The Distraction of Anarcho-Libertarianism
by Tibor R. Machan
To be sure there are those who insistently call themselves anarcho-libertarians, following mainly in the footsteps of the late Murray N. Rothbard and writing, most often, for blogs and other forums at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, or where the philosopher Roderick Long blogs (the Molinari Institute or such?). Rothbard, however, wasn’t your ordinary anarchist, one who rejects all law and government. He advocated what he called defense or justice agencies (or something along those lines) that are, in fact, governments but without the authority to tax, committed to nothing more than defending individual rights. Yes, these would be governments and govern in terms of principles that would restrain their power severely, limited to the function of securing our rights (as the Founder’s put it in the Declaration of Independence). Rothbard, however, considered it a necessary feature of government that they engage in coercive taxation. Ergo, no government for libertarians. But none of the libertarians I know, including the radical capitalist Ayn Rand, believed in taxation, so Rothbard was begging the question here.
One area of difference between Rothbardian—or anarcho—libertarians and others is not what so many of the former embrace, namely, anarchism, but the idea of floating governments. By this view governments need not have jurisdiction within some contiguous geographical region but can, a bit like pizza delivery or plumbing service providers, float about, adjudicating disputes in any region that would hire them to help uphold justice.
Could such floating governments function? Perhaps, in times when location doesn’t have a lot to do with movement—as in a Star Trek like world where people can travel from one place to another without having to occupy solid space as they do and thus without needing permission to traverse locations. Or maybe sooner. But this isn’t the point I wish to focus upon here.
Instead, the issue is whether these so called anarcho-libertarians have some kind of higher moral ground than those who hold that there needs to be some kind of adjudication system in place at some firm location for a free society to function.
Most defenders of the classical liberal idea of limited government include as one of their premises that human beings sometimes do not conduct themselves in a civilized fashion and find themselves, thus, in conflict with others. Even when they do their utmost best to act in a civilized fashion and respect the rights of everyone, they can make innocent mistakes that can lead to disputes among them. And it is important, in such instances, to have in place a forum and process that will enable them to reach some sort of decisive settlement of the dispute.
This is where the institution called “government” comes in for even the most libertarian of us. Any idea of doing away with government—and renaming it something like “defense agency” or “justice agency” or the like isn’t the same as doing away with it—is a myth, an idle dream for anyone interested in justice throughout human communities.
Governments, of course, can have many forms and most have been corrupt versions in most of human history, there is no disputing this among libertarians. But anarcho-libertarian have the penchant for elevating their Rothbardian version of libertarianism as holier than though—as if they were pure, while all the rest, such as Nozickians, Randians, and those who follow the likes of von Mises and von Hayek, were all corrupt and compromised on libertarianism.
Not so fast. First of all, there is an ongoing and unfinished philosophical dispute about whether the anarcho-libertarian position is any more libertarian than the rest, and in my view, at least, it isn’t at all. As I noted above, the only substantive difference is that the Rothbardians believe governments can move about, float in space, and need not be anchored to terra firma. This is interesting but not a moral issue at all. It is a technical one.
More importantly, though, the alleged purism of the anarcho-libertarian rests on semantics—renaming the institution that is to adjudicate disputes and thus gaining some supposedly moral high ground for denouncing all government. Rothbard, as I noted already, defined government in terms of taxation—it isn’t one if it doesn’t tax. Rand, who had no problem using the term “government,” defined it without this element. So, which is the better definition?
Well, historically most governments have taxed but does that settle the matter? After all, one may define “marriage” as the exclusive and committed romantic relationship between two people and protest, well, since adultery and philandering is rife among these so called married people, when so understood marriages have never existed. Those, then, who want what marriages might and ought to be would them insist on renaming it, but to what point? None that I can see.
There is another thing going on here. Much of this, in my view, is turf fighting. By now libertarianism is not just a movement but a sort of industry, seeking clients all over the place—e.g., publishing and selling journals and books, soliciting donors to foundations, institutes, centers and such. (This is even evident in the way they treat one another’s organizations and the people associated with them—sometimes, sadly and destructively for liberty, with out and out contempt.)
And aside from the good feeling people may enjoy from thinking themselves to be the pure at heart among all the rest who are, well, not so pure, willing to bend a bit here or there, the title to being the holiest libertarian of them all can gain one some coins, too. I will not make the mistake, as some economists might, of construing this the prime reason for much of the acrimony—for, yes, much of the disputation is sadly very acrimonious—but it is one of a collage of reasons, I think, that so much ink is spilled on who is the most libertarian of them all. (The most recent development in this is the emergence of a pseudo-dispute among so called Left and Right libertarianism; yet, libertarianism is neither Left nor Right!)
There is, finally, the proclivity of many people who chime in on what a certain religious, political, ethical, artistic or philosophical movement really is all about to wish to have their way of understanding it to be the superior, even the only, way. This one-size-fits-all mentality isn’t confined to libertarians but they, perhaps more than others, may feel more at home with such a motive since it fits the silly version of individualism: Doing it my way, just because, well, it’s my way. This view comes to such folks, I believe, more comfortably, since they aren’t bound by various notions of duty to the team or the like. (Yet a little prudence might inform them that hanging in there together, in a friendly fashion, may fend off being hanged individually.)
Anyway, libertarianism is the political idea that a society is best that abides most consistently, most fully by principles of individual rights to life, liberty, and property—at least this is one very good way of identifying it. The best institutional arrangements for getting such a society in play and maintaining it are explored in what can be called libertarian political science—should there be such bodies of specialists as courts, police, military, legislatures, etc.—and because the viewpoint is rather radical, just exactly what that political science will ultimately yield hasn’t been adequately explored, as far as I can tell. (Most well funded political science and public policy centers at universities, have only recently begun to pay attention to the libertarian alternative, so scholarship and research on that issue is rather scarce.)
In my view these acrimonious, pseudo-moralistic, name-calling fights among defenders of human liberty do more damage then service to the central purpose, namely, to make headway and to contain the statists everywhere.
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