First, a coalition of libertarian mayors, magistrates, city councilmen, etc. could use their position to make their areas of influence safer for markets to function by employing non-statist means. But once you get any higher than that, the nature of the office makes it impossible for its occupant NOT to be statist.
Second, local officials are not rulers. Higher officials are. And a libertarian ruler is a contradiction in terms.
But more than that is the fact that economic secession will work where geographical secession fails. A local politican can turn a blind eye to his or her local agora without having their conduct called into question. A governor - not so much.
Additionally, the Federal government directly controls state governments. State governments in many cases don’t even directly control the local ones. Basically, there is a lot more room to work, a lot of small victories that can be easily won without wasting our influence, and a solid, local base will be pretty damn hard to stamp out.
Imagine if such a coalition were formed, where a couple hundred local governments gave asylum to tax resistors. Imagine if that constituted only 1% of the population. Do you think that the federal government could put three million people in jail when they are opposed by numerous, decentralized local governments? Not without acts of atrocity which will only resolve the people against them and hasten their defeat.
Meanwhile, a state that gives such asylum would simply have its centralized power easily taken down by the federal government and replaced by a more cooperative regime.
Political processes yield political results. Apolitical processes yeild apolitical results. You cannot start with one and achieve the other any more than you can plant potatoes and get apple trees.
We didn’t always have political systems. At some point, an apolitical system become a political one. A political one could become an apolitical one as well. It really doesn’t follow that for some reason – by definition – elections can’t lead to the downfall of the oppressive state.
That sounds like a good idea, but how can a local government become an asylum for tax resistors? How can they keep federal agents out? It would be easy for the federal government to justify using force against rebelling local governments using local police to attack federal agents. In fact, whenever local government do anything even a tad out of line, the federal government simply threatens to withhold federal funding (that money, of course, should still belong to the individuals in that area).
I think a grass-roots approach can only work if a top-down approach is taken at the same time. Look at what the Ron Paul campaign did! many, many people learned about capitalism for the first time, and he provided an example for other local politicians to emulate.
Ron Paul was much too radical to win (I wish he had adopted a more moderate platform while continuing with his radical rhetoric).
This sort of incrementalism has very well for the left, and it can work for us, too. Too many anarcho-capitalists are stuck on an all-or-nothing approach, though.
As Rothbard often said, “incrementalism in principle is perpetuity in practice.”
The reason incrementalism works for the left is that it is the nature of the state to increase. Since it is thier goal to increase the state, they can either push for revolution or reform, and get more of the state either way. But a moderate platform by a radical anti-statist will serve to dilute the movement and to undermine the rhetoric.
If Paul were to beome President, there would be two distinct results. The first is that he would help to spread the word about liberty. The second would serve to undo all that in the long run - he would restore the faith of the people in government.
I am all for the first, which is why I am voting for Paul in the PA primary. But the second will only postpone the inevitable. Statism will have to run its course before it ends, and a politician who makes people believe in the state will make that neccessary process much longer than it really needs to be. We cannot keep the state under control forever. It WILL devolve into tyranny at some point, and I’d rather have to deal with it myself than shrug the burden off to my descendents.
But here’s why I’m not afraid of letting statism run its course. Agorism is no old trick. It comes from an understanding of economics, history and philosophy new to this age and completely foreign to our enemies. While it is true that raw tyranny will help to undermine the state, there’s no reason to assume that we will see that immediately. All we mean to do is let the state’s fiscal apparatus eat itself into oblivion - which it will eventually. Whether it happens sooner or later, it will still happen someday. I’d rather live to see it, and be there to help finish the beast off.
Neither of us are going to convince the other, and our positions are clearly laid out in the previous two posts.
I will make one last point, however:
I think it’s dangerous (and, in some ways, cruel) to oppose a less oppressive government (in other words, prefer a more oppressive government) in hopes that it will cause people to join us.
And I think it’s both dangerous and quite cruel to postpone the inevitable oppression to another generation. It will come someday, no matter how many Ron Pauls run for office and no matter how many votes they get.
Why should we put off facing it? That’s not a rhetorical question, I really want to know why you think we should make it a long and painful proccess for our descendents when we can begin to put an end to it now? And I don’t see why allowing the government to kill its own money will neccessarily require them to start acting like brutes. The whole point of agorism is to make working in the agora more profitable than working for the state. Once again, all the trillions of government dollars won’t buy them an army worth anything, if the people selling the food and cars and clothes and eventually guns won’t accept it. And even if that doesn’t happen right away, how many people in the military are so blindly servile that they would turn their guns on people who aren’t doing anything other than keeping their families healthy? I would suggest, not very many at all. I predict mass-defection long before any widespread violence even has a chance to happen.
Again, we’re not advocating insurrection. We are simply encouraging people to barter, when you get down to it.
I don’t have any faith that a collapse of the state will mean that there won’t be a state afterwards. All throughout history, states have collapsed and formed. Look at the USSR. And I don’t have faith that agorism alone could even come close to bringing about a collapse before the state (with the eager backing of statists) responds.
I do have faith, however, that individuals educated about free markets will notice the the results after taxes, regulations, and spending have all been cut, and will continue to elect politicians who will do the same.
States are almost inarguably the most successful type of organization in human history. Your assertion that more tyranny today will bring about less tyranny tomorrow is clearly very debatable. Why wasn’t that true for Cuba, or North Korea? I guarantee you there are people in those cultures who hate their governments more than you hate yours.
Absent futures markets, political discussions of all stripes tend to be dominated by social incentives. The people involved have little reason to pursue the truth, even if they don’t realize it. Most people involved in such things are more interested in their own social clubs and whatnot (which is fine by me, but such institutions are rarely incentive-compatible with their stated goals). If your serious about finding ways to reduce and eliminate state power, I’d at least start with serious tools (not armchair prophecy) but thats just my opinion.
You’re looking at things from the political perspective, not the economic. The political approach isn’t “the good”, it’s far from it. Even if you could successfully “shrink the government”, you wouldn’t be making any qualitative changes to the situation, only quantitative. You wouldn’t be in any way reducing what it claims sovereign authority over; the state’s assumed authority would still encompass every sphere of human life, it would only be (at best, and only temporarily) limiting its exercise of that assumed authority, or (as is more likely) making its exercise of that assumed authority more tolerable. If it robs me of a tenth of my property it is no less a crime than if it were robbing me of nine tenths of it, and if it allows me to do X it still retains the assumed authority to deny me that privilege or to regulate it. Even if it goes so far as to limit taxation to a 1% sales or income tax, and allow all activity in which one might by their rightful liberty engage, without regulation, and the only requirement being that one obtain a license for certain things which in all cases is granted unconditionally upon request, it would still not be “the good”, it would just be a more tolerable evil. At the same time, you’d be making the state more efficient and effective at enforcement, actually hurting the real good, the only element of the free market which persists in spite of the state’s existence: the counter-economy. You’d be making it more likely, not less, that the exploitation of the productive class would persist.
When they have trouble putting food on the table to feed those children using the state-controlled market and currency, the counter-economy will sell itself quite easily. It’ll probably appeal to them long before that point, as other goods and services become more difficult for them to obtain legally.
The most tyrannical states are also the most unstable. That’s also a strawman, as it is not some Marxist-style inevitable final revolution we’re talking about, it’s something that requires some actual effort on our part. Quite a bit more effort than goes into the wishful thinking and fantasizing done by those using the political approach, though still far less effort than that same political approach would actually require to even come close to being successful.
Well excuse us for not providing you with yet another doomed-to-fail “get liberty quick” scheme. This stuff doesn’t happen overnight, the state has persisted for thousands of years, it could take us centuries still to end it. At least we’re not peddling an approach that’s already a complete demonstrable failure, but rather something which has actually shown signs of being a viable strategy.
Speaking of Cuba, I found this rather interesting. Counter-economics as a means to get around the state’s controls is, unlike voting, as natural as breathing. It IS the free market. We can either make use of the very thing we claim to embrace, or we can continue trying to make more tolerable the very thing we claim we wish to abolish.
Oh, by the way, for all those here who don’t think the counter-economic approach works, here’s an example of it (unlike voting) working right now in the real world: Black market saving Zimbabwean economy.
The fact that many people are ignorant sheep is why our fantasy candidate must have the charisma of Barack Obama. Any strategy dependent upon people become informed independent thinkers is doomed to fail. Charisma is what separates the men from the boys, in politics, but charisma is a tool that can be used for good or ill.
That’s not counter-economics, is it? Waiting for the statist system to fail and taking credit for the black market that must inevitably result?
I didn’t mean to criticize the ideas of agorism, only the certainty that some people seem to express about it. Elements of it might work, sure, but they might not. I don’t think anyone here is qualified to say one way or the other, let alone justified in supporting more coercion now in hopes of it leading to less later.
So basically you’re betting on some messianic figure on a white horse to appear and, maybe, lead you to the promised land of liberty? And this makes more sense to you than directing your energy towards cutting the legs out from under the state using methods and tactics which have already proved effective at doing so? We each have limited time and energy; wasting any of it on pipe dream messiahs is foolish.
That is counter-economics, in an advanced stage, but lacking the necessary consciously libertarian component present in the agorist approach. All states inflate, regulate, prohibit, and tax, so there is always a counter-economy. The larger the counter-economy grows, the more fragile the state’s hold on society becomes. There is a feedback loop at work with the counter-economy; as more of the wealth of society is made unavailable to the state, as it is denied revenue and forced to expend ever greater resources on enforcement, the state must inflate more, regulate more, prohibit more, and tax more to maintain its wealth and power. As this occurs, the counter-economy grows and even more of the wealth of society is made unavailable to the state. The more the state tries to hold onto its position, the more quickly it is brought to collapse as people are driven out of state-controlled markets and into the counter-economy. Zimbabwe is an advanced example of this phenomenon.
Agorists seek to bring about an acceleration of this process, and to ensure that it is libertarian, so that the resulting collapse results in a libertarian society; the first phase, in which we currently find ourselves, requires promotion of the anti-political counter-economic approach to existing libertarians as well as the promotion of libertarianism to existing counter-economic entrepreneurs (those who are already involved in black and grey markets). In this phase we must expand both the counter-economy and libertarianism, one individual at a time (the only way conversion actually works).
The next phase begins when the libertarian counter-economy has grown to the point that all of society has been “tainted” by it to some extent, and we have grown strong enough and numerous enough to establish whole counter-economic communities, whether underground or aboveground, wherein the counter-economy has outgrown the state-controlled market, and where we have garnered sufficient sympathy with “the masses” that any violent response by the state towards our “alternative lifestyle” would not have popular support. It’s not going to be easy. The state may indeed conduct mass arrests in attempts to suppress our movement, but this has been the case with every successful civil disobedience movement of the past and there is no reason to expect that we’ll get a free pass. We must remember however that the state’s enforcers are people too, with families and friends, and by the time any crackdowns occur in the next phase our movement we’ll have grown to the point that it’s doubtful if any would not have friends or family who are a part of it to at least some limited extent. While we will offer no compliance with the dictates of the state, our movement must remain non-violent in means to achieve non-violent ends, and this peaceful disobedience to the state will win us sympathy with those not themselves a part of our movement. As we show people a better way to live, a more peaceful and economically-prosperous way, in contrast to the violent oppression of the state, more will join us. To borrow a phrase from the communists, our way is “propaganda of the deed”.
In the phase which follows, the third phase, the agora will grow from dispersed agoric communities to the point that it, and not the state-controlled market, encompasses the majority of economic activity within our society. It will end with the last violent response of the state, the last desperate attempt of the political class to hold onto their power, before becoming so marginalized and unappealing that there’s nothing left of it but a few pockets of statism which are quickly evaporating. At this point, the transition from the third to the fourth phase, agoric security has reached a point of superiority to the state’s forces, and suppresses this last desperate violent reaction; this is the point of revolution. With no state threatening the agora, agoric security and arbitration entrepreneurs compete with each other for customers, economic prosperity grows in the absence of the state’s parasitism, and we (or at least our descendants) get to live in the world’s first truly free society. All that would remain for us, or our descendants, then is to remain vigilant against renewed exploitation while living our lives in peace.
We are most certainly qualified to point out the complete failure of the political approach in even coming close to anything resembling success, while pointing out the demonstrable successes of the counter-economic approach.
We aren’t supporting more coercion, nor are those peddling the political approach supporting less coercion. To say that there is “less coercion” requires a qualitative change, not merely a quantitative one as political libertarians support. A lower tax rate is not “less coercion”, as the threat of death or imprisonment for refusal of payment is completely unchanged by the actual amount demanded by the state. We are quite justified in supporting the actual denial of our lives, wealth, and liberty to the state and opposing attempts to divert our limited time and energy towards making the demands on our lives, wealth, and liberty merely more tolerable.
“Pipe dream messiah”? What I’m looking for is a leader. And no, I’m not waiting for one to show up (although that would be nice), I’m crafting myself into one. A tack I think other Austrians should also take, but perhaps it doesn’t occur to them. “WE are the change we seek!” Ha ha… ok, Barack said that, but it still applies in this case, eh? [:)]
I still don’t see what activities that organized counter-economists performed that contributed to the collapse of the Mugabe regime. I thought counter-economics was about forcing the issue, as opposed to just waiting for the enemy to screw it up entirely. You might be waiting a long time on this side of the Atlantic, as our economists are a bit more sophisticated and our currency is a lot stronger (strategically, e.g. being the world’s reserve currency).
A dangerous thing for a libertarian to look for. Leaders associated with politics are rulers, which are repugnant to libertarianism. We need intellectual leaders and entrepreneurs, not political power-shares.
If they existed, they probably don’t want to be seen. If they did not exist, if the movement was without direction, it only shows how an organized counter-economy can potentially be vastly more effective than you seem to think.
Every time you profit from a peaceful transaction that is prohibited by the state, you are “forcing the issue” a little bit. Agorism is about carefully growing that little bit into a counter-economic force.
You haven’t taken a good look at the dollar’s vital stats recently, have you? I wouldn’t be surprised to see hyperinflation in the next two decades even without a counter-economic movement “forcing the issue”.
Sure, I’m on it. The thing is, even if the dollar does collapse, it’s going to be built right back up again by statist leaders. Why? Because there are no Austrian leaders poised to capitalize on the dollars collapse. The new statists will just blame the old statists and promise that their new and improved program will do better. And the people will have to choose between two versions of the same because there will be no Austrian in the race.