So, like always, as my introduction to this post, I just want to say that these views are quite tentative, ambiguous, and poorly expressed. So, again, I hope that you will bear with me or something.
The position concerning what ‘political organization’ is best, of the proponents of “anarcho-capitalism”, is that we should dismantle, get rid of, any sort of ‘political organization’, we should reduce the ‘states’, that is, the compulsory, territorial monopolies of provision of law and order, into what many of the people here call “private defense agencies”, that is, into businesses each providing law, order, or both, ‘freely competing’ with each other, and seeking the voluntary contributions of people. Now I am sure that most of us are familiar with the fact that Mises did not conceive of such an arrangement. Despite what people like Poptech want you to believe, he never even engaged any form of it at all; in fact, when he talked of “anarchy”, he was using that word to refer to the absence of any sort of police force, which is clearly not what “anarcho-capitalism” is about:
He is saying, in that quotation, that “[t]he anarchists contend that[…] a[…] society could do without[…] a police force”. Now, as I already said, that is clearly not what the “anarcho-capitalists” believe; all of them express that, in a ‘free society’, police forces would exist; the only difference would be that they would be provided by the ‘market’, instead of by a monopoly. If someone disagrees that Mises ever engaged “anarcho-captalism”, I want to see the proof; but, for now, I have yet to see any. He came very close to thorough ‘voluntism’; but he never seemed to give it any thought that these voluntary governments could ever be non-territorial; he always assumed that, whether they were voluntary or not, they would, because of “technical problems” never elaborated on by him, have to be territorial.
The “anarcho-capitalists” contend that Mises hypostatized states, that he removed the analysis of states out of the rest of his work, that, although he knew of the fact that monopolies do not have the incentive to serve consumers, he did not subject his view of states to that. Why are monopolies of provision of food bad from the point of view of consumers but those of provision of law and order not? Why should the market produce every good besides law and order? What is so special about law and order? The following quotation outlines the most general, most basic form of this argument:
Now:
Now, because “the best theories […] cannot work if not accepted by a majority of the people”, his later assertion that “[e]conomics must not[…] be left to esoteric circles” makes sense. He believed that he and other people had to convince the masses to accept the philosophy and economics of “liberalism” to see that “liberalism” triumph. But, as Mises has written, the masses are just a bunch of “simple routinists” and “dullards”. So what sort of chance did he really expect us to have? How are we supposed to convince masses of dullards to embrace our theories, many of which are not very emotionally comfortable to hold and many of which go straight against our intuitions? The masses are not interested in learning this stuff.
But I am not so convinced that the explicit theories of the masses really matter. I am not so convinced that it really matters whether or not the hordes of “simple routinists” and “dullards” embrace “liberalism”, “libertarianism”, “anarcho-capitalism”, or whatever you want to call it. But, far from thinking that his insistence of this point was a blunder, I think that it was a systematic error caused by the fact that he failed to conceive of law and order provided by a market. He is saying that “[i]n the market economy the realization of technological innovations does not require anything more than the cognizance of their reasonableness by one or a few enlightened spirits” but then that “it is different in the field of social organization and economic policies”. Now, in reading that, what people like us should immediately realize is that we do in fact conceive of law and order provided by the market; so why should his assertion that “[i]n the market economy the realization of technological innovations does not require anything more than the cognizance of their reasonableness by one or a few enlightened spirits” not apply also to the movement toward the dismantling of statism? And why should it not apply to the choice of ‘policies’ once we do reach these ‘stateless societies’? If we assume that what will bring the dismantling of statism will be a market process, why should we care about convincing the masses?
I am not sure where I read this; but I remember reading an article where the person was talking about how the progression toward the dismantling of statism will probably happen through the market, not through convincing the masses. The way that he thought that it would happen is that companies would actually make it more difficult to subjugate us. The most extreme example of this is a company saying “ok, the state takes 20% of your income per year; if you sign up with us, we will require only 10% per year and will defend you from the state”. After a while, when other companies competing with them keep lowering it, we will finally be left with such a powerless state that we will need something other than the state to provide protection from petty criminals; and those companies would probably morph into general defense agencies. The closer that they get to cutting off all of the funds to the state, the less the state will be able to provide any sort of protection; and the closer that they get to that, the less profits that they will be getting. So it is probable that, in destroying the state, they would morph into “private defense agencies”. Now I am not sure what the gradual steps between that will be.
Now, on that point, expressed in the words of Mises, “[h]owever dull a man may be, he knows how to tell the difference between [paying 20% of his income] and [paying 10% of his income]”. So, in conclusion, if we assume that the dismantling of statism will be a market process, we no longer have to think of trying to always convince the masses; and I think that this is a much better prospect, anyway. The masses of people are so dull and thoughtless that, if we truly had to convince them to embrace our doctrines, we would, in my opinion, be screwed.
Now this does not go against what the Mises institute is doing. What they are doing is reaching out to people who want to learn this stuff, the people who will be a part of the ‘market process’ toward the dismantling of statism. They are teaching this stuff to people who could otherwise have never been exposed to any of this. They are speaking to the masses only to find out who the thinking people are.