Anarchism and Me
Alexander S. Peak31 July 2007
I have a confession to make. I am no longer a minarchist.
A minarchist is one who advocates a government which is limited in its power to a few core functions deemed to be absolutely necessary. The minarchist typically supports such things as government-hired police, government-hired military, government-maintained roads, perhaps some government-printed or government-coined money, and perhaps even a government-maintained library. But the minarchist does not support massive government entitlement programmes or other features of our current political system, which he deems too expensive, too wasteful of our tax-dollars, or too intrusive upon our individual Liberty.
I, for the past year, have been a radical minarchist. By that I mean I did not support taxation, and believed that all functions of the government should be funded through voluntary contribution, the same way the ACLU is funded. People don’t give to the ACLU because the ACLU will throw them in jail for not doing so; people give to the ACLU because they believe in this or that cause. And, surely, if people find public roads, public education, public police, or a public military worth maintaining, they will donate. Those that do not believe these functions are worth their donation will not donate, just as those who do not feel the goals of the ACLU are worth fighting for do not donate to the ACLU.
I still maintain that if a government is to exist, this is the most ethical manner for it to be funded. As a radical minarchist, I despised the state, but regarded it as the necessary evil.
There is the issue of the free-rider effect that is worth addressing, for surely there would be those who wish to get a free ride, who wish for police protection but are not willing to pay for the police. But I figured, as I still do: so what? Then we don’t have a public police force. Those wishing for protection will then turn to private police agencies working for a profit, and those not wishing for even that will simply have no protection whatsoever. In short, the market will handle it.
And this, my dear friends, is how I saw things. However, I still maintained that a government was necessary. I supported having a government because I supporting using this government toward certain ends, including: forcing firms to place labels on food cans listing the nutritional facts, and providing certain regulations over environmental issues.
My defence for government-created environmental regulations was two-fold.
The first was the general welfare clause of the Constitution of the United States.1 Accurately understood, this clause does not give government the vast degree of power that most seem to assume it does. That clause only affords the federal government the authority2 to pursue actions which benefit the people of America generally, that is they do not benefit certain groups over other groups. Therefore, the general welfare clause can only apply to such things as national defence, environmental protection, and the like. The federal government cannot constitutionally engage in such things as public education, welfare, or Social Security, all of which “benefit” certain classes of people at the expense of others.
I still believe this to be true, the general welfare clause is limited to those actions which supposedly benefit the general people, and I encourage libertarians to adopt this argument. My change in opinion here is that I no longer believe that the Constitution is legal. Regardless, I will continue to use constitutionality in my arguments against certain government policies because I believe that it strengthens my argument and I recognise that not all will agree with me on the illegality of the Constitution.
My second defence was a theory of natural rights in the Lockean tradition. I surmised that since land or sea which has not been made privately owned by means of one mixing his or her labour therewith is still therefore publicly owned, that is to say all persons of the Earth own it (and will continue to justly own it until a person or persons takes it out of the state of nature by mixing his or her labour with it), we had a natural right to our collective property not being ruined. I also held that due to the alacrity of the air, no man could rightly own it except that which they have been able to contain, for example in an air-tank. I therefore held it reasonable that the EPA, which I established previously to have constitutional merit in existing, should thus create regulations for the protection of this common property.
The question I then had to consider was whether the government and its regulatory body was the best means by which of achieving this.
I talked to a friend of mine this summer. She had previously been a Democrat, and was highly involved in the Towson University College Democrats. She mentioned to me that she and her boyfriend have recently become anarcho-syndicalists. I commended her for her conversion, and informed her that I had been drifting towards anarcho-capitalism. I brought up the fact that a primary reason for my supporting the state had been the environment, to which she replied that in an anarcho-syndicalist society, pollution would be dealt with by people shunning or having nothing to do with those who violated the basic principles they held. I found this approach a bit weak, but being familiar enough with the anarcho-capitalist philosophy, I informed her that it was similar, except that under anarcho-capitalism, one could also sue his or her neighbour (whether that neighbour be a person, firm, or collective) which pollutes the property of the person issuing the suit. Not only would the polluter have to deal with the community shunning them, but they would have to take a monetary loss to pay the person or persons whose property the polluter damaged. This would include damage to streams and to air that the resident has to breathe.
She heard my argument, and agreed that it would provide a stronger sting to the polluter than the anarcho-syndicalist approach. It was about this time that I realised I was an anarchist. With the ability to sue those who polluted, is an EPA really necessary? If your factory is polluting the air on my property, then it's causing damage to my property not only by making the plants and such that grow thereon suffer, but by decreasing the overall value of my property, for given the option to buy two identical homes, one will likely choose the one without the looming cloud of smoke than the one with.
I had already been familiar with other libertarian arguments for improving the environment,34567 but had until this point still regarded the EPA as necessary. With the rejection of this premise I was easily able to reject the premise that food labelling be required of the government, which had rested primarily on the idea that if we were going to have an EPA, we might as well have this as well.
So there I found myself, no longer needing to justify the state. The state, it seems, is the object of idealists, not of realists; idealists who believe they can shape the world into something that it is not through allowing coercion to prevail, instead of accepting the reality of man for what it is.
I have for quite some time been of the opinion that minarchists and anarchists were both valuable to the libertarian movement. And I maintain this belief. As I said to Mr. Aaron Biterman, minarchy is worth defending, as its application would improve the quality and condition of our lives a million-fold. Anarchists are valuable to the movement as they are the heart and soul of the movement. They are our radical side, the side which pushes the idea that Liberty is a goal in and of itself, which should be cherished fully. They are the ethicists. Minarchists are important to the movement because they communicate our ideas to people who would be scared off by the idea of absolutely no government, as I had been for quite some time. They are the proof for would-be libertarians that one does not have to be an anarchist to wish to provide defence to Liberty. They make people comfortable, so that we can all work together in our shared goal of reducing the power of government.
Harry Browne, when he was alive, disliked very much discussing the minarchist/anarchist divide in the libertarian movement, and with good reason: we share goals, why not work together to achieve them? He would often say that if we ever get to the point where we lived under a state of reduced power, that that would be appropriate best time to really debating whether anarchism or minarchism would be an appropriate end. He would also say that it was never his intention to stick his foot out and trip anyone whose goal was to limit the state; that although we may disagree about the end goal, or the best means of reaching it, as long as we were working peaceably toward Liberty, we shouldn't try to bring each other down. I am indebted to Mr. Browne’s wisdom.
I wish to make it clear that I have no ill-will to my minarchist allies. I intend to continue supporting the Libertarian Party, which I view to be a minarchist party. I sincerely hope that none of my minarchist friends feel suddenly detached from me due to this conversion.
Footnotes
1. The first clause of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution reads, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”
2. The Constitution actually doesn’t afford the government any true authority, as Lysander Spooner pointed out in his work No Treason.
3. Mary Ruwart. “Libertarian Solutions: The Pollution Solution: Stopping the environment’s worst enemy.” LP News (June 1999). <http://www.lp.org/lpn/9906-environment.html>.
4. Mary Ruwart. “Pollution Solution II: Restoration as a tool to save the environment.” LP News (July 1999). <http://www.lp.org/lpn/9907-pollution.html>.
5. Bill Winter. “Saving the environment starts with stopping the government.” Liberty News. (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1973). <http://www.liberty-news.com/showNewsletter.php?id=200308301&src=>.
6. Murray Newton Rothbard. “Conservation, Ecology, and Growth.” For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Second Edition. (New York, NY: Collier Books, 1978). Ch. 13, p. 247-268. <http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty12.asp>.
7. I have not yet read this work, but I should like to if I ever find the time. Murray Newton Rothbard. “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution.” Cato Journal 2, No. 1 (Spring 1982). P. 55-99.
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