Anarchy.
You didn’t see benefits, I pointed them out.
What needs to happen is instead of property rights being violated, an increase in justice is what is lacking and the gov’t is the number one violator. The problem is not many people want to actually use power to uphold property rights. There is nothing wrong, even a little bit of effort, in stopping ( or which semantically means sustaining or to keep, as in, to keep it broken) a criminal, even if that means locking the door or having a gun for protection. That’s how I can keep it from being broken in my neck of the woods. If a justice enterprise could open to compete without the monopoly gov’t enforcing it’s arbitrariness it could happen, but it is a matter of keeping it broken or sustainment or else in the non-utopia world criminals being the special pleaders they are would simply rise up upon others. And if everybody waits and sees without actually stopping them in other words keeping or sustaining the effort to break their effort to utilize a monopoly hold again it starts all over again.
If the idea of upholding property rights (which includes in the natural law tradition property in person) was actually carried out by more people the gov’t would be seen as any other criminal that has victims. At this moment it simply gets a free pass even though some people do exactly what the gov’t does on a daily and nightly basis, ie. extort, steal, and murder, etc…, and such people get repercussions, whereas, the special pleaders in gov’t roam free.
the see what happens approach seems void of human action when there is human action.
The relevant point is not that Hobbes was correct but that his arguments are left unharmed by the usual libertarian criticisms, as is the case with other thinkers (I believe Callahan suggested Aquinas, Scineram has suggested numerous others above). The point isn’t that Hobbes and Aquinas are correct, or that libertarian philosophy is lacking, rather, what I’m arguing is that a lot of the arguments advanced on these boards and by the likes of Rothbard and Hoppe have absolutely no force against some of the other arguments against libertarianism. Low quality arguments advanced by laymen is nothing specific to libertarianism, but the tendency to confuse rhetoric with serious argumentation might explain why people who think seriously about these issues don’t find your arguments all that convincing.
Now, as for your other argument, society is complex. And as much as it pains us to admit it, we know very little about how a given constitution will play out in the long run, our know of “constitutional craftsmanship” is limited to say the least. Ideally, we’d like to create some sort of constitution that will achieve a perfect balance of powers and achieve a deadlock between the different branches and levels of government in their bid for power. What we do know, however, is that in any system there will always be an incentive for actors to break the rules of the game. Just as extreme libertarianism requires a very strong belief if property rights, so does democracy require some sort of belief in the rule of law and democratic politics. Libertarians tend to hold a curious double standard when it comes to this issue.
One last point about the calculation argument, yes, it’s still valid. But it’s just one consideration amongst many as opposed to some knock down argument. For most goods consideration of knowledge and incentives says that its a good idea to leave their provision to the market. But take the example of asteroid destruction that I raised in another topic, the incentives structure is such that in this case the market would most likely under provide the good in question. But what is more relevant is the fact that in this case the knowledge argument is irrelevant, even a private firm would find it very difficult to gather the relevant knowledge due to the one off nature of the good and the uncertainty that surrounds it.
How should a global state be constituted then?
So do you reject libertarian rights theory? What is the root of our disagreement?
But doesn’t this reduction also reduce the anti-monopolist position into nothingness? If the position is just “see what happens,” then anything goes: you could break the monopoly on law and watch a monopoly on law arise again, and that would be “anti-monopolist.”
But the principle of charity requires addressing the opponent’s strongest arguments.
BTW, do you have any comments on my post here?
Serious libertarian scholars, like Jan Narveson, have tackled the welfare arguments of Aquinas and Hobbes, from a different perspective. Your point just looks like “individuals on this board aren’t using enough sources.” I disagree on knowing very little on how a constitution will play out in the long, de Jasay has written extensively on the issue. And your last point about the asteroid incentive structure looks like nothing more than a wild guess.
Sage said:
I think it reduces hyper-pluralism and relativistic emergentism to absurdity, in that it basically just says “let’s push the restart button and whatever emerges emerges” (including states). It’s basically far too reductionistic as a political philosophy, and its relativistic attitude about political organization undermines itself from the get go. When you break it down, thin libertarian hyper-pluralism is basically political relativism with a preference for non-violence that it can’t actualize without breaking its own rules - libertarianism itself must go out the window if one is to maintain total relativism about legal systems. Since any notion of cultural preconditions for freedom has been scrapped, it is forced into an attitude of tolerance towards any non-libertarian social order that “emerges”, which logically includes any form of state.
This is panarchism. It reduces to a more decentralized and diversified model of what we have now, with a landscape of localized states that one can superficially “choose” between.
I just caught a TV documentary about a U.S. prison and it occurred to me how the almost inevitable formation/rise of gangs and cliques there is possibly analogous to the formation/rise of states. Countless of “experiments” like these where you lock hundreds of individuals in a tight (scarce) space with scarce resources seem to converge to points of “stability” in which groups/collectives coerce (limit the freedom of) the individual. Hopefully I never have to test this personally, but if I was to be thrown in such an environment I’d be strongly incentivized to join a gang (and relinquish my individuality) in order to survive. For some reason, prisons don’t seem to remain a horizontal set of individuals for too long before they converge into a set of gang hierarchies. I thought this could give a glimpse into “what happens”.
Z.
Yeah, I can’t make any sense out of panarchism. For example, John Zube writes:
Anarchists want the State ABOLISHED, either by revolutions or by reforms or non-violent actions. Panarchists want to abolish only 2 of its most important and coercive features: Territorialism and compulsory membership. They would leave the rest up to individual choice.
Okay, but territorialism and compulsory membership just are the defining features of the state. If you abolish those, then you’ve thereby abolished the state, and are actually an anarchist.
I have always understood panarchy to mean a situation in which there are so many states, and by consequence they are so small, as to be practically no states at all, but only historical remnants. It also could be understood as the advocacy of unlimited secession rights for small units (short of individuals) of, say, 10’000 people. Basically the Mises view.
I think things get more ambiguous with the notion that “everyone has a right to choose what form of government, and what particular government, to live under”. At face value, this may seem like a certain phrasing of the principle of consent. But when one takes into account the nature of how governments actually work, which essentially precludes the possibility of everyone living under it to explicitly consent to it, and when one considers the implications of absorbing all forms of government into libertarianism, panarchy ends up looking like a confused concept. It’s as if the panarchist wants the spirit of anarchism while simultaneously wanting to preserve the state in any of its forms.
The idea, for example, of a purely “voluntary monarchy”, just seems conceptually incoherent. Perhaps it is concievable that a particular individual gladly wants to be subject to it, but as a system that inherently is territorial in nature it would seem to inevitably effect people who just happen to live or be born in the area and don’t explicitly consent to it. Once one takes into account how the social dynamics of political systems actually work, as well as the problems of intergenerationality and the disagreements that exist within any society, the whole thing seems like a mish-mash that amounts to little more than relativistic tolerance towards the existence of multiple states or forms of states.
The practical reality that this picture paints to me seems to be along the lines of an even greater multitude of states over smaller geographical regions, accompanied by an even greater diversity in the form that states take. But is that freedom, or just a localized re-structuring of non-freedom?
It would certainly be good enough for me.
Great post, dude. I never thought of the prison analogy to explain why I though the rise of states (at least to the size of a “tribe”) was inevitable. Thanks, Z.
I could understand Panarchism, outside the context of the real world, but “unlimited secession” seems inherently limited by geographic scarcity.
Real world?
You’ve abandoned your anarchy?
That would be because they are filled with gangsters.
Is there taxation and monopoly on justice?
You caught me, slip into common parlance once, they are all over it. Change it to “as a hypothetical exercise”.
No.
I think what he means is that the land property of a given government within panarchy inherently precludes aterritorial secession - leading us back to “love it or leave it”. If individual secession doesn’t require moving, and yet a micro-government in panarchy has a land claim, there is a dillema between the micro-government’s land claim and individual secession in that its claim to authority inherently extends over onto the individual existing on the territory. Hence, it really isn’t aterritorial in practise. If, short of either being a primitivist or starting from scratch in a barren area, one cannot avoid being on a claimed domain due to geographical scarcity, then it is practically impossible not to be subjected to one government or another.
What is this “common parlance?” [Don’t answer]
Then what is “anarchy” but “unlimited secession?”
That ignores the possibility of competing “governments” within any given territory, where one doesn’t necessarily have to choose between governments at all.