Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge
do me a favor?: cut and paste this everywhere. it’s a…marketing ploy. but it’s sincere.
A Philosophical Challenge
My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State argues that
(1) The political state or government rests on force and coercion.
(2) Force and coercion are always wrong if they can’t be morally justified. (That is, the use of force is wrong if it lacks a moral justification.)
(3) The arguments for the moral legitimacy of state - for example those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas - are unsound.
(4) Hence, state power has not been shown to be morally defensible.
Until you show me otherwise, I conclude that government power is in every case illegitimate.Not only are the existing arguments for the legitimacy of state power unsound; they are pitiful. They are embarrassments to the Western intellectual tradition.
So I issue a challenge: Give a decent argument for the moral legitimacy of state power, or reconstruct one of the traditional arguments in the face of the refutations in Against the State.
If you can’t, I insist that you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism.
Henceforward, if you continue to support or observe the authority of government, you are an irrational cultist.
We’re all anarchists now, baby, until further notice.
I may agree with Sartwell about legitimacy, depending on what he means by it. But I detect a missing premise or two. For example, that in the absence of a decent argument for the legitimacy of state power, you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism. Aren’t you rationally obliged to accept the social system that does best relative to the values you care about? So what if human flourishing, not legitimacy, is your greatest concern. You can still accept that all states are illegitimate. But suppose the path to the best feasible anarchy leaves people worse off in terms of flourishing than in the best illegitimate states. It seems, in that case, you would be rationally obliged to support states that do better for people than anarchy, despite their illegitimacy. In which case, it would be irrational cultlike behavior to endorse anarchy just because it is not illegitimate.
Now, some people would say that doing better for people than the relevant non-state alternatives is all it means to say government is legitimate or coercion is justified in the relevant sense, but I don’t think so. It seems perfectly coherent to me to say both that an instance or pattern of coercion is morally unjustified and that it leaves its victims better off than they would be in the nearest anarchist possible worlds. In that case, you just have to choose between flourishing and legitimacy.
I think moral and political philosophers have a bad tendency to make all normative vocabulary line up. So you can retrofit all moral language so that “justified” just means “best for flourishing.” But I think that we in fact have multiple conventional moral vocabularies that are orthogonal to one another, which relate messily, and sometime incoherently. In the absence of a revisionist account of moral terms that gets them all to march in a single direction, you just have to accept that sometimes its best (according to one conventional moral conception) to do the wrong thing (according to another conventional moral conception) and there is nothing internal to reason or morality, as such, to tell you which conception generally carries overriding force.
Anyway… The point is: Showing that the state is not legitimate does not deliver anarchy because “If the state is not legitimate, then it is not morally defensible” is a false premise. The existence of a moral justification, in terms of flourishing, say, doesn’t entail final moral justification, since there is no fact of the matter about the final authoritative moral vocabulary. And the language of “legitimacy” may have its own internal logic that is at some level indifferent to flourishing. So showing that the state is not legitimate need not entail that it is morally indefensible.
Note: I am not sure whether I agree with myself.
May 29th, 2008 11:09
Ah, the conflict between justice and consequentialism rears its ugly head once again
May 29th, 2008 12:32
I am (as I’m sure you are) a libertarian in large part because I think these two axes (justifiable as in non-coercion vs. maximum happiness) are very closely aligned. It should be viewed as an empirical question how close they get or can get to each other, including whether they actually can lie together - whether government can be minimized to zero without losing any of those essential public goods or without a serious loss to some significant part of society. I almost agree with Sartwell: it remains to be seen (to me) if any of government is necessary, and so I would support any effort to reduce it, carefully. But if it gets to a point where we just can’t get rid of some government function without serious negative consequences, then so be it.
May 29th, 2008 13:46
One problem with having multiple moral vocabularies is that in case of conflict among vocabularies, the final decision might be random.
This is reminding me of voting: If many people have different opinions about what to do, what do you do?
Or in this case: if you give credence to multiple moral theories, and they prescribe different actions, what do you do?
There is no “perfect” voting, just as there is no “perfect” way to merge simultaneously believed yet incompatible moral theories.
Maybe the best I can do is to give each moral theory some weight (according to how strongly I believe it), and give preference to the actions that don’t really strongly clash with any of my moral theories.
When there is a really strong clash, I have a tough decision. And my decision often feeds back into the “weight” that I will give each moral theory next time around. If I decide in favor of X this time, I probably tend to let the weight for X grow a bit stronger.
People like Crispin are trying to create the appearance of a really strong clash. “X or Y, what’s it going to be, can’t be both??!!!” Is that helpful?
Will makes an eloquent defense of value pluralism. While I don’t share his exact weights (and thus don’t call myself a libertarian), I think that’s the way to go given where we are in human history.
Someday we may really really understand what makes us satisfied, and be able to use a very precise metric to help us with our decisions. Since we are not there, some diversity of moral conceptions is good. It helps us to not get “stuck” trying to maximize some overly simple metric that cannot fully capture the complex underpinnings of human satisfaction.
May 29th, 2008 13:47
This sounds strangely familiar to my ears.
May 29th, 2008 16:28
Matt, Except what you say is a lot clearer!
May 29th, 2008 16:35
The moral justification is utilitarian.
Where is the empirical evidence my rights and safety are better secured under anarchism?
Sweden vs. (the artist formerly known as) Somalia. No contest.
May 29th, 2008 19:12
Where is the empirical evidence for the justification of utilitarianism?
May 29th, 2008 19:34
So showing that the state is not legitimate need not entail that it is morally indefensible.
If we allow this, can one also say that robbery and murder by “civilians”, committed in no sense defensively, might also be defensible? Or is the point of this post to say that “Yes, the state (or more precisely the flawed individuals that comprise it) is simply a completely different beast, wherein these acts of robbery and violence, if not continued massively on a regular basis but only upon the establishment of a state, are not necessarily morally indefensible if they aim at human “flourishing”?
So, even assuming the idea of “flourishing” is more important than legitimacy, where is the legitimacy in restricting competing entities in the attempt to provide said flourishing? Either initially or currently. That would seem to be the argument to make precisely if one upholds value pluralism and multiple “moral vocabularies”.
May 29th, 2008 19:51
As for Sweden vs. Somalia, I’d argue the case for Sweden lies more in its culture than its statism. Combine bad culture with bad state and you get trouble. In the case of Somalia, Peter Leeson’s research suggests that it was actually better off under anarchy. Perhaps an anarchic Sweden would be ideal..
May 29th, 2008 21:15
“Sweden vs. (the artist formerly known as) Somalia. No contest.”
Free State Iceland vs. Nazi Germany. No contest. Hell, Somalia vs. Pol Pot’s Cambodia. No contest. I could go on all day.
Cherry-picking is a double edged sword.
May 30th, 2008 00:31
Somalia: Better Off Stateless
Somalia wasn’t a pleasant place without a state, but it wasn’t great with one either. It became better than many other sub-saharan African states. To me the real argument against anarchism is that government is inevitable.
May 30th, 2008 03:31
I’m not totally familiar with all of the moral justifications that Sartwell purports to demolish, nor the fiendishly clever argumentation that he (purportedly) employs to do so; however, are we asking the wrong question?
If the main line of argumentation runs: “force without consent is wrong, and force with consent be no force at all”, as I assume, then are we really objecting to the State, or are we objecting to our inability to consent to the State?
If a man walks into your house and hands you 1 kg. of solid platinum and then demands (at gunpoint) that you pay $5, then that transaction is morally illegitimate. The objection isn’t to the trade of Pt for $ in general (those are excellent terms!) but to your lack of choice in the matter.
We clearly have the same relationship with the State as you do with the platinum-bequeathing villain. It seems to me that the argument against State coercion isn’t an argument against the trading of total autonomy for certain protections, rights, and social services. To make an argument [b] for anarchism [/b] you’d need to show how consenting, collective trade in rights and property (a la, the State) is [b] always [/b] wrong regardless of how much the participants favor it.
Arguments against coercion seem to point towards an opt-out model of citizenship which is distinct from anarchy. Upon adulthood, you’d have the choice to either opt-in to the social contract and become a citizen, or opt-out and become ‘outlaw’ in the most original sense of the term.
The pre-Christian Icelanders reserved this as sort of punishment. People could be sentenced to skoggangur (literally “outlaw”) and were placed outside the legal norms of Icelandic society. Viking people being, well, Vikings, you can guess that this usually didn’t work out well for the outlaws- they could murder and steal with impunity, but all others could steal and murder them without the slightest consequence and indeed received considerable bragging rights for the act.
I heartily endorse an opt-in/opt-out citizenship model.No one should have to suffer the burdens of the State without consent. But I fail to see how arguments against coercion disallow consenting citizens to make certain transactions involving their rights and property. Of course, I haven’t read Sartwell’s book.
Would that we lived in a world where Sartwell could, with a stroke of a pen in a notary’s office, sign away all of the burdens and benefits of the State. If that happy day ever dawns, remember, I have dibs on his car.
May 30th, 2008 07:57
hey thanks for putting it up! ok here’s the anti-consequentialist/utilitarian argument in the book: we define the state as a group of people with a (fairly) effective monopoly of force. now, this force can be used for good, wherein we all flourish (or it could be…), but once you have constituted such a force, you are always potentially its victim; it is, by definition, effectively irresistible. it is an always-full reservoir of utilitarian disaster. when it mobilizes for war or genocide, the flourishing is over. and it always might, even if it doesn’t. even if you thought the u.s. gov was helping us all flourish, no human institution but government could have developed atomic weaponry: you need forced taxation and a patriotic science bureaucracy. so though some of sort of flourish, the means by which we do so can be turned to the extinction of the species.
May 30th, 2008 08:17
crispin,
does it matter to your argument that atomic weaponry has already been developed?
May 30th, 2008 08:34
Crispin, No one doubts people can fare poorly under states. But some of states seem pretty good! Does Switzerland regularly dip from the well of utilitarian disaster? Don’t people there do really well? Is there really a feasible alternative anarchist scheme that the Swiss could get to from here that would leave them better off?
Are you a George Kateb fan? Me too!
May 30th, 2008 09:12
“The arguments for the moral legitimacy of state - for example those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas - are unsound.”
Gee, that’s not a very big assumption, is it?
As for myself, believing in government by consent of the people, the basic moral argument is that the preservation of civil and human rights is a social enterprise. Anarchy cannot preserve civil rights at all, having no organized authority or mechanism to do so. There is certainly a fair debate to be had on the level of organization or the power that the state mechanism should have (one reason cherry pickings like “Nazi Germany” and “Pol Pot’s Cambodia” are far less convincing than “Sweden” is that Sweden’s is far more representative of self-govenrment). However, there is a relatively simple argument that, morally, anarchy provides greater opportunity for unjustified government to rise to power than does an organized, representative government using the minimal amount of “coercion.”
One of the great problems with such too-clever-by-half philosophical arguments like these is that they don’t truly function in the real world. The only way an uncoercive state of anarchy could exist for long is if everyone agrees to respect each others rights. That such respect has not been accomplised in human history, even with some level of organization and coercion (over those who would run roughshod over the defenseless in such a system), makes the argument very much akin to angels and the heads of pins.
It’s certainly fair to observe that organized, “coercive” governments have failed to reach a state of civil harmony, as far as individual rights go, but it’s folly to pretend that in the real world any state of anarchy could come as close as these systems have. One must also argue this from a global perspective. Cherry-picking the ad-hoc example of some small, fairly harmonious collective that managed to avoid organized government for a time is stealing a base. Those naturally get swallowed up, either by oppresive forms of government or the representative ones, the latter being a far better compromise.
May 30th, 2008 09:19
Anarchy isn’t possible in the world we live in. Sure you could get rid of the Civil Govt. in theory. However, there is always Order in Disorder, so the Vacuum would just be filled by the Mafioso and/or military strongmen.
To not understand the basic fact that anarchy/Libertarianism pressuposes a Rational/sinless world and we obviously do not live in such a world makes your support of such…..Irrational.
May 30th, 2008 10:43
TGGP,
Great Somalia link. The selected comparison drew some serious attention here, but I was mainly being glib.
For the most part I believe social organization comes from the bottom up, so an anarchist Sweden would in my opinion be a comparatively ordered society, just as East Germany was relatively functional compared to other Communist states. Both societies are filled with cooperative and capable individuals.
An anarchist society would function relatively well where the people themselves work, cooperate and organize spontaneously to a high degree (e.g. Japan; see Kristof on Kobe earthquake), and where threat from organized external violence is low; most likely due to the beneficence of a great state military power, as in the modern world, or from geographic isolation from others, as with the older Iceland. (unsustainable and externally predicated conditions)
But even with these conditions, such a society still would not live as well, or as fairly as under state government.
May 30th, 2008 10:45
ok you gotta check out the book! anarchy no more supposes a sinless world than does statism, since both are run by people. that is: say people are evil. would a good solution be: let’s give some of them guns, handcuffs, jails etc and see what happens?
but anarchy is impossible in the sense that the state is a snowball: it has increased the pervasiveness of its authority since it was established, and cannot be stopped. so, putting it mildly, we’re fucked.
May 30th, 2008 11:34
Sartwell’s assumptions avoid the nasty fact that human beings inherently will organize themselves into a society of some sort. The question isn’t are states legitimate; it’s what is the best way for such a society to organize itself. (What ‘best way’ is, is of course open to debate). Not having the biggest club in the neighborhood, the best way for me involves restricting others ability to use force to coerce me; we then proceed quickly down the path of the society (state) monopolizing the use of force as best it can. You can change the label but the situation will exist in any society.
May 30th, 2008 12:15
no i think people always create a society, and that there are always power differences. i just want to minimize coercion.
May 30th, 2008 12:31
just because something isn’t called a “State” doesnt mean you don’t still have the same thing governing you.
the Mafia families are a prime example of alternative Govt. and orginizations like that are inevitable if/when the Civil State is gone..in theory. There is always Order in Disorder, that is a Scientific statement and applies politically.
May 30th, 2008 13:02
JP,
If Mafia families are the alternative to the state, then the question becomes whether the market competition between Mafia families is a better check on power than the check electoral democracy places on a monopoly Mafia family. Anarchist libertarians generally view the power of Exit more favorably than the power of Voice; competition is superior to monopoly.
May 30th, 2008 13:12
This post is very true. I enjoyed reading it. Great post!
May 30th, 2008 13:23
[...] Wilkinson says in a multiple dimensional ethical product space that can’t be true. Essentially, [...]
May 30th, 2008 14:10
I’ve been thinking through this myself; I have an idea that short of some compelling justification, there is no reason to use force against people, which makes the default position “anarchy” unless or until it is shown that you need an institution like the state to compel people to do things . . . but this is just to say that a compelling argument is one that reasonable, informed people would accept and sign onto (as in a contract) if you *could* get them all together and sign a contract. Of course, the argument contra Locke, Hobbes, et al there never was a real contract basically missed the point of their argument. Then again, there may be ways to efficiently get everyone to agree, or at least most everyone. David Schmidtz offers proposals as to how this might be done. And I’m not even convinced that you need to compel everyone to go along for the state to be able to do things — just a large enough segment of the population that is convinced that they have a rational and moral stake in contributing. I have a hunch that Rasmussen and Den Uyl, who have all kinds of right things to say on other topics, have right things to say on the matter of state legitimacy in the pages of -Liberty and Nature-, so I’ll probably revisit them sometime soon. In any event, the idea that even a “minimal” restricted state imposes unreasonable, liberty-destroying kinds of obligations on its citizenry is dubious. Even with the more extensive state that we have now, it does warrant questioning whether it makes us substantially unfree enough to significantly restrict our pursuit of human flourishing. The “proofs” that it does, strike me as rationalistic-deductivist, in the face of my own actual psychological perspective on my freedom. There’s just a lot more of an empirical sort to put into our reasonings about this. I think that some “anarchist” economists like David Friedman are actually better at being more receptive to this than other anarchist theorists, even as much as he doesn’t really grasp important philosophical fundamentals.
And, in the end, I don’t think that there exists compelling justification for a state considerably more exstensive than a minimal one, even on the “social contract” reasoning. There are just too many hurdles one encounters at each step you attempt in moving away from Friedman-style “anarchy.” Again, short of *compelling* justification, people should otherwise be left free in their own affairs and pursuits. If there were compelling justification for believing that people would be going hungry under laissez-faire conditions, and that private charitable institutions couldn’t deal with such problems, you could justify state action in that area, but the compelling justifications just aren’t there. And there is *certainly* no compelling justification for the egalitarian intuitions that a Rawls brings to his “original position” from which deviations have to justified. The only justifiable “intuition” (and it’s not even right to call it that) to bring to such a hypothetical social-contract situation from which deviations have to be justified (via some compelling justification) is the libertarian one — people should be left free.
May 30th, 2008 14:50
How about this for a very modest, party-pooping rebuttal to Sartwell: there aren’t morally legitimate ways to achieve anarchism from where we are now. We have a government; the public doesn’t seem eager to vote for anarchism, and trying to remove the government through violence isn’t justifiable.
Will’s argument is interesting but I’m not sure that human flourishing and legitimacy are so independent. Consent is a big part of the legitimacy of an agreement; and in general people consent to what they believe to be good for them, what will increase their freedom or capacity to do what they want. If anarchy doesn’t increase human flourishing, most people won’t want it. If they don’t want it, they won’t consent to it, and I don’t see how it can be legitimate to impose anarchy on the unwilling.
May 30th, 2008 15:18
I have another theory. I should be able to use coercion against anyone to my advantage to the extent I can get away with it. Oh, wait, that’s not a theory–that’s reality!
The State is the consequence of that reality. Debating a morality of the state (or the legitimacy of states doing what they do, i.e., exercising their monopoly on violence) is as useful as debating the morality or legitimacy of gravity.
Personally, I would love to live in a world with much less coercion than we experience now. But nobody arguing for less coercion offers any reason to believe that it is possible given the current state of civilization. Creating a less coercive state in this world might be as functional as de-clawing a cat and releasing it into the woods.
May 30th, 2008 15:43
A counterargument:
You are free to depart the social contract at any time. Plenty of places still exist where one can drop off the map and disappear, living for all intents and purposes free of any governmental attention or requirement. Some country may claim power over that area but as it will never choose to use it during your lifetime as long as you stay there and do them no harm it is a difference that makes no difference.
I argue that government does not rest on force or coercion insofar as you have the opportunity to take it or leave it. It rests on a social contract. It is the lack of understanding or adherence to this social contract either on the part of the government or the human that causes events which require the use of force on the part of either the government or the human. Many uses of force can be justified morally and many cannot, but it depends on the nature of the crime against the contract.
May 30th, 2008 16:04
luagha: ever tried not paying your taxes?
May 30th, 2008 16:16
Care should be taken to actually look at the anarchist tradition. Let’s take one prominent anarchism observer’s observation:
Further, he claims:
With this in mind, it should now be clear that many anarchists believe that violently overthrowing (say) the US government is ludicrous. For one thing, national states control (and use) the greatest means of violence in human history. And even if it were possible, one entirely likely outcome is some form of fascism. Because the culture hasn’t yet cultivated the sort of bottom-up social institutions that would be necessary.
Many anarchists believe in an advanced, industrial society run on principles such as solidarity and worker self-management. When we look at history, doing away with feudalism, chattel slavery, etc, required many generations of struggle and preparation.
If you’re interested in one proposed anarchist vision to use as a frame of reference, Participatory Economics is an interesting possibility for some aspects of society. (Of course, any real improved society would require experimentation. So it’s a vision, not some rigid blueprint.)
May 30th, 2008 16:21
(And please excuse for that unwieldy first paragraph; I just got home from travelling, and had to set things up so I could post.)
May 30th, 2008 19:37
I get the impression sometimes that anarchists view the following two situations as different:
1) On an island with 100 democrats, 90 of them vote to establish a tax and enforce it with guns. The other 10 opt not to pay the tax; the island police force arrests them under the law.
2) On an island with 100 anarchists, 90 of them band together and sign a contract to pay for common roads. The other 10 opt to use the roads, which go everywhere, anyway. The island’s majority contracts to form a roadways-defense-force to prevent this misuse, and the 10 are locked up in a small POW camp.
One of these is unjustified and immoral coercion, the other is a rightful private action in defense of property. Yet the options available to all parties, and the results—10 people locked up because the 90 will them to be locked up—are exactly the same.
That’s why I think anarchists are talking themselves in circles. If you use the word “government” they imagine themselves in the harassed-underdog role; if you use the word “private militia” they imagine themselves as the self-defending strongman on top.
May 30th, 2008 21:08
The following argument is invalid:
1. If you cannot provide a good argument for P, then you are rationally required to believe -P.
2. You cannot provide a good argument for P.
Therefore, you are rationally required to believe -P.
The argument’s invalid because 1 is false. It can be rational to believe neither P nor -P.
Sartwell’s argument is of this invalid form.
May 30th, 2008 21:21
True arguments or not, the base (and wrong, IMO) premise of the original (and I suppose any logical argument?) is that rationality is the highest facet of humanity. Intellect is subservient to human biology (ecology?).
I have a question regarding the anarchy/government discussion above. Can it be said that government is the inevitable result of anarchy? After all, government has been the definite historical result this time around.
May 31st, 2008 22:35
If anarchy means absence of police powers at all (private or public), I think that’s an unserious position, given man’s proclivity to victimize his fellows. On the other hand, if we take anarchy to mean voluntary submission to police powers then, morally, voluntary beats involuntary every time.
So I think rather than “anarchy vs state” dichotomy the question becomes the granular “lower barriers to migration are better,” combined with “no state should interfere internally with another.”
Thus, as long as we had many jurisdictions with low barriers to entry, we could imagine a mix of states and non-states (eg Disney, La Cosa Nostra) coexisting, all “marketing” themselves to a mobile population as a check on quality and a spur to policy innovation.
June 1st, 2008 06:00
Crispin, I’d submit that the impossibility of anarchy, which you accept (assert) is good reason to say the state is legitimate, on the “ought implies can” principle. Elaboration of the argument here: http://lawandletters.blogspot.com/2008/06/first-crack-at-crispin-sartwell.html
June 2nd, 2008 22:22
just because state use of force and coercion (putatively) HAVE not been morally justified does not mean they CANNOT be justified.
June 3rd, 2008 07:50
“I’ve been thinking through this myself; I have an idea that short of some compelling justification, there is no reason to use force against people,”
The justification is that business interaciton between strangers can only be maintained through the threat of force. There is no reason for my gorcer to honor a deal or a price unless there is the threat of lawsuit. There is no reason for an oil company to honor my property boundries without the threat of police aciton. Without force purely consensual trading only works in tight-knit groups or in a perfect world. Even anarchism supposes the necessity of force, they just want to have multiple arbiters of force to choose from.
Whats funny about wanting the ability to opt for another provider of force is that they can already do so, by moving. It is most likely that you will have to move in order to acquire the services of different arbiters of force in an anarchist system, but they see no problem with that. We already have a free market on force, it’s call the world and there are many nations to choose from.
As to anarchism, I think it is utopianism. There is nothing in anarchism to protect your “rights”. With anarchism the strong will always prey on the weak. Security companies (or DROs or whatever) will have geographic monopolies in mos areas, where their the only game in town. So without another security company paid to keep an eye on the first security company, those with the training and the weaponry can do whatever they want with the citizens. Dictatorships will arise, price manipulation similar to the mafia will occur, and the rich will get away crime while the poor are victimized. Hobbes was right, life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short.
June 3rd, 2008 12:11
Fry,
Then that itself provides the compelling justification the person to whom you were responding is looking for. But that is not a justification for government, only a justification for using force in self-defense against contract violation.
Well, no, that’s not funny. The Coase theorem taught us that what is most important for efficient market outcomes is transaction costs. When I want to switch cell phone providers, I just pick up the phone and make a call. That low transaction cost provides the check of competition on regulating cell phone providers. But if I have to move in order to switch governments, the transaction costs of switching are much higher, and thus the regulatory check of competition is much lower. Which is one of, if not the major reason we get piss poor government.
Absolutely untrue. A central tenet of free market anarchism is that there is no need for granting firms geographical monopolies on force. The territories would overlap in the absence of monopoly. Search Google for the term “polycentric law” or “polycentric legal order” and read the work by Tom Bell and Randy Barnett on this issue.
Notice the disconnect between the first sentence and the second two sentences. You first acknowledge that a free market in the use of force exists on an international level, but then immediately claim that a free market in the use of force (e.g. anarchism) is utopian. How is it that, under the international anarchist order (for there is no central state), the rights of weak countries remain protected against the will of stronger countries?
This is precisely what anarchists deny. Without a government to enforce a monopoly, competition thrives.
June 3rd, 2008 17:16
Anarchism is more than just a market on the use of force and you’re right, the current scenario of international competition is apples and oranges.
I also simply disagree that geographic monopolies will not occur. Rural areas and sparse population don’t encourage business diversity, especially for something with a high market entry cost like defence. Of course even if you could absolutely guarantee, not just make geographic monopolies unfavorable, you would still incur the problem already discussed. One of the biggest of which is without uniform justice we have no guarantees that our DROs won’t simply enslave us. All the arguments I’ve seen in favor or a just anarchism rely on a miracle of fine-tuning, to keep all DROs perfectly in line with each other, each individual signing up to a large bureaucracy of overlapping protection, and voluntary regulation.
June 3rd, 2008 17:21
Correction: Problems already discussed above.
June 4th, 2008 16:39
Fry,
Well, I don’t think any anarchist - definitely not this one - thinks that you can absolutely guarantee the non-existence of geographic monopolies; the best we can do is structure incentives in such a way that they are unlikely to arise.
As for your claim that “Rural areas and sparse population don’t encourage business diversity”, I completely agree - all the more reason not the live in rural areas with sparse populations. This is an argument frequently made against privatizing things like the Postal service or public schools or roads. No one is entitled to live wherever they please. There is no reason why urban dwellers should have to subsidize rural communities. Part of the cost of choosing to live in a rural community is doing without some of the same services enjoyed by more concentrated populations.
But we have no such guarantee now regarding our governments. Demanding such a guarantee is utopian, for there is no higher authority to turn to to reign in the lower authority, for if there was such a higher authority, the problem would be recreated one level higher. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The relevant question is not which system makes a guarantee possible, because no system does that. The relevant question is whether electoral democracy or market competition act as better checks on power.
And this differs from electoral democracy…how?
July 21st, 2008 16:23
[...] Wilkinson discovers one or two leaps of logic in philosopher Crispin Chartwell’s new anarchist tract.44. KP: He’d have to be an anarchist philosopher with a name like that, or a photographer [...]