Tuesday 8 March 2011

The Anarcho-bahn?

Natural law Freemen, Radical libertarians/ minarchists/ anarchists - all us freedom lovers are to a greater or lesser extent guilty of trying to template freedom. People ignorant or unaware of the possibility and indeed preferability of non coercive solutions frequently pelt us with 'but how would...' questions. Whether they truly can't imagine the simplicity and consistency of voluntary solutions or the statist mindset holds such sway over their natural minds that some cognitive dissonance causes this defensive reaction to the suggestion of freedom - still they demand answers. They want an anarchist society to provide the same statist solutions to the same problems the state itself created. 'what about the poor?' (1) They cry 'what about the railways?' They want reassurance that everything will be the same.
The crime we are often guilty of in answering these questions is rushing to positively answer these challenges in the hope of converting another believer for the cause. First off unfortunately the way the world is designed to maintain the privilege of legitimised coercive control, additional support won't make much difference right now. Yes the idea needs to spread but we are too early. By a longshot.
Secondly by trying to reassure the statist that there won't be any scary differences in libertopia we are trying to predict the future. We are also templating and compromising total freedom. The voluntary society cannot be planned. There cannot be an anarchist position on motorways or anything else come to that. We don't have views or policies.
The fact is some things that we have come to appreciate may well only be possible through coercion.
In statist healthcare debates socialists often attack free marketeers with claims that no insurer would pay for intensive cancer care or other serious diseases. If the only way to fund these extra few days of miserable excruitiating terminal decline is through violent extortion then perhaps it just isn't ethically justifiable.
Likewise without compulsory Purchase orders or as the yanks call it emminent domain it might be impossibly expensive to drive a road across a continent of private homesteads. Without corpratist protectionism the scale and rate of technological and industrial innovation might be very different. Why would voluntary customers subscribe to a legal system that granted privileged exceptions to safeguard risky investments?
Some of us go to extraordinary lengths to assuage these concerns.
I often mention Walter block. He defends the most extreme aspects of total freedom. See his 'in defense of' book for radical views of slum lords, wealth hoarders and pimps. He is radical and uncompromising in his application of anarchist principles. He alone has outlined in detail a complete examination of coercive roads and a full illustration of possible voluntary alternatives. (Google Walter block roads for the free pdf) In order to make this work he has had to argue some extremely problematic ideas.
These are not problematic because the principles are faulty but because he is trying to provide an anarchist provision of what is possibly a uniquely statist concept. There may be some things such as motorways that will not be consistent with freedom based on voluntary principles. Just because the state used violence to give us things we have grown to love does not mean we should attempt the impossible to preserve the few coercive treats we're addicted to. If coercive rule had never existed we may never have imagined or grown used to such provisions. There would have been no question of rolling back corpratism/globalism/consumerism or maintaining them under anarchy.
Block's world of competing flag poles a la the north/south Korean border in order to homestead airspace to defend against bridges over landowners who refuse to sell to the road builders might be as impossible as it sounds.
One of the amazing things about discovering and adhering to the non aggression axiom in the pursuit of whatever freedom we crave is that it forces us to rexamine assumptions we have been brought up not to question. Many of us have found our views and attitudes changed. We realise that we cannot have our freedom without extending that same equal boundless freedom to others.
The possibility that libertopia might be radically different in unexpected and even unwelcome ways is one such revelation.
The only thing of which we can be certain is freedom from coercion. The M25 might not be on the cards.

(1) as if social welfare is why we have rulers. This is merely the latest historical excuse from the coercive class who used to ride on such shams as divine right, the greater good and hypocriticaly the defense of freedom.
Even the justification of collective defence is a fallacy. It might fit. It might appear to make sense. But it can never be more than a fabrication. Whether created out of wishful misguided idealism or from intentionally deceptive design this justification cannot be the truth. The objective truth is that there is no social contract. The mythical collective does not and never has voluntarily subjected to coercive authority for any reason whether that be social welfare, collective defense or the provision of choo choo trains.
Hobbes was a cunt. And so was Plato. He really was a cunt.

4 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. thanks for the comment sorry i took so long to get around to replying

    "The privatisation of roads may be a good idea,(its certainly better than state owned)but it would get complicated,I'm not a big fan of what we have in london and I think thats what would have to happen in a Rothbard/Block world.Too many cameras,the creation of a bigbrother state, its open to abuse and athoritarianism."

    it may well be complicated or it may not. a friend of mine once asked how, under anarchic polycentric law and competing police, he would be safe when visiting my house. i explained the likelihood that providers would have reciprocal arrangements which he thought impossibly complicated. it would be no more complicated than the way that competing insurance companies interact today when their customers smash into each other. people have grown used to not having to even think about security and health. these services are a given and the sheeple can instead invest their time in choosing scatter cushions.
    my girlfriend - definitely not an anarchist - frequently boils her opposition down to the 'problem' that there would be too much choice. it is inevitable at such an early stage in the spread of voluntarism that many current slaves have grown to love their safe worry free cage and are more than happy to have their masters make all the choices. i usually reply that a voluntary market society would be akin to booking a holiday. some people like to choose each individual component - hotels, flights, transfers, meals, activities - whilst others prefer an all in one package that includes food and drink in one price. in libertopia there may be geographic areas in which individual autonomous homesteads purchase or mutually organise their own security and their may be whole gated communities where the single rental price covers all bills including sewage, power, security, health etc.
    there are countless examples of such supposed complication in the world today - international trade between private companies, cross border financial flows etc. your cash card in all probability works in almost any atm around the world. sure there is state involvement in international finance but the complexity behind the scenes of your simple straighforward holiday cash withdrawal would likely continue in a voluntary society. like the free market story of the unknowable complexity involved in the production of something as apparently simple as a pencil private roads may well appear equally simple on the surface even though a complex web of voluntary arrangements underpin the whole system.
    probably the best example from our own world that could be used to guess at how a voluntary road network may operate is mobile phones. you can have contract, you can have pay as you go. you can chose your network provider but you are still able to call people on other networks and even use competitors' cell masts when your phone is unable to connect to its preferred network. all these arrangements between competing businesses exist and work because it is in their mutual interest to cooperate in such a way.

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  3. your car payment transponder or whatever may be akin to a pay as you go sim - purchased annonymously at a bricks and mortar grocery shop and allows you to travel the country on various networks apparently without complication. behind the scenes the business will take care of all the complicated cooperative arrangements. unlike some fellow idiots who attempt the impossible and predict the future libertopia i dont believe such systems are dependent upon recent technologies. private fire services operated in london on nothing more than lookouts, bells and logo-ed plates on homes indicating their subscription. likewise toll roads predate what we consider to be our national road network. the oft heard complaint that we would have to stop every hundred feet and tip coins into a toll booth is unfounded. where today this could be achieved with wireless electronic communication in times of yore a subscription plate like the private fire service subscriber or the chromed bumper badges of the RAC would perform a similar function.

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  4. on the subject of cameras i have a problem with the bigbrotherwatch type of view that they are in and of themselves a complete evil. what i dont like is the coercion behind most cameras - many local authorities require a certain number of cameras in any private commercial establishment as a condition of permission. the state police have departments that work in tandem with the coercive planning authorities on stuff like this. no-one likes cameras being pointed at them so in all probability a totally freemarket in retail spaces may well not have such impersonal oppression. friendly human doormen would be more effective and popular. human guards already in place are considered by the security industry to be preferable to even monitored camera systems.
    the state always fucks things up and usually resorts to the bluntest most violent solutions. we can see that in the london congestion charging zone. there is no need to have images of vehicles and occupants recorded and like pay as you go phones there is no commercial need to have databases of names and addresses cross referenced to those vehicle details. ever wondered why the UK is one of very few countries that prohibits the tinting of windscreens?
    from economics and market theory we can see that providers will offer what customers want at the minimum cost to themselves. so long as they are making money they have zero motivation to do anything else. customers will want safety and security so providers will supply that demand. it is unlikely that customers will want their private movements tracked - so it is probable that vehicle identities and payment systems will be more anonymous like pay as you go phones
    in short the market mechanism should prevent authoritarian abuse. there wont be any authority remember.
    additionally as i said in my original waffle - there is no need to create templates for an anarchist world in order to promise people that everything will be the same. if crossing a whole continent of private properties is not economically feasible absent coercion then evidently free open roads will have been an exclusively violent treat that we have grown so used to as to ignore their ethical impossibility. perhaps. human ingenuity and innovation will supply whatever demands exist. the state currently limits use of the airways to an insane degree. in respect of property rights and the potentially high costs of gaining passage the skies may the answer. or perhaps a voluntary society would be a far more localised society with mutually free roads in and around dispersed village etc. who knows? not I but the provision of roads is no justification for the continuance of coercive rule.

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