First of all, I’d just love to say I love reading your posts. You almost always do a stellar job explaining your positions and reasoning. Just a thank you for your contributions!
Now, on to your post. I mostly see what you’re saying, and mostly agree as well. My biggest concerns come in the beginning. Yes, man acts. It is a fact. But I’m confused as to why action must be a choice. For an extreme hypothetical, suppose you are placed in a concrete box that is literally big enough to hold your standing body. There is nothing you can do besides stand there. Do we mean that you act (or choose) by standing there, even when there is no possible alternative? To make the connection between this extreme hypothetical and the real world, consider the direction the authoritarian state must move in, regardless of the rate at which it moves. The authoritarian state must continually restrict choices, and in theory, approaches a limit, so to speak, of zero choices for its subjects. That is, it needs it’s subjects to eventually fall in line with its planning, and the only way it can accomplish this is by reducing the number of alternatives available.
Of course, as far as I know at least, no state have ever achieved this, the true molding of man into the perfect citizen with no radicals. What I theorize happens is that as the number of choices diminishes (choices that many would make if made possible or available), a sort of “pressure” builds up. This “pressure” can be alleviated in several ways: foreign war, rallying of nationalistic feelings, revolution, among others. Of course, these alleviations of this “pressure” are what tend to lead to the demise of the state itself. That is, when the state increases its internal “pressure” by restricting peaceful, voluntary interactions, it increases the likelihood of the state’s destruction during a necessary release of “pressure.” Since the state (and of course, I say state as meaning the authoritarian state) must restrict choices, it dooms itself. The underlying cause of this doom is, I am hypothesizing, the fact that man is inclined to be free and seek peaceful, voluntary interactions.
I totally agree that more work needs to be done on political praxeology and the theory of conflict and power, and many Austrian-minded folks could be well-suited for such an endeavor.
The difference between being confined to a box where you cannot move and the state’s threats is that you can still choose in the latter case. You have no choice but to stand in this box you have constructed, but you always have a choice to obey or not obey the commands of the state.
I do understand this. I simply am hypothesizing that the eventual goal of the state is to essentially put all of it’s subjects into a theoretical “box” where there are no alternatives. That’s what I mean when I say the state attempts to move to a limit of zero choices. That is, a society where there is only one type of healthcare available, one type of employer, etc. these being through the state. Of course, the only way this could be achieved would be by destroying ideas and knowledge of alternatives. And of course, I’m theorizing that destroying truth and knowledge is not really possible.
There are always alternatives, though I can certainly see why the state would want to limit the options available. Don’t forget the black market. The more products the state bans, the more products enter the black market.
Again, yes, there are alternatives and the black market, among other alternatives. However I don’t think this counters what I was saying. In fact, alternatives and black markets exist because the truth and knowledge exist. As in, the black market for cannabis exists because: there is demand for it and there are those with the knowledge and will to provide the supply. This can only be wiped out if the knowledge is destroyed, but I theorize this to be impossible. That’s what I’m saying… the state attempts to reach the limit of zero choice, but mathematically, the limit can never be reached. Instead, pressure builds to increase alternative and peaceful, voluntary interactions.
I’ve always understood from Mises, that at a minimum doing a specific thing, or not doing it qualifies as choice. Because in the action you are attempting to substitute one future for another future.
I love these kind of thought experiments, because they are extremely interesting. I agree, that moving the physical body to the attainment of ends, becomes literally impossible. However, even in such a position, I dare say a man would be hard-pressed to not find his mind wandering to different thoughts. Not directing them is even a hard thing to do. I’ve tried, I do meditation at times, and even the effort to let go of the interaction (almost like a conversation) of the self and the stream of consciousness, is in and of itself an effort to an end.
But yes, this is an extreme example of the types of ‘action bottlenecks’ that man seeks to avoid. I think we all know that claustrophobic feeling of getting boxed into binary no-win situations. I think there’s may be some strong hardwiring to provide strong emotional stimulus to avoid such situations. Be that as it may, it’s interesting.
I like this analogy, as I think it’s an apt one. There’s one other factor I’d bring in, it’s not just restricting of one choice, that’s not the motive of the political action, it’s the protection of someone else from risk. That’s the false god that needs to be slain. My analogy is this, as a parent, my job is to raise a my child to the point where he can go out and make adult choices whose full weight he can bear the consequences of, both good an bad. As a parent, I will use false consequences, in order to reinforce certain behaviors before the child is capable of the full adult rational and critical thinking necessary to make these decisions without running into individually existential risks. Like running across the street, lying to friends, teasing, the social benefits of sharing and social interaction, etc. However, those guiderails have to slowly slip away, and his critical thinking has to develop and mine has to fall away. He’s gotta learn the hard way.
Sometimes this parental action isn’t for the child’s interest, but for the parent’s interest. “Quiet down, I’m trying to think.” “Not now, I’m busy…” etc. At this point the parents behavior is about not simply keeping the child alive, but getting him out of your way. There may be times and reasons. My boys have to be quiet when I’m on a conference call. I need my job, and the respect and confidence of my peers is important to that end. However, capricious application of rules leads to confused, resentful and ill-equipped young adults with a hard road to walk.
When the government does the equivalent (think drug laws, or drunk driving laws) they insert capricious interference, with the natural order that reality and rational thinking men would provide. We need strong critical thinkers, savvy consumers, street-wise entreprenuers. Not gullible, weak, unimaginative, petulant, resentful, hypocritical, entitled brats. But that’s what the smothering mothering of well-intentioned busy-bodies creates when it gains legitimacy in legislation.
I almost think every home is a microcosm of the transition from authoritarian control to freedom and independence. We ought to learn from that example, and copy the familial behaviors that work to achieve that transition for it’s children in a healthy way.
Instead of coddling and controlling the citizenry, I’d rather see a state that takes a sink or swim approach. We need mentally strong and formidable free thinkers. They are huge assets to any society. And yes, I believe increasing pressure is put up with to a point, and then you see a massive scale reaction. What the tipping point is in today’s world? I don’t know. But there sure are a lot built up pressure in the system. Something’s gonna happen. We need better political theory so we can analyze political technology, both proposed and existing.
Amen, Charge! I think a lot’s been done already on the technology side already, Natural Property Rights theory, DROs, Private Property solutions to externalities (pollution, etc). But also, at a higher level with the writings of many people Nozick, Thoreau, Spooner, Rothbard, Hoppe, etc. But I think the theory of conflict is missing, and whatever categories fall out of it naturally.
The other night, I was starting to put together some propositional logic statements that describe action, and then look at diagramming different scenarios. Including conflict, choice, exchange, time preference, things like that. Neat, but not sure how useful. First I have to teach myself the different tools out there for these kind of formal logic expression.
@gotlucky : “The difference between being confined to a box where you cannot move and the state’s threats is that you can still choose in the latter case.”
I love that point, and it’s a good one. I think of the state more as a pressure cooker. They keep trying to open valves, but someone else ends up finding otherways to make the fire hotter, or to close off avenues of escape. Sadly, things can actually get a lot worse than they are in the US, historically it’s happened. However, in the end, the pressure cooker explodes, if the tension keeps building, and this is I think the point you are making. We can only conform to a point. My main concern is for the intellectual health (economic and political) of the polity. Thank god for homeschooling, let’s get them a proper theory of conflict with which to educate their children, not just a proper theory of economics.
I would agree with this, except I’d word it differently. The eventual consequence of the intervention is an emergent phenomena. The pressure of the “box” is created by the well-intentioned, and mal-intentioned, actions of millions of individual despots through all 3 branches of modern govt, and into the “busy-bodies” of the citizenry. I don’t think the intention is to actually, remove freedom. In each individual act, the teacher’s union striking for more pay. Feeding hungry children at school. Police interfering in families, arresting people for drug use, judges legislating from the bench, federal govt taking power from states to abolish slavery. In each little tiny interference and violation of the underlying assumption of self-determination (and self-responsibility) the box is unintentionally closed in, and the pressure builds.
It’s an unintended consequence, but as the “legitimacy” of such capricious and short-sighted interference becomes commonplace, the intellectual landscape is adapting and these types of behavior gain momentum. We’re at a point now, however where the backlash is building yet again. It can’t continue. I sure hope we’re smarter now. The phoenix that rises from the ashes of these mega-states (empires), will be a direct result of the intellectual landscape in place, and the distribution of real wealth and power when the conflagration consumes the existing institutions.
In some ways, I wonder if we aren’t just still going throught a 400 year cycle of european empire. It might just be taking a really long time to work through and discard mercantilism. We might still be trying to digest all that was entailed and followed from the Rights of Man, and the trail blazed by the still fledgling economic science that began to gain steam with Adam Smith’s the Wealth of Nations. We put slight variations of Aristocratic societies on top of us again. Marxism was yet another interesting experiment, but it again had no choice but to put despotic leaders on top of the mega-state.
Liberalism and Capitalism are still nascent technologies in spite of their impact on modern society. Social democracies are another experiment we’re currently destroying the world with. In the end, the healthiest political technology we’ve seen implemented is what might be termed confederations of free city-states. Meaning privately (or relatively so) owned local government, and free trade and movement treaties between these entities.
Social democracies are arising out of this naturally occuring order, and the uber-wealthy (which can’t reasonably exist under a true free market.) are still finding ways to gain, hold, and consolidate power through bad intellectualism and propoganda from threats created by them.
The most insidious intellectual falsehood currently being perpetuated, is that the government is the servant and protector of the population, and that they and they alone can fight the evil-doers, whether overseas or at home (“robber barons”). In the end it’s the same argument, and the same people pulling the strings.
We might also be wise to pay attention to other emergent behaviors that are self-organizing. We might learn important lessons from them. How does a population of ants work togehter? I’m not interested in the mindlessness of their behavior, but more interested in the ways group behaviors change based on the propogation of signals (pheromones for them). In our case, it would be interesting to watch how ideas and narratives travel through our social groups and change the underlying landscape; it changes the way we organize and interact with each other. My desire to push back toward the city state experiment, is to increase the experimentation and the competition between different types of political organization. Just like we get out of capitalist organiztion of economic life.
As I see it, I don’t think a state is needed for any of the things you supposed and said in the OP’s first paragraph, but agree with the latter that a libertarian state is needed so that statists cannot simply sprout a state in a stateless region and join with the easily convinced masses to begin aggressing via something like democracy.
If you could make a libertarian state without any of the features we hate, basically devoid of state aggression, that may be a good thing. But is a libertarian state possible, that is the real question.
I do not believe that it is in “our nature” to want a state.
I do believe it is in “our nature” to do what is best for us (meaning I do what is best for me according to my own standards of what is “best”).
The state can influence what we deem “good” for us in some ways.
For example, I know very few people who like paying taxes. I cannot actually think of one person who is totally fine with every tax he pays. Occasionally, you will find someone who doesn’t mind paying some taxes, but only if he believes paying the taxes benefits him directly (building of a highway near his home that makes getting to work faster, thus increasing his productivity, thus making him more money). This is empirical evidence against man’s supposed desire for a state.
Logically and praxeologically speaking, you could say that man likes to pay taxes because it is preferable to jail. But, in and of himself, most men prefer not to pay it. Take the highway example I gave above. I believe that if this man knew with 100% certainty that if he did not pay his taxes he would not be caught, he would not pay his taxes because if he did, he would essentially be doing so out of charity for the state. Unless he believes that being charitable to the state will bring him closest to achieving his ends, he will not give because this will be counter-productive to his ends.
The existence of the state is predicated on two things: first, taxes. Second, for taxes to be attained, the state must persuade the majority of people that the existence and collection of the tax makes each individual in the majority better off, at least until it has the power to force each individual to do whatever it wants, regardless of an individual’s approval or perceived benefit. Initially though, both of these conditions must be met. Eventually, only the first must be met.
The better question: is it in man’s “nature” to think that he is more likely to achieve his ends with the state than without it? If the answer is “yes”, then anarchy has no chance. If the answer is “no”, then once achieved, no one can hold onto power for long, as man’s nature will be more powerful than any regime can possibly control. I believe the latter is the right answer. No regime ever does maintain control, and it is usually lost when it pushes back on man too much.
As for the assertion that the state has always existed: this assertion defies all logic. The state had a beginning, as all things do. Read Hasnas’ Obviousness of Anarchy and Anarchy is inescapable. Not even the state can escape anarchy. In fact, within the state it is anarchy. Kind of a political unmoved mover argument. Go far enough up the chain of command and there is a guy on top without a leash.
Doesn’t this assume that all states must inherently levy taxes? Certainly a libertarian state would not levy taxes, as it would consider that an unjust obligation.
Okay. Why? A tax-less state is not unimaginable. Could we get some elucidation on this.
In practice it seems to be always the latter that makes taxation possible. Taxes were built on war necessity, at least in the US, then on so-called ‘class warfare’.
Well, you’ve got a real problem. Because it is in man’s nature to realize that he’s more likely to achieve his ends given cooperation, and that is the role the state ends up providing. The state is forced on people via their need for social cooperation.
I don’t think this means anarchy has no chance necessarily, if autarchy is a viable concept, that is if a libertarian state can be forged.
The real problem is the lack of available land. If we had land, libertarians long since would’ve moved away from states and begun their own thing.
Since we live in a world where all land has been claimed by states, libertarians have tended to focus on societal change.
However, there’s always seasteading, and space-colonizing. Which, long run, seem to me much more promising than societal change, even in the US.
I think we who understand anarchy would be able to live in an anarchy with relatively little need for adjustment. But the average person who is not interested in politics at all would face culture shock.
Anarchy has never caught on as a political system because to even know that it is better requires each person to be educated and go through a series of logical deductions; the cost of becoming an anarchist is non-zero, both in time, thought, and money.
This basically dooms actual anarchies to being small but highly educated societies peopled by ideological partisans. Which is fine. So why aren’t there any such small anarch communities operating successfully today? Either because of the land issue I mentioned previously, or…?
If you instituted a free society as a minimalist state, you could bring in masses of people who have no great interest in politics, and get them living in a free society with a minimum amount of political education. Because it is a free society, they’d realize over time that their political choices actually matter in such a society, at last have incentive to actually become educated, and in time you get a culture of liberty from which you might, might be able to form a mass culture of actual anarchy.
The cultural problem is one I want to address with a sort of anarchy on training wheels via autarchy, but that doesn’t mean that I’m willing to compromise the values of libertarianism. There would be no state aggression. Only one possible form of free association already solidified into a working system for the masses, from which all branching is possible.
In short, it would subvert all other states by showing people that a mass state is possible without taxes, without aggression, without state owned industries, and by that proclaim that indeed the emperor has no clothes.
This is essentially the heart of my thought on it. I would like to see the whole world reject arbitrary authority and move to anarchy, but I’m not satisfied with anything less than societal change on a wide scale. I think minarchy, if done right and in line with libertarian ideals (not what most of you would assume someone means when they say minarchy) could be a bridge to an eventual mass anarchy.
And my efforts currently are directed towards building a political theory of what such a minarchy would look like, one that could subvert the current concept of the nation state towards anarchy.
It’s not that people are naturally inclined towards a state, but that they are naturally inclined towards social cooperation. Often this means following the leader. And when the leader becomes a despot, now you have a king and onward to further statism with time.
Anarchy may be the best form of social cooperation, but we cannot deny that anarchy is indeed a form of social cooperation. It is a paradoxical one, one that says the individual is better off when allowed to make all of his own choices over his own property.
A libertarian state would not extract wealth by force. I think it’s actually an important thing to create a state that does not extract wealth, to show that it’s possible, can be done, and is viable. Such could spark mass dissatisfaction with government structures the world over, leading to rapid and dramatic change towards libertarianism, which I’m pretty sure is what the vast majority of us on this board want and would love to see happen in our lifetimes.
It could indeed, which is the founding concept of autarchy, a state predicated on voluntaryism.
This is actually where the state would enter human nature. Because it can be in the self-interest of someone to repress others for personal gain. Basically all evil involves win-lose transactions. As voluntaryists we reject all such win-lose transactions as innately immoral and seek to build a society explicitly on win-win market transactions.
Not hierarchies per se, but rather cooperation–primarily in the form of specialization of work. Hierarchies are not inherent to specialization and social cooperation, as everyone could be self-employed in different fields. Hierarchies, in the form of business organizations let’s say, are a result of cooperation in the same field, since some will be better or worse, or have more capital or less, or more or less knowledge in an area. Thus you end up with teacher and student, investor and worker, etc., cooperating towards the same end. It’s still cooperation.
Generally they don’t care and have not heard, correct. Hoppe i think it was points out that the cost of educating yourself on political issues is not non-zero, and because most people in a democracy (with one vote once a year or so) or a totalitarianism (no votes ever) know that they, as one person, have very little control or influence, they have almost no incentive to educate themselves on these issues.
The solution seems simple to me then. Create a minarch society where each person’s individual decisions have almost total control over their political situation. This is what I want to create in autarchy. This gives each person rather massive incentive to become politically informed and to research what sort of political system they’d prefer to live under, in an environment where the cost of political experimentation is near or at zero.
I think autarchy solves the incentive problem. And I’m going to test the idea by launching it in the real world, as a seasteading society.
Exactly :\ I’m not satisfied spending the next 300 years educating the masses in hope of sparking some libertarian movement. It’s just not going to happen. There’s been encouraging signs since at least the 1970’s, and it still hasn’t happened.
Actual change requires something more radical, something more visible, and something subversive in the disruptive sense of the existing state orders.
Generally they don’t care and have not heard, correct. Hoppe i think it was points out that the cost of educating yourself on political issues is not non-zero, and because most people in a democracy (with one vote once a year or so) or a totalitarianism (no votes ever) know that they, as one person, have very little control or influence, they have almost no incentive to educate themselves on these issues.
The solution seems simple to me then. Create a minarch society where each person’s individual decisions have almost total control over their political situation. This is what I want to create in autarchy. This gives each person rather massive incentive to become politically informed and to research what sort of political system they’d prefer to live under, in an environment where the cost of political experimentation is near or at zero.
I think autarchy solves the incentive problem. And I’m going to test the idea by launching it in the real world, as a seasteading society.
Exactly :\ I’m not satisfied spending the next 300 years educating the masses in hope of sparking some libertarian movement. It’s just not going to happen. There’s been encouraging signs since at least the 1970’s, and it still hasn’t happened.
Actual change requires something more radical, something more visible, and something subversive in the disruptive sense of the existing state orders.
From a libertarian point of view, given that aggression (force, as he said) is inherent to democracy, politicians are perpetrators of mass aggression against entire societies, forcing their collective decisions on untold millions and on propert they don’t own, and thereby the chief criminals in the world today.
(In any case, to be precise, violence is not morally wrong. It takes violence to perform surgery, but surgery is not aggression but voluntary. Violenece as a term is therefore morally neutral. It’s when violence is paired with aggressive coercion, contravening voluntary choice of the person it’s directed against, that it is immoral. Therefore we should prefer the term ‘aggression’ or ‘invasion’ when speaking about the thing that we object to in state and criminal action.)
Do you think this makes them more statist or less statist? It makes them more statist by default, as they typically don’t have a commitment to a moral principle like the NAP or any philosophy of property rights. They thereby more easily fall for arguments of the statists, and statist rationale, just as someone uneducated in economics can be fooled or at least confused by the false-reasoning of the broken-window fallacy (which professional politicians still tout!).
It’s the ones who end up causing harm as a result of trying to legislate goodness that end up doing the most harm. Eg: the 2008 market crash caused by gov intervention and force in the loan market and the idea that everyone should have a house regardless of ability to pay. It’s those trying to do good that I fear the most
Agreed, my proposal for autarchy includes creation of charter cities, analogous to city-states of old, as the basic social unit of society.
I have the same goal. As was said before, anarchs and statists can live side by side, it’s the statists who seek to get rid of the anarchs.
Therefore, my conception of autarchy holds as the highest political value voluntaryism. And if someone wanted to setup a charter-city as, say, a communist dictatorship, they could, but they would have to obtain and keep people in that system purely by voluntary choice.
It is designed to allow people with a certain ideology to group together easily, exclude others of unlike ideology, and allow the results to fall squarely on the heads of those whom believe in the ideas of that city, and no one else, and to make it easy to leave the sinking ship
Thus you would have regions of pure ideology, and we’ll see thereby where citizens would voluntarily choose to live. I wager it would be in the free places.
Also, redistribution would be impossible without coercion, so such a libertarian society immediately short-circuits any attempt at Bismarckian politics.
And since the political form is open-ended, people would have incentive to educate themselves politically because they can live under any extreme they want with a simple choice. No one needs to picket or try to change some political process single-handedly. Simply start a new city-state that reflects your ideals and see if anyone joins you.
And I would say this is incorrect, because my ability to act only requires my personal freedom, not yours. In fact, my ability to act and choose may be enhanced by your loss of freedom. Hence, the state, and its modus operandi of screwing some people for the benefit of others.
But that’s where the supposed benefits of anarchism, and the historical prevelance of the state, work against your claim. If anarchism would truly offer so many benefits to so many people, why have people historically chosen or at least tolerated the state in some form? We’ve had a few thousand years to figure this shit out at this point. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that there’s something inherrent in our nature that leads to this conclusion.
Yes, but the state is always necessarily a minority. If it gets too big it kills the host. So all you need is a small portion of humanity to keep it going. In fact something I’ve noticed is there’s a possible parallel between the black market for drugs and the state. The constant ratcheting up of restrictions and violence against drug dealers merely ensures that as long as the demand is there, the next dealer to satisfy it will simply be that much worse than the previous one, even if the increase in cost leads to a minor decrease in demand. Because the demand for drugs is largely inelastic and not responsive to changes in monetary cost. I would say it’s possible that something similar exists with the demand for the state, or institutionalized violence. And as a result, even if more people do find their way to freedom oriented thinking, as long as there’s a small core of violent authoritarians, they will continue to support and ratchet up the state to ever increasing levels of violence and domination. And if there’s an inherrent human tendency toward some form of centralized authority, that means the state is likely the dominant and inevitable form of human society for the foreseeable future. You don’t need a lot of statists, you just need a few who are smart enough not to become too parasitic of their host society.
And I would say your military and law enforcement examples don’t restrict that possibility, because just as spending someone else’s money on something leads to a lessening of concern as to how it’s spent, having someone else do your knee breaking also leads to lessening concern over the knee breaking itself.
I would say you are off on this, because whether or not human nature would or could support such a system has to be inherrent to its logical consistency and feasability. Otherwise you could dream up any system and as long it was logically consistent, it gets a pass. And also specifically to anarcho capitalism, in its modern form and in the form I think you address it, it is heavily dependent on a prxeological view of the world. You can’t base a socio political system on human action without also addressing human nature. A positive economic analysis need not go beyond human action, a socio political analysis does.
Not to be insulting, but have you ever been involved in politics to any degree, on the local or national level? Because I have, since birth my family was heavily political, locally and for a short time nationally. We actually go an all paid invite to Bush I’s innauguration for all the fundraising my parents did. There emphatically are such people. They are not rare, they are just mostly disassociated with normal people.
Haven’t you read Hayek and how and why the worst rise to the top in politics? Or Isabel Patterson on the humanitarian with the guillotine? Psychotics can and do rise to the top in politics, and they are enabled by people who are assuredly good but also seriously misguided as to how to do good for others.
