Defending Anarcho-Capitalism: A response to the comments of ‘Voice of Treason’

Photo: Isaías Campbell (Flickr)

In this piece, I will attempt to answer some of the points raised by ‘Voice of Treason’ in his rebuttal of Olly Neville’s recent article for The Backbencher: ‘The Idiocy of Minarchy’. The arguments expounded are interesting in that they highlight some common misconceptions regarding anarcho-capitalism and those who ascribe to this political philosophy. ‘Voice of Treason’ begins by stating that:

“Certain goods are public goods. Explain how you build an effective road or railway network only through voluntary transactions between individuals? They require large-scale collective action and everyone benefits from the result – so everyone should pay. More to the point, how does one provide comprehensive care for the disabled, the old or orphaned? It’s not enough just to say “leave it to the kind and generous to make provision”, because that rewards selfishness. Mind you, anarcho-capitalists see no problem with selfishness (or am I being unfair?). As far as I can see, that will result in a society in which a feckless and selfish group leeches off the efforts of a generous and industrious group – i.e. exactly the society we have now.”

There has been plenty of literature outlining various possibilities for efficient and cost effective private road/railway networks. A commendable work in this field is ‘Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads’, edited by Gabriel Roth. Empirical examples of private roads/railways include Britain’s very own Private Roads Services, PRAs in Sweden (which operate two thirds of the country’s road network) and a rather wonderful private highway in Tokyo. Meanwhile, provision of comprehensive care for the disabled, old and orphaned may be accomplished voluntarily in a number of different ways. Human ingenuity has found solutions such as mutual aid societies (a detailed history of which can be found here), charities, community co-operation and indeed for-profit firms: all of which utilise both monetary and psychological incentives to succeed in looking after both those who can pay, and those who can’t.

“The[re] are many intellectual flaws underlying anarcho-capitalism but one is a flaw common to some versions of leftist anarchism: that a pure form of freedom is ever achievable. Every action has potential consequences for the liberty of others. The mere act of ownership is a bar on the liberty of others to use the things you claim as yours, for example. Or you may decide to build a railway from your house to (let’s say) Newcastle, but that might piss off the people whose land lies in between. The resolution to such dilemmas cannot be provided purely by free markets; there must be other forms of collective action to resolve problems.”

I’m not in agreement with this apparent conflation of voluntary interaction and selfishness at all. Whilst some may see no problem with ‘selfishness’ in certain cases, advocating a free society does not presuppose a blatant disregard for your fellow man; indeed, most anarcho-capitalists are strong advocates of co-operation and non-profitable means of achieving certain ends. The assertion that removing coercion “rewards selfishness” is a purely subjective judgement, and in my opinion incorrect. Many people gain far more psychologically from unpaid volunteer work than from working the night-shift in Evil Capitalists Inc., but does this make volunteer work more ‘selfish’? Far from rewarding money-centric egoism, reducing the role of the state would incentivise individuals to co-operate all the more (as I have previously argued), fulfilling the roles of the state more efficiently and of course, of their own volition.

The argument referring to leftist anarchism and the impossibility of ‘pure freedom’ is the same confusion that Isaiah Berlin made between freedom (negative liberty) and power (positive liberty). As Murray Rothbard wrote in The Ethics of Liberty:

“Berlin upheld the concept of “negative liberty” — absence of interference with a person’s sphere of action — as against “positive liberty,” which refers not to liberty at all but to an individual’s effective power or mastery over himself or his environment.”

The ‘railway to Newcastle’ example is also based on a misunderstanding of the anarcho-capitalist position. In order to be able to use the property of the “people whose land lies in between” for any end, one must come to voluntary agreement/contract with them – either by paying them, or convincing them that a railway is a lovely addition to their garden vista. If neither can be achieved, building the railway would be a criminal invasion of property rights and punishable by private courts.

“The same can be said for laws, generally. The very existence of laws implies some collective organisation to enforce them – a de facto state, however small. You might say “to hell with laws” as many leftists do (and I often sympathise), but then how does one enforce the property rights essential to anarcho-capitalism? Or individual rights to life, liberty, safety etc? Pure, unsullied individualism is not even possible, let alone desirable.”

Thankfully, ‘Voice of Treason’ then goes on to discuss legislation. Whilst David Friedman can explain the beauty of private law far more eloquently than I (see this illustrated summary of his “Machinery of Freedom” lecture), it is sufficient for the purposes of this article to remind readers that an organisation enforcing law does not have to be a state. A state is simply an institution that satisfies either (usually both) of these characteristics:

(1) acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”;
(2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defence service (police and courts) over a given territorial area.

I would certainly dispute anyone who holds the “to hell with laws” sentiment if that law they were lampooning happened to be natural rights-based Rothbardian property rights and its derivatives. I worry that ‘Voice of Treason’ is once again equating moral individualism (Ayn Rand’s misanthropic nonsense) with the just application of property rights, which forms the cornerstone of anarcho-capitalist political philosophy.

“But ultimately, what is a ‘state’, anyway, but a collective, which may be coercive, or not to a greater or lesser degree? How is it different to a corporation (highly coercive bordering on fascistic) or a co-operative (less coercive but still restrictive). Anarchism (of any sort) requires the removal of all coercive hierarchies, but NOT necessarily all hierarchies. I’m not sure if I’m a minarchist, but they do at least recognise that hierarchies are unavoidable and take a pragmatic approach to minimising any element of coercion.”

Historically, states arose out of anarchy when warlords appropriated land and started extorting protection money from the population. This was called ‘rent’ and eventually ‘taxation’ but there is really no difference. Rent is a form of private taxation, every bit as coercive as feudalism. That is the basis of capitalism and it rests on the idea that there are no limits to private property ownership, which is the other really big flaw in anarcho-capitalism. (Incidentally, slavery is also a logical consequence of unrestricted property ownership).”

Legal initiation of physical coercion by any firm in an anarcho-capitalist society is oxymoronic. Perhaps ‘Voice of Treason’ is again referring to fallacious “positive liberty” (maximisation of opportunity). Meanwhile, there is no such thing as private taxation; it is another oxymoron. Feudalism arose due to inadequate delineation of property rights and the consequent arising of unlawful land monopolies. Feudal landowners almost invariably did not own their property in the legal anarcho-capitalist sense, which (according to Lockean original appropriation principles) rightfully belonged to those who first mixed their labour with it (namely, the peasants). Slavery is a logical consequence of unrestricted property ownership, but anarcho-capitalism is not unrestricted property ownership. Again, arguing from the natural-rights perspective, the will of any man is, by definition, inalienable. The impossibility/illegitimacy of slavery in this manner is actually explained best by an antithesis of freedom, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (in The Social Contract):

“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts. Finally, it is an empty and contradictory convention that sets up, on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited obedience. Is it not clear that we can be under no obligation to a person from whom we have the right to exact everything? Does not this condition alone, in the absence of equivalence or exchange, in itself involve the nullity of the act? For what right can my slave have against me, when all that he has belongs to me, and, his right being mine, this right of mine against myself is a phrase devoid of meaning?”

‘Voice of Treason’ concludes:

“So, individual freedom without restriction eventually leads to total tyranny with power and land ownership concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite who were selfish enough to take it by force. This is the society we inhabit today. It is not collectivism per se that leads to state oppression then; it is the refusal to place any restrictions on the concentration of power, including ownership. Minarchism seems like a pragmatic and very logical attempt to deal with that problem.”

So, individual freedom (as defined by strict application of Rothbardian property rights) leads to total absence of legitimate aggression, with ownership determined by voluntary transactions between individuals that are incentivised to care for their fellow man. This is not the society we inhabit today. It is indeed not collectivism per se that leads to state oppression then; it is the refusal to apply anarcho-capitalism’s universal ethic and instead allowing one group to parasitically expropriate the production of another. Minarchism never has, and never will be a universal ethic. Pragmatically, it is nothing more than an ideological cop-out for those who abide by false utilitarian arguments.

Daniel Pryor writes on political and economic issues from a libertarian perspective. Follow on Twitter @DanielPryorr

The uncomfortable truth about the Left’s ‘monopoly’ on caring

The most caring way to spend £2.50? Photo: Rohit Sharma (Flickr)

Accusations of ‘champagne socialism’ are not legitimate arguments against those who advocate a larger state. But they do put pay to fallacious myths of right-wingers exclusive ‘selfishness’, writes Daniel Pryor.

In all probability, you have at some point preferred sipping a skinny latte to saving a dying African child. In fact, if you have ever drunk a cup of coffee, at any point, you have irrefutably demonstrated your callous disregard for the preservation of human life. That £2.50 could have been donated to any number of charities that effectively save lives: contributing to the search for a cure for AIDS, sending food aid to alleviate starvation in the developing world, or supplying mosquito nets to malaria-ridden countries. Through a gross, inhuman act of negligence, you have explicitly demonstrated that you value a cup of coffee above a human life.

The above assertion – that buying coffee (or indeed any selfish indulgence) reveals a demonstrated preference in that particular instance for self-satisfaction over charity – is valid. However, the accompanying ‘think of the children’ guilt-trip that one so often hears from the self-proclaimed ‘champions-of-the-oppressed’ on the Left is not. Such frequent intimations of right-wingers’ exclusive greed, sanctimoniously spat out by socialist commentators (think Polly Toynbee, Laurie Penny, Seumus Milne), are hypocritical in the extreme. The cold, hard truth is that all but the most hardcore of egalitarians must admit to conducting themselves with a degree of selfishness; like the rest of us, they too have stooped to the base level of living in excess of necessity.

According to the Left’s own (flawed) proletarian logic, buying a cup of coffee from Evil Capitalists Inc. does not benefit the poorest in society. Instead, it is supposedly a naked exploitation of the workers that produced said coffee. Those who consume the luxuries that they themselves declare to be wasteful are providing rope with which to hang themselves, if ever they should criticise right-wing greed. At what point does living beyond essential requirement become self-indulgence? Is there an acceptable level of poverty at which one can pack up and go home, satisfied that quotas for saving the poor have been met? Apparently so. Some profligacy is apparently fine, but we should raise taxes and welfare slightly because forcing people to be a little less selfish would be lovely.

Greed is admittedly a relative concept, as well as an absolute one. It is absolute in that any consumption above the absolute minimum for sustaining life is, by definition, more than necessary. Equally, one can legitimately argue that Starbuck’s tax avoidance is greed on a grander scale than a Guardianista indulging in a cup of Starbuck’s coffee (ignoring, of course, the positive ramifications of such tax avoidance). But those who advocate freer markets and reducing the size of the state are often not greedy in the relative sense. Various studies have shown that in recent history, government welfare has ‘crowded-out’ private donations. New Deal government spending reduced charitable activity within churches, post-Second World War increases in US government spending reduced charitable giving, and contemporary analysis of the German welfare state indicates that increased welfare spending engenders a ‘significant…crowding-out of private philanthropy’. Milton and Rose Friedman summarised this phenomenon in ‘Free to Choose: A Personal Statement’:

‘We believe that one of the greatest costs of our present [American] welfare system is that it…poisons the springs of private charitable action.’

Therefore, reducing compulsory transfer payments (welfare) to the poorest in society actually incentivises individuals to contribute more directly through voluntary private charity. Freeing markets encourages the proliferation of not-for-profit, charitable organisations: encouraging more people to voluntarily choose to help others. The beauty of free market capitalism is as well as harnessing self-interest as a productive force for the betterment of society, it also motivates those who’s natural desire to do good of their own accord is depersonalised and superseded by the state.

‘Right-wing’ is not a synonym for selfish and ‘left-wing’ is not a synonym for selfless. This pernicious and false dichotomy, espoused daily on the comment sections of news websites and across social media, replaces genuine intellectual debate with crude caricatures and ad hominem attacks. The free market may allow you to pursue a materialistic lifestyle, but it certainly does not force you to.

Daniel Pryor writes on political and economic issues from a libertarian perspective. Follow on Twitter @DanielPryorr