The minarchist-anarchist conflict has been an undercurrent of debate in the one of my local Campaign for Liberty groups in the Metroplex. It has gone so far as to conflate advocating a belief in a stateless society with wanting to neutralize the liberty movement. Although it brings about lofty feelings to know that someone believes a single person is capable of that, let alone yourself, the truth is that trying to recreate one of a legion of failed state-based governments is the real neutralization.

Thomas Knapp, publisher of the daily Rational Review News Digest, wrote a piece for the Center for a Stateless Society on the specious argument that the state is necessary because human beings are flawed creatures.

“If men were angels,” wrote James Madison in The Federalist #51, “no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Unfortunately, he failed to reach the conclusion which screams from those two premises: Since men* aren’t angels, and since they don’t become angels when they enter into the business of governing, trusting them with that business is a very, very bad idea.

Madison was a creature of the times in which he lived: Inspired by Enlightenment ideals to exalt freedom as the highest political value, but unwilling to completely abandon the notion that some men must rule over others for the good of all.

The story of the US Constitution is in part the story of Madison’s attempt to bring those two conflicting sentiments into a workable alignment. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” he continued, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

The measure of Madison’s success — and the success of others like him around the globe who helped cast off the bonds of feudalism and usher in the modern age of democracy — was a political, economic and industrial revolution which lifted much of humanity from poverty and bequeathed individuals born into that new age a sense of possibility for reaching their own potential.

The measure of his failure, and ours, is that because we’ve never fully excised the cancer of government from the tissue of society, it has lived on. It has metastasized into a somewhat different set of organs than the old feudal cancer plagued, and it has adapted itself to the use of our greater material productivity as its food and fuel.

As a result, government is now far more dangerous than ever it was in the feudal age. The explosion of population and productivity engendered by limited freedom have allowed it to exact far more onerous demands on its “democratic” subjects than any feudal lord would have dared attempt — or could even have conceived of attempting! — to impose on a lowly serf.

Because freer people produce so much more than feudal serfs, government can take that much more of what we produce without us noticing so much … on the front end, at least.
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If men were angels, I say in reply to Madison, I might not object to government. Men, however, aren’t angels. Power tends to corrupt us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Some men are bad; all men are fallible.

For precisely that reason, vesting the exercise of power in a monopoly institution, however representative or seemingly well-intentioned the people composing that institution might be, is a recipe for disaster. Such an arrangement is bound to compound error and exacerbate injury on the one hand, while on the other it fails to give full scope to the individual’s potential for innovation and advancement.

There is no “up side” to the state.

• "Glossary"
• "For Rules, Not Rulers"
• "We Are All Anarchists Now"
• "Tilting at Electoral Windmills"
• "A Minarchist’s Case for Open Immigration"