Anarchy is not an end in itself - the end is breaking the monopoly on law

Economics Political Theory
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I just wanted to jump into the discussion for a minute.

It may be the case where a libertarian community is the first panarchistic community; And the primarily role of the community members may be to strategically do what others don’t want us to do in a peaceful and non-coercive way.

Do libertarians want to abolish the monopoly on law or do libertarians want a world where they can do as they wish?

The primary difference between attempting to abolish the monopoly on law and doing what others don’t want us to do seems to be the means employed. Unless I am misinterpreting the intentions of this idea, abolishing the monopoly on law involves using the monopoly against itself. This implies using the same “means” that the monopoly uses to get things done.

How does abolishing the monopoly demonstrate that I may do as I wish as a libertarian? Is it the case that it will be written into law that libertarians may now do as they wish, and then we can proceed to actually do what others don’t want us to do? What stops a statist from breaking this written law and reimposing another monopoly on law in some way? (especially considering that this seems to be the dominate trend in social organization throughout history) What would we do then?

On the other hand, doing things as if there were no monopoly on law involves participating in social exchange in a peaceful and voluntary way as if we were already in a world where the monopoly on law had been abolished. So by doing things as if there were no monopoly on law we are actually doing what is intended to be done “after” the monopoly on law is abolished. At that point, the statist is in a position where he must take the initiative against us, rather than us against him.

How do the risks compare between these two courses of action?

I don’t know if I see the necessity between abolishing the monopoly on law (in the proposed context) and doing what others don’t want me to do. Is it possible to skip that part and to start actually doing as we wish? Is it time for a libertarian community to start emerging in some small way or must we keep waiting for something to happen that will “allow” us to have a libertarian community?

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We’ve been discussing the workings of a practical strategy, not a movement.

What criticism? I’ve made the same points several times, and none of them were critiques of your proposal. You seem to be reading all sorts of profound abstraction into my very mundane practical questions. And now you want to bring in praxeology to tell me that it’s my neighbor I have to fear if I break the law, more than the police?

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Wow, this thread exploded while I was away…

But the problem with normative ideologies is that they are ultimately aesthetic and no one’s aesthetic can objectively supersede anyone else’s. So, we’re stuck back at square A with libertarian prescriptions being just one entry in the battle of equal opinions. But I think libertarian theory has a stronger case than this, not built on natural law (sorry Rothbard) or normative ideologies. I’m still fleshing this idea out as we speak (I put a first draft up on the Politcal Theory forum titled, “What Law Is” and I’m working on the next revision, I might have it finished in another 6 months or so).

Well, I’m not trying to present myself as being value-free, here. I am making a value-based, normative prescription for the social order, namely, the abolition of territorial monopolies on law. That said, my prescription goes no further than this, that is to say, I am not prescribing a particular sort of legal order to replace the territorial law monopolies. That is what I meant when I said that it doesn’t matter to me how society looks, that is, what sort of legal order emerges in the absence of law monopoly, so long as the law monopolies themselves are abolished. I do not think this is inconsistent with liberty and the human condition, either. Just as it is the nature of humans that we are characterized by tremendous individual diversity (Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature), so it is the nature of human relationships (of which human community and society is a subset) that they are characterized by at least as much diversity as individual humans. That means there is no One Right Answer to the problem of law just as there is no One Ideal Human or no One Right Economic Order. Yes, I have my aesthetic and moral preferences and I will, within my community and my sphere of influence, lobby for those. But, on a larger view, a world of human freedom must necessarily be characterized by a large degree of variation in social orders.

I do believe (and I think Hoppe says this somewhere) that a sort of “global standard” of law will tend to emerge in a natural order society and, I believe, that such a global standard would be almost completely rational. It is to this social order which I think the rational, natural law approach of Rothbard, Hoppe and others can be applied most beneficially. But I think local communities will tend to reject deductive arguments from natural law premises - even as a guide - in forming their own customs. The process which has always obtained, haphazard and ad hoc though it is, seems to me to be the most likely way that communities will always form and evolve their customs. On the global scale, I think that adjudicators will be most interested in the “cutting edge” of legal theory and are the most likely to conscientiously adopt natural rights arguments as a basis for adjudication.

Clayton -

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By the way, I have been speaking 100% about the de facto law enforcement situation, using common parlance for brevity only, completely devoid of any such connotations. Really, I’m not big on connotation, and apparently you are, which must be why there’s such a massive disconnect between what I’m writing and what you’re seeing.

I don’t soft close, I don’t beat around the bush, and I don’t hesitate to point out flaws. If I thought your proposal was flawed or too risky, I would’ve said so. It may be flawed, but I have no way of knowing until I understand it better. I have no expectations or estimations either way. I have no “growing feelings of doubt” about your proposal as I continue to post. What I have are growing feelings that I don’t understand your proposal. And no, “I don’t understand your proposal” is not a code-phrase for “Your proposal is wrong” - like I said, I don’t do that.

Matter of fact, I think your proposal sounds fairly promising, which makes it all the more frustrating that I can’t get you spell out how you think it might work - even just as a “proof of concept.” Remember that this whole conversation started with me asking how you plan to convince people to do it.

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Well, I think it’s more than just pushing the reset button, for sure - education is part of it but even that is pretty limited since most people will never specialize in law, economics, political theory or any social science. However, there are very, very basic principles of human thought and social organization which are “hardwired” into humans - things like the principle of universalizability or the rule of first use, etc. - which governments actively and continually subvert. In fact, their very existence depends on the continued success of this subversion. I believe it is governments that are fighting gravity, not the other way around*. But I think the first order of business is debunking the territorial monopoly of law at the intellectual/academic level (LvMI is contributing to this battle) and exposing to the popular consciousness the ways in which the territorial monopoly violates those basic "hardwired’ ethical principles, like universalizability, property, etc. The philosophers might view the choices between various theories of property as arbitrary reflections of aesthetics, but our biology says otherwise. Property is not arbitrary and what property rules operate in the real world are not a matter of choice. Even the most determined governments (e.g. Soviet Union) have been unable to revoke the rules of property and the laws of economics. Men can be influenced but humanity cannot be remade, even by ubiquitous threat of force and the most thorough brainwashing program.

Clayton -

*On first exposure to libertarian theory, it seemed to me that governments were the default and fighting them was like fighting gravity, the more I study, the less I believe this is the case, governments are at all times in a very precarious position and history actually bears this out when you realize that revolutions usually constitute the death of one government (even if followed by the birth of another.

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“The idea of simply pressing the state collapse button and then being a shrugger about consequences from that point onwards is self-defeating.”

I think this is an implicit rejection that human society is naturally self-organizing, that is, that there are some cultures and societies which are capable of self-organization and others which are not. Of course, the cultural preconditions to statist society can, themselves, be seen as a regression in the condition of self-organization of society. That is, the emergence and spread of the cultural myths (such as the Hobbesian myth) which permitted states to form and consolidate their power in the first place show that human self-organization is a process which may be arbitrarily far from equilibrium at any time, not a state of affairs.

Clayton -

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Also note that statism has emerged most strongly in areas of the world with both strong individual social norms combined with social homogeneity. I’m not saying there is a causation here, only correlation (I think the Amish disprove causation), but I don’t think that human self-organization depends in any important way on a large number of people having (correct) strong normative opinions about society. Of course, it is important what views the opinion-molding class holds but that is a battle that can only be fought with the pen.

Clayton -

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Doing what we wish in the open is called “civil disobedience” or “being a scofflaw”; to do it secretly is called “agorism.” These things are already being done by others.

The million-dollar question is, how do these actions advance libertarianism? Or is there some specific way these actions can be taken or embellished/organized/harnessed so as to be more effective than the current practice of these things? What is the specific mechanism posited? These are not rhetorical questions; I’m actually saying that these are the questions to be answered before each person can choose the best course of action, or the proposal most likely to advance liberty.

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That statement functions as a nice summation of the thread, and maybe also of the role of the LvMI.

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OK AJ I hear you.

Here are some thoughts:

“By the way, I have been speaking 100% about the de facto law enforcement situation, using common parlance for brevity only, completely devoid of any such connotations. Really, I’m not big on connotation, and apparently you are, which must be why there’s such a massive disconnect between what I’m writing and what you’re seeing.”

I would say implication as opposed to connotation.

“…every single word I write is chosen to try and maximize one thing and one thing only: clarity;”

A lot of what I wrote in the last few posts was devoted to clarifying the idea that when we refer to an idea such as “A breaking the law,” that this can only have social meaning if “law” somehow refers to another person. For example, consider “breaking the pencil”. Now the “social” meaning is gone. Why? because we took out reference to another person. Reference to another person is part of the concept of “law” in common parlance. If the common parlance conception of law is just words on paper, then the idea of “breaking the law” becomes a version of “breaking the pencil.” I was trying to clarify that.

Here is the relevant passage in Hayek’s “The Facts of the Social Sciences”

“From the fact that whenever we interpret human action as in any sense purposive or meaningful, whether we do so in ordinary life or for the purpose of the social sciences, we have to define both the objects of human activity and the different kinds of actions themselves, not in physical terms but in terms of the opinions or intentions of the acting persons, there follow some very important consequences; namely, nothing less than that we can, from the concepts of the objects, analytically conclude something about what the actions will be. If we define an object in terms of a person’s attitude toward it, it follows, of course, that the definition of the object implies a statement about the attitude of the person toward the thing. When we say that a person possesses food or money, or that he utters a word, we imply that he knows that the first can be eaten, that the second can be used to buy something with, and that the third can be understood–and perhaps many other things.”

The idea here is that, for example, if we say “I see a statue,” what we imply is that we see something not possessing a consciousness, whereas if we say “I see a person,” we imply that we see something that does possess a consciousness.

The point I was trying to make in the previous posts was that when we say “I’m breaking the law,” the social meaning of this is that I’m doing something that another will does not want me to do. That is the social meaning of “I’m breaking the law.” Or at least, that is my argument… I’m trying to clarify.

“I don’t soft close, I don’t beat around the bush, and I don’t hesitate to point out flaws. If I thought your proposal was flawed or too risky, I would’ve said so. It may be flawed, but I have no way of knowing until I understand it better. I have no expectations or estimations either way. I have no “growing feelings of doubt” about your proposal as I continue to post. What I have are growing feelings that I don’t understand your proposal. And no, “I don’t understand your proposal” is not a code-phrase for “Your proposal is wrong” - like I said, I don’t do that”

I’m not perfect. Maybe I misunderstood you. Maybe I’m so focused on my points I misinterpreted some of your questions as disagreements.

“Matter of fact, I think your proposal sounds fairly promising, which makes it all the more frustrating that I can’t get you spell out how you think it might work - even just as a “proof of concept.” Remember that this whole conversation started with me asking how you plan to convince people to do it.”

Thank you AJ

Well, since I’m not really trying to advocate any particular plan, but more trying to advocate an idea about how libertarianism could come about consistent with libertarian principles, then here is another idea along the same lines. Again, it might be faulty in different respects. But it’s just the principles concerned that I’m trying to illustrate.

Let’s say a group of libertarians infringe each others copyrights, and then begin filing copyright infringement law suits against one another. Tens of thousands of them. Person A copyrights something, and B violates the copyright. Person B copyrights something, and C violates it, etc… And this is done on a massive scale, and each infraction is then reported to the authorities.

Eventually, the state passes a law to stop this practice. Then, the same tens of thousands of libertarians now begin reporting each other under this new law, perhaps, in addition to continuing to file the original copyright lawsuits.

In other words, the idea is a massive “utilization” of the legal system we are compulsorily subjected to.

The state realizes that a definable group of people is doing this, i.e., libertarians.

If they pass a law that discriminates against libertarians as a group, then they have formally recognized libertarians as a distinct political group.

If they pass no law discriminating against libertarians, then as compulsory citizens of the same status as all other citizens, libertarians may utilize the legal system as they are entitled to under the law.

So the idea is to utilize the legal system to such an extent that the state no longer wants a certain group of people to be part of the state.

This is peaceful action. It is simply utilizing the legal services that are available to us (in fact, forced upon us). It does not entail altering or abolishing the legal system of any group. It entails utilizing the system coercively imposed upon us, as we are entitled to do.

This does not involve any hostile or aggressive actions towards nonlibertarians. Nor does it entail an attempt to change the mind or ideology of nonlibertarians.

It basically satisfies all the same points that the e-mail invoice idea did. The difference is that instead of libertarians trying to form a new community, in this example, they try to get expelled from the community they are currently in.

As with the last example, the idea is not a wholesale expulsion, but rather focused one. The idea is to demonstrate the principle of political pluralism with respect to a limited number of issues or laws, starting with ones that are purposely chosen to be peaceful and non-disruptive to nonlibertarians.

The goal is to establish the principle of legal coexistence; the principle of coexisting societies on a nonterritorial basis.

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If you assume that, then I would contend that civil disobedience violates the NAP as much as the statism. You are forcibly violating the state’s claim of property over your person. Now, whether or not the state has the right to assert that claim is irrelevant if we are assuming that both positions are equal.

Given this, I can’t think of any way to directly resist the state without violating NAP, whether you are attempting (futilely, IMO) to coerce the state, or taking advantage of the state’s own coercive means (voting).

So, if every position (other than nothing) we can take includes some sort of coercive means (if we are still assuming statism and libertarianism are morally equivalent), we have to think who can better coerce the other. As far as I can tell, the state has the bigger stick.

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Second

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I batted that idea around on some other thread, but I was advocating massive unemployment compensation or welfare applications. I like the frivolous lawsuit idea though. The only problem is, this is how the state “expels you from the community”:

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This idea is quite interesting, it seems clearer how it could play out. I wonder if this has been tried.

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When people talk about “unfettered markets,” I like to use this picture to remind them what fettered markets really are:

http://www.diaspora.uiuc.edu/news1206/HandlerFig6.jpg
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Jackson:

In my examples, I’m assuming a political atmosphere of statism.

This means that people do not want a libertarian society to emerge, and are willing to resort to coercive means to prevent it.

I make this assumption as my beginning assumption. Then I try to see if there is some way that a libertarian society could conceivably be sought, that did not entail libertarians resorting to the same means to attain it.

But I don’t mean to imply that they can avoid all social friction completely. Doing something someone else doesn’t want you to do, generally makes that other person mad, and then the other person may consider some sort of hostile action. This is human nature.

If people are willing to allow libertarians to form their own social relationships without threatening them with force, then two things happen:

  1. There is no use for my examples and suggestions as I’ve outlined them.

  2. Such people are no longer statists, since they are “allowing” coexisting communities.

My suggestions for various ways that libertarianism may move forward beyond scholarship, are based on an assumption of statism, meaning, I’m assuming that these attempts to construct a libertarian society would be done in an atmosphere where other people do not want libertarian society to come about.

If my assumptions aren’t met----if people are willing to “allow” libertarian society to emerge—then, as I mentioned, there is no need for ideas such as these, and also, such people would not be statists…

If libertarians can convince nonlibertarians to become libertarians, then there is no problem. Then there is no use for the kinds of suggestions I’m making. I’m only suggesting things that would apply supposing that nonlibertarians can’t be convinced to become libertarians…

Your plan is that libertarians should vote themselves into liberty.

Here’s why I believe that in principle, this will never work.

Voting will entail the following scenario.

Person A will cast his vote, in which he expresses how he would like to utilize the social means of coercion.

A’s vote will express A’s desire about what the legal relationship between B and C must be, in order for them to avoid being on the receiving end of the coercion.

A’s vote will always be an expression of his desire to use coercion to arrange the legal relationship between B and C.

That obviously means A wants to decide the legal relationship between B and C instead of B and C deciding the relationship between themselves.

That is exactly the situation we have now, and it’s called statism.

For the purposes of debating, one could claim that libertarians billing each other online for a penny an hour (my first example), or, a legal “utilization” campaign (my second example) constitute coercion towards nonlibertarians.

For the purposes of debating, one can claim anything.

I’m more concerned whether myself and other like-minded people would consider it coercion. I don’t think we would.

If you did, that might simply mean you won’t be joining or participating. But I’ve already stated and implied that all of my suggestions are for people who would volunteer.

No person who does not want to participate must participate.

I think you are continuing to provide a flawed analysis of the current situation.

You are continually using the same analytical form. Here it is again:

“You are forcibly violating the state’s claim of property over your person.”

So here, again, you are identifying only one actor with the word “you” and “your.” You identify only one actor who will act.

Your very premise is totally unrealistic and inaccurate.

This actor will take an action that will, apparently, displease (anger, upset, make mad, etc…) someone else.

But you have not explicitly referred to another person in your phrasing.

Instead, when you come to identify what you only imply is a person (since A can only do something socially to another person), you habitually call that person the “state.”

You are equivocating, because the “state” cannot be displeased, angry, upset, or mad. Only a person can. You imply that A will do something that will displease B, but you refuse to refer to B as a person.

Your analysis is flawed.

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Recently, someone posted a link to a good article where someone proposed that the way to attain a libertarian community was to make it too expensive for libertarians to be governed.

I think his idea was more along the lines of opening businesses that have the effect of helping people protect their assets from expropriation.

The idea above might have the advantage that the expense of operating the “businesses” (the agencies involved) are paid by the same people who are imposing these “businesses” on unwilling “customers.”

Thus, the idea that the “customers” begin utilizing these services—as they are entitled to, as involuntary “customers”—in ways that are beneficial to them, and that help them to attain their goals.

Then, libertarians aren’t trying to necessarily abolish or alter what they are involuntarily subjected to, meaning, they are not telling other people to abolish or alter those services----any more so than a person who shops at store A versus store B tries to alter or abolish store A or store B.

Someone says to me: “You must utilize this service; I will not allow you to establish another.”

Then I say to him: “OK, until you allow me to establish another, I’m going to utilize this service.”

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I guess each of us would have to determine which means would be the most advantageous toward achieving our ends. I would say that some sort of civil disobedience that exposes the absurdity of someone not wanting me to do something that is completely peaceful and unimposing could possibly advance libertarianism. That is, if this actually convinces those who don’t want us to take these actions to accept the absurdity of it.

But what Adam is proposing here is very interesting and I think different from civil disobedience. It appears that Adam may be suggesting another possible route in his last example which one might call concerted civil obedience of certain “allowed” actions. I guess the idea here is that by acting in a way that is “allowed” by others but is also extremely inefficient and costly to them that they would start “allowing” us to do something else to avoid those costs. At that point we have attained change through peaceful and non-coercive means.

These two methods are fundamentally consistent with libertarianism in the sense that they are courses of action that don’t involve using the same means to achieve change that the statists are using.

To answer your question, I think that we have to compare the various means that could be utilized to advance libertarianism making sure that the mechanism we use is consistent with the fundamental principles of libertarianism in addition to being a practical way to advance libertarianism. As for specifics, I think that as long we are both consistent and aware of the risks involved that we could experiment with all of them since there is really no way to know what will work. All that we have in our power are the fundamental principles of libertarianism and our ability to think of new creative ways to bring about the change we want.

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I think this is too simplistic of an analysis of voting. What if you are voting in an attempt to dissolve the social means of coercion?

I don’t understand how this is any different than denying one use of your corporeal body by forcibly disobeying their desires (civil disobedience). You stated elsewhere on this post that you and most on the forum would disagree that would be considered coercion, but that seems merely a statement of the aesthetic preference of some group. If you are willing to accept that as valid, I don’t understand why you would be concerned with abolishing the state, as it seems rather self evident that the aesthetic preference of a vast majority of humans is statism.

The statist. The one who’s livelihood depends on enforcing the “word on paper” known as laws.

Simply replace “the state” with “a statist” or “a cop” or “national guardsman” in any of my statements.

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Can’t agree, Clayton. I agree there is certainly a wide range of what a stateless society could look like, but I think it direly important that we begin building out philosophy into a working and actual system in writing. Such must occur before a society can come about in fact, and if a society goes stateless before we have at least one proposed workable system then that society will be under the gun trying to do intellectual work on the spot and the libertarians that society looks to for guidance will seem to be fools without any answers, thus giving ammunition to the statists and potentially leading back to a statist society, thus making the world’s situation worse than before.

True, but implementation likely has many blind alleys and sharp edges that need to be considered. It’s like you’re saying now that we know the principle of the steam engine let’s not actually build one. Problem is, the first steam actual engines blew up. It takes time to mature a technology. And libertarianism is a political technology.

I don’t think this is likely to ever work or ever result in broad change because we’re doing it part time and they’re doing it full time and by the millions, in the way of every greater and lesser intellectual running public schools and the organs of media generally. They are literally opinion crafters.

I was watching an episode of Adventure Time last night, and there’s a section where the Princess literally invades a house and starts shoveling treasure into a bag like a thief. And the two homeowners come home and are surprised to see her and ask what she’s doing. She says, “Collecting taxes” and the two say “Okay” and go about their business.

That’s four and five year olds already indoctrinated into the system of coercive taxation as if it were perfectly moral and natural. We’re completely outgunned in the intellectual arena and always will be. So again, good luck with that tactic.

No, I will give you a tactic I think will work far better.

We know that all states depend upon the sanction of their victims to continue operating, we call this their legitimacy. Governments use intellectuals to create legitimacy and in exchange give the intellectuals job security and power.

In any war of words then, the government will win, and a war of words is all we’ve been offering until now.

Because we accept the NAP and refuse to even consider violent revolution as a means to change or power, libertarians have tended to view education as the only means to fight statism.

But there is another way. The argument of action. If our argument is put in the form of an actual working libertarian free society, then people will be able to see results with their own eyes, to see the actuality of things like how a society would work without gov courts and police, to see that this system actually works, which they don’t currently. I’m greeted by incredulous near hysteria currently when explaining libertarian concepts to ordinary people.

Probably because the indoctrination process begins at such a young age.

Show the world that societal problems can be fixed without resort to a coercive institution and the result will be their legitimacy will melt before their eyes, and nothing they say will be able to change that, because people will believe their eyes whereas they can very easily rationalize away -any- logical argument you give them.

We substantially agree, but I want to do it by comparison, something that cannot be easily ignored, and you want to do it by education, something which can be.

I disagree that it’s easy to change men’s minds about the state; it takes a long chain of conceptual integration and consideration to come to the libertarian conclusion, even for people naturally inclined to philsophical thought.

But when I say to my non-political neighbor, hey, let’s start a place with no taxes. He gets it right away.