Posted on 01/14/2002 6:38:35 AM PST by SteamshipTime
Anarchy, I must point out, is not synonymous, at least in my mind, with bomb-throwing lunatics, or rioting in the streets. It is as placid as a pond, as peaceful as a park. There is nothing chaotic about it. It is certainly not the absence of government, but only of government imposed by strangers. The anarchist governs himself, based upon principles found to be enduring and valuable: the Ten Commandments, for example. Anarchy has been the basis of society, long prior to the existence of government. Does your family have bylaws? Are there regular elections, or meetings for the sake of writing new laws to cope with new problems? Do family members regularly charge one another with violations of the law, and demand justice, as meted out by strangers? Not in my family. Family members may disagree, of course, but these disagreements are worked out and eventually settled without recourse to written statutes or judges. No lawyers are necessary. God’s law, we have been taught, is written on our hearts. We don’t need to quibble about the precise meaning of words in laws because we all know, instinctively, what is right and fair, and what isn’t. It is only when we leave the family that we encounter the world of legalisms. As a physician, I am on the staff of several hospitals. All have staff bylaws. These are bulky multi-page documents, intended to deal with any and every circumstance surrounding a physician’s staff privileges. Before being accepted on the staff, you must sign the bylaws and agree to abide by them. Indeed, one hospital even affixes to its signature-line the jurat that the signer will be bound not only by these bylaws, but by any additions that may be made in the future. Astonishingly, this absurdity seems to provoke little reaction from the doctors. Perhaps that is because they realize that the bylaws don’t mean anything anyway, but exist mainly to provide the hospital with justification for acting against a particular physician if his actions might be considered dangerous to the hospital. Strangers from hospital-accreditation, who, ultimately, control the purse strings, require them. The laws of your local community, not to mention state and federal governments, are sufficiently numerous and complex that you cannot possibly know them, although ignorance of the law – an excellent excuse for any alleged lawbreaker—is considered no excuse by the lawmakers, who may profit from infractions. You manage your day to day activities quite nicely without reference to these countless regulations. Indeed, were you to consider them prior to acting, you would be reduced to inactivity; they would overwhelm you. In fact, the innumerable laws which are said to apply to all of us are out of our thoughts. That undeniable fact is, in itself, an excellent argument for anarchy. We have government, with its innumerable laws, but we function as though we didn’t, because otherwise we’d spend more time pouring over the statute-books, and haggling over definitions, than doing our work. Moreover, the government itself, though passing new laws with alacrity, pays little attention to them, at least where its self-interest is concerned. It does what it thinks it must do, and if its actions are prohibited by the laws, it ignores them. The proof of this is all around us. To wit: "No state shall make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender for debt." That constitutional provision would virtually eradicate our economic problems; the government not only ignores it, but violates it. Actions not specifically permitted to government by the constitution are denied it. Nearly all of the government’s actions are, by this constitutional standard, unconstitutional. Does anyone in Washington care? Do most Americans? The written laws are tools to be used, when it is considered desirable to do so, against individuals and corporations, except the federal corporation, which ignores any laws it finds oppressive. What keeps society together are not the myriad laws imposed by government, to be applied as needed; it is the law written on our hearts. The shootings at schools around the country have undoubtedly stimulated a new outpouring of laws, but there are already numerous laws prohibiting shootings at schools, or anywhere else. "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is the relevant law, and it’s already written, though not taught. Indeed, it is forbidden to be taught in many schools. Therein lies the problem! There is freedom in the law, we are told, but that is only true if it is God’s law, not that of some strangers who call themselves government. Those laws bring slavery. Indeed, that may be their purpose.
I believe it was Chesterton who remarked that Christianity had not failed; it had not been tried. And Ayn Rand described capitalism as the unknown ideal. I would like to suggest, in a similar vein, that anarchy has been tried, is being tried and is a universal success, but remains an unknown ideal. I’ll explain.
Well, that's pretty much what I was talking about. The difference was that you couldn't escape the protection rackets in the river valleys. You're in the Nile Valley. Somebody grabs control of the irrigation system and says you gotta pay up or else. What do you do? Walk off into the desert?
The first agriculture seems to have been in Turkey but the state didn't appear until thousands of years later. It has to intensify before they can catch you in their racket. Otherwise you just walk away from the jerkfaces and set up a new farm elsewhere.
LOL! Guess it depends on how many years you figure you got left. I don't suppose I have all that many left to waste paying crooks for screwing me all these years. So, seeings we've already GOT those cages down in Cuba, whats to lose? I do see your point, but when you award people who've defrauded you, it just encourages the crooks among us to do more of the same.
Yeah, in todays world they're called democrats.
Even an Honorable Society needs occassional enforcement of it's established principles. I would view this governance as a form of Anarchy. Blackbird.
Probably, and I certainly don't have the answer to that problem either. Actually, I have a lot more questions than I have answers, but we were warned that our government would only work for a 'moral' people and that certainly doesn't describe US any more, does it?
You talk of government as if it were a foreign entity imposed on society.
You replied:
That is precisely what it is. A government may, as you say, be organic and grow out of its community (or more accurately, out of previous governments). But that does not change its purpose - which is to control and manipulate the development of that community. It imposes a system of law and order instead of letting the market choose the mechanisms for self-defense and conflict resolution which work best.
You speak of the government as a thing, an abstraction. But the government is a group of human beings, who share a language, a history, and a culture. And like all human beings, they are fallible. Some are even evil, and they do evil things. The point is, the "government" is not so very different from the "society" that produced it. Even the worst governments must have the support of a sizeable fraction of the ppulation they govern.
You also speak of the market as a thing, an abstraction. But it too is made up of fallible human beings, some of whom are evil. There is no guarantee that a free market will form spontaneously in a given society, or that it will "choose the mechanisms for self-defense and conflict resolution which work best."
I wrote:
Have you considered why there are no anarchistic societies anywhere today?
You replied:
Historically, they have been conquered by states. Once installed, the state has been extremely difficult to weed out.
This is not a ringing endorsement of anarchies. Apparently, anarchies cannot compete with other forms of social organization. Who wants to be conquered by a foreign people?
I wrote:
What sort of society would be required for anarchy to form and florish spontaneously?
You replied:
Well, the first step is obviously for people to recognize that such a thing is thinkable.
I would say that a second would be a recognition of the right to individual secession. A friend of mine has this dream of buying an island in the Straits of Juan de Fuca and making her own country. Why the hell shouldn't she have the right to do precisely that?
Getting people to think is a good first step, and you certainly are doing that here. (I am not sure how "individual secession" would work in practice, however.)
I would add that the people must possess certain virtues -- such as honesty, self-restraint, and self-reliance -- for any free society to exist.
A government is very different from the society that produces it.
von Mises, in his “Socialism”, proves that even in a perfect world, The State is incapable of performing the objectives which we set out for it. This is because it has no way to measure the progress of its endeavors. There is no yardstick by which we can judge progress so it engages in movement for the sake of movement. This we call bureaucratic waste. This in itself is unacceptable – but the truth is far worse.
People are not perfect. They have foibles and weaknesses. The State, by its very nature is evil. It is not a reflection of the Public but rather a perverse and distorted amplification of the Public's worse tendencies.
Here’s a definition of a state for you: a State is an agency that exists for the distribution of stolen goods to politically favored groups. It takes money from the productive through taxes and distributes it to groups that are well connected. Since it rests on a foundation of theft, it necessarily is corrupt. All its actions serve to increase the amount of theft and create new groups of parasites to live off that theft.
The primary mechanism that the State uses to incite one man against his fellow is War. In fact, the only thing the State is capable of is war and destruction. Nock said that war is the health of the State. At each war, the State increases its power and pushes the individual under its control a bit further. WWI brought the Income Tax. WWII turned it from a class tax into a mass tax. The power of the State increases. The freedom of the people declines.
Democracies have found new kinds of wars to wage. The War against Poverty. The War against Racism. Against Domestic Violence. Against Crime. Against Drugs. Against Illiteracy. Now, a War against Terrorism. The beauty of these new wars is that they can never be won, since they are wars against human nature itself. Thus the goal fades off into the future and the battle is waged for its own sake, causing still more destruction. The process has already started in the war on terrorism. bin Laden increasingly is forgotten is new countries fall on the scrutiny of the warriors.
Since the only purpose of the State is to create parasites to feed off the productive and the way it does this it through war on human nature, the inevitable result is that agents of State worsen the problems they are designed to correct. Welfare causes poverty. The court system causes crimes. The schools cause illiteracy. The CIA causes insecurity. The Defense department causes war. Etc.
No, the State is very different from the society that produces it. The market brings out the best in bad people. The State brings out the worst in good ones.
A market is not people. It is the mechanism which a self-ordering system uses choosing between options. It does not require people to operate. But human society is a self-ordering system and consequently it progresses and evolves through markets. Despite the claims of the socialists, all human societies have progressed this way. No exceptions.
While markets are not perfect, they come pretty close. More to the point, they are the only mechanism which has been demonstrated to work at all. Perfect socialism is perfect stasis and states can only function at all in so far as they allow freedom of action to their citizens. Which is precisely why the West won against Communism. More liberty.
You said: This is not a ringing endorsement of anarchies. Apparently, anarchies cannot compete with other forms of social organization. Who wants to be conquered by a foreign people?
True it is not. Ultimately all states have ever been good for is to protect you from other states. Which is not a ringing endorsement of states.
Historically states have won over non-states (and it’s important to note that there have been examples of non-state non-primitive societies) because of two factors: bigger firepower and the element of surprise. The real danger has always been the hordes which suddenly appear at the horizon in ship or on horseback armed with new and more dangerous weapons.
These factors are a lot less important today than they were even fifty years ago.
Pearl Harbor could never happen in today’s world. They would have spotted the fleet the second it left Tokyo Harbor.
More to the point, it is possible to make yourself an extremely unattractive target for relatively little money. The doctrine of MAD works. Combine it a Swiss-style defensive military and no one is going to attack.
The greatest thing about the market is that it forces rich people to act precisely as if they cared for the poor - John Robson
The didn't arise spontaneously as a governments, their evolution to a government probably required many generations. They began as nomads, pillaging and plundering agricultural communities. This evolved to something resembling the protection racket of modern organised crime (a primitive form of government itself) collecting tribute from such a community, and then finally to a governing, taxing relation. This (the Gumplowicsz-Opppenheimer theory) is a widely accepted explanation of the origin of the state. That social contract stuff is a lot of bunk. Governments grew out of aggression and plunder. Lawmaking and other activites typical of government can all be explained as motivated by a desire to maximise production of goods by the laboring subjects.
But the discussion here is about governments in general, not the U.S. government in particular, which, historically at least, has been less bad than most governments. But the fact that the world average annual govermental murder rate for the 20th century is 6 times the historical criminal homicide rate in the U.S. is less than a sterling endorsement of government in general.
Nonsense. If we set limited, well-defined objectives for the state we can determine whether those objectives are being met satisfactorily. Those who expect government to provide a paradise on earth are bound to be disappointed; but I am not one of those. (By the way, I was not aware than von Mises was an anarchist; would he have accepted the label?)
People are not perfect. They have foibles and weaknesses. The State, by its very nature is evil.It is not a reflection of the Public but rather a perverse and distorted amplification of the Public's worse tendencies.
You remind me of the gun-grabbers who say that a gun by its very nature is evil. Guns are tools; they are neither good or bad unless used for good or bad purposes. Likewise, any human organization may be used for good or ill. The state is evil when it does evil.
Here’s a definition of a state for you: a State is an agency that exists for the distribution of stolen goods to politically favored groups. It takes money from the productive through taxes and distributes it to groups that are well connected. Since it rests on a foundation of theft, it necessarily is corrupt. All its actions serve to increase the amount of theft and create new groups of parasites to live off that theft.
Your definition is, of course, a caricature. (Who says that a government has to tax?) Nor does it apply to governments alone: individuals and non-governmental groups are perfectly capable of theft.
The primary mechanism that the State uses to incite one man against his fellow is War. In fact, the only thing the State is capable of is war and destruction. Nock said that war is the health of the State. At each war, the State increases its power and pushes the individual under its control a bit further. WWI brought the Income Tax. WWII turned it from a class tax into a mass tax. The power of the State increases. The freedom of the people declines.
The state did not create war; it might be more accurate to say that war created the state. You said as much yourself when you admitted that there are no anarchies because they have be conquered. That admission makes the rest of your argument pointless: why bother with an arrangement that cannot survive in the real world?
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not the answer to the problem. I appreciate you pointing that out.
This is a truly astonishing statement. Markets operating without people? How is that possible? (And what would be the point?)
On 11 September 2001, the terrorists managed to attack without a fleet.
More to the point, it is possible to make yourself an extremely unattractive target for relatively little money. The doctrine of MAD works. Combine it a Swiss-style defensive military and no one is going to attack.
I agree, and I think the Founders would agree too. However, note that MAD depends on nuclear weapons, which were the product of a modern state. It is doubtful that a private firm would have been able to carry out the Manhatten project.
It is pointless to talk about governments in general. None of us has to deal with government in general, but with a particular government. The details are important. Why has the U.S. government been less bad than most? What can we learn from that?
I think it's obvious the peolple have been way too lazy for too many decades. Blackbird.
I agree that we've become lazy, but I don't know that I'd go so far as to say 'most'individuals still have some morality. There's virtually no one left who doesn't do things that they themselves deem to be immoral, if you only consider that they go on paying taxes that buys things they find morally reprehensible. In just that one small item, we have been completely 'rotted' by those at the rotten head. And even though this tax is still 'voluntary', people keep right on paying it (knowing its wrong) because they don't have the faith and strength of their fathers to rebel against it. If 'most' didn't go along with it, it couldn't be rammed down the throats of the few who would stand against it.
You say there's nothing wrong with the Republic that can't be fixed and that its up to the people. I agree. I just don't have your faith that even a small percentage of the people will ever rise up and flatly refuse to adhere to the gazillions of unlawful laws that have deposed the Republic and replaced it with mobocracy. In today's world, 'most' don't even recognise the fact that so many of these laws ARE unlawful.
That may be, but nevertheless up to this point the thread has dealt mainly with government in general, the principle of government, not particular governments.
Yes, I should be working too. Have a good trip.
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