Life Without The State (addendum)

First of all, apologies for my lack of posts recently- I have kind of gotten out of the habit, plenty of posts get brain-drafted, especially now that the news is full of Real Stuff Happening but don’t quite make it as far as the WordPress site.
Never mind.
I’ve been reading a lot of Hoppe recently, and his writings often concern property, to whit property being either something you’ve bought, or something ‘previously unowned’ that you have mixed your labour with- heather you collected on the moor, a plot of land in the wilderness you built a farm on, you know the sort of thing. What’s been troubling me is at what point does something previously owned become something unowned?

The reason I’ve been on this train of thought is that in my surrounding area there are various buildings that are derelict, abandoned by the owners (mostly pubs, ok you got me there) and they obviously DO belong to somebody… but.
Now, I don’t want to get all moral and socialistic here… I don’t want to start saying things like ‘the community deserves better than to have these derelict buildings around’ and ‘the council should take them over’ and things like that, but what I would like to explore is whether at some point a squatter becomes a homesteader.

Forget the town for a minute. Imagine that somebody claims a piece of land in the wilderness. They build a log cabin, till some soil… then get fed up, or die, or marry some sort in the local town and move there, whatever. They leave. Twenty, thirty, forty years later you, homesteader, are scouting about looking for a place to live and raise your crops… this place is a good place, but the remnants of the log cabin still remain. Can you rightfully claim it? If the cabin is gone entirely, could the descendants of the previous owner turf you off, even after you spent maybe half your life improving that land, perhaps to a better state than that long-forgotten homesteader? In short, does a one-time claim to property, even if not exercised for many years, count?

So, back to the town again. Records possibly exist (although not always) so is it correct in this case? If not, why not? Is it correct in the wilderness but not in the town due to the record of the owner? Is it never correct? You could go crazy on that one… never sure if any land ever belonged to anyone before. Imagine the ramifications if people started laying claim to land that held important things. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Vatican, The Bank of England. Hmmm… If you could prove it… ok.
So. What if no record exists?

So now, for the final part of this thought experiment… we are doing this,without a state. Yesterday, the revolution happened, the State withered away and an anarchist situation entailed. There are no ‘official records’ no ‘official judges’ and only private solutions to these problems. You took over an abandoned pub, moved in, and started a thriving business. Nobody has cared about or visited or improved this building for several decades and it has lain unused for all this time. Are you a squatter? A trespasser? Or have you mixed your labour with something previously (albeit merely recently) unowned?

On The Rights of Man, the Freemen, and Libertarians

I’ve a lot of time for the Freemen, and increasingly less and less time for Libertarians. This post was brought to you in part, by the letter A, the number 42, the very public spat between the commentariat at the Libertarian Alliance blog and Captain Ranty (found here at their place and here at his place) and this thread at Samizdata. Actually it was the thread at Samidata that riled me the most.

I shouldn’t have a dog in this fight, I’m not a freeman, or in lawful rebellion and I am also not a libertarian (big OR little l), I am an Anarcho-Capitalist and very comfortable there. Really, however, all the four (five?) things I just mentioned should have more in common than we have different, and we all should be facing the same arguments with the people we meet in our daily lives. It’s just that for some reason the libertarian backwaters of the internet just lately seem to be full of snide remark and barely-concealed contempt for the freemen, who after all are walking their talk and putting themselves in jeopardy for their rights which is something that really should garner a fair deal of respect, not sideways-glancing remarks about ‘showing us up’ and alluding to their mental health with mealy mouthed quotes from Greek myth.

We are governed supposedly by consent, whether this is given implicitly or explicitly. This is supposedly the justification for everything our government does for (to) us, all the money it taxes (steals) from us to pay for it all, and so on. But what happens if you don’t consent? Do you just have to put up with it because everybody else consents? The libertarian commenters I have been reading would seem to say so, which is surprising given that it comes from the sort of people who sometimes append ‘individualist’ to their self-descriptions. Furthermore, even if a minority don’t consent, then claims to government by consent can only be mostly true, by definition. What happens when one withdraws or, more accurately, states that they have never given their consent and furthermore refuses to pay for it all at all is the experiment that the Freemen and Lawful Rebels are carrying out. They are choosing to use ancient laws and treaties and constitutional arguments to do it, but basically that is what they are doing, snide comments about using legal mumbo-jumbo to get out of paying their council tax nonwithstanding. They are giving voice to their non-consent and refusing to play the game any longer. Bravo.

And it is a game, a game of charades. If you cannot withdraw your consent then you cannot really be said to have given your consent at all. If you do not consent but keep quiet and pay up because you are afraid of the consequences then you are cowed into submission, not consenting. In reality, there IS no government by consent, and therefore in reality we are living in a dictatorship, regardless of the existence or not of concentration camps, secret policemen, political prisoners or any of the other trappings of state power- it is a question of magnitude.

The libertarians, especially those commenters at the LA thread, seem to think that this is just fine, or perhaps get too carried away with whether Magna Carta is repealed or not, or whether the version ratified by parliament is the definitive version or whether the version signed in 1215 counts forever, or other endless circles of argument and counter-argument to actually consider this reality. This is perhaps because, as statists (a question of magnitude again) libertarians believe that such a thing should exist and therefore by extension that it should have the ability to fund itself by confiscation of wealth from those people unfortunate to live under it and so on and so forth. All arguments I have seen from libertarians against Freemen accept this premise and argue whether Freemen are legally or lawfully correct in what they are doing (i.e. staying within the state’s frame) without considering whether one group of people (the state) have the right to demand that another group of people (everybody else) give them money, allow them onto their land and so on. It should be patently obvious to everyone, but especially to libertarians, that one group of people absolutely does NOT have the right to demand these things from another group of people regardless of what the two groups call themselves. If someone comes onto your land without your permission then he is a trespasser whether another man in a wig has said he can or not, and if a man in an office rifles through your wage packet then he is a simple thief.

People choosing to stand up to trespassers and thieves earn my respect, whichever means they choose to use to do so.

Jeremy Kyle as a Justification for Anarcho-Capitalism

Lots of people deride the Jeremy Kyle show -often with some justification- as one of the very worst examples of car-crash television, parading the weak and the feckless for the viewing public’s titilation, and I suppose it does. What it also does, however, is provide a very real and current demonstration of how voluntary associations and trade can be harnessed to aid people absent the state’s involvement.

The Jeremy Kyle show does help people. They have comprehensive aftercare and counselling as well as providing the mediation, polygraph, DNA analysis or whatever else is required to help the participants turn whatever corner in their lives they have appeared on the show to turn. Nobody is forced to appear -except by their consciences or desire for the truth- and most importantly of all, the services provided by the show are free at the point of use.

This is not to say that the producers, researchers, counselling teams or even Mr. Kyle himself are volunteers, donating their time and energy for purely altruistic reasons (not that there is anything wrong with that), they expect to profit from it. They put on a show that people watch, sell advertising and turn a profit from helping people, all without court orders or state-certified mediation services or any of the other tendrils the big state loves to infect people’s private lives with. From this we can show that absent a state, the profit motive would indeed lead enterprising people to plug the gaps in the market left by the state’s dissolution, and those enterprises would by no means be out of the reach of the poor.

Life Without The State part 2: Defence

This was originally one of the areas that gave me the most difficulty on moving from a minarchist position to a fully-fledged anarchist one. What do we do about defence? What about the Khomenis, the Obamas, the Bin Ladens? Surely, we’d need some sort of state, even if only to maintain nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers to protect us from nasty fellows like that?
Not neccesarily. With the exception of Bin Laden, most of the assorted nasties that stalk the world today are heads of states. States have wars with states. We may say that “we” had a war with France or Germany or Afghanistan, but in actuality it was the British State that went to war with the French, German or Afghan state and the people of these islands (and the people of those places) were merely the poor suckers who got dragged along for the ride, to fly the State’s planes, drive the State’s tanks and shed their blood in some far-off place to achieve the State’s goals. “We” did not win the Napoleonic War any more than “we” won the World Cup in 1966.

So simply doing away with the state may reduce or even remove entirely some of the antagonisms the people of these islands face. No state to wage wars on other states is also no state to interfere, indulge in covert or “black” operations and generally make a nuisance of itself overseas. Some people here may want to sell stuff, or buy stuff, or even volunteer to fight in your local conflicts if they wish but that’s about as far as it goes. “The British” would no longer collectively be defiling the land of your prophet or stealing your oil or whatever else it is that’s pissing you off.

But what about defence? When I originally became won over to this idea, it was Obnoxio who I discussed this with, and the general thrust of his argument (and what I finally grokked) was that an anarchist nation-? territory-? None of the standard terms seem to apply somehow. An anarchist geographical area wouldn’t work to the same rules when being invaded. There’s no taking the capital city and it’s all over, the whole place would need to be occupied by armies. Like many wars of recent times, the invader can take the cities, but not hold the countryside. Even in a small island like Great Britain there are lots of places to be, and it’s a huge, very expensive and possibly impossible undertaking to hold them all. This coupled with the likelihood of the majority of households being armed in such a place, what with there being no police pretending to protect people and all, any sane cost-benefit analysis is liable to find invading such a place to be unprofitable. Even a booming economy (likely without regulations or taxes hanging around the market’s neck like an albatross) wouldn’t serve as a rational prize, as the destruction of life, morale and infrastructure would likely ruin such a thing.

Of course, we don’t solely need to consider rational actors. In fact, none of the three examples I listed above could be described as rational actors. Khomeni and Bin Laden are both millenial religionists and Obama is a dyed-in-the-wool international socialist. All three and indeed many others may well decide that an Anarchornutopia land-of-milk-and-honey springing up in these islands would be worth any cost to bring under the yoke of International Socialism/ bring into the Ummah/ rule under the Caliphate and the idea of a long, bloody campaign wouldn’t necessarily put them off. It didn’t put off the worldly, rational (if wrong-headed) creed of Neo-Conservatism with respect to the Middle East after all.
But. Just because there is no state doesn’t mean people won’t organise. Such a thing doesn’t require any form of top-down goings-on. History is littered with examples of people spontaneously forming militias, partisan groups and resistance movements to defend themselves, their property and their neighbours. In all likelihood such militia groups would already exist in any case, partly for their social aspect and partly for any other number of reasons as they exist to this day in the United States. Any irrational actor invading such a place would not only find himself fighting house-to-house against householders defending themselves but would almost certainly end up fighting a protracted guerrilla war against a highly-motivated and fairly well organised partisan group. Such groups exist in Great Britain already, despite disapproval from those who pretend to rule.

The danger of invasion would still exist of course, but it does already. It’s pretty obvious that the Chinese or American State could walk in and take over any time they wanted- the fact that they haven’t is probably more to do with preferring the status quo to the world they would inhabit after setting such a precendent than any moral considerations. The British State doesn’t make it any less likely, but it costs a hell of a lot more money. Anarchy would require dealing with reality, and dealing with it without relying on nanny to come and scare the bad boys away. Bad things happen, and being adult enough to deal with them is part of the territory. Don’t you think it’s time we grew up?

Life Without A State part 1: Criminal Justice

Ok, so in my previous post I outlined total anarchy as, well. Not a system of government. Not a system at all, in any usual sense of the word… although of course people will organise themselves into systems of some degree. What I’m envisaging is a total lack of a system.

No police, no courts, no army, no politicians, no health service… nothing. Enough to make most quail… death on the streets, poor people dying of cholera, rape and murder a fact of life? Well, no, actually.

We’ll leave the NHS and other socialised health care systems out of it for a second, as alternatives can and do exist and move onto the more radical things I have mentioned. I was originally going to cover all of this in one post, but it’s become too long so I’m going to make it a series, starting with the police. How would life be without a police force? Before we go anywhere, perhaps we should look at the lower entries of this recent Samizdata comment thread which turned into an off-topic discussion of law, and lawlessness, and was in part the inspiration for this post. While I’m no legal expert and haven’t the foggiest regarding tort law, common law or any other kind of law it is clear to me that the situation we find ourselves in is hardly ideal… where the rich can buy (or sell) justice, where those who defend their kith, kin and property can go to jail while scofflaws and bandits go free. Where the police and courts and far more interested in holding aloft politically correct values and defending the status quo than protecting the public from wrongdoing. We’ve been educated by the media (particularly films like the Robocop series) to believe that without that ‘Thin Blue Line’ society would soon tear itself apart, but is that really the case? Perhaps there would be murders, rapes, burglaries and robberies… but don’t we have those now? And would it really be any worse? To suggest it would is to suggest that the law-abiding majority are only so because they live in fear of the police and don’t want to go to jail, which is to suggest that Mr. Bun the Baker who is always so nice to your granny would instantly turn on her and steal her purse if he didn’t expect Mr. Plod to be along on his beat fairly soon- it’s a nonsense.
Most people are not criminals simply because most people are not criminals.
In fact, I am almost certain that crime would be reduced in such a situation. Besides the oft-repeated points of well-armed gentlemen and ladies defending themselves in the street (and robbers never knowing exactly WHO is going armed) there is certainly the point to consider that you, your family and your mates are probably not going to stand for Mr. Bun robbing Granny and will head out for restitution- and surely they won’t be content with a slap on the wrist.

This would be a world where responsible householders would be armed as a matter of fact- and would-be burglars would have no way of knowing which were which. The same for Granny, and well turned out gentlemen in the street. A violent and lawless world for sure but, and I say it again, don’t we have that now? People get burgled, the streets aren’t safe at night, junkies and lowlifes rob dear old ladies at will and the Big State has proved time and again that it is either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
So why pay them to?

Quandry

Reading through this Samizdata post, and recalling the conversation I had with Obo, the question of politicised, militant expansionist Islam has once again caused me to re-evaluate where I stand on the political spectrum.

Let me say straight off, I have nothing against muslims particularly, and the way that modern muslim immigrants (as opposed to the influx of Pakistani immigrants that occured before I was born and who’s offspring I grew up with) tend not to integrate, keep within their own communities or even their tent-wearing penchants bother me not one jot as long as I’m not paying for it. Chinese people have been doing the same all over the world (minus the tent-wearing) for centuries without a problem. The protest marches and ‘death to the infidel’ placards do worry me, I will admit, but I have a hard time accepting that they should be stopped or banned, not least because that sets a precedent for stopping protests and banning marches.

And this is where it starts to get sticky. Not only does Islam stand for everything that I am against (and it has every right to) but even Vanilla Islam is ostensibly dedicated to spreading its creed by the sword and its more militant cousins just get worse from there. A little digression is in order here, perhaps.

My conversation with Obo, in which he pretty much conviced me on the merits of full-blown Anarcho-Capitalism centred mainly on my hangup that we need a State to protect us from other states… and his rejoinder that a fully-armed anarchic society that had to be taken street by street, village by village would simply not be worth the cost to any potential invaders. Ironically, the open sore that is the Afghan conflict is the most current example of this… showing that merely taking the capital (and even a few other cities besides) of a nation that is used to having no government doesn’t really get you a lot, except a lot of wasted time, money and lives.
Unfortunately, it also gives us another example. The fact that huge expenses in money, time and lives do not neccesarily put off ideologically-driven opponents. The ideology of the GWOT is only a decade old, and yet it has sustained that bizarre war, what sustenance then could an ideology many times that old give to conflict? Islam conquored Afghanistan, a place that even Alexander hurried through and a place that has defied in modern times the full might of both the USSR and USA.

So what then, of our putative anarchist Greater Britain and Associated Islands? Should the rest of the West fall (and given that world domination is in the very warp and woof of Islam, and given the extensive penetration of the West by unassimilated muslims and the Western penchant for appeasement, multiculturalism and special treatment for certain groups I’m far from convinced that it won’t) when the Jihadis reach our shores do I really think that a war lasting decades and costing maybe thousands of lives (all sent not down to Hades but off to 72 virgins) would put them off?

No.

Which kinda leaves me stuck. Again.

T-Shirts With Communists On

One of the subjects that constantly pops up round this corner of the blogosphere is the ubiquitous Che Guevara t-shirt, and it seems to provoke howls of something approaching anguish from some sections of the commentariat.

The something mostly centres on the quite correct opinion that Mr. Guevara was not a very nice person (to put it mildly), and I’d guess partly because that famous image decorated the digs of the lefty students that grew up to be the Enemy Class of today and to see that image still portrayed on the clothing of the young and ignorant arouses some quite uncomfortable feelings.

I think Che Guevara t-shirts are a Good Thing, and to explain why I’d like to take you on a little trip through time, back to when young Master Wh00ps was a sunday-school attending christian.

Back then, and possibly still, one of the frequent lessons was the one about people who professed no faith wearing crosses merely as a decoration. It was -perhaps predictably- the fault of celebrities and it was a grave threat. It devalued the faith to have its symbol used indiscriminately by people who knew very little of what it represented. Those people were possibly correct, although perhaps the irreverent use of crosses is more a symptom than a cause of their church’s decline.

The same thing applies I think to the use of the Che image. Although back in communism’s heyday the image was used by lefty students and hardline fellow travellers, these days most of those wearing the t-shirts, putting up the posters or even drinking the soft drink have no idea of the history of the subject let alone notions of following his example. Quite apart from the irony of using a portrait of a communist revolutionary to do something as banally capitalistic as selling t-shirts, the idea that his legacy is to become a mere pattern, something only as powerful as paisley or the willow pattern is quite an attractive prospect and a sign that his particular brand of Marxism is dead in the water, at least in most parts of the world.

Bring on the day when Gramsci, who’s ideas and legacy are arguably more of a threat to Western Liberal Civilisation than Guevara’s are or ever were is merely a pattern on a t-shirt and no longer the godfather of the slow-burn incrementalist revolution we currently suffer. I’ve never seen Gramsci Cola on the shelves, a fact that is, perhaps, telling.

‘Rules’

As this post at Counting Cats illustrates, a written constitution is no guarantee of anything except ‘rules.’

Finding ways around ‘rules’ is human nature, so natural that it is.something we learn almost at our mothers’ teats: children pushing their boundries is something we all did and our babes will continue to do, yea, even unto the ends of the earth. It is the reason that any target-based system is doomed to failure: demand that all A&E departments process their patients and get them on a ward within four hours and they will simply designate a corridor as a ward and ‘admit’ patients to it after three hours and fifty-nine minutes. Demand that police solve a thousand crimes a week and they’ll fine a thousand litterbugs and let the murderers go free. It’s what people do.

A constitution is basically a book of rules for governments and almost as soon as such a thing is codified the power-hungry statesmen (is there another kind?) will set about finding ways around it and testing how far such a thing can be bent. Eventually, after about two hundred years of bending, it becomes something ancient and unimportant and it can be broken at will as anyone that dares voice their concerns will seem very odd indeed.

Musing On A Saturday After-noo-oo-oon

Following a brief discussion on Twitter with @obotheclown, I’ve started to think in a slightly different way, perhaps even coming some way towards solving a conundrum I’d constructed for myself since coming to the anti-state side of the equation, namely: Given that the state inevitably grows and gathers power unto itself, how would a nation go about maintaining a small, non-authoritarian state that nevertheless has the wherewithal to defend its citizens from other, less libertarian state apparatuses?

As Obo said (I’m paraphrasing), an anarchic nation or territory  that is armed to the teeth would need to be taken household by household, a difficult and costly (in terms of blood and cash) slog of house-to-house and street-to-street fighting, and would hopefully not be worth the effort to conquer. Therefore, part of my rationale for keeping a state at all (defence) would seem to wither away. Certainly, the  British Isles have no significant natural resources that would be worth the cost to take, and lebensraum here is limited at best. Certainly,  some ideologies or cults of personality may decide to invade our wet and windy islands for merely ideological reasons (and ideologies can be used to justify anything) but for rational actors a well-armed and robustly anarchic British Isles would simply be too much bother.

However (you could just sense a ‘however’ or a ‘but’ coming, couldn’t you?), a well-armed and robustly anarchic British Isles is presicely what we don’t have. What we have is a British Nation firmly wedded to the British State and to some great extent dependent on its largesse, whether in terms of cash or in terms of its dubious protections. Like junkies, the British people are hooked on the state to the point where most of them cannot even conceive of life without it (that damned meta-context again). I’m getting dangerously close here to the subject of the post of Al Jahom’s that I never got around to writing a response to. I’m pretty sure that if anarchism were declared tomorrow, and Putin turned up with his big-state mob sometime next month after the dole cheques hadn’t been paid then most of our fellow islanders would welcome him with open arms.

Like a serious addict, the british public needs to be weaned off the state slowly, so that when the time comes to shut it down altogether the majority of people are armed, self-sufficient and responsible. Going cold turkey would have effects, rather then shakes and shivers and seeing babies on the ceiling we’d experience riots, looting and disorder, as the dole-bludgers and the public employees first got angry, and then got hungry. Civil society has taken a real beating at the hands of the state over the last few decades and would certainly not be able to take up the slack straight away. People would feel better for being clean, for sure, but getting through withdrawal would not be much fun, and it would be a dangerous time indeed with the risk of some strongman politician offering some more big-state-skag ever present.

Annie vs. Minnie: Falls Count Anywhere

The Anarcho-Capitalist/Libertarian debate seems to be doing the rounds again, if this article by Ian B at Counting Cats (thanks to The Devil, my Rss still doesn’t seem to want to pick up Counting Cats) and to some extent the comments at this B&D post.

I’ve been mulling the same thing over in my head for a while, to be honest and had been inclining towards the Anarcho-Capitalist side myself. Firstly, Anarcho-Capitalism just sounds cooler, ha ha. Mainly, though, (taking the USA as a case in point) there doesn’t seem to be any way to prevent a state accumulating more and more powers and becoming more and more tyrannical without doing away with it altogether. From small acorns grow mighty oaks, and so on… and the best way to stop our wall of freedom being undermined by the roots of tyranny is to break out the weedkiller…

Coercion. I’d never really thought of it in that way before -still being new at this- but what Ian B is saying does make sense. Not that I accept that society as a whole needs coercion (perish the thought!) but that some individuals in society need coercion. Criminals… robbers, rapists, serial killers and so on. They need coercing into not robbing, raping and serially killing their way across this fair land of ours. So who’s going to do this coercing?

You don’t want the state locking you up and nabbing all your heard-earned, so you’ve done away with the state. Now what? What’s to stop me (and my band of merry men, natch) from locking you up, shooting our kittens and taking your new plasma telly? Well, you might be armed to the teeth, ready to defend you and yours, or you might be subscribed to some rent-a-cop service who patrols your road or place of business. So I come busting in and you shoot me dead or hit your panic button and have Group 4 shoot me dead or whatever, and that’s the end of it.

Suppose though, that you just don’t like me, or I’ve slighted you in some way and you’ve invited me over with the express intention of shooting me dead and claiming I was about to molest your african land snail, or something. Who decides? You might well say, “oh well that’s the risk you take visiting anybody’s house and its just tough” or maybe you envision me having my own private security firm with standing orders to investigate my suspicious death or something, but again you hit some problems… do they have the right to enter your property to gather evidence? Probably not. What if Loomis (the company I hired) come to take you away to their court to try you and Group 4 (your guys) attempt to stop them… shootout? Pistols at dawn? Some sort of deal?

Now it may come to pass that eventually these companies would work out some standards of practice between themselves, much as USB became a standard without government diktats, or maybe they wouldn’t. It seems to me equally as likely that a spontaneous order would organically spring up or that we would end up fragmented, each in our own little castles armed to the teeth and distrustful of strangers.

So, one thing that minarchism has going for it is an independent monopoloistic arbitration system (courts) that anybody can appeal to, and enforcers of the same (police). There’s one other thing that I can see minarchism offering that Anarchism can’t:

Remember these guys? Big-State, nuclear-armed loonies with big, professional standing armies. Maybe not these guys -maybe their successors or others like them- but eventually somebody is going to start eyeing our putative Minarchist or Anarchist nation with envious eyes, and a minarchist nation with minimal taxation can provide a professional standing army and nuclear deterrent while an anarchist nation would presumably make do with a voluntary militia.

So I’m coming down on the side of minarchism, I’m afraid. Eventually, sure, the state will get bigger and bigger and have to be put down with a bloody revolution. It’s happened before, and no doubt it will happen again. I’m pretty sure that’s where the USA is heading. Perhaps that’s just the way it’s supposed to be… endlessly cycling between liberty and tyranny.