Download How (and why) to be a Free-Market Radical Leftist

Roderick T. Long
Auburn University /
Molinari Institute
An institution that claims, and in large
part achieves, a forcible monopoly
over the provision of legal services
(adjudicating disputes, and securing
compliance with the results of
adjudication) within a given
geographical territory
“Anarchism ... may be described as the
doctrine that all the affairs of men
should be managed by individuals
or voluntary associations, and that
the State should be abolished.”
– Benjamin Tucker, 1886
“The anarchist is the enemy of
humanity, the enemy of all
mankind, and his is a deeper
degree of criminality than any
other.”
– Theodore Roosevelt, 1901
“Anarchism is a political philosophy
which considers the state undesirable,
unnecessary, and harmful, and instead
promotes a stateless society, or
anarchy. Any information relating to
anarchists should be reported to your
local police.”
– London Metropolitan Police, 2011
▪ differs from minarchism (minimalstate libertarianism) in seeing no role
for the monopoly state
▪ differs from social anarchism in the
degree to which it sees market
mechanisms and private-property
institutions as legitimate and major
sources of cooperative order
Comes in
both “capitalist”
and “socialist”
forms, depending
on what economic
forms are predicted
to prevail in a
freed market
Problems with forcible monopoly: the
shoe industry analogy
▪ moral objection: violates moral
equality
▪ 1st economic objection: incentival
perversities
▪ 2nd economic objection:
informational perversities
All the same problems with a
forcible monopoly of legal
services:
▪ violates moral equality
▪ incentival perversities
▪ informational perversities
The State is not a forcible monopoly
because its subjects have consented
Tacit consent:
▪ the restaurant analogy
▪ the houseguest analogy
By remaining in territory and
accepting state benefits, you consent
▪ consent argument is circular: staying
within a territory counts as consent
to the State only if the State is already
assumed to have legitimate
jurisdiction over the territory
▪ in any case, a contract needs clear
and agreed-upon terms; no such
terms here
▪ accepting benefits doesn’t count as
consent, especially when alternative
means of obtaining those benefits
are either forbidden or rendered
unduly costly by state action
▪ voting doesn’t count as consent
because it’s done in self-defense
Social cooperation requires
a background structure of
law
The state must provide this
law because the free
market cannot produce
its own precondition
False assumption #1:
can’t have social
cooperation without
law
In fact lots of social
cooperation proceeds
without law
False assumption #2:
can’t have law without
violent enforcement
In fact many legal systems
rely on nonviolent
incentives
Examples: Law Merchant,
17th-century Amsterdam
False assumption #3: can’t
have violent law
enforcement without the
State
In fact many stateless legal
systems have used violent
enforcement more responsibly than comparable states
Examples: medieval Iceland,
contemporary Somalia
1. Legislative defect: no
known or settled law
2. Executive defect:
insufficient power of
organised enforcement
3. Judicial defect: people
being judges in their own
case
No known or settled law?
Markets provide uniformity where
it’s needed (e.g., credit cards).
The Law Merchant provided
greater legal uniformity than
existing state courts.
Inadequate power of
organised enforcement?
The alternative to a shoe
monopoly is not that each
person makes her own shoes
Judges in their own case?
Fallacy of Composition:
“Everyone likes at least one tv show”
 “There’s at least one tv show that
everyone likes”
“Everybody has a father”  “There’s
someone who is everybody’s father”
Likewise fallacious:
“Everyone should submit their
disputes to a third party” 
“There needs to be a third
party to whom everyone
submits their disputes”
In a 3-person society:
▪ A and B can
submit their
disputes to C
▪ A and C can
submit their
disputes to B
▪ B and C can submit
their disputes to A
Moreover: it is only under anarchy
that the no-judges-in-own-case
requirement can be satisfied
Under a state, any dispute with the
state will be adjudicated by the
state
Division of powers an insufficient
solution: no one would want a
dispute with one branch of a
firm to be judged by another
branch of the same firm
The Rule of Law requires anarchy
If providers of
security
enforcement
services compete,
they can resolve
their disputes only
by violent warfare
Competing firms are less likely
than states to resort to warfare
War is more expensive than
arbitration, but states can
socialise the costs because they
have a captive customer base
Without a final
arbiter, disputes
can go on forever
without
resolution
2 senses of “final arbiter”:
▪ Platonic finality: resolution is
absolutely guaranteed
▪ Realistic finality: disputes
usually get resolved more or less
reliably
▪ No legal system, whether state or
anarchic, provides Platonic
finality
▪ Both state and anarchic legal
systems have regularly provided
realistic finality
What guarantees that security forms
will resolve their disputes in any
particular way?
Well, what guarantees that the
branches of government will resolve
disputes in any particular way?
The Constitution doesn’t even say how
such disputes should be resolved.
▪ Functioning markets require secure
property rights
▪ Secure property rights require a
legal system
▪ Thus markets cannot exist until a
legal system exists first, and so
cannot provide that system
▪ One could equally well argue that states
presuppose markets, since you can’t have a
state unless there’s a sufficient productive
surplus to extract, which presupposes
productive prosperity, which presupposes
markets
▪ In fact markets and legal systems
(whether states or anarchies) grow up
together
People tend to think of a legal system as
something independent of the activity it
constrains, something that stands outside
social cooperation and makes it possible
But that’s the metaphysical illusion of a
“self-enforcing rule”
A legal system’s existence depends on, is a
product and instance of, social cooperation
Private security firms
already exist: they’re
called Mafias
They specialise in
violence and so will
dominate
Either that, or foreign states will see a
power vacuum and invade
Organised crime gets its power from the fact
that it specialises in services prohibited by
states: drugs, prostitution, etc.
State prohibition makes these services both
unusually costly and unusually risky, thus
attracting profit-seekers with high tolerance
for risk and violence
Mafias are typically parasitic on states
Also, any society that has managed
to overthrow its government has
already learned techniques of
resistance that can be turned
against new aspirants to power, be
they Mafias or foreign invaders
If legal services
become a
marketable good,
then justice will be
sold to the highest
bidder, while the
indigent will lack
legal defense
entirely
▪ States magnify the power of the rich:
I can bribe a politician $1000 to direct
$1000000 to my favoured project,
because the politician isn’t spending
his own money
▪ A judge who favours millionaires
over the poor will favour billionaires
over millionaires: reputation matters
▪ There would be far less economic
inequality in a freed market:
competition is a levelling force
▪ Those who can’t afford legal services
can sell their right to compensation (as
in medieval Iceland, or contingency
fees today)
▪ The compenstaion rights of indigent,
heirless murder victims could be
homesteadable property
▪ There exist pro bono legal services now
(the ACLU, the Institute for Justice)
and these would be still more plentiful
in a more prosperous society
Free markets are great at satisfying
preferences, but many consumers have
intolerant preferences (against
homosexuality or drug use or
worshipping Cthulhu) and will
happily pay for laws banning conduct
they find offensive
The inelasticity of demand for
intolerant laws varies from person to
person
If inelastic demand is widespread,
that’s as much a problem for
democratic states as for anarchies
If most demand is elastic, anarchies
will be more tolerant than states
The cost of paying monthly premiums not
only for “basic service” (protection against
theft, assault, etc.) but “premium service”
(protection against one’s neighbours
having the wrong habits) is much higher
than the cost of voting for an intolerant law
or politician
Democracy allows bigots to socialise costs
that anarchy would internalise
If indeed security firms would tend to
choose arbitration over warfare, they
will evolve into legal networks
indistinguishable from states, because:
▪ Customers will prefer firms that
belong to the network
▪ Thus the network can put
independents out of business by
refusing them access
▪ And so: a territorial monopoly
Free markets tend to undermine
cartels, because the collective interest
in maintaining them gets defeated by
individual interests in breaking them
More importantly (because more
reliably), cartels create profit
opportunities that attract outside
competition
A legal network faces potential
competition not just from isolated
independents but from rival networks
Just as abusive state legal systems have
incentivised network alternatives (e.g.,
the Law Merchant), abusive stateless
legal networks could do the same
If free-market anarchy is the
goal, how should we work
for it?
Frequently heard argument:
minarchists and anarchists are on the same
train, headed in the same direction:
minarchists just get off one stop earlier
Hence anarchist should focus on assisting
minarchist projects until then
Problem with this argument: from
an anarchist perspective, the part
of the State that minarchists want
to keep (the monopoly) is the cause
of the problems that minarchists
and anarchists agree in opposing
Thus, rather than joining the
minarchists in pruning the
branches, anarchists should seek
to strike at the root
Get rid of the root (the monopoly),
and the branches will wither of
themselves
The ruling powers in society are too
far outnumbered by those they
rule to be the sources of social
order they claim to be
Both social order and elite power
depend on popular acquiescence
Without such acquiescence,
our rulers would be like
Hitler in the Monty Python
sketch, a random weirdo
ranting to tiny, puzzled
audiences
Hence:
a) the state is not necessary for
maintaining social order; anarchy
is a viable end
b) petitioning the state, or seizing
control of it (whether by electoral
or revolutionary methods) is not
necessary as a means
The path to a free society:
▪ education
▪ direct, bottom-up grassroots
action
▪ building alternative institutions
to bypass the state
We abolish the
ruling elite
merely by
ceasing to
support
them.
c4ss.org
s4ss.org
molinari.co