So today I want to start off talking about what a legal system is or what I take a legal system to be.
I take it to be an institution or a set of institutions that provides dispute resolution in a systematic and orderly way.
And it typically does this through the exercise of three functions, the judicial, the legislative and the executive.
Now I think the judicial function is actually the central core of what a legal system does.
The judicial function is the adjudication of disputes.
Then we're going to say that the legislative function is the function of determining the
rules in accordance with which these disputes will be adjudicated.
These may or may not be functions exercised by distinct institutions.
You could have a system, for example, where a legislature passes laws, exercising the legislative function, and then the judiciary applies them.
That would be sort of a strong separation between them.
Or you could have like a common law system where laws arise and legal precedents arise through judicial precedent.
And so the results of earlier decisions are what provide the rules for later ones.
Or you could have a mixed system, as we do.
Then there's the executive function, which I think is fundamentally the function of securing compliance with the result of adjudication.
Meaning, on the one hand, getting people to submit to adjudication and then getting them to abide by whatever the result of the adjudication is.
and this might be done by force.
You force people or it can be done through
informal means like boycott
or it can be done by some combination of the two.
But insofar as something's doing those things,
it's doing the things we think of as typical
of the legal system.
Well, given that sense, what should we say a state is?
Well, I would use state and government interchangeably.
There are contexts where they have different meanings,
But for present purposes, I'll treat them both as equivalent and say that a state is any organization that claims and in large part achieves a forcibly maintained monopoly within a given territory of these legal functions and particularly of the use of force in the executive function.
So let me say something about the various parts of that definition.
I say in large part achieving, because I don't think any state actually succeeds entirely in having a forcibly maintained monopoly of any of these functions.
The fact that the mafia may decide forcibly to arbitrate some dispute among some of its members or something doesn't mean we're not living under a state.
It has to be the case that the state just by and large manages to maintain this monopoly.
I say monopoly within a given territory, this is trying to capture sort of the traditional
Bavarian conception of the state as territorial monopoly.
And I say forcibly maintained because if the monopoly isn't maintained by force, then you
could say well it's not really a state because they're open to competition, it's just that
and no competition has arisen. So it's a competitive system in the Austrian sense, though not say in the neoclassical.
Well, what's wrong with having a state? What's wrong with having a forcible monopoly?
Well, as I've said before in saying why I think that there's a basic justification for libertarian rights to begin with,
I think that there's a presumption in favor of a kind of equality and authority.
This is the kind of equality that Locke talks about when he says we're all born free, equal, and independent.
And the way he puts it is that there are no marks to justify the subordination of some people to others.
and the both the general fact of other concern of agent neutrality seems to favor this idea as well as this more specific concern that to live a fully human life we should deal with each other through reason and persuasion wherever possible it seems to justify a general approach where it can't be the case that some people claim authority over others and not vice versa but anytime
Every time you have a forcible monopoly of something, you are there by claiming that you've got some authority to do something that no one else has.
Whereas, you know, if what you're doing is just, then you should allow anyone else to do it too.
If the service you're providing is one that it is just to provide, then you have no right to exclude others from providing it.
If the service you're providing is unjust, then you shouldn't be providing it at all.
There's no basis for saying, me and my gang are the only ones who have the right to provide this service.
Now, Locke, from whom I borrowed this notion of equality and authority,
Locke famously thinks that there are some reasons why we need to have a state,
that there are certain, as he puts it, inconveniences of the state of nature.
And in this context he means inconveniences of anarchy.
The term state of nature doesn't mean the same thing as absence of a state for Locke,
but for this purpose we could treat them as equivalent.
And although this isn't usually noticed, the three problems that he mentions for anarchy
line up interestingly with the three traditional functions of the legal system.
seems as though one of his arguments is an argument for a monopoly legislature,
one of them is an argument for a monopoly judiciary,
and one of them is an argument for a monopoly executive.
Why is that the case? Well, let's start with the legislative one.
He gives this as a reason for why we shouldn't have anarchy,
and I'm going to try and use this as a reason for why we should.
Alright, so his legislative objection is
if you don't have a central government, if you just have people free to go around
with their own interpretations of justice, people have different interpretations of justice.
They have different interpretations of natural law, they have different interpretations of what
is permissible to do, and so
And even when people can grasp, you know, sort of the general principles, it would be difficult to figure out how to apply them.
You know, a lot of the cases we've talked about this week are cases where people might agree on general principles,
but it can be a matter of dispute on how exactly we apply them.
And so therefore, this is a problem Block thinks with anarchy.
Well, I'm going to say, certainly it's a pervasive feature of the human condition
that people have different interpretations of the requirements of justice.
That's going to be true under anarchy, but it's also going to be true under government.
Ordinarily, the people in government, the people who are administering the monopoly legal system,
will disagree with each other about the interpretations of justice.
I mean, it seems pretty clear that not everyone in the current U.S. government
is unanimous on interpretations of justice. I just saw a speech by Ron Paul last night on C-SPAN.
It seemed to me that his interpretation of justice might be different from George Bush's.
So it's not as though there cease to be competing interpretations of justice under government.
The answer would be, well, yes, sure, but there's a way of dealing with them under government.
Under government you have constitutional constraints, you have checks and balances and so forth,
and I'll say, well, yes, sure, fine, but why do you assume that that's not the case under anarchy?
Under anarchy there are checks and balances too, that is, there are incentives, there are various incentives for people to do things.
The point of constitutional design is that a government is supposed to be structured in such a way
There's a way that people have an incentive to work together and reach some reasonable solution rather than fighting it out when they have different interpretations of justice.
But there are also incentives under anarchy for people to work their disputes out peacefully rather than fighting it out.
I would argue that they have more incentive because under anarchy it's harder for them to externalize their costs.
They're less likely to choose violent conflict if you have to pay the cost of it.
That's something we'll talk about more later.
But I think that anarchy shouldn't be seen as an absence of checks and balances.
I think it should be seen as sort of taking checks and balances to the, you know, to its own biological conclusion.
and could sort of start a new check and balance.
Another thing is people often assume
that there's going to be less legal uniformity
under anarchy than under government
because some people all know
that there are different legal interpretations.
But I think there's actually a reason to expect
that there might be more legal uniformity under anarchy.
Example I would point to is the law merchant,
which was a system of commercial law during the late middle ages and early renaissance.
And part of the story of how it emerged was this. This is a period when international
trade was increasing, the mercantile class was growing, there was much more trade going
on and so you had many more cases in which merchants from different countries would be
be entering into agreements with each other, commercial contracts of various kinds.
However, the commercial laws of these countries were lagging behind in the situation.
Each country had a completely different set of legal standards governing commerce and governing contracts.
And it was often the case that the courts of one country simply would not recognize or enforce contracts
that were made under the laws of another country.
So this is a case where there was insufficient legal uniformity.
So the merchants complained, but the government court is a monopoly, so they're not that responsive to such complaints, they just said to the merchants, you know, go shove it.
So instead the merchants got together and they formed their own system of commercial law in courts. They were an international character.
Now they couldn't enforce these through force because they had governments that were largely monopolizing that.
They enforce it primarily through boycotts and things like credit reports and so forth.
If you wouldn't submit your disputes to the merchant court, if you did, but you didn't abide by them later,
then they'd spread the news saying, here's the person who doesn't abide by the decisions of the merchant court,
take that into account when deciding whether to deal with them.
And so this is a case where the mercantile law was actually more uniform than the law that was being provided by government.
Well, think about standardization in general. There are all sorts of economic incentives to move toward standardization.
One example I like to use is, why are there no triangular credit cards?
Where did someone decide to start a credit card company and start issuing triangular cards?
Is that illegal? Not as far as I know. I mean, I suppose it might be. There are a lot of laws out there.
But it doesn't seem as though you have to assume it's illegal in order to understand why no one's doing it.
If someone issued triangular credit cards, there wouldn't be much demand for them, because they don't fit in the ATM machine, they don't fit into the machines where they take the imprint or where they charge you, they don't fit into wallets very well, so we don't need a law forbidding triangular credit cards, triangular credit cards are just not going to be that popular.
Lots of cases where, you know, look at the fact that it used to be that PCs and apples were completely incompatible with each other, that a disk from one couldn't go in the other.
And now they're more compatible, it's still not perfect, but they're much more compatible with each other.
There wasn't any law saying it, it's just that, you know, you can sell more of your computers if you make them compatible with the other guy's computers.
Another reason why we should have reason to doubt Locke's claim that an absence of generally known legal standards is a problem for anarchy is that states have an incentive to overproduce laws, states have published, regardless of what the content of them is, they publish these huge telephone book sized chunks of legislation and they're constantly spewing them out.
If you try to keep track of all the laws, but Congress passes, just go with Congress, forget about all the state governments, forget about all the regulatory agencies, just go with what Congress produces.
You couldn't possibly read through it all. Even if the content of it was excellent stuff, which I wouldn't count on, and of course most of the people in Congress have no idea what's in it either.
There's an incentive for states to do this because they're not restrained by market demand.
A market would not want so many laws that you couldn't keep track of what they were.
It was very hard to find out what's legal and what's illegal.
Some regulatory agency will find some chunk of the law that it turns out you violated,
but it's very hard if you know ahead of time.
I mean, you can hire teams of lawyers and they'll try to find out for you.
Well, I think that states have an incentive to do this in a way that market agencies wouldn't.
But I think that if there are so many laws, and they're constantly being more being produced,
I think that's the functional equivalent of there not being a generally known law.
It's traditionally part of the law that it has to be promulgated.
It has to be announced to people what it is.
You could say these things are promulgated.
There are places where you can go and look it up,
but if you couldn't read through all the laws that apply to you in your lifetime,
unless you sort of give up everything else and just spend your whole life reading these things,
Reading these things, in some sense, there is no generally known and settled law.
It's not known because it's too huge to read.
It's not settled because more of it's coming out in vast and readable chunks every month.
So I think it's the state that's more likely to be subject to this problem.
All right, second there is what, another defect that Locke thinks he sees with anarchy,
which I am going to call the judicial defect.
Locke thinks that it's a bad idea for people to be judges in their own case.
It's a bad idea if I've got some dispute with you and I decide to be judge-jury and executioner.
I decide, you know, I try the case myself as it were, I decide that you're guilty and I'm innocent
and then I impose on you whatever penalty I think is appropriate.
Locke thinks that's a bad idea, thinks that people are likely to be biased.
But Locke thinks, well, that's inevitable under anarchy
Because under anarchy, everyone's equal, so everyone has an equal right to, you can't have a special cadre of people who are judges and everyone else not.
Either everyone has the right to judge the law of nature or no one does. Everyone has the right to enforce the law of nature or no one does.
And so he thinks that it's appropriate for people under anarchy to be judges in their own case, but that's a defect of anarchy.
And it's a good thing if we can get ourselves out of that.
It's a good thing if we, it'd be much more civilized and much more reliable way of doing things if we agree to submit our disputes to a third-party arbiter.
Well, I think that's generally a good idea, when a third-party arbiter is available.
There may be cases where you've got to do something instantly, like someone's attacking you and you can't defer to a third-party arbiter.
But in cases where you can, it does seem a more civilized way of behaving to do it rather than simply sort of unilaterally impose your judgment on the case.
But I think that Locke is mistaken in thinking that under anarchy, people have to be judges in their own case.
Suppose you accept the rule that everyone should submit their disputes to a third party arbiter.
Does that imply you have to have a government? I don't think so because I
don't think it implies there has to be a single third-party arbiter to whom
everyone submits their disputes. If you have an example of a fallacy of composition,
it's like saying everybody likes at least one TV show therefore there's at
least one TV show that everybody likes. That would be a fallacious inference. So
for example suppose you've got a simplified scenario, you've got three
Three people on a desert island, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, or Larry, Moe, and Curly, or whatever
you prefer, and they have disputes with each other and they should submit it to a third-party
arbiter. Does that mean that Larry and Moe should pick Curly as their king and submit
all their disputes to him? Not necessarily. Any dispute between Larry and Moe can be settled
by Curly. Any dispute between Larry and Curly can be settled by Moe. Any dispute between
Curly and Moe can be settled by Larry.
Now that's a very simple setup,
but expanding that more broadly,
there's no reason you can't have,
you can easily have a case where everyone's disputes
are referred to some neutral party as an arbiter
without it being the case
that there's a single overarching arbiter
or body of arbiters for the whole society.
And in fact, this is often what we find in stateless or near stateless societies.
In the Old Western frontier, for example, it was very common if you and I have a dispute,
then I pick someone I trust, you pick someone you trust, and those two people get together without us
and pick a third person they both trust, and then the three of them arbitrate our dispute by majority vote.
Perfect system? No, but it works fine. Enough.
But I think it's not just the case that anarchy can allow for the requirement not to be judged in your own case.
Probably the only anarchy can.
Let's go back to the island of Larry, Moe and Curly.
Suppose they didn't adopt the anarchist solution.
Suppose instead they picked one of them, Curly, to be the emperor, and Larry and most of it all their disputes to him.
Well fine, but now what happens if one of them has a dispute with the emperor?
Well, if the emperor is the arbiter of all disputes, the emperor is going to have to be the arbiter of this dispute.
So likewise, if you set up a government to arbitrate disputes among people in society, what happens if you have a dispute with the government?
Well, you could say, all right, yeah, but the government comes in different branches.
And if you have a dispute with one branch, it can be arbitrated by another branch.
Well, that's better than nothing.
You know, it's better to have it arbitrated by a different branch than by the same branch.
But still, you know, if you had a dispute with the marketing division of General Motors
and you were told that it was going to be settled by the legal division of General Motors,
you know, you might not feel that confident about the result.
Certainly, governments with divided powers are all other things being equal better than governments without divided powers, but still it seems like anarchy is a case where you've got it in effect divided still further.
It's only to the extent that the situation is anarchic that you've got a situation where nobody is a judge in their own case.
And certainly we know that this isn't a purely theoretical question.
Those governments in general do tend to act as judges in their own case.
There are lots of things you're not allowed to sue the government for.
Now, there are some things you are, but suppose I wanted to sue the Supreme Court.
Well, who's going to adjudicate that?
That seems unpromising.
The final objection that Locke has to anarchy is the one that seems to have to do with the executive function, with enforcement and organized force and defense.
He says, look, if everyone goes around acting as their own individual police or defense,
if there's no unified defense for the entire community, just each person goes around defending
themselves, that may be fine on a case-by-case basis or person-to-person basis.
But if there's any sort of organized threat, you as an individual all by yourself are not
not really in a very good position to defend yourself.
Well, I think that Locke is confusing monopoly with organization.
What Locke is saying is you need some sort of organized or coordinated defense.
It's not a good idea just to have everyone individually defend themselves and let it
be at that.
In many cases where it's better if you coordinate work together.
Well, that seems fair enough, but that doesn't show that it has to be a government monopoly.
And you could make the same argument for why there should be a government monopoly on shoes.
Think how inefficient it would be if everyone made their own shoes.
If I had to make my own shoes now, I mean, I wouldn't even know how to start.
Whatever I came up with would be a pretty sorry attempt.
And so you could say, well, you don't want everyone making their own shoes, so therefore
there has to be one monopoly agency that makes shoes for everyone.
Well, I don't see why, you could have, under our system, you know, there are many different
providers of shoes, and they provide different kinds of shoes, and some are expensive shoes,
and some are cheap, and some are good shoes, and some are bad, and you can still make your
own shoes if you want, but you're not forced to.
The fact that it's a good idea to have some sort of coordinated effort of making shoes
doesn't mean that there has to be some single unified agency for the whole community.
Also, it doesn't mean that other providers have to be excluded.
Also, I think that a problem lock fails to notice is,
well, we notice this in another context, which I'll get to,
we notice that if you're worried about organized threats that are hard to defend against,
creates an organized threat that it's hard to defend against.
And the extent that you create a monopoly agency
that monopolizes more and more of the means of force,
to that extent you're creating something
that's harder for you to defend against.
Now these criticisms that I'm making of Locke
are all in a way inspired by Locke.
Because there's the sorts of criticisms
that Locke himself makes against absolute monarchy.
This Locke is replying, among other things,
to Hobbes' argument that any government is better than anarchy.
So Hobbes thought that anarchy is so bad, it's so hard to get cooperation going under anarchy that you're better off with any government no matter how oppressive and then in fact an absolute monarch is better because if you have a government with divided powers then since Hobbes thinks it's hard to get cooperation going unless you've got someone above the cooperators forcing them to cooperate then if you have a government with divided powers you know that's too much like anarchy to be stable so the ideal government is going to be one where everything is
Unified, and therefore you should never have a revolution, Hoppe's thought.
Chris Locke is writing in the period going up to the revolution of 1688, and so he's
trying to justify a revolution not to prevent one.
So-called Glorious Revolution, although I think that's too kind a description of it.
It has good points and it's bad points.
If you're English and Protestant, it had its good points.
If you were Catholic and Irish or Scottish, it had its bad points.
But anyway, since Locke was trying to justify a revolution,
it's not as if Locke was such a big fan of William and Mary anyway,
but that's another story.
Anyway, so Locke wants to argue that although he agrees with Hobbes
that anarchy has problems, the problems that Locke is talking about
are not as severe as the problems Hobbes talks about.
Hobbes thinks that it's impossible to get cooperation going
without some sort of authority over them.
Which is not sort of you,
because if you figure out what it means to set up authority,
it seems that you have to cooperate to set up the authority,
so it's hard to see how cooperation could presuppose it.
Anyway, Locke is more optimistic than Hobbes
about the possibility of cooperation.
He does see certain objections to anarchy,
and therefore thinks these are reasons
to set up a government,
but Locke thinks that these objections to anarchy
apply with even more force to absolute monarchy.
For example, he thinks that absolute monarchy is not a solution to the legislative problem because under anarchy the law is just whatever the king says and he can change it any time so there is no known and settled body of law.
And absolute monarchy doesn't solve the judicial problem because the king is always going to be a judge in his own case if you don't have a divided system of powers.
And the absolute monarch isn't going to be a solution to the executive problem
because the absolute monarch is going to have so much power it's going to be hard to defend against him.
So really, in a sense, I'm following Locke's footsteps in the arguments I'm giving against Locke.
I'm going to say to Locke, yeah, you're right that these objections you give to anarchy apply with even more force steps with monarchy.
But then I want to say, and actually they apply even to the watered-down version of government that you want, and they don't apply to anarchy in the way that he thinks.
Well, what sorts of replies can be or are given to this kind of argument?
Well, one argument a lot of people want to give against anarchy is the use of force needs to be subject to constitutional restraint.
Under government, you've got a government, the government has vast powers to use force, but it's restrained by constitution.
Whereas under anarchy, anyone can go around using any kind of force they want, and that seems much more problematic.
Well, I want to say, yes, it's a good idea for the use of force to be subject to constitutional restraint.
But what kind of constitutional restraint are we talking about?
There's a sense in which, if by constitution you simply mean a written constitution, with a list of rules saying the government shall do this, the government shall not do that, that's not much of a restraint.
If you look at the old Soviet constitution, it guaranteed freedom of speech.
For a mathematician, you can look at stuff in our constitution that you might not think the government is paying scrupulous attention to.
So just writing something on a piece of paper is not the kind of restraint we need.
We need constitutional restraints in the older sense, not of stuff written on a piece of paper, but ways in which the political and social institutions are structured in such a way as to create incentives to preserve liberty rather than to impede it.
and even things like checks and balances.
Checks and balances aren't just sort of things written in the Constitution,
it's supposed to be things whereby if one branch of government starts to get out of hand,
you try to structure it so that another branch of government will have the incentive to stop them.
That was at least the theory behind the U.S. Constitution,
at least you read the sorts of things that Madison writes about it,
that was at least his theory behind the Constitution.
I would say it didn't work very well, but anyway that was the plan, but of course if by constitutional restraints you mean not what's written on a piece of paper but the way that institutions actually function and the ways in which they have incentives to help each other or interfere with each other and so forth, then you can see that constitutional restraints are perfectly possible under anarchy. Anarchy will have constitutional restraints too in that sense. There will be institutions
It's a mistake to think of constitutional restraints as some sort of magical free-floating things that exist independently of the actions of people.
But in fact, the constitutional restraints exist only insofar as people act in certain ways.
Unless you mean just the things that are written on yellowing pieces of paper in the National Archives.
But if you mean actual incentive structures.
Well, the actual incentive structures in society don't exist apart from people acting.
This is sort of related to what I was saying at the end of last time about, you know,
when you talk about the market will take care of it, you could say, well, the Constitution will take care of it.
But part of the Constitution is taking care of things is people doing stuff.
Now another objection people often have is, well look, you libertarian free market type anarchists want to provide legal services through a market.
But a functioning market presupposes a functioning legal order.
This is an argument that Randians, for example, often give, that a market presupposes that there are stable and secure titles to property, that are traded back and forth and so on, and that can't be the case unless property rights are generally protected, and that can't be the case unless you've got a functioning legal order, and therefore, before you can have a functioning market, the legal order has to be already in place, and therefore the legal order cannot be produced by the market.
Well, the problem is, if that argument worked, the reverse argument would also work.
You can't have a functioning legal order without a functioning economic order,
because where's the legal order going to get the money and the resources to do its stuff?
A government requires resources. You might say, well, there already have to be people growing food
and people producing various kinds of economic goods and services
in order for you to even have a legal order.
The people who are going around adjudicating disputes
must not be spending all their time in agriculture or hunting.
So there must be already some existing thing going on.
I think the mistake is to think that requiring means presupposing
in the sense of thinking that something has to be there already.
It's terrifically true.
You cannot have a functioning market
without a functioning legal order of some kind.
You can't have a functioning legal order without a functioning market of some kind.
And so you can say, well, you know, which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Well, I can't answer the chicken and egg one, but in this case, I think the answer is
that a functioning market and a functioning legal order have to arise together.
Which makes sense. I mean, if you think of different kinds of society,
you think of less complex, less, you know, societies as institutions are less fully developed.
There's some primitive market order there, and there's some primitive legal order there.
People are growing stuff and exchanging in some way, or cooperating in some way,
and there's also some mechanism for resolving disputes.
We can't really imagine a society that has one of these things and not the other.
And they grow together.
This also reminds me of something that some 17th and 18th century philosophers used to worry about,
which comes first intelligence or language and the puzzle was that if we
had intelligence first well then we could develop language but you might
think that you need language in order to become intelligent but I know that you
need intelligence before you can develop language and so this would be an
argument either for thinking that they both burst on the scene simultaneously
together or else that that that there's an infinite past and people have always
been intelligent language users all the way back but those aren't the only two
Possibilities. You might think that being intelligent isn't all or nothing, speaking
language isn't all or nothing. You gradually do a little bit of one, a little bit of other
and gradually build up. One objection, and this is really the, I think the Randians'
favorite objection, this is the one that I had a long debate online with Bob Bedinato
about is the worry that in an anarchist society there's no final arbiter. There's no legal finality, another way that this is put. So think of it this way, the idea is this, if you and I have a dispute, we take it to court under the existing system, the court resolves it in your favor, but I'm not happy, I can appeal to the Supreme Court. Once the Supreme Court decides it, it's over and done. Whereas in anarchy, if there is no final court of appeal,
It seems as though you never get anything settled.
Anything, any court's decision can be appealed to get some further court.
It's a further court. It's a further court forever.
And there's no way of bringing anything to an end.
If there's no way of bringing disputes about rights to an end,
then that means that property titles are never going to be stably settled,
that what you can do in your area of personal freedom is never going to be stably settled
and everything's always constantly going to be up in the air.
Well, my answer to this is I want to distinguish two different senses of what it means to have a final arbiter or to have legal finality.
By legal finality, you might mean what I'm going to call platonic legal finality,
which is legal finality where certain disputes are settled beyond the chance of any further possible raising of them.
There's simply nothing you could do to keep pushing the issue. It's just over and done.
Whereas by realistic legal finality, I mean something where, by and large, for most of the time, people have a pretty strong incentive not to keep raising it.
But it's not an ironclad guarantee, but it's a fairly reliable way of settling things for the most part.
I think the reason this distinction is important is I think the notion that government provides legal finality while anarchy doesn't
depends on an equivocation between these two senses.
It's certainly true that anarchy lacks platonic legal finality.
Nothing under anarchy can ever guarantee with absolute certainty that something is resolved once for all and forever.
But neither can government.
You know, take the case where you and I have a dispute. We go to court. The court decides in your favor.
I have to... No, I can go to the Congress and try to get a new law passed or a new constitutional amendment passed
or try to get new Supreme Court judges appointed who are more favorable to my point of view.
Or I can try to convince people to do something different or I can try to shame the Supreme Court justice
The State, for the most part, does provide realistic legal finality.
Most of the time, for most disputes, I'm not actually going to be motivated to try and foment a revolution, or even to try and petition the Congress to appoint different judges and so forth.
You know, most of these disputes, you know, people give up at some point. There's some where they don't, and those have different levels of intensity, but you know, under the state system, most decisions get resolved well enough.
Of course that's equally true of anarchy, at least we've been given no reason not to think so.
From the fact that under anarchy you could in principle go on appealing from court to court to court forever
doesn't necessarily mean that it would be the interest of people in the real world to actually have things go that way.
because although people, in any particular case that they're in, they might want it to go on forever until it's settled their way,
generally people like legal finality too, and courts that cut it off at some point are arguably going to be more favored black consumers in the long run than courts that allow it to drag on forever.
Now, I think more broadly, the notion of the demand for a guarantee that these disputes
will be resolved depends on a certain kind of magical picture of the state, which ordinarily
is not a failing of libertarians, ordinarily it's a failing of statists, but I think that
Non-anarchist libertarians are guilty of maybe a watered-down version of the same mistake.
Often, when non-libertarians complain about any libertarian solution to anything,
leaving aside the anarchist dispute, just who will build the roads, who will help the poor,
who will teach the schools and so forth,
There's the assumption that the government guarantees that certain things will happen
because the government passes laws and decrees and says, this shall be so, as though it's
saying so, just magically made it happen.
And so often appear people say, well, maybe under a libertarian system, some combination
of Private Enterprise and Private Charity would avoid the problem of poverty, but there's
no guarantee that that would happen, whereas if you have a government that says that the
poor have a right to welfare, then you've got a guarantee.
But the question is, what are they picturing?
I mean, the government can guarantee something and yet it not happen.
I mean, the government has been guaranteeing help for the poor for quite a while, and so if there's still a poverty problem, it's just that, you know, the guarantee doesn't work so well.
They can say, well, they haven't issued the right guarantees, they haven't worded them right, but there's this assumption, first of all, that something is guaranteed to happen if the state says so, and it's not guaranteed to happen if the state doesn't say so.
But, there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that's the case.
The state isn't something apart from the people in it.
So, if you leave something up to the market, you leave it up to imperfect people with a variety of incentives to do various things.
If you leave it up to the state, you also leave it up to imperfect people with a variety of incentives to do various things.
So, the question is not, you know, shall we guarantee it or shall we instead leave it up to this, you know, this very hazardous random process?
The question is, you know, given that these two ways of handling it both have something in common.
They're both just people doing things with whatever incentives they have.
You know, we just have to ask, you know, which incentives are the more reliable?
And I think that there are a lot of reasons for thinking that state incentives are less reliable.
Just the fact of having a monopoly means that you're insulated from certain kinds of negative feedback for your decisions.
If your customers can't go anywhere else, then you lack certain reasons for keeping services efficient,
keeping prices low, keeping your behavior not obnoxious that you lose to the extent that you have a sort of a captive customer base.
Now, of course, you know, the argument is often given that there are perverse incentives under market,
sort of the public goods problem being the classic example of a perverse incentive that people think the market faces.
Well, I'm not going to go into much detail about public goods right now.
and sort of take me aside from the main things I want to talk about, but I just want to point
this much out. Suppose you think that there is this perverse incentive that you have under
markets, the public goods problem. We know there are also perverse incentives under government,
the public choice problem, incentives to rent seek, to abuse power, and to exploit your
monopoly position. So the mere fact that you've got a perverse incentive over here doesn't
settle the question of which way to do it because you've got a perverse incentive over
Now the question is, which of these seems like a bigger problem?
Well, even aside from looking at the details, and I'm going to claim historically that it's hard to find any example of a so-called public good that hasn't been provided on a voluntary basis one time or another.
But anyway, just on purely theoretical grounds, although even if there are these perverse incentives, the perverse incentives create an incentive to fix them.
to fix them. That is to say, any entrepreneur stands to make a profit by figuring out some way to provide the public good without the free rider problem.
Take the standard example of lighthouses, which are supposed to be impossible to provide on a free market basis because you can't exclude non-payers from getting the lighthouse.
Well, historically entrepreneurs figured out that if you bundle all the fees for the lighthouse with fees for the harbor, you can exclude ships from using the harbor.
And so then you fund the lighthouse out of a proportion of the fees for the harbor, you bundle private good with the public good, and because you can exclude people from the private good, you can thereby pay for the public good.
Well, why did the people who were running lighthouses figure this out when economists didn't?
Well, because the economists didn't stand to make a profit from it, so they didn't have the same incentive to notice this sort of thing.
But Israel Kirzner gives this example that you're more likely to notice a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk
than you are to notice some ad or something.
We tend to notice things from which we're likely to profit more than things that we're not likely to profit from.
So even if markets do create perverse incentives, they also create incentives for people to figure out how to fix it.
It's less clear that that's true in government. If anything, it seems to be the other way around.
That when some government function is doing badly, the usual solution is to demand more money for it.
It's like our schools are not doing a good job of educating, so we need to pour more money into education.
The more badly it does something, the more money is thrown at it.
Whereas in a market, the more badly something does something, the less money you throw at it.
Companies that do things badly lose profits compared to companies that do things well.
But in government, it's just the other way around. The best way to get more money is to do things badly.
So we need to ask not only what are the perverse incentives, but what the incentives are for fixing the incentives.
All right. Well, suppose it's true that an anarchist system would be the best way of doing things. The question is, how do you get there from here? What's the best strategy for getting from a present situation to a stateless legal system?
Well, there are sort of two main families of strategies. On the one hand, there's a strategy of taking over the state.
And you can think of it doing this by violent revolution, but you can also just think of it as doing this through electoral politics.
Voting for people who will get into power until you have a majority of anarchists in power who will then dismantle the state.
The other method is what you might think of not as trying to take over the state, but more as trying to bypass the state.
You do things like education, building alternative institutions, encouraging people to withdraw their support from the state,
even ultimately eventually to the point of mass civil disobedience, you just sort of move as much as possible into the realm of voluntary systems and the state gradually loses its support and withers away.
Now there are questions about how effective either of these strategies is.
So far, neither strategy has been terribly impressive, because there just aren't enough anarchists yet.
Of course, obviously, both of these options would become more viable as the number of anarchists increases.
But the question is whether there are some specific arguments for or against either of these strategies.
Now, voluntarists, which is the name for a group of people that includes people like Carl Wattner and Wendy McElroy, George Smith, and then agorists, which is a movement started by Sam Conkin, not only favor the bypassing strategy over the takeover strategy, but they think the takeover strategy is inherently illegitimate.
Now, I'm on the whole more sympathetic to the bypassing strategy than the takeover strategy.
However, I think that the argument that the takeover strategy is inherently illegitimate is too strong.
I think that many of the problems they raise for it are genuine problems, but I think that it's...
I want to hold to sort of a more moderate version of the bypass strategy.
Okay, let's start with the moral arguments.
And the moral arguments tend to be given more by the voluntarist than the agorists.
One argument is that by engaging in political action, either by voting or by holding office,
you are thereby either exercising or sanctioning unjust power.
So let's take the case of holding office first, talk about voting in a minute.
So here's the idea that by holding office,
I am thereby taking on and agreeing to wield power that as a libertarian I'm committed to thinking is unjust.
So I'm now wielding unjust power, and that's illegitimate.
The worry is not that I'm going to be corrupted by the power, and they certainly have that worry that I'll be corrupted by the power, but this is a separate point.
This is the point is that even if you're not corrupted by the power, even if there aren't bad psychological results for you as a result of wielding the power,
It's inherently unjust for you to wield the power, because this is unjust power.
It doesn't matter if you're going to do good stuff with it, you shouldn't have it to begin with.
Then there's also the argument that voting itself is a form of unjust power.
Because when you vote, you're not just voting for yourself, you're voting for other people.
Whoever wins the vote, the majority who wins the vote is going to be imposing whatever it is they want on the minority.
And so by voting you are thereby exercising unjust power against or exercising or attempting to exercise unjust power against the minority.
Now I think these claims are too strong. Think of it this way.
Suppose that you're infiltrating the Death Star and so you've got to put, you know, you've got to put on Imperial Stormtrooper uniforms in order to get on there.
Now, we're not talking here about the worry that in order to prove you're a stormtrooper you might have to torture a prisoner or something, that's a different kind of worry.
But just the worry that by putting on the uniform of the enemy you thereby have, have what? Have you endorsed this, you know, this unjust system?
Or by taking over the Death Star you're now wielding this illegitimate power, namely the Death Star itself.
Well, what counts as wielding it? I mean, you're not aiming it at anyone.
You are going into something that's already aimed at people and you're trying to take it apart.
Suppose there were a Death Star hovering above the Mises Institute with a beam pointed down and was about to fire.
And so I managed to get up there and get into the Death Star and I'm trying to dismantle it.
And someone says, oh no, look what Roderick is doing.
He's now in the Death Star that's aimed at the Mises Institute. Isn't that unjustified?
You know, he is now occupying this unjust position.
Well, you see, that seems too strong.
Likewise for the voting position. I find the voting position particularly puzzling
because the voluntariists are the main ones who make this argument.
are also big fans of the arguments by people like Herbert Spencer and Lysander Spooner
that are designed to prove that we don't consent to government by voting.
Because some people have said by engaging in voting you're thereby consenting to government,
therefore government is legitimate.
And the volunteers don't like that argument.
They agree with arguments by Spooner and Spencer.
Spooner says you don't count as consenting to government when you vote
because you're really voting as a matter of self-defense.
And Spencer says, you don't count as consenting to the government when you vote, because nothing you do counts as not consenting.
If you vote, you're thereby consenting to the system, but if you don't vote, then you say, well, if you don't vote, you can't complain, so you're thereby again consenting to the system.
If nothing you do counts as saying no, then your yes doesn't seem to mean much.
Well, I think the Voluntaryists are right in citing these arguments by Spooner and Spencer.
But I think their own argument against voting comes dangerously close to the very arguments that they rightly reject.
It comes close to saying that by exercising the vote, you are somehow sanctioning state power.
Because when you vote, you are trying to impose what you're voting on everyone.
All right, fine. But what are you voting for?
If you're voting for an increase in liberty, then it's not clear how easy you're imposing anything on anybody.
Now, both the voluntarists and the agorists give pragmatic arguments against voting and holding office as well.
I think these pragmatic arguments are better. In fact, I think you might say they're largely right.
But I don't think they're completely right. I think they draw too strong a conclusion.
But I think they certainly identify things that we should always be alert to and worry about.
You might see that the way they see it is, seizing state power is like seizing the ring in Lord of the Rings.
And you want to use it for good, but it can only be used for evil and it will corrupt you as soon as you...
It'll start corrupting you as soon as you hold on to it.
And while I don't think there's any necessity to that, I certainly think it is a legitimate worry.
It's true that power corrupts.
and, you know, there's no reason to suppose that libertarians are exempt from that dynamic.
In fact, often when we see libertarians get into power, and often they end up much less libertarian than they were when they started.
And we were talking outside of lecture yesterday, I think, about what's been happening with the Costa Rica Libertarian Party,
started off pretty good, and there was a lot of excitement when they managed to get people elected.
Now the elected libertarians seem to be turning out to be a lot less libertarian.
And then, of course, we've got Dana Rohrabacher, someone who started off a fairly hardcore libertarian,
and he's in Congress now and is no longer recognizably libertarian.
Well, you can see we have exceptions, too. We've got Ron Paul. Do I think that, you know, Ron Paul is an absolutely pure libertarian in every issue? No.
But it doesn't seem to me that he's been noticeably made any less libertarian by, of course, by power he's got. It's not clear that he's got any power.
But he could get more power by going more along with the Republican mainstream, and he has not. He has stuck to his guns.
And so I think he's an example of someone who can end up in a situation like that without being corrupted.
So just imagine many, many more of him in Congress and we wouldn't get anarchy, he's not an anarchist.
He's got that deviation from the plumb line.
Another argument they give is that we should be trying to shake people loose from the status
paradigm. We shouldn't try to make them think of political change or social change mainly in
terms of going to the government and saying please, please do things differently and petitioning our
We should encourage people to think of political change as something that's in their power to do and not something you do by petitioning the government.
So that's a reason not to focus on political action.
But again, I think it's right as far as it goes. I think that that's a reason for not making political action sort of the central and sole part of your strategy.
But it doesn't seem to rule it out. Also, there's a general argument that bottom-up strategies are more effective than top-down ones.
But again, I think from a libertarian standpoint, it's largely right.
Although I think it's sometimes stated in excessively extreme forms.
I remember an argument by George Smith where he says,
Look, we all think that private solutions are better than governmental ones.
So therefore, why on earth do we attempt a governmental solution for bringing about liberty?
Well, you could say, you know, we all think that private roads are better than governmental ones.
So why on earth do you drive on a governmental one to work?
Well, that's the one that's in front of my house.
The whole point is you don't have libertarian society yet.
You can't draw on all the libertarian means that would exist
if you'd already achieved your goal.
Still, I think it's certainly true that we shouldn't think of libertarianism
as something that can be socially engineered from the top down.
That's certainly right for them to have that concern.
And more specifically, they say, well look, if the majority of people are already converted to libertarianism, then you don't need to get people in political power and start imposing things.
If the majority of people are already libertarian, then they can just go ignore the state.
And if they all ignore the state, the state will go away.
Just a few people ignore the state, it doesn't go away.
But if most people ignore the state, then they're just some guys without any power.
On the other hand, if the majority are not libertarian, then you're not going to succeed in getting into power.
or if you do get into power, you'll quickly be booted out as soon as they realize how radical you are.
And so, imposing liberty from above won't work if libertarians are not the majority and it's not necessary if they aren't.
Again, I think that's largely right and it relies on the insight of people like Etienne de la Boétie
who argued that every government necessarily rests on consent
in the sense that the rulers are vastly outnumbered by the ruled.
There's no way that a few hundred or thousand people in the government
could possibly be ordering millions of people what to do
unless the millions of people decided to go along with it.
His point was you don't need violent revolution.
You don't need to force them to do something different.
You just start ignoring them.
If everyone started ignoring the rulers, then the rulers would just be some guy.
However, I think that there are, I don't think that any of this is a decisive argument against
political engagement.
I do think it's a reason for thinking that the main focus should be on building alternative
institutions and educating and so forth, but I don't think it rules out political action
entirely.
For one thing, suppose that this alternative strategy works and gradually the state starts
losing power.
Well, if the state starts losing power, the odds are at some point they're going to panic.
And when people in power who are about to lose power panic, they might do something
nasty and they might still have, you know, access to weapons of mass destruction because
whether there were any in Iraq or not, there certainly are in the US or in many other countries
where this strategy might be tried.
And so it might be a good idea to have some people on the inside.
It would be nice to have, you know, have libertarian people in those positions of power in order
in order to restrain the government from lashing out in desperation toward the end.
And as the final decline approaches and more and more people are becoming libertarian it
will be easier to get them into positions of power.
But anyway, in the meantime, in the short run, there are some sort of forms of political
action, voting in elections, voting in referenda, even writing your congressman, though that's
certainly an overrated form of activism but still some of these things can
genuinely avert some harms sometimes in the short run when the state is is about
to choose between you know doing something really god-awful and doing
something only slightly bad you know you can't generally be nudged in one way
rather than another and although the result may be far from what we want you
can you know you can save many people's lives for being ruined by trying to nudge
in one way rather than the other. So I would disagree with the view that political activism is somehow completely off limits, either on moral or pragmatic grounds for libertarians.
But again, I do think that there is a presumption in favor of the other strategies being the one that more focus should be placed on.
And of course, this also leaves open the question of whether things like running for office should be viewed as attempts to get into power, or whether they should instead be viewed as parts of educational campaigns. People have had that dispute, too.
Now, of course, there's a famous argument that many economists give against voting. There's nothing specifically to do with libertarianism.
It's often argued that voting is irrational because the contribution that your vote makes to the final outcome is effectively zero,
except in cases where the election is actually so close that it's decided by a single vote.
But apart from that, the result would be the same whether I voted or not.
You know, even if the vote is so close that it's determined by three or four votes, still the result would be the same whether I voted or not.
And so people often argue that that means that it's irrational for you to vote.
However, I think that if that argument were right, then many other things would be irrational that we don't think are.
Because in most of the cases where you're contributing to some social or political cause, let's say the libertarian movement,
Most of these are cases where your contribution is not going to be decisive in that way.
Now maybe it would for, you know, if you're Murray Rothbard, your contributing or not might very well be, in the long run, turn out to be decisive.
But, you know, for most of us that's probably not the case, or at least we have, you know, no good reason to think it is.
So you might think that, you know, there's no point, there's no point in writing a libertarian article or libertarian blog post, because if your point in doing that is to try and promote libertarianism, do you really think that the triumph of libertarianism will be determined by whether you write this blog post or not?
Some people may think that, but over lunch someone was talking about some Trotskyite splinter group that purged someone, or that someone quit from her anyway, they had some kind of falling out, where the dissenter was told that he was single-handedly responsible for the failure of the revolution, or at least for sending the revolution back 50 years, but it seems unlikely.
So, what are we supposed to say about these cases where we make some small contribution but you might think, well, it's really no contribution at all because if what you're working for happens, it would probably have happened even if you hadn't made this contribution.
If it doesn't happen, it'll probably not happen, even if you do make the contribution, you know.
Why isn't that a reason? If that's a reason not to vote, it seems like it's equally a reason not to make any contributions at all.
I think that's a good reason to think that we ought to regard contributing to public causes as a duty of some sort.
Because we can't, you know, given that we, given strong universalizability,
we can't coherently adopt a perspective that says that these things don't matter,
because really we'd like it if everyone made enough of a contribution that this thing actually comes about.
However, I don't think it could possibly be a perfect duty.
That is to say, I don't think we can have a duty to contribute at every possible opportunity
to every possible public cause we might, because that's just too all-consuming, but that doesn't
mean that we should just sort of blow them all off.
I think we have an imperfect duty, meaning that we have a duty to contribute to public
causes, but we get to choose which ones and when, and the duty is something like the duty
to contribute to public causes reasonably often.
This is sort of the notion of an imperfect duty that you find, for example, in Kant.
He didn't invent it, but he's probably now the most famous promoter of it.
Of course, the fact that it's an imperfect duty and you get to choose the precise causes
and the precise occasions means that it's perfectly okay if some people decide that
voting is going to be one of the things that they do.
Some people decide that they want to contribute by voting and they won't miss any opportunity
to vote.
It's typically all right for someone else to think that voting is not one of the ones they want to pick.
You know, just as you can pick which charities you donate to.
And if you contribute to a charity to relieve starving people in Africa,
someone will say, oh, so you don't think muscular dystrophy is important?
And someone else contributes to muscular dystrophy.
And you say, oh, so you don't care about starvation.
Well, you know, they're both worth contributing to.
You're not necessarily contributing to the one you think is the most important, assuming you can make a choice like that.
You can have various sorts of personal reasons for being more interested in one cause than another.
And so, I think it's that voting is perfectly rational.
And it can be, you can decide to make it an instance of your general duty to contribute to public causes.
I certainly don't think that there's a duty to vote, especially since in most cases there's no one worth voting for, but even when there is, it doesn't seem as though there's a duty to vote, given that you get to choose which of these contributions to make, and you don't have to choose that one.
So broadly I would say that political activism is probably not where...
Political activism in the sense of actually sort of trying to influence the state by petitioning it or trying to get our pals into power in it
is not... it probably shouldn't be the central thrust of a libertarian politics.
The libertarian system is the only one that can be achieved without having to take over the existing state structure.
In most cases, you want to take over the existing state structure because you don't like what they're imposing and you want to impose something different.
And libertarianism is the only one where you can just get what you want by withdrawing support.
I think withdrawing support and building alternative institutions is the more promising strategy,
but I think the other one has its place, it's permissible,
and that we probably have a duty to contribute
to the overall cause in what ways we can,
but we don't have to be sort of a Chernyshevskyan libertarian
who devotes every moment of our lives
to advancing the cause.
Although, if you want to be,
there's nothing wrong with that.
It's probably good that some people
should pick that to specialize in.
and, you know, maybe, you know, being a Chernyshevsky and libertarian activist probably is a form of the good for some people and not for others, but it can all do our part, and there aren't. Questions? Yes.
With most people, it's not that they've thought through anarchism and rejected it, they've never even taken it seriously as a possible position to consider.
Why do you think that is, and do you have any thoughts about how you can get people at least to engage with it?
Okay, so the question is, most people who are non-anarchists are non-anarchists not because they've considered anarchism and objected it,
but because they haven't even taken it seriously as a system. Why is that and how might that be prevented?
Well, I think part of the reason is that most people don't see anarchy as one sort of legal system or political system among others.
The State decrees that it happens. It serves a very useful function for the State of making the State seem utterly indispensable.
It also makes it seem sort of innocent in a certain way because often you think that the decree is going directly into action without means and although sort of you know in the background of your mind that there are means, often sort of the bloody handedness of the state can get ignored because of this incantational view.
Now, some people say, well, this is the reason we shouldn't use the term anarchy.
We should use something like a polycentric legal order, or competing jurisdictions, or something like that, so it doesn't scare people off.
But, of course, sooner or later, they'll figure out that, you know, if we first start talking about it, they'll imagine it happening within the framework of what is the picture of the state.
I like to use the term anarchy. Let's find by me if other people want to use other terms in convincing people. It depends in part who your audience is.
One reason I like it is that it's easier to get inspired about something radical sounding like anarchy than get inspired by something like, who's going to go to the barricades for competing jurisdictions?
Again, we were talking at lunch about someone recently who was arguing that we shouldn't press issues like gun control or the drug war, things like that, that are controversial for non-libertarians.
Instead, we should focus on issues like tort reform. Who's going to be converted to the cause of tort reform? I mean, some people will.
Well, because it's not clear what tort reform means. Some of the things that go into that name I don't even think are libertarian.
But anyways, because you've got a libertarian version of tort reform. All right, that'd be nice.
But that's not the way you build a movement of enthusiastic, committed people. Yeah.
Now, I go to the overriding things about the state.
First of all, getting money to run the state.
Now, our tax system is so messed up, and no one has the courage or has the guts to get
a simplified tax system so they could get the money to run the government.
The last thing I want to say is the unconstitutionality of the Federal Election Commission awarding
money to politicians that are running for office that you would not want to have in
the office of president.
That's unconstitutional, is it not?
You're taking money from me to support a man.
I don't want to be in government.
All right, so the...
You're taking money from me to support a man.
I don't want to be in government.
Yeah, so the three points are...
Sorry.
The three points are...
So first, just a reminder of the story of Alexander the Great,
who had this complicated Gordian knot to cut through and he cut through it.
Second is...
What was the second point?
The tax.
The tax, yeah.
You're taking money to run the government and simplifying the taxes.
and we need to simplify the tax system to get the money to run the government
and then finally what about the unconstitutionality of the Federal Election Commission
that takes your tax money and gives it to people running for office that you would not want it given to
Let me take those in reverse order
Certainly I agree that the Federal Election Commission doing that is a bad thing
There's a great quote from Thomas Jefferson who said that
This is an actual quote from Thomas Jefferson, unlike most quotes from Thomas Jefferson,
who said that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves
and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
So you're taking your money to give it to someone who's running for office that you
don't want, yeah, that's certainly wrong.
Of course, I think that's more broadly, that's not just an argument against the Federal Election
Commission, that's an argument against the federal government that it is electing people
It's an argument against government as such, because the government is always promoting things that some of the people who are forced to pay for it don't want.
And so that would be my argument on the tax system, too. I mean, there are better and worse ways to run a tax system.
But in all cases, you have forced contributions of money. You're compelling people to give money for things that they wouldn't voluntarily contribute to.
Could I put one thing in there? The next thing that comes is this. On the national ballot, put none of the above. In other words, you've got all these Democratic and Republican parties with the government with money coming from everywhere.
Money does not turn itself into cards and wines. It turns itself into a force. This is Oswald Spengler.
And the amount of money governs the force that it exerts. Now, why couldn't we have, on the national balance, none of the above?
You know how many people say, my God, where did they get these candidates? I wouldn't vote for them for dog catcher, and yet they're running for president.
I say this, if you give the citizens the right to say, none of the above, go back and get men that we may or may not approve of.
But the point that you're getting to it, it's like being on a boat and whether we're on your compass is going to get you where you're going.
And I say that the citizen's compass is his own mind and the way he works, you have to educate him a little bit.
But my point is this, that the only way you're going to do anything with politics and all is you're going to kick these guys out or prevent them from becoming electives until, you see my point?
Yeah, now I agree that having none of the above on the ballot would be an improvement over the present system because in front of the present system you have to choose among a bunch of bozos that were picked not by, you know, they're there on the ballot not because of you, but because of some power elite wanted them on the ballot.
So having none of the above would be an improvement. However, I don't think that that would be enough to make the system legitimate because it's still going to be the case that if a majority of the people does want one of these doofuses, they're not going to impose it on the minority who doesn't.
But as an intermediate reform, yes, I think that would definitely be an improvement.
Okay, so the question is, do I think that, some anarchists think that, anarchist libertarians think that anarchist libertarians and minarchist libertarians can cooperate just fine, sometimes the argument that's given is, well, we're both going in the same direction, it's just the one wants to go farther than the other, and other anarchists are more purists and think, no, we shouldn't,
We shouldn't cooperate with people whose ultimate principles are ultimately going to lead them
to something that's in conflict with what we want.
I think it depends.
There are different degrees of deviation from libertarian purity and there are different
degrees of cooperation.
So, the more purest they are, the more, you know, the broader the range of things you
can cooperate with them on.
But, yeah, anyway, so yeah, I guess that's my short answer.
Yeah.
There's something weird that I'd be interested to hear about and take on it.
When they're based over the volume area, in particular, the moral obvious, the voting, and so forth,
I agree it's sort of interesting and weird that they also cite sooner and sooner
Women shouldn't be able to vote, to vote, but of course the explanation is that men shouldn't be able to vote either, nobody should be able to vote because there's, you know, participants who can't vote, et cetera, et cetera.
But it seems like, you know, Spooner is sort of advancing the same sort of arguments there as the Volcaire installment went to advance against more of the students who are voting, that they're just participating in the,
participating with some degree of seriousness in this,
and then there's a little bit of an institution to give thanks to that, but you know, it seems like at least in, you know, that it would be, of course, one thing that would be, one thing that you could look at is, you know,
I think I know what Spooner was saying, which is that by participating in the voting process, you're not actually consenting to the state, but if you think of what you're doing, if it appears to be very serious and it's very hard not to think of it, and if you're sort of doing it all the time, then it's hard to sort of treat what you're doing as a consistently defensive thing.
He doesn't say that all voting is self-offensive. He just says that there's no way to tell if it's voting self-offensive and not authorized to impose non-differentative voting.
I don't know if he's making his arguments for votes or not, or is it a matter of opinion?
Okay, so the question is, I mentioned that the voluntarists seem to think that by voting
you are in some sense sanctioning the state, if they're also fond of quoting Spooner's
argument that by voting you're not sanctioning the state.
And then it's pointed out that there might seem to be a similar conflict in Spooner,
because although Spooner in No Treason says you're not sanctioning the state by voting
because you might be voting in self-defense, but later on he has this argument called against
Women's Suffrage, where he seems to be arguing that against those who are agitating for women
to have the vote, but his argument is, well, no one should have the vote. It's an illegitimate
goal because what we should be doing is trying to get away from society, which people make
these decisions by voting. And the question is, is that a conflict? And then the suggestion is,
well, it might not be if the reason is not that it's not justified, it may be voting is justified
as self-defense, but nevertheless, if you engage in voting a lot, you're going to start to start
Take it seriously as a kind of, as sort of the central core of political action, and you may become the case that you're no longer voting strictly out of self-defense, but you've been sort of co-operative into the system.
I guess I might just say, yes, all of that sounds plausible. I mean, has this... Oh, and the further question was, do the voluntariest make any such distinction?
There's this line toward the end of Women's Suffrage when Spooner says the best thing would be not for women to agitate for the vote, but for women to march down to the courthouse and burn up all the legal documents.
So he certainly wasn't advising that they should refrain from agitation of some sort.
But again, I suspect he's thinking that it's going to be similar to this point that some of these guys make that we should try to be winning people away from thinking of voting as the main venue for making these decisions.
Well, the volunteers say that sort of thing, but the volunteers also seem to think there's just something directly illegitimate about the vote, just as in the case of taking office.
They think it's illegitimate to take office, not just because it's going to corrupt you in the future, but because the mere fact of taking office now puts you in an unjust position.
And I don't know whether Spooner thinks that or not. Mark, you go ahead.
I agree with you that the word anarchy, or anarchy, is something that is very engaging to me.
But on the downside, one of the things that is the biggest problem with words is the ethical position, the fractal issue, the association with violent anarchy,
In terms of taking that connection that people give to the word,
but trying to solve the downside of the word.
was used as a synonym for chaos. Even apart from people thinking of actual anarchist movements, just the fact that it's used as a synonym for chaos.
And to some extent, it was used as a synonym for chaos before people were calling themselves anarchists.
So it's not as though we can simply blame the status for appropriating the term anarchy to mean something chaotic.
Although, of course, the reason it means something chaotic is because people assume that absence of state and absence of chaos are the same thing, so what's behind this meaning is a false assumption.
Also, of course, there's the historical association of anarchists as people with bombs blowing up stuff.
Of course, my association is of statists as with people with bombs blowing up stuff.
They certainly did more of it, but nevertheless, there was a period where violent action of that kind in the late 19th and early 20th century was associated with many anarchist movements, although it hasn't been dominant.
One thing I want to say is that, well, notice the title I gave this talk, an anarchist legal order. I didn't just say anarchy, I said an anarchist legal order.
Now, if someone says they're in favor of anarchy, you think, oh, chaos. If someone says they're in favor of an anarchist legal order, well, you may not be sure what it is that they're advocating, but you already know something about what you were assuming must be wrong.
So it has to do with the way that you advocate anarchy. You advocate anarchy in such a way that makes it clear that you're not associated with chaos.
Now that doesn't mean that their connections are going to go away.
A lot of the things that we advocate, a lot of the things that monarchists advocate are things that non-libertarians associate with chaos.
Let's have these assumptions and we have to work our way away at them.
Yeah?
Let's go ahead and make the complaint or the criticism that the uniformity brought by perhaps a law-marriage system would result into an economic form of oppression.
How would you respond?
You were talking about the values in the previous lecture about non-domination or individualism.
How would you respond?
Okay, so the question is, I was saying that we can expect uniform legal standards to develop under anarchy.
So the worry that they'd all be sort of fragmented, split, or just not genuine.
But now the question is, well, couldn't that very uniformity cause a danger?
If we're worried about non-state forms of repression,
couldn't we be worried about forms of legal uniformity, even if they're not imposed by the state?
I always say, yes, certainly that is a legitimate worry.
I think it's not overriding because the market tends to provide uniformity when people need
it and diversity when they don't.
For example, DVD discs are all the same shape and size, well, I mean, they're all the little
ones, but I mean, they're sort of generally, DVD discs are all the same shape and size
because that uniformity is desired.
But the content that's on the discs is very different, lots of different things.
And so the market does tend to provide the uniformity when people need it and the diversity when they don't.
But of course, as I also said from the last lecture, the market doesn't do this magically or in any absolutely guaranteed way.
Certainly, although I don't think there's any sort of strong push toward a bad kind of uniformity, I think it's certainly a genuine danger.
And it's something we have to keep our eyes open for.
In some sense, I think, some people think there'll be no need for a libertarian movement once the libertarian society is realized.
I think that the libertarian movement will definitely be needed, you know, because you want to keep the society libertarian.
You also want to keep the society, you know, individualist and pluralist or whatever else in addition to being libertarian.
And, you know, there will always be dangers worth facing.
So I don't think we want to close down after that's the case.
Robert, unfortunately, all of these things have to come to an end.
On behalf of the participants in the seminar and the people who were locked in with me on Mises.org,
I want to thank you for an excellent seminar on the foundations of Lutheran ethics.
Thank you very much.