Government and Anarchy: Some Preliminary Observations

Government and Anarchy: Some Preliminary Observations
by Russell Madden

A perennial source of tension and discussion in libertarian circles is the question of whether freedom would better be defended by anarchy (in the form of competing, nonexclusive defense agencies) or by a truly limited government (in the form of a State able to enforce a uniform set of laws within a given territory).

The points and observations I raise here are not meant to be exhaustive. Too many others have trodden this ground to cover them all, e.g., Murray Rothbard for anarchism and Ayn Rand for a limited government. Even so, there are issues of agreement and division between both sides that would be helpful to summarize and briefly explore in advance of that distant day when we - or our descendants - finally begin seriously to reverse the quick march to tyranny that plagues us today. When we reach that magical threshold between limited government and anarchy, we would do well to know in advance whether or not we should cross that Rubicon.

1. Regardless of the type of governance preferred - socialist, capitalist, communist, fascist - the supporters (and average folk) want to live under a single set of principles (or rules or laws). Mutually contradictory principles/rules/laws create uncertainty and arbitrary actions on the part of the enforcers and the inability of citizens to know what is or is not acceptable behavior. (Precisely one problem with our present government, e.g., antitrust laws.)

2. Both free-market anarchists and advocates of limited government want a society in which the initiation of coercive force/violence is prohibited; where private property is sacrosanct; where adults can choose for themselves and do whatever they are capable of doing as long as they do not violate the rights of any other adult. (We will not deal with borderline cases here.)

3. Since there will always be individuals who want to ignore proper principles/rules/laws and prey upon innocent citizens, there need to be organization(s) that will retaliate against criminals/invaders, i.e., an enforcer(s) of the principles/rules/laws who can reestablish peaceful conditions, punish wrongdoers, and try to achieve justice/restitution for the specific victims of rights-violations.

4. The crux of the disagreement seems to be whether these enforcers will be solely and completely competing private defense agencies or some mix of governmentagencies with limited jurisdictions working conjointly with private defense agencies. At best, a limited government (at the local, state, or federal level) would have a top court, a legislature, and an executive that will concern themselves solely and exclusively with issues arising within the constraints of the above-agreed-upon principles/rules/laws. In the latter scenario, these agencies (along with various police and/or military organizations) will be available to resolve any disagreements between lower governmentbodies and/or defense agencies regarding potential criminal or civil matters that cannot be resolved by arbitration or lower level bodies.

5. There is no real "final arbiter" (as the phrase is usually understood) in either the anarchist or limited government scenarios. For limited government, in some instances the Supreme Court will give "final" rulings on particular cases. But if Congress deems that the ruling(s) violate basic principles, it can pass a law addressing the issue at hand. Or the Executive can refuse to implement the court's order or the legislative act. Also, since political power arises from the rights of individual citizens, those citizens can themselves, via a proper jury system, rule that a prosecution violates basic principles; in essence, voiding in particular cases any law or court ruling that the jury members believe violates those basic principles. There would be no appeal from any jury finding of "not guilty."

6. Rather than the usually envisioned vertical ladder of power with individual citizens crushed beneath the weight and power of all the layers above them, in a proper limited government scenario, the relationship among all these factors is more a circular/spherical web/matrix in which power is distributed throughout the system; a true "checks and balance/separation of powers" system. (Because juries can also be unjust, e.g., white courts convicting innocent blacks in the old South, other agencies can step in to correct such violations.) In essence, any particular component(s) can act as checks on other components that violate basic principles.

7. Another crux issue in this debate is: how is the single set of basic principles to be arrived and agreed upon? And secondarily, what to do about individuals who refuse to accept the basic principles or the authority/legitimacy of an agency? In a limited government, a constitution (of which ours is a first approximation) that recognizes basic principles is voted upon and ratified. Everyone - whether he agrees that zero initiation of force is proper or not, whether he believes in private property or not, whether he accepts the constitution or not, whether he acknowledges the authority of the government agencies or not - is subject to those basic principles. Regardless of whether they consent or not, citizens are bound within the jurisdiction of a proper government to observe basic principles or face the negative consequences.

8. In an anarchist system, no one can be bound to any given set of rules or by the authority of a particular agency without direct consent, i.e., this system rejects "implied consent" and accepts only "explicit consent." There appears to be no way to require that everyone be bound by the same set of basic principles/rules (there are no laws, of course) within a given territory or jurisdiction. In a limited government system, however, whether you accept non-initiation of force or not or give explicit consent to be punished for rights violations by a government agency or not, you are subject to such basic principles/enforcement. In an anarchist system, there is no society-wide mechanism for establishing those basic principles that are supposed to guide all private defense agencies.

The major flaw I find in the anarchist argument is that most proponents assume the existence of the society-wide set of freedom-oriented principles necessary to make the idea of competing private defense agencies viable yet offer no acceptable means (within their own premises of explicit consent, open competition, and so on) of having those basic principles established nationally and applied to everyone, willing or not. If one group of people belongs to an agency that accepts, say, communal provision of food, water, and medicine, then the members do not consent to the objectively valid principle of non-initiation of force, etc. Yet how can they - in the anarchists' worldview - be bound to a set of principles they refuse to accept or consent to, a set of principles that they sincerely believe to be invalid?

Yes, the non-initiation-of-force friendly agencies can join together to suppress and/or disband the communal agency, but then we have a situation in which a supra-agency de facto exists to suppress competing agencies that do not accept the basic principles of a free society, i.e., the equivalent of a government agency enforcing the equivalent of a formal constitution.

In other words, the proper agencies will not be able to tolerate a competing agency in the territory they enforce that disagrees with them on basic principles.

Unfortunately, by the anarchists' own standards, such competing agencies cannot require anyone to be bound by a set of principles to which he does not give explicit consent; nor may the private agencies require or ask for territorial exclusivity... yet they are forcing the "communal" agency to accept those proper principles within a particular jurisdiction. But without a territory-wide equivalent of a constitution, i.e., a document of principles enforceable even against those who reject it, anarchistic defense agencies cannot legitimately engage in such actions against the objectionable agency.

In order to work as advocates want and claim, private defense agencies assume what their own principles deny them the ability/power to establish.

(See my essay "'Imposing' Freedom" for a discussion of why enforcing these basic, objectively valid principles against "unwilling" others is a proper and moral use of retaliatory force by a government, i.e., does not require "explicit consent" from violators.)

9. Assume for the moment that there is a way to pay for such a limited government without taxation, i.e., with voluntary payments. (Many options have been offered on how users might pay for and fund various government services.) There would not be a great deal of difference between this situation and the anarchist situation...except that with a constitutionally limited government, there would be a legitimate way to establish and enforce proper basic principles even against unwilling others. There would also be a range of agencies - including bodies of individual citizens in juries - effectively able to veto the actions of other agencies that violate those basic principles.

10. In addition to the point in (7) regarding the necessity for some kind of territorial exclusivity even with competing defense agencies (in terms of observing and enforcing basic principles), there is the issue raised by some who contend that the reductio case of anarchistic principles would be individual citizens/families living by their own rules on their own property. But any time such individuals ventured beyond their own property, they would have to discover a set of principles/rules/laws acceptable to others in order to function in a society in which people actually live and interact. This fact eventually leads to the kind of objectively valid basic principles discussed throughout this piece and the necessity for a territory-wide set of compatible principles/rules/laws, i.e., a government-style constitution.

The kind of limited government described above does not and has never existed. Nevertheless, nothing within its description is inherently self-contradictory. Pace anarchists, a (limited) government action is not, by definition or nature, one that violates rights. Even though every government action does involve coercion, only initiation of coercion is improper, not its use in each and every instance. It is not a violation of rights to enforce the peaceful conditions necessary for any moral code to operate...even if applied against who refuse to give explicit consent to either the agency or the proper principles it enforces.

As with any human institution, limited government has been, can, and could be abused or lost through ignorance or malice or laziness. Such an observation would, of course, apply equally to anarchist defense agencies. Corruption is a hazard regardless of the type of power involved. The fundamental question is: which system of enforcement - a group of anarchist defense agencies or a properly limited government - would best preserve liberty and protect our rights and would best be able to justify its actions in doing so?

The limited government under consideration here is, in essence, no different than the one championed by Thomas Jefferson, who said that a good government...

...even though it was imperfectly implemented by the Founding Fathers. (Though given that theirs was the very first attempt at establishing a limited government from the start after millennia of unfree states as precursors, it is no surprise they did not get it completely right...and simply amazing how incredibly close they did come with no other real examples to draw upon of a nation founded - in principle - as a limited government.)

Some might complain that any government is too dangerous to permit to exist; that the hundreds of millions killed by government automatically disqualifies the very notion from the realm of possibilities.

Yet internecine conflicts "enjoy" a legacy as long and "illustrious" as the wars instigated by the State.

A (limited) government is merely a tool to help achieve the goal of preserving freedom. It can be a very powerful tool, yes, and as such, it can be very dangerous. People are wise to be wary of it and to approach it cautiously and judiciously. Yet something so supremely valuable and precious as liberty is not to be obtained or maintained easily, without effort or risk of failure, nor by a weak tool. Any tool can be misused or abused: guns, knives, nuclear weapons, drugs, alcohol, families. But let us not commit the intellectual error of the gun-banners, the victim-disarmament crowd, the pacifists, or the prohibitionists who believe that all will be dandy as long as we ban and outlaw the tools that "cause" pain, suffering, and death.

A tool, however, is not responsible for the ignorance or evil of its wielder. To condemn the tool for the devastation it has been used to accomplish is to toss out the baby with the bath water. There are monsters who have slaughtered innocents with guns and knives. There are monsters who have slaughtered innocents with government.

There will always be monsters.

There is nothing inherent in the structure of a limited government that inevitably leads to disaster any more than there is anything inherent in guns that inevitably leads to murder. But there needs to be a set of objective political principles founded in an objective morality that can be applied to everyone, whether all individuals accept those principles or that morality or not. Anarchism fails in that requirement. A properly limited government does not. In either system, there remains room for problems to occur and for people to violate the rights of others. Unfortunately, the underlying rationale for an anarchist society is self-contradictory and must therefore be rejected.

While Utopia is impossible and success never guaranteed, freedom is the natural right of every peaceful individual. It is a goal worth the peril that is government. In the past, we let both freedom and the benefits of a limited government slip from our grasp. But it is never too late to correct that mistake. All we need are the courage, the foresight, and the integrity to act.

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