above the level of worker-owned businesses — which seem to do fairly well — or specific industries in social democracies, which also do fairly well.

      • Roger Parker

        Thanks for pointing this out Damien,

        I was working off memory from Muravchik’s “Heaven on Earth” book which I read 5 or 6 years ago. I can’t find the exact number, and we could always just argue over the definition. I did see though (in his appendix) that in 1985 70 countries considered themselves Socialist or were governed by Social Democrats, and that 62 third world countries in 20th C listed themselves as Socialist (not exclusive of 1st list). When you include all the smaller scale communes, kibbutzim and so forth, we certainly have a lot of attempts.

        But you are right, in that when I look at his 1985 list, it includes not just USSR and China, but also Sweden and Australia, which I agree cannot be considered either clear-cut failures or textbook examples of Socialism. 

        I will revise my statement to it has been tried dozens of times in dozens of ways the purer the attempt the worse the experience. N. Korea, Cuba, USSR, China, East Block, 3rd world disasters, etc.

        If workers want to non-coercively purchase the means of production, they should by all means do so. A worker owned company may work just fine. Indeed, I fail to see why people can’t be workers, consumers, owners and entrepreneurs at the same time or at the minimum during different phases of their lives. I have.

        My point is that top down, centralized, coercive master planning of the economy in its various fascist/socialist guises has been an abysmal failure. I think a great argument (such as Heritage’s) can be made that the more coercion, interference and master planning done, the worse the outcome.

        Relating this back to Matt’s original comments: If you go toward more socialism you get worse freedom and prosperity and as you go toward more liberalism you seem to get better prosperity and freedom. If these are what you value, I think a good argument can be made to explore in the direction of libertarianism. Perhaps even all the way to anarchism. 

         Granted, a whole lot of people — especially those desiring to exploit others — do not value widespread freedom and prosperity. Lenin, Castro, Mao and the funny little guy that runs N Korea seem to have gotten exactly what they wanted. 

        • Damien S.

           Self-described in the constitution socialist countries include Portugal, India, Sri Lanka, Syria, Bangladesh, Algeria, and Tanzania plus Mexico from 1928-2000. While none of these stand out as economic powerhouses they’re not the self-starving or self-killing disasters of Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.  (Then again, neither are Vietnam or Cuba.)  Portugal is a First World country with $26,000/capita GDP, if at the low end.

          “the purer the attempt the worse the experience”

          That’s rather disputable.  Democracy has always been part of socialism as advocated; Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” was 1848-speak for universal suffrage and direct democracy; one-party states ruled by a vanguard party and rigged elections was Lenin’s innovation.  Why should North Korea be considered purer than India, or for that matter the United States (public schools and food stamps and all)?  Central planning isn’t sufficient to be a properly socialist country and it’s not clear that it’s necessary, either.

    • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

      Thanks, Roger.

      A few people have brought up the “anarchism is a relatively new idea” issue.  But I’m a bit puzzled regarding what work this claim is supposed to do.  I explain my puzzlement in an update to the main post above.  Hopefully somebody can clear me up!

      • Roger Parker

        Matt,

        In my original comments I was going to include a paragraph on transition points in history and evolution.  Some ideas which were not feasible in earlier eras become possible later on. I deleted it for brevity. Large states were not feasible to migrating hunter gatherers. Representative democracy wasn’t feasible in illiterate agricultural communities and so forth.

        The point is that as societies progress (or not), they can accumulate (or lose) technical, scientific and institutional knowledge. Tomorrow’s institutions are enabled based upon the developments of the past. The potential future becomes part of the “adjacent possible.”

        When I look back at recorded history I see a long string of exploitation. Over time, various societies have solved some problems with institutions and protocols (courts, rule of law, norms, values, credit checks, eBay ratings, etc). These too are often then infiltrated with parasites and predators. and so on. Move and counter move.

        I believe strong arguments can be built that we should voluntarily and non-coercively move in the experimental direction of less government intervention, coercion and monopoly. I think we have ample experience with going in the opposite direction and how it leads to impoverishment, catastrophe and the serfdom. I don’t know if it will develop to the point of “outsourcing” defense or not. Maybe not now, maybe not for a millennium, maybe never. That is OK, I trust reality more than theory.

        All that said, I agree with you that some kind of all at once, top-down, master planned conversion to anarchy would be a disaster. See my comments to C Cruz. We should build more experimentation and choice into the current system and begin exploring new colonies? with new rules and institutions that are informed by the best institutions to date.

      • Anonymous

        Matt, very interesting article.   If I understand it, the point is that anarchy decays back into some other -archy, so it’s doomed and shouldn’t be a goal.  The last closest approach to anarchy got us to the moon, perhaps the next approach to anarchy will discover a cure for politicians’/criminals’ compulsion to use offensive force.  Again, if I understand this article, I say let’s keep trying for anarchy.
        I’m usually defending the Constitution, all this talk of anarchy has taken me outside my normal sphere of thought, I like it.  The Constitution is, or was supposed to be, based on the philosophy stated in the Declaration, which includes the postulate that government is instituted to secure rights.  Securing rights is the defensive use of force, whereas  -archy(rule) is the offensive use of force (violates rights).  So doesn’t an-archy (no rule; equals no offensive force), by definition, allow for a government that genuinely secures rights (defensive force)?   Assuming that is achievable?
             

        • Damien S.

          “The last closest approach to anarchy got us to the moon”

          Say what?

          • Anonymous

            Damien, yes, that was a clumsy statement.  I intended to point out that America, by far, had the least government in recent history.  In other words, America is the country that most closely approached anarchy, if I understand the definition being used here.  The resultant prosperity, and scientific and technological progress, then made it possible to go to the moon.  Who knows what achievement is possible if, to borrow a phrase, the mainspring of human progress is unleashed again?
                 But I’m used to the term “anarchy” being used for the opposite end of the government spectrum to describe the result of too much government, where the suppression reaches the point of human endurance and society enters uncontrolled, random tyranny.  I didn’t fully understand Matt’s article, was trying to explain my take on it, and ask for clarification.
                 I also see that I posted to one of his comments instead of to his main article.  A double whammy of clumsiness, my apologies.

          • Damien S.

            “by far, had the least government in recent history”

            I’m deeply sceptical that that’s the case, especially “by far”.  As for our wealth, our sheer size plus geographic isolation from major wars goes a long way to explaining that.  Granted that we’re a developed country, we have 2-4x the population of the next largest such countries; obviously we’re wealthier.  And have never been bombed or embargoed.  We also trailblazed in government schools and universities, which generate the education and research that also backs our wealth.

            Our wealth enabled us to go to the Moon, but so did a giant government project to go there. And Sputnik and Mir were Communist achievements.

          • Anonymous

            I agree with some of your statements if you’re referring to the 1960’s when America had become more Europeanized, and the
            world Americanized.  By then we no longer had the least gov’t by far.

            But I was referring to America’s meteoric rise in wealth and innovation after the adoption of the Constitution at a time when
            other nations were still being ruled by kings, etc., key word “ruled”.  The American concept of government as a
            securer of individual rights (effected in relative, but not absolute terms), was the opposite of the ruling concept of the rest of the world.  In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville observed that America’s equality, voluntarism, and energy were
            thriving in a complete absence of any apparent government. 

            The colonies weren’t that big in size or population, only average resources, infrastructure was decimated by 2 wars(Revolutionary and 1812), and constant conflicts with Indians didn’t help.  You’re in good company with government
            universities, Jefferson believed in them, but the public school idea didn’t gain much ground till the 1830’s. The factors you mention for wealth didn’t apply to America when it turned the world upside down and exploded into prosperity.

            I agree about the Moon race.  Given the situation in the 1960’s, we wouldn’t have gone to the Moon without a gov’t project.  As for Sputnik, the entire world benefited from our scientific and technological progress. Plus, the Communists were subsidized, overtly and covertly, by the US taxpayer in the name of “stability”, a term I learned to despise while studying
            doctrine in the AF.

            But had liberty continued to flourish, a United Mining Co. and an Adventure Tours Co. (hypothetical) might have had their own
            Moon race in 1950. Or maybe not, we’ll never know what could have been.  But we do know that more freedom is better than less freedom.

          • Damien S.

            Post revolutionary rise: a country founded roughly 50% on slavery is an odd candidate for “least government”.  Our rise also had a lot to with stealing land from the Indians. Public schools might not have taken off nationally until the 1830s, but that’s still before the bulk of our industrialization.  Our oldest public school is Boston Latin, started in 1635; Massachusetts started compulsory education in 1642, followed by other New England colonies.  Hey, guess where America’s industrial revolution started?

            Also recall that a small federal government doesn’t mean small total government; sttates can play a large role too.

            Size: the 13 colonies were already bigger than the UK.  But we quickly expanded from that to be much bigger than any European country.  Lots of good land (stolen) and immigration meant we had a big population too, which means more wealth.  Stuff like a large free trade zone didn’t hurt, but don’t overlook the basic geographic factors, especially underlying our modern wealth.

            Democracy helping the US industrialize vs. European monarchies isn’t a very strong argument for having no government.  It could be down to “freedom”… or it oculd be down to having a government that works for the people rather than for an elite.  Public schools, internal improvements, patents and copyright.

            You’re saying Sputnik happened because of US progress?  Maybe in part, but you could just as well say the Moon landing happened because of the rest of the world’s progress. Especially with us using German rocket scientists to build rockets carrying bombs created in part by European scientists. Germany was world leader in chemistry for a good while, and they’re obviously still quite good in manufacturing — with  a nice big government. Japan too, for that matter.

          • Damien S.

            In other words, I definitely think “economic freedom”, or more specifically lack of arbitrary monopolies, internal tariffs, and class privileges, helped America develop.  But I also think government had a big virtuous role: schools, roads, canals, railroads (typically private but on granted land), external tariffs that protected early industry from raw competition with Britain.  There’s also a non-virtuous role, in stealing most of a continent and in slavery (which New England also benefited from for a while, triangle trade and all.)

            And, for purposes of space access, we benefit from sheer size, stolen or not; 300 million First Worlders with Florida launch sites have an advantage over 80 million First Worlders who are nearly landlocked, which advantage has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with geography.  The Cold War also helps: access to orbit is a lot easier when you already have a booming ICBM industry; USSR and USA had a head start on everyone else in that respect.  And it’s still the USSR that had the imagination to go first, using their *own* technology.

  • C Cruz

    Oh, I know a completely no-risk way that we can easily test the theories of anarcho-capitalism!  And it really weirds me out that I don’t have to read through the comments to guarantee that it hasn’t already been mentioned.

    • Roger Parker

      Great point C Cruz,

      You lay out a dynamic or process that allows the system to discover how libertarian it can go. Personally, I have yet to be convinced that there is no need for government (though I am open to the idea). What is needed is — as you suggest — voluntary choice  and constructive competition. The more the better.

      There are a lot of ways (alternative paths) to build more choice and competing alternatives into the system:
      1) Don’t take the government path if free enterprise alternatives clearly exist (toll road, pay for service fire, insurance etc)
      2) Make as many choices at the lowest level as possible/practical (State vs federal, local vs state)
      3) Build options into the programs where possible (rather than retire at 68 and pay 6%, allow people to choose 72 at 6% or 68 at 8% for example)
      4) Allow people to opt out of the program all together (Galveston’s opt out of SS)
      5) Allow competing experimental tests on major ideas before rolling out countrywide and then allow individual states to choose the one that fits best 
      6) Allow people to have choice in where their tax goes (your idea). 

      I trust voluntary choice and constructive competition to lead us to better institutions. They won’t so much be designed from the top down as evolved and developed from the bottoms up. If this leads to successful anarchism, then so be it. If something else, I am fine there too. If it proves unworkable all together, then let’s try something else.

      The problem with government isn’t that it is a government, it is that it lacks constructive competition and benchmarks for performance, and that it is a coercive, bureaucratic monopoly with little incentive to actually deliver efficient solutions to the problems it supposedly addresses.

      In brief, we have too much rationalized arguments on what will or won’t work and too little discussion on the process we should take to discover what works.

      • C Cruz

        Roger, woah!  Right on!  You’re the only other “pragmatarian” I’ve ever met.  ”Pragmatarian” is the word I grabbed for people who care primarily about results.  It combines the invisible hand from libertarianism and the pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping.  That guy was so cool.  He went around saying that he didn’t care if a cat was black or white…what mattered was whether it caught mice.  It shouldn’t matter whether an organization is public or private…what matters is results.

        If you get a chance you should check out my blog… http://pragmatarianism.blogspot.com/
        It’s pretty darn great finding another pragmatarian because as you can tell from my latest post…I’m getting the feeling that the concept is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

  • Anonymous

    In my eyes, the argument against anarchy is much more basic, from a moral or political philosophy perspective. Anarchism offers nothing to the world in terms of institutions to propagate it’s pre-supposed morally superior world. It doesn’t even propose to protect the rights individuals claim under anarchy – and if thought about properly, is amoral or silent on morality. Anarchy is the absence of political philosophy. 

    Anarchism does offer a personal philosophy and moral view, but it is nothing like say classical liberalism, progressivism or even conservatism (which actually lacks a coherent philosophy). I came to this view via work in emergent orders and complexity science in which it became increasingly clear to me that the “emergent orders” which anarchists rely on to magically produce a society ordered in a way that protects liberty, was in no way guaranteed to occur. In fact, the most any anarchist can accurately claim is that some people might be free under anarchy.  It’s axiomatic with respect to the “complexity” (complexity as a technical term) of society. It’s inherently chaotic and accordingly, will also vary wildly based on small changes in initial conditions. In fact, to be solely empirical, one could quite strongly argue that the state is much more of an emergent inevitability from anarchy, as it has emerged from anarchy uniformly in many, many societies or has been imposed from the outside (which, from an emergent order perspective, is a distinction without a difference). 

    Given the above, how can an anarchist assert any moral superiority when their supposed “philosophy” offers nothing but false hope and unwarranted certainty? I think it was this same kind of thinking that led folks such as Hayek to reject “Natural Law” – which is really just magical thinking too (sorry folks, but anarchy is just dressed up magical thinking). We used it effectively as a rhetorical tool against the divine right of kings to argue for individual sovereignty, or at least classical liberals did. Anarchists do nothing of the sort, fyi, they simply say “Party on Garth” to the world and think – with virtually no evidence to support their claims – that the world will end with more free people.

     Lol, sorry, I just am struck each time I write about this by the arrogance of anarchists, who argue from a fictional moral perch that their philosophy doesn’t even provide them. They preach about “NAP” and voluntarism as though others may not have had that sophomoric moment when reading Rothbard or Hayek or even Friedman or Rand, that we speculated about what a stateless society would be like and were thrilled by it. However, one needs to temper one’s passions with reason and all reason leads to the ineluctable conclusion that without a state guaranteeing negative rights, and delivering at least some very limited public goods, personal liberty won’t exist in any meaningful way for people. To assert otherwise is interesting, but not based on anything but fanciful thinking. I know this sounds arrogant, but really, it’s also very simply true.

  • Anonymous

    Claiming that the past lacks evidence of stable regimes for communism and various forms of state-free or state-light libertarianism I think misses a key environmental condition: technology.  The most important lesson from the past re. stability is the ability of technology to completely change what is and isn’t stable.

    I could argue that the enormous welfare state as seen today is unstable given its absence in history (other than recent history).  However, I would be ignoring the fact that it isn’t “years of successful existence” that indicates stability but a mix of that with, arguably more important, a viable theoretical framework (ie. explanation) of why the system is stable or not.  I would vastly prefer an argument addressing why anarchy is unstable beyond that of “it hasn’t worked in the past.”  That only begs the question.  The welfare state is only stable because technology has made it possible.  Increased technology = increased productivity = excessive wealth = welfare-state is possible.  That is a (somewhat) satisfying theoretical basis.  It is quite possible that a similar argument is available for anarchy, especially as wealth increases.  Sounds like an interest discussion.

    Btw, I am no anarchist.  Simplified, I am a minarchist most aligned with someone like Milton Friedman.  But my view is a function of technology.  I do see non-cohersion as laudable goal (though I prefer maximizing (collective) negative liberty over non-cohersion), but given the current technology available coupled with our place in the inertia of history, I find that said minarchism to be the most defensible both from an individual and collective view of morality (the latter seemingly is the premise of this fine blog).

    An interesting blog entry, if I might presumptuously suggestion one, could the role technology plays in molding which system of organizing society is most desirable.

    • Damien S.

       The comprehensiveness of the modern welfare state depends on high productivity (I’d disputed “excessive” wealth; what does that mean?)  OTOH the basic ideas of state aid through hard times or funding of hospitals and schools aren’t new or tech-dependent; some older and much poorer states have done them.

      Instabilities for anarchy lie in externalities and means for dealing with them, and in the economies of scale of territorial defense and aggression.  As for technology, I think it’s made anarchy less likely, as it’s increased the power of individuals to affect other people, which is what needs regulating.  We’ve also seen growth in population size and density, with the latter providing more people to be affected by one’s actions.

      Dispersed 17th century farmers don’t need a lot of regulation.  Urban dwellers in an age of dioxins and nuclear weapons do.

      • Anonymous

        “As for technology, I think it’s made anarchy less likely, as it’s
        increased the power of individuals to affect other people, which is what
        needs regulating”

        Hmm, well I humbly disagree.  I think you are confusing dependency with complexity.  While the complexity of our interactions has certainly increased, our mutual dependencies have significantly fallen.  At one time, homage to the group, and its leaders, was required for the basic necessities such as sex, food and shelter.  This, happily, is no longer the case as productivity increases have liberated us from spending our lives trying to survive and working as a group to achieve that end.  Going it a lone was just not an option.

        Technology, from what I can tell, is breaking down these natural collective action dilemmas.  Just take the extreme idea of a nanofactory that can produce anything you want it to.  Now you have zero dependencies; Anarchy is getting pretty stable.

        Anyways, I think this these discussions are important – more generally, what impact does a changing environment have on the social systems stability?  But I thought this was a blog of philosophers concerned about the moral good not pragmatic politicians debating stability?

        • Damien S.

          Uh, you’ll note that we don’t have nanofactories.  And rapid prototyping ‘replicators’, while cute, are not yet particularly useful. Nor do they make food.  I see dependencies as increasing as well.  For hunter-gatherers, any adult can strike out into the wilderness and have a chance of surviving.  Ditto for subsistence farmers.  Most of us today are utterly dependent on a complex web for our basic survival, and dependent on the economies of scale of that web.

          We are less dependent on our particular family or society or immediate rainfall levels.  That’s a far cry from being less dependent on external factors in general.

          And I wasn’t even talking about dependencies, but about vulnerability to adverse effects.  We can make far more forms of pollution, and subtle forms, and far-ranging forms, and higher population densities magnify the problem.  Leaf-burning is okay in rural areas but banned in urban ones for air quality reasons.  The 18th century didn’t need to worry about dioxins or acid rain.  Isolated farmsteads don’t need fire codes, cities do.

          If my actions can affect only 50 people, then ‘anarchy’, or voluntary social coordination backed up by shunning and such, can work.  If my actions can affect a million people, even in small ways, and there are a million people who can affect me, then we currently have no better means of handling that than government regulation.

          The relevance of debating moral good in isolation from pragmatic possibility can also be debated by philosophers.

          • Anonymous

            The idea of nanofactories is to let us think about the potential impact of technology on the stability of anarchy, minarchism, etc.  Indeed perhaps some technology increases and other decreases the stability of anarchy.  I think it is interesting to think about.

            That our actions affect many (in a massively complex and difficult to model way) is no argument against anarchy.  If anything, complexity might require (not just ought, but must) more de-central decision making ergo anarchy / minarchism.  Managing the resulting externalities becomes a pragmatic question of whether regulation, or not, will do more overall harm than leaving it alone.

            But negative externalities are a very small piece of the interactions pie.  We are biased against type 2 errors.  You  must think about all the interactions that are either neutral or positive externalities as well.

          • Damien S.

            Hypothetical technology could reduce dependency, yes.  Real technology hasn’t.
            And nanofactories that can be used by the disaffected to make nerve gases or plague vectors or nukes might invite regulation anyway.

            Negative externalities seem like a rather large piece to me.  And more importantly, a vital, can-kill-you, can kill *civilization*, piece.

          • Anonymous

            Oh cmon, “real technology doesn’t decrease dependencies”.  Can you address the elephant in the room (the internet) or does that also require state invention to manage all the spawning negative-externalities?

            “Can kill you” should be supplemented with “is likely to kill you”.  This is why the early groups were so damaging to anarcho-stability as I would vastly increase my odds of dying without them.

            Today that isn’t the case.  Your references to plagues and nerve gases just isn’t born out by the evidence as having even marginal impact on our fecundity or longevity.  When discussing these things, materiality is everything.

          • Damien S.

            What about the internet?  Can you eat e-mails?  Get clean air off the web?  The internet doesn’t need much regulation but it doesn’t make the regulations we do need any less necessary.  It’s irrelevant to whether we need a state, unless you can swing it to produce global reputation-based coercion and enforcement — which condition might not be any more ‘free’ than life under a democratic state.

            Materiality is everything?  Well, your nanofactories *don’t exist*.  They’re not material.  But if they did and were as general purpose as usually hoped for, then they could make such things.  Or more conventional guns and explosives.  Explosives free of the chemical tracers the modern state has put in fertilizers, too.

  • Vangel

    “Whatever else can be said about them, anarchist societies are, as an empirical matter, clearly unstable.”

    I do not believe that it is that true at all.  I will agree that anarchist societies are vulnerable to opportunists who seek power and conquest and have no problem with using force to conquer others.  This means that an anarchist society or societies with very few laws or regulations require the protection of some other state against conquest.  Think of Hong Kong under British rule where there were very few rules but the colony enjoyed the protection of the Royal Navy. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=546092083 Terry Mcintyre

    Medieval Ireland, which appeared to be a stateless society, held off against England for hundreds of years. This is a better track record than many states. I wonder, if England had not had superior technology, whether it would have prevailed.

    • Damien S.

      Stateless, or several non-unified states?  Calling a tribal society elected kings “stateless” seems problematic.

      And, what superior technology?  AIUI England started invading in the 1200s, but not deeply or the invaders got semi-assimilated, then really took over in the 1600s.  Where’s the tech gap?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_HSKXAWKADVEXMD6SG7DRBB7H3I Silly Wabbit

    Classic anarchism wasn’t just against “the state” but rather all marco-institutions of governance and control, such as religion or monopoly capital (read Kropotkin’s definition of anarchism, for example). Others (most notably Goldman) critiqued patriarchy from an anarchist perspective.  Its more theoretically useful to think of societies as multi-layered and multi-dimensional rather than a 3 or 4 category typology. Few societies are going to me the classical anarchist definition of 1) No Central State 2) No Religion 3) No Monopologies 4) No patriarchy but we develop systems to classify societies (or *sigh* nations) within those categories. 
    From this perspective, I’m not sure that the exercise suggested by the author of this post is terribly useful. its better to think of multi-dimensions of anarchism and attempt to ascertain the degree to which certain societies (or even really any aggregate of social organization) measure on these dimensions. 

  • Pingback: Reading The Ethics of Liberty, Part 1 - Hoppe's Introduction | Bleeding Heart Libertarians

  • http://www.facebook.com/todd.myers.33 Todd Myers

    It seems that anarcho-capitalists and minarchists neglect the moral foundations that must be put in place to realize an order of voluntary exchange. At a minimum, the sanctity of property rights must be upheld, but such sanctity can only be generated by creating institutions that embed the moral argument for property into a population. The moral argument for the sanctity of property will confront the interests of individuals who may benefit from negating property rights. The rationality of property rights can be grasped at an individual level, just as the benefits of violating property rights can be grasped at an individual level, but only through an elaborate socialization process can such norms become socially effective. Launching such an education program requires large amounts of resources that would involve either religious organizations, non-profit organizations, or as is presently the case, state institutions.

    The contradictions associated with the state taking resources to inculcate a property rights ethic should be noted, but a lack of enculturation and institutional sanctions for property rights open the doors for the systematic undermining of a property right regime by individual actors violating property rights for their personal benefit. The pragmatic presence of violence may only be able to be countered by a use of force to establish the moral and social norms necessary for the relatively more peaceful regime of a relatively laissez faire regime.

    The concentration of wealth within a central state not countered by a laissez-faire decentralizing movement tends to make whatever gains are made by such a state vulnerable to huge losses when the centralized node is disrupted. It appears that an argument for greater liberty exists on pragmatic grounds, but it is not the argument of a transcendent natural rights regime, it is an argument that emerges from the study of networks and cost/benefit analysis. Violence cannot be banished it can merely be minimized and a state monopoly on violence may contribute to that minimization. All efforts must be exerted to prevent that monopoly from moving a system to the extreme vulnerability of centralization.