Evidently, this theory is founded on the false premise that a rational individual could not willingly benefit by receiving less than the full produce of his or her labor. Please understand, I agree that exploitation is a real phenomenon, which is what takes place when someone without consent expropriates the benefits of another’s property rights. With that said, workers are facing actual exploitation by government controls that restrict the rights to collectively organize, that reduce opportunities for entrepreneurship and that push people into the labor market in the first place.

To that end, I have said:

Communists are right in viewing the state as exploitative, but not because it upholds property rights, but because the state exists only by systematically usurping those rights. What would prevail in a stateless society — one without government propaganda championing that “taxation is voluntary,” “voting is freedom,” and “government is security” — is a strengthened sense of property rights and individual autonomy.

So I also support higher wage rates, but I would rather reduce the dead-weight loss of existing government controls instead of trying to counter-balance them with new government controls.

Why Agree to ‘Exploitation’?

This is not an exhaustive list, but there are a number of reasons why accepting less than the full produce of one’s labor would be sensible.

• Higher time preference — The premium someone places on the earlier satisfaction of a goal rather than a later satisfaction is called time preference. Someone with a higher time preference would value immediate gratification to a greater extent than a person with a lower time preference; someone with a lower time preference would still more greatly value immediate gratification, just to a lesser extent. A laborer who had a higher time preference might very well agree to accept reduced wages now instead of waiting for greater returns in the future, when a product’s purchase is completed by the final consumer. An employer facilitates the demand for earlier gratification by paying wages in the present and waiting for compensation from consumers in the future. The more distant the span of time between when the labor was performed and when the product’s purchase is completed by the final consumer means that the discount in wages would be more prominent. That is because a future good has less value than that of an otherwise identical present good. A dramatic contrast of a difference in time preference might be someone who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness compared to a young, healthy adult. The one does not have much longer to enjoy the benefits of his or her labor and may accept reduced wages that were paid immediately, while the other has a long life ahead of him or her and may be willing to wait until the final consumer has purchased the good produced. In an environment where savings were not eroded by money inflation, market-based interest rates encouraged savings, economic conditions were more stable, it was easier to start a business and people’s incomes were not confiscated through taxation or destroyed by coercive regulatory controls — anxiety about the condition of the economy would diminish so that people would be more inclined to adopt a lower time preference and demand a higher portion of the produce of their labor.
• Reduced risk — Even if time were not a factor in a decision, some people are less averse to risk than others. As the saying goes, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” The sentiment of that saying is that it is better to have a guaranteed reward than risking the possibility for even greater reward. That is an accurate statement for some people, but not all. Depending on the circumstances, which is practically impossible to share in common identically with another person, it could be more prudent to run the risk. A laborer with the resources to open a business could find it more sensible to continue working for a lower wage than possibly reaping greater rewards by opening a business and putting those resources at greater risk of loss. Here again, discriminatory tax policies and regulatory controls (like licensing laws and capital requirements) have made it is costlier and thereby riskier to go into business for one’s self, and the state’s crowding out of demand, like in the education sector, makes it more difficult to earn a return on investment. One of the reasons that large businesses favor greater regulatory controls is because those controls stymie competition from small businesses struggling to afford the added costs of regulatory compliance. Abolishing occupational licensing laws and zoning controls against mixed-use property would lead to a flurry of home-based, low-overhead enterprises, which are less risky and less costly to operate than store-front operations.
• Charity — It is pretty common for people to volunteer their time or offer special rates for their work if they know those savings are going toward a good cause. The social anarchist band Anti-Flag regularly plays at charity event, for example, and I do not ever recall its members mention they had been exploited by playing a charity event.
• Prevent competition — One of the reasons that profits tend to minimize over the long term is that profits signal that more resources need to be devoted to that good, which stirs competition. One way of preventing the rise of competition is to deliberately price a product or service for significantly less than its anticipated value to the consumer. The strategy is founded on the idea that resources will be devoted to more profitable investments first. The resulting diminished profit dissuades new competition from forming and may drive out old. In that way, businesses are also looking to build customer loyalty in case competition does arise. This works both ways. Purchasers, including purchasers of labor, have to be weary that paying too little will lead the seller of the labor to look more vigorously elsewhere for employment.
• Volume discount — One of the reasons that stores like Sam’s and Costco exist is because customers can save quite a bit of money by purchasing in bulk. The same principle holds for purchasing labor in bulk. To hire someone occasionally to make repairs around the house, the homeowner would expect to pay a higher price per hour than if he or she had agreed to pay a regular salary to work a set number of hours indefinitely or for some longer period of time. The person making repairs would benefit from having a steadier stream of income and reducing his or her time and expenses associated with recruiting prospective customers.
• Good will — Someone just entering a trade has a few disadvantages. One is that a potential employer is not quite sure of the laborer’s professional and personal skills. In order to entice a potential employer to accept the added risk of hiring someone without a known reputation, the laborer can improve his or her prospects by temporarily accepting reduced compensation. The same could hold true for someone wanting to improve a tarnished reputation. That is common for professional athletes, who might sign a short-term contract in hopes of displaying their skills for other potential employers.
• Experience — For people learning a trade, apprenticeships can be an important step to becoming an experienced professional. An ironic note is that Marx himself served as an apprentice for a German newspaper. By requesting a lower wage rate, more employment opportunities arise, which can provide a springboard to increased experience and higher compensation in the future, the same as what happened to Marx after attending college.
• Reduced warranty — One last scenario is that an agreement could be made that an employee would not have to guarantee his or her work. This arrangement is made less often, if only because one’s reputation typically is regarded as more valuable than any short-term benefit of avoiding the inconvenience of correcting a mistake. An example could be where a customer, over the objection of his or her car mechanic, insisted on having some mechanical repair or alteration made. An agreement might be reached that, for agreeing to a reduced fee, the mechanic is released of responsibility for warranting the work.

I am sure this does not include every scenario in which an employee could benefit from accepting a reduced wage. In a genuine free market, I think there would be fewer people working for a wage. More people would be able to afford to run their own business from their homes, or they could share spaces and tools at community-managed workshops. Self-organized, low-overhead market forces would be in a better position to rebuff widespread economic downturns, should they occur.

In an open market, two people are likely to have fewer mutually beneficial trading opportunities as their circumstances become more aligned, so they would not exchange at all if they assigned the same value to the items being exchanged. The noteworthy think about exchange is that it allows for people of distinct backgrounds and circumstances to flourish instead of conflict. Catallactic competition means that people with identical demands can more affordably satisfy those demands. The more people who have that same demand means that satisfying that demand can become less expensive. When a trade does occur, it does so because people in different circumstances have different values to satisfy. With that understanding, it becomes understandable why individuals would give greater importance to some values than they otherwise would for certain circumstances and why people in different circumstances perceive the benefits of achieving certain values differently.

Marxists and opponents of monied exchange are mistaken and do a disservice to alleviating actual exploitation in that they do not distinguish the one-sided nature of state privilege from the mutual benefit of consensual exchange. It is not only that they have a misunderstanding of the nature of property rights; they believe that the measure of an individual’s value exists independent of his or her unique circumstances (or context). To an opponent of the private ownership of property, an exchange involving money would be prima facie evidence of exploitation, since the measure of a value being equal across society, they believe one party’s benefit comes at the expense of the other. This is what leads them to believe that working for a wage is necessarily exploitation, claiming that workers are in a position of either receiving less than the value of their labor or starving. Besides being a false dichotomy and full of hyperbole, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of value. A self-interested person would not act at all unless he or she expected to gain or keep more than the value of the labor expended. Because of opportunity and transaction costs, acting to gain or keep less than or equivalent to the value of the labor expended would only hasten death. From the circumstances of the laborer, the wages received in return are more beneficial than the benefit that could be have been received by working elsewhere or taking leisure instead. It could still be the case that exploitation is taking place, that better opportunities were never available because of a systematic violation of property rights, but working for wage labor is not a sufficient condition of it.

Ad hominem attacks aside, YouTuber hawanja’s video on free-market anarchists seems to make the point that people “naturally organize themselves into hierarchies” that require violence to be maintained, so anarchism runs counter to the human condition. It is left unstated why violence is needed or ethically justified to maintain these hierarchies if they were so natural. He further claims that a state is the historically necessary “institution that enforces order through violence.”

The first of hawanja’s misunderstandings has to do with his definition of “state.” A key distinction I and Barack Obama would make is that a state claims a territorial monopoly on its enforcement of order through violence. The insinuation of hawanja’s definition, which ignores the territorial monopoly claim, is that any enforced order necessarily signifies the presence of a state. Throughout the entire video, viewers are presented with this false dichotomy: statism or chaos. Anarchists do not oppose order. The etymological origin of “anarchy” means no ruler (not no rules), similarly how “monarchy” means one ruler. Regardless, statists generally insist on conflating “anarchy” to mean a conflict for rulership that takes place in a failed state. Anarchism recognizes that rulers are not justified in their actions and are counter-productive to a peaceful, productive existence.

Another unfounded assertion is that “this natural hierarchical structure to human beings” is justified in using force to maintain its power. After all, just as a good majority of people naturally like ice cream, I hardly think that would justify “natural hierarchical structures” enforcing the consumption of ice cream.

The Enemy of My Enemy

Another tried and true fallback in defense of the state is the canard that a state is necessary to protect us from corporations, which hawanja rightly pointed out are creatures of plutocratic state protections and subsidies. They are granted limited liability by governments and are under a legal obligation to pursue the interests of shareholders, not employees or the environment or the public. However, should the blame rest with corporations or also with their architects (governments) that created them and shield them from accountability?

He cites laws prohibiting discrimination and child labor and food safety and consumer protections as examples of good government. Of course, governments have historically been used to promote all sorts of racial discrimination, child labor, and made food and consumer protections harder to come by and more expensive. hawanja unintentionally, I presume, confirmed this point when he showed a picture of Rosa Parks, the civil rights heroine arrested for disobeying a segregationist city ordinance that ordered she give up her seat to a white passenger, when he mentioned government laws prohibiting discrimination.

I think it is all well and good that government-enforced slavery and Jim Crow apartheid, the more overt government measures used to uphold discrimination, have been removed. However, that does not do so much to help those past victims of discrimination. All the ways that governments prohibit wealth creation has meant that past victims of government-enforced discrimination continue to suffer at the hands of government-enforced poverty. As Charles Johnson summed up in his “How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It” essay, “The poorer you are, the more you need access to informal and flexible alternatives, and the more you need opportunities to apply some creative hustling. When the state shuts that out, it shuts poor people into ghettoized poverty.”

Governments are not responsible for ending child labor. As a thought experiment, just consider what would happen if child labor was prohibited by law in Nepal. It would have the same effect as enacting California-style building codes in Haiti: absolutely none, because there is no wealth to implement those laws. The credit for the advancement of human civilization rests with the grandest form of human cooperation, the wealth-creating division of labor.

Coincidentally, I would think the issue of discrimination would create another dilemma for supporters of the state. Historically, racism, sexism and slavery would have been considered “natural hierarchical structure[s] to human beings,” just as the state is said to be. Yet, left-liberals, as I suppose hawanja is, do not propose that the enforcement of racism, sexism or slavery was just. Based on what principle though? And how would that principle not equally apply to racism, sexism and slavery?

hawanja also appears to be under the impression that governments were responsible for the abolition (or near abolition) of child labor, neglecting the fact that child labor is still legal in the United States under some circumstances. More to the point, mass child labor was an example of a problem exacerbated by the heavy hand of government. Had it not been for mercantilist and protectionist Robber Baron economic policies of the 19th century, wealth creation for the average family would have been realized much more broadly and quickly so that parents could afford to send their children to school sooner. Many social problems, including institutional discrimination, that governments are credited with fixing were largely already successfully being addressed through direct action before legislative interventions took place.

Consider consumer protections against price fixing. Historic examples of consumer protection during the Progressive Era were done at the behest of business interests. As noted liberal historical Gabriel Kolko wrote of the implementation of the Federal Trade Commission, in “The Triumph of Conservatism”:

The provisions of the new laws attacking unfair competitors and price discrimination meant that the government would now make it possible for many trade associations to stabilize, for the first time, prices within their industries, and to make effective oligopoly a new phase of the economy.

He called it a triumph of conservatism because federal intervention into the economy was able to secure the existing economic structure, what Kolko called “political capitalism” and what we know today as “crony capitalism” and “corporatism.” In Kolko’s conclusion, he said:

The varieties of rhetoric associated with progressivism were as diverse as its followers, and one form of this rhetoric involved attacks on businessmen—attacks that were often framed in a fashion that has been misunderstood by historians as being radical. But at no point did any major political tendency dealing with the problem of big business in modern society ever try to go beyond the level of high generalization and translate theory into concrete economic programs that would conflict in a fundamental way with business supremacy over the control of wealth. It was not a coincidence that the results of progressivism were precisely what many major business interests desired.

Kolko’s book is something, documenting how nearly every aspect of the Progressive Era legislation — from food inspections, environmental conservation and banking reforms, for example — were used as covers to cement the existing cartelized trusts already in power.

The book does a great job of documenting the problem with hierarchical institutions, that the people who already have the most access to the government are going to have the most influence in shaping what solutions are offered, how they are interpreted and how they would be implemented. Regulators — like all self-interested creatures — are sure to implement solutions that preserve their power and prospects for future employment, since their interests closely align with those of the regulated. If regulators or politicians are corruptible with bribes, the powerful can leverage their influence to a greater degree than they could in a freer market. For just a fraction of the cost, favorable regulations worth millions of dollars can be bought with campaign contributions. On a free market, it would be more costly to bribe someone who did not have the luxury of using taxes, as government regulators can, to pay for the enforcement of regulatory or legislative cronyism.

Making More Trouble

Next, the video documents social problems that libertarians typically attribute to government. In the past, I might have been guilty of short-changing why those problems are a consequence of government intervention, so I will take the time below to make the points clear.

1. Food prices — Yes, governments subsidize cattle and meat production at the expense of healthier, more natural forms of food, and place restrictions on the importation of those products. It is not a market phenomenon that it costs more to purchase a salad than a hamburger. All the resources devoted to feeding cows and other animals and creating bio-fuels like corn-based ethanol could have been used to produce food for organic diets. In addition, the federal government has sealed off arable land that could be used to farm, and city ordinances often place restrictions on mixed-use property, some of which could be used for home or community gardens on abandoned property.
2. Low wages — The ways in which labor organizing is discriminated against is too long to list. Just to list some examples, I would point to the ’35 Wagner Act, which was championed by business interests and conservative unions to clip the more wildcat unions like the anarchist International Workers of the World. Typical demands, like collective bargaining and calling for limited strikes, that unions are legally permitted to make today are pretty meek by comparison. Before the era of having to get government recognition, when most of the historic gains of the labor movement were actually realized, unions could call for general strikes and indirect boycotts, opened union hiring halls, signed closed-door contracts or demanded worker management of the firm. Other government interventions are through occupational licensing laws, use-restricted zoning regulations, legal tender laws, capitalization requirements and capital-favored taxation policies that mean more people have to work for wage labor in the first place.
3. College expenses — It is not a coincidence that college tuition expenses increase at the same time that governments actively encourage people to go into debt by providing low-interest loans and restricting the establishment of new higher education options. The government and the corporate credentialism fetish is also partly to blame. One major expense of college is the cost of textbooks, which are artificially marked up do to the enforcement of artificial intellectual property claims.
4. Environmental conservation — It is also no secret that common law environmental tort protections were removed from courts in the 1900s, which is how pollution problems were handled until environmental legislation that legalized greater environmental damage took power out of the hands of property owners. That is not to mention that the largest polluter in the entire world is the United States federal government.
5. Drug safety — Yes, illicit drugs are more dangerous because of government. They cannot be made under true laboratory conditions; there is no possibility of any legal redress for fraud; and every year millions of people acting consensually are terrorized by government agents and hundreds if not thousands are killed by those government agents. The crime and escalated costs associated with drugs are a consequence of prohibition.
6. Terrorism — See “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” by Chalmers Johnson.

At the beginning of the video, hawanja criticized the favoritism that governments grant corporations, only later to praise the cronyism of farm subsidies for multimillion dollar farm conglomerates. He said that government protection has led to stable food prices in the United States, which is not so true of late. However, the relative stability has only come because Americans already pay much higher prices for foods like sugar than do residents of developing nations. In terms of dollars, the average American family transfers an additional $146 to large agribusinesses every year because of these policies, which do not include the approximate $300 per family given directly to mostly multimillionaires through the federal budget. The costs of milk, butter and meat products would be deflated if trade restrictions on international markets were abolished, helping to reduce poverty overseas.

Looking at the unintended consequences of those subsidies, the abundance of corn, some of which is used to sweeten sodas, has been linked to increased obesity in Americans. There is also the problem that developing nations wanting to compete in farm production are constantly being underpriced by subsidized farmers, leading developing nations to become dependent on subsidized farmers for food. That is something developed nations hold over developing nations as part of “Open Door Imperialism,” but it is not a fact I would cheer. Without government protectionism, land use could become more environmentally friendly, as well. A Reason magazine article said:

The distortions and perverse incentives of U.S. agricultural policies have encouraged practices that damage the environment. Trade barriers and subsidies stimulate production on marginal land, leading to overuse of pesticides, fertilizers, and other effluents. A central if unstated purpose of American farm policy is to promote production of commodities that would not be economical under competitive, free market conditions. This often means emphasizing crops better grown elsewhere, requiring more chemical assistance.

The conclusion of the video makes a laundry list of mandates that hawanja thinks the free market could not provide, like affordable housing and health care, public transportation, environmental and consumer protections, expanded broadband internet coverage, protection for the homeless, protection of endangered species, food and medical safety and national security. He said that the free market cannot do these things; “we do these things because we need them to survive.” His unstated argument is that these are public goods that markets cannot provide for.

I have argued in the past that with a little creativity, public goods can be provided, assuming there is public support for those goods, which would also have to be the case in a democratic government. To quote Kevin Carson, “As always, it’s not a question of what we’ll do when the state stops solving the problem. It’s a question of how to stop the state from creating the problem.”

The problem becomes that regardless of the possibility of providing those public goods on an open market, those goods become harder to achieve with a government in place, which creates an entirely new set of obstacles for achieving those original public goods governments were purportedly created to solve in the first place. Public goods, like security and safety, are not impossible for governments to provide, just costlier and more difficult than they would be on a free market. The first new public good created by the presence of a democratic government would be an informed electorate. It is not in the average person’s economic interest to know much about the issues at hand or the candidates running for office. That is because a single individual’s vote has almost no significance in the outcome of an election, and even if a single vote could turn an election, a voter has no method of holding a politician to his or her campaign pledges. It gets worse. A single politician in Washington, D.C., is one of 535 votes in the legislature. The idea that a citizen’s vote would make any noticeable difference to the his or her life is almost inconceivable.

The second public good that must be provided for in order to solve the original public goods problems is the creation of just laws. When thinking about it, there are thousands and thousands of pages of legislation and regulation under discussion. It would be next to impossible and meaningless to read every line of every bill introduced or regulation proposed in order to find out if some special benefit is being given to this or that special interest lobbyists. Even if we could decipher what the legislation or proposed regulation meant and its impact in the future, which would be difficult enough, contacting a congressman or regulator is going to have a negligible impact on influencing policy. Even if we could change the policy, it most likely only means a savings of a few dollars or cents per voter. Special interests who stand to gain millions or billions are always going to have the time and money to devote to gaining special favors.

Since human beings are not perfect or all-knowing, market failure is possible, but as David Friedman notes, “In the political system, market failure is the norm. If you think of the political system as a marketplace, we cannot expect individual rationality to produce group-rational results.” So the idea that government would work if we could only get the right people in charge is a failed strategy in practice and beyond naïve in theory.

When a government does try to address public goods that allegedly cannot be provided by the market, policies are going to serve the powerful and wealthy. Seeing how I would actually like to see those public goods provided to people, I cannot support a government, because a government makes those products less attainable for the people who most desperately need them.

I think there are reason to believe it is very unlikely that an army would attempt to invade a stateless society. For this discussion, I will assume that people think it is a big enough concern that people think some type of national defense in needed. National defense is what is commonly called a public good, a product or service in which it is difficult if not impossible to exclude people who have not paid for it from enjoying its benefits. A classic example of a public good is a lighthouse since any passing ship can use it to aid navigation. Similarly, if I hope to repel an invasion or discourage the threat of an invasion from a large-scale force, as a consequence then I will likely need to defend my neighbor’s property too. (Incidentally, I show how lighthouse operators overcame the problem.) The theory is that public goods become underproduced relative to their demand as everyone is waiting for someone else to pay for them. In essence, everyone sits on the sidelines hoping others will pay for it.

It is worth pointing out that the existence of a state does not address this problem of public goods, but only creates more public goods, namely the creation of just laws and an informed electorate. Meanwhile, laws that favor special interests are private goods under statism, and so they are produced in great supply, while laws to insure equal justice are underproduced.

Also, it is conceivable that the possibilities I point to below could exist within a taxless minimal state, however unlikely that would be to exist. I do think that if national defense could be shown to work without the state’s aid, then government officials would just exist as some nominal figure heads without much authority.

The free rider problem could also be minimized if defense expenses were reduced by not threatening other countries. Relatively cheap defensive weapons like shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles along with snipers would cripple any occupation before it even started. Such a free society could drastically reduce its defense budget, vastly decreasing the free rider problem off the bat. This would be something that people valued, not the paranoid national security state that now exists. The only solution that the state offers for public goods is to forbid competition and create more free riders in the beaucracy. Yet entrepreneurs have a financial stake to figure out how to exclude free riders, so listed below are just a few possible solutions that occur to me for privately funding a national defense. I cannot explain exactly which solutions people will eventually adopt, for if anyone could, that would be a good case of installing a dictator (which would sort of defeat the point).

1. Ostracism — The more anonymous a free rider can become, the greater the number of free riders. People who contributed to some national defense might proudly display a sign on their mailbox or on their car. Entire neighborhoods might brag that 100 percent of the households have contributed to national defense. A low contribution rate within a neighborhood would probably be seen as indicative of other social ills, and their property values would likely suffer.
2. Make it easier to pay — Businesses might raise funds by asking customers for voluntary contributions, as with tipping. At a restaurant, people know that their meals are discounted to some degree because their hosts are paid very little per hour. If people understood that their meals were discounted by the lack of any national defense overhead, it would seem fair to most people if they tacked on ten cents or something like that to a good cause that benefited them.
3. Ask for charity — Fundraisers could always be held to ask for donations from people in other countries. Citizens of neighboring countries who did not wish to see the invasion of an adjacent nation might find it helpful to contribute. They might be worried about an interruption of trade. We could also ask residents of foreign countries who value liberty to help.
4. Disperse the collection process — People could be asked to collect funds just from others around their neighborhood. This way the money was being given to others whom they know. In a free society, I think people might then become more engrossed in their communities, and have more invested in the caretaking of others through institutions like mutual aid societies.
5. Guarantee funds — There might be some guarantee to refund a contribution if a sufficient amount of money were not raised. An aspect of a free rider problem is the worry that not enough money will be contributed and the money will just idly go to waste.
6. Partially exclude free riders — There are ways of making the free rider problem more manageable by de-emphasizing services for geographic regions of the nation that failed to pay their share. You might also offer premium services to those who do contribute. Maybe people who contribute could be invited to special safety classes to learn to defend themselves and their homes, which might help to reduce their home insurance rates.
7. Bundle services — The private supply of firearms guarantees a private good, namely protection of an individual’s property. But the vast distribution of firearms also provides some measure of public good like national defense. Dispute resolution organizations (DROs) might very well require the purchase of a bundled national defense service in order to receive their full protection. Some DROs might try undercutting the cost of bundled services; however, they would likely have a fairly diminished reputation as a result, causing more trusted DROs to be less willing to have reciprocal agreements with them. The cheapskate DROs would find their dispute costs increasing as a result, and would have to raise its rates near those of the more reputable DROs anyway. I mentioned lighthouses as a classic case of a public good. Well, this was a way lighthouses owners overcame the problem of free riders by also operating the docks near their lighthouses. Navigation to their docks became safer In turn, their docks got more business. So it can be more profitable to bundle a public good with a private good.
8. Advertising — Sponsorships are also a popular way of funding public goods. The broadcast television signal is interrupted by commercials, for example. Organizations could even broadcast that they financially support defense services. At sporting events, prize promotions are often funded privately so that a sponsor receive some public goodwill. This would likely also be the case for a widely desired good like national defense.
9. Donut model — Before fully transforming into a stateless society, a nation could gradually free itself in a pattern of increasing concentric circles until the point of reaching its border. This way, a stateless society could more gradually transition away from statism. In the meantime, the stateless inner ring could begin experimenting with other funding models to see which work best.
10. Lottery — Lotteries have been used by governments to fund education budgets and all sort of other spending. I am sure there would exist other lotteries for people to gamble their money, but one that’s profits were invested in a public good might garner more appeal. A lottery could be used in conjunction with another funding methods to get even wider appeal.

I am sure there are lots of different approaches to public goods. The reason more solutions have not been developed is because the states historically have always monopolized the service. Imagine if the government began regulating beauty as a public good, which it conceivably is, and taxed people who did not meet some quantitative standard. You might see some initial improvement in the attractiveness of a population, but those government standards would begin to erode to meet the majority’s demands. After a few generations, people would be asking themselves how they could ever find a partner without government-run matchmaking.

• “Providing for the Common Defense” by Charles Peña
• “The Myth of Public Goods” by Mark Davis
• “Funding Public Goods: Six Solutions” by Roderick T. Long

Richards opens that “Radical libertarians are equivalent to leftist Saul Alinskyites. Both despise government and the Constitution, seeking to destroy America.” To say something like that reveals she has never given much serious thought to either. Alinsky was a utilitarian, inside-the-system guy. Mr. Libertarian, a deontological private property natural law supporter, denounced the system and was an “Enemy of the State.” Economically, methodologically, historically, and culturally they were polar opposites. It was precisely that Rothbard insisted on practicing his radicalism, where Alinksly used more pragmatic means. Rothbard was not concerned with accumulating power; he wanted to destroy it.

So already we are off to a shaky start. Also, it is not so much that libertarians despise government — which some people connote to mean rule and order — but the state, an organization within a given territory that maintains the monopoly authority to designate the legal use of force. Nor do libertarians conflate America with the government, as Richards seems to do. Quickly, she conveniently deliniates society from government when she said Rothbardians think that society “prevented war, rape, and pillaging” prior to the development of the modern nation-state. In actuality, Rothbardian libertarians see the state as needlessly exacerbating those tragedies.

Laughingly, Richards said, “Society can’t survive and thrive without leadership and checking and balancing leaders.” As if. An organization with sovereign immunity cannot be held accountable, particularly if those checks and balances are maintained within the same organization to be rendered as consequential as costume jewelry. The founding fathers that conservatives so prize had some understanding of this, calling the constitution only for a moral people as John Adams did. It was Thomas Jefferson who said “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” John Locke called the state of nature a “state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal … .” So clearly, these classical liberals thinkers did not believe it was the government that kept order.

Richards states that libertarians do not believe people are evil, only governments. That is an odd insight to make, for who does she think libertarians believe occupy government? Libertarians like Hans-Hermann Hoppe have made the point that the incintive structure of the state lends itself toward accumulating more power and inviting conflict. That is true. More so, they argue that precisely because people are capable of committing evil, then a centralized organization with the popular legitimacy to commit acts of aggression should not stand because evil people will be attracted to that unique source of power.

Even taking at face value the conservative point that all people are to some degree evil, then the existence of a government in no way minimizes that problem. In fact, by regularizing and legitimizing the morally criminal behavior of the state, those evils are compounded because the most evil would have the most to gain from that system. Of course, any social system will work more smoothly if people tend to be more peaceful and honest, yet which of these systems encourage that behavior and punish anti-social affairs? As Rothbard himself said, “[W]hatever the mix of man’s nature may be at any given time, liberty is best.”

Later in the article, Richards again conflates government with society. For the most part, this is also the modern conservative view, which is why so many want to criminalize what they deem to be immoral acts among consenting adults instead of educating others about their mistaken ways. In that sense, they are ideological cousins of liberal authoritarians like former law professor and current Obama regulatory “czar” Cass Sunstein. They see government as the source of all technological advancement and at the root of civil society.

Richards is wrong again on a few more points, as well. While a popular myth, it is not true that war is part of human nature. While it is true that conflict will exist over (limited) resources, we have found ways to minimize those conflicts, such as through the use of property rights and arbitration. Besides, the existence of a state makes war more affordable for the war makers as the costs of building an empire can be defused over the population through taxation. As war makers have become removed from the consequences of their violence, constant war has become costlier than ever before. It is government that is civil war, according to French anarchist Anselme Bellegarrigue. While modern warfare may consume fewer actual lives, the aggregate labor stolen by the war machine is no less wasted. The life of each one of us is drained again and again day after day to fund the most successful criminal enterprise in history.

In another failure, Richards cites a Karl Marx quote from Ralph Raico’s lewrockwell.com article on Marx’s insights into the state, which she takes to mean an acceptance of Marxist political economy even as Raico makes explicit that he is “far from being a Marxist.” The point of Raico’s quote was to reveal Marx’s own dualistic view of the state as first, continuously under the exploitative hand of the capitalist class, and at other times as an organ of exploitation of whatever party in control.

In fact, some of the very few accurate protrayals she offered was calling radical libertrians leftists who believe we can “endure without states and central leadership.”

Looking back, Richards has claimed that Rothbardian libertarians want to “destroy man and his right to Life,” believe “depravity is nonexistent in man’s nature,” are “anti-wealth,” and favor “communal control.” For these points, Richards offers not a single quotation from Rothbard or any other libertarian.

I am drawn to one of my favorite Frederic Bastiat quotes, when he said:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

With some credulity, statists have become conditioned to let others — even words written on paper — have dominion over their lives. When someone offers the radical notion that no one else owns your body, they are called the dangerous ones. When some point out that the state has no resources of its own and can only exist by usurping our rights, with some arrogance, they are told to be the enemies of individual rights.

To Richards, I say trust in yourself and treat your neighbors as an equal. So long as you look to leaders for the change you seek, you can bet to be changing out one set of dogs for another while ignoring the things all of us can do for the betterment of ourselves and those around us.

To the loved ones of Mr. Stack and his victims, I offer my condolences. For Stack, I have nothing but condemnation for his acts. His brutality was needless and heartless.

I agree with Stack that what the IRS does is evil. Taxation is extortion.

What is easy to overlook is that the vast majority of people who advocate for government intervention into peaceful people’s lives do not see it that way. That’s just the way it is, they say.

Part of it is a lack of education. They have not read the books we have or heard the speeches we have. They have never studied agorism or read How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne. And so they are still indoctrinated in government slavespeak.

Part of it as well is they believe that with enough government intervention and threats of violence, they can overcome circumstances they dislike in society. The only practical solution they see is violence. To offer voluntary and consent-based solutions to their problems seems so foreign them. In fact, in Stack’s suicide note of sorts, he said “[V]iolence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”

So if the news reports are accurate and this man did do this, then he would have been acting under the same failed premises as those he intended to attack. He was a frustrated, desperate man who was willing to take his life rather than become a victim of the IRS any longer. But that is not how he will be remembered. He did not advance the cause of liberty one inch. He set it back. I’ve written before why violence is not the path to liberty.

For those of us whose highest political end is individual liberty, I believe one of our missions is to explain why violence and threats of violence are at best temporary antidotes to social ills — like heroin to an addict. Luckily, most everyone lives by the non-aggression principle everyday; it only takes making them aware of this and convincing them that the same principle applies to government too.

I would suggest reading Stack’s letter. An excerpt is below.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

He was obviously an intelligent and lucid man. He was angry at an unmerciful system that cripples ingenuity and compassion. He hoped to be a martyr in the revolt; but really, he is just a killer.

Disclaimer: This note is not meant to devalue or discredit the work that has already been done by activists in the GOP. Any action in this liberty movement is much appreciated. It is also worth noting that everything in this note applies to those from the left attempting to use the Democratic Party as well. Myself and many others are merely trying to point out the damage that can be done to the movement if we adopt the “restore the GOP” strategy as our primary means of affecting change in this country.

1. We give up our leverage as the majority maker.

From Chuck Young’s blog [post] “Lessons of the Paul Campaign – r[evol]ution within the reForm“:

“There is a branch of game theory called coalition theory. It ponders questions like the following: if we have 3 groups, with 49, 49, and 2 ‘votes’ respectively, all seeking to win an election with 51 votes total, which of these 3 can be said to have the most ‘power’? And the answer is (drum roll): they all have equal power, because any one of them that wishes to win must make a deal with some other group.

“In this little theoretical truism lies a possible answer to the riddle of how a dedicated and united cadre might wedge and manipulate two bloated, corrupt ‘superpowers’ like the Democratic and Republican parties. What is required isn’t a majority, but rather a minority substantial enough that both powers must continuously bargain with this third group to gain its temporary allegiance. Of course, the two superpowers could always come out in open alliance with each other once and for all — but that in itself would be a victory for the good guys with immense ramifications.

“The difficulties in launching and sustaining a viable third party are well documented; what is called for probably isn’t another political party. Indeed, such a thing would likely be undermined, as have the Libertarian Party, Constitution Party, and similar entities of the left, e.g. the Greens. But while a third party is probably untenable, it’s clearly suicide to remain in this abusive relationship with the Republicans.

“Why? Go back to coalition theory. By trying to ‘reform’ the Republican Party, our movement COMPLETELY SURRENDERS THE LEVERAGE IT HAS AGAINST THE TARGETS OF SAID REFORM. There is a shockingly naive assumption in all this, as the criminal elements in the GOP get away with political murder. It’s believed that somehow they will surrender their authority because they ‘need us.’ Some coalescing may indeed happen, but expecting those who run the GOP to just ‘come around’ to our way of thinking because they’re in the process of getting the crap kicked out of ‘em flies in the face of repeated experience. Most people in 1976 wouldn’t have given the GOP another shot at the presidency for 12 years at least; yet they were right back in the saddle in 1980, with a ‘revolution’ … of sorts.”

2. We will never be able to ignite the mass movement necessary to enact genuine change as we will always be plus-or-minus 50 percent of the voting postulation. We will always be trapped in a reactionary paradigm against the other half of the FALSE left-right paradigm.

Which leads to 3 ….

3. The party in power will inevitably waver on its principles if only to maintain its position as the dominant party.

From “A Disquisition on Government” by John C. Calhoun:

“A written constitution certainly has many and considerable advantages, but it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the power of the government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. Being the party in possession of the government, they will, from the same constitution of man which makes government necessary to protect society, be in favor of the powers granted by the constitution and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit them …. The minor or weaker party, on the contrary, would take the opposite direction and regard them [the restrictions] as essential to their protection against the dominant party …. But where there are no means by which they could compel the major party to observe the restrictions, the only resort left them would be a strict construction of the constitution …. To this the major party would oppose a liberal construction …. It would be construction against construction — the one to contract and the other to enlarge the powers of the government to the utmost. But of what possible avail could the strict construction of the minor party be, against the liberal construction of the major, when the one would have all the power of the government to carry its construction into effect and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing its construction? In a contest so unequal, the result would not be doubtful. The party in favor of the restrictions would be overpowered …. The end of the contest would be the subversion of the constitution … the restrictions would ultimately be annulled and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.”

4. The party will shape the change agents more than the change agents will shape the party.

From Chuck Young’s blog [post] “Lessons of the Paul Campaign – r[evol]ution within the reForm”:

“This brings us to the very disturbing turn Paulism has taken: the invocation of that same ‘Reagan Revolution,’ the ‘Robertson takeover’ and the like, to ‘sell’ Paulism to the GOP ‘conservatives.’ Groups like the Republican Liberty Caucus are even openly equating Ron Paul with Ron Reagan – with REAGAN, super neoconservative, warmongerer extraordinaire, the most profligate spender the nation had ever seen (until the record was broken by a certain successor), a man that sold out so-called conservative principles so profoundly, that Ron Paul himself quit the Republican Party in disgust and ran as the Presidential candidate for the LP in 1988!!!

“What a long, bitter history the movement for LIBERty has when it tries to be ‘conservative!’ And yet, because we’ve convinced ourselves that we’ve nowhere else to go, we find ourselves chanting this mantra: ‘we really are conservatives, we are real conservatives, be a conservative like us.’ And always in this equation of the movement with ‘conservatism,’ ALWAYS, there is a softening of the anti-war, anti-empire stance. And so one wonders, vis a vis this GOP ‘takeover’ – who’s zoomin’ who, hmmm?
The signs are all around the paleocon ‘surge.’ It isn’t only that Ron Paul is being equated with Reagan and Goldwater (can you hear that…? it’s the sound of Rothbard turning over in his grave). We have Bob Barr as the nominee for the LP – Barr, ex-CIA, who voted for the Iraq ‘War’ and the Patriot Act. And the rising star in the LP is Wayne Allen Root – note his initials, ‘WAR,’ and rest assured that ‘peace’ will never be his middle name. It seems the deeper we commit ourselves to this dysfunctional ‘conservative’ assertion, the more we are moved toward the ‘libertarianism’ of Neil Boortz – not the other way around.”

5. The hierarchical structure of the two major parties is easily susceptible to co-option, as only those at the top would need to be compromised in order to steer the party. This is evidenced by the current state of both parties.

Potential solution?

Remain a tight united libertarian cadre which works on single issue coalitions at a local and state level all the while applying the philosophy of liberty in a manner which will cause those of the statist persuasion to appreciate the consistency of libertarianism and question the hypocrisy of their collectivist mindset. Eventually the tight united cadre will grow as those beginning to appreciate liberty more and more will be picked off from the fringe of the parties.

All the while we must begin to build and create parallel institutions based on mutually beneficial voluntary associations so that we may offer an alternative to the people when the current system inevitably collapses. We must be prepared to offer an alternative as our enemies surely will be. [Editor's note: A few edits have been applied to Bush's note to conform to the punctuation style on this site.]

My take is that the Libertarian Party is largely a waste, save as a protest vote or an education tool. Participating in the primary elections of the major parties leverages the most impact from voting, which is still about as equivalent to a suggestion box on a slave plantation. Bush has said he is “beginning to explore the revolutionary possibilities associated with agorism, counter-economics, and the creation of parallel institutions which will rival and compete with the state.” I wholeheartedly agree; we should be spending our time agitating and organizing, not begging the state.

He is also beginning to take some heat from Ron Paul apologists (not all Paul supporters, including myself, are apologists) for questioning Paul’s support of welfare-warfare Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). For as beneficial as Paul is at spreading the message of liberty, it is just as important that liberty activist hold themselves accountable to at least the same standards by which they hold others. I believe attempts to confine or marginalize different opinions shows a lack of confidence is one’s own ideas. To paraphrase “Zeitgeist: The Movie,” take truth as the authority, not authority as the truth.

This is the same point I made in a post earlier this month. Committed libertarians have not made any progress electorally because they are not willing to scratch enough backs, and if they were willing to scratch enough backs they wouldn’t be committed libertarians any longer. It is not simply a small-government versus a big-government mentality. It’s electoral libertarians or constitutionalists versus a multitude of warhawks, rent seekers, and stripes of big-government conservative and liberal social reformers who are more than willing to trade favors. Those are entrenched groups, and they find that big government suites their needs.

Before those groups came to power, Ludwig von Mises published “Human Action”, the most complete case for classical liberalism, and “Socialism”, which described the calculation problem of centralized economic planning. Leonard Read opened the Foundation of Economic Education, aiding the early careers of F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Henry Hazlitt. Ayn Rand championed the heroic nature of the individual. Their support for electoral politics was understandable given government’s popularity in the 1940s and 50s; but they failed to stop government growth when government was much less intrusive and when it was a tiny fraction of its current size. All the things that have happened since — the trillion dollar-per-year empire, the instillation of dictatorial client states in South America and the Middle East and the subsequent “blowback,” the hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians killed by American forces, and the authoritarian law enforcement tactic leveled against American civilians — happened despite their work. Those tragedies and many more happened anyways.

The fear is that liberty would be in full-scale retreat and that greater atrocities would have taken place had libertarians not participated in electoral politics. There’s a case to be made there, but it is speculation. What isn’t speculation is that government spending as a part of the economy is at an all-time high, and everyone expects it to stay on the current trajectory indefinitely. Most Americans still support pre-emptive war and torture for anyone the government labels a terrorist. In Michael Cloud’s book “Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion,” he cares to use the Weight Watchers Test to gauge the promises by politicians of reducing the size of government, referring to the famous diet plan in which participants meet regularly to weigh themselves in front of other members. He said:

The Weight Watchers Test of government lets us know where we are, which direction we’re moving … and how fast we’re going.

The Weight Watchers Test of government frees us from sleight-of-mouth and political illusions.

It offers us the facts, the truth:

Are we moving toward bigger and bigger Big Government … or getting closer and closer to individual liberty, personal responsibility, and small government?

According to the Weight Watchers Test, libertarians have failed and failed more miserably than anyone else I know. (I include myself in that criticism.) The government has grown from arguably the freest non-colonial government in all of history to the most dangerous existing threat to humanity (considering the military arsenal at a president’s disposal and their predecessor’s historical willingness to use it). A limited government has the perverse tendency of growing immensely since lifting many regulations and securing relative stability makes it possible to generate astounding amounts of wealth, allowing the government parasite to grow largely discretely until the point where the parasite of government becomes so entrenched that government and the market almost appear co-dependent and inseparable.

There are three possible reasons why I think libertarianism has lost political ground. First, we could be wrong, and libertarians fail to understand the scope and circumstances to which coercion should play in human interaction to promote prosperity. Philosophically, I think libertarians (those who support the maximum attainable role of individual liberty) are right. Human beings are the most prosperous, yet fragile, animals on earth. So I don’t think humans have progressed because of our extraordinary physical traits. It is because of the human mind and its reasoning ability. So it seems that the negation of the reasoning mind by initiating force is detrimental to the fruits of human progress. I appreciate Ayn Rand’s comment that “All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.”

Second, libertarians may have failed due to a lack of effort. For this, I refer to the Ron Paul’s presidential campaign of 2008. In one day in November of 2007, his supporters raised over $4.3 million. A month later, supporters exhausted over $6 million in a single day, a record for the largest fundraiser in the history of politics. Libertarians are unlikely to ever find someone as honest and distinguished as Paul. He got more media attention than any ideological libertarian before, yet he rarely garnered more than 10 percent in Republican primaries despite the thousands of YouTube videos and millions of dollars invested. Even if Paul ran again, I’m doubtful that level of enthusiasm could be reproduced.

Third, maybe libertarians have tried the wrong strategy of clinging to government strictures to achieve intellectual inroads. Instead of trying to liberate the entire country, we could try to focus on something of which we have some control — ourselves and our personal relationships.

A belief in the maximum role of individual liberty is inherently an individualist philosophy. That means taking responsibility for our own liberty, just as we take responsibility for our own welfare — instead of giving that power to middlemen, the politicians. We can “be the change,” as Ghandi said, and lead by example to thwart the arbitrary controls others seek to impose on us. In that way, our ideals, cascading individual by individual, will eventually be reflected in the institution of government to the point where it is commonly accepted that government is no longer necessary. I don’t have to wait for the whole country to shift before I take responsibility for my own life and enjoy the benefits of living by honest, consistent principles. It can be achieved by taking peaceful direct action through education, outreach, and agorism.

What if Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Rand, and Hazlitt had worked outside the system 50 years ago? Imagine how much further liberty would have advanced. That too is speculation, but we’ve seen that electoral politics isn’t a path to salvation either.