the most frequent reaction i get to most of my economic/social/political ideas is 'but there'd be anarchy! rioting on the streets, looting!'
well, well well.
many many people in london have just had the deeply unnerving lesson that the state cannot guarantee their security.
alot of people's faith in the state rests on widely held assumptions about the perfect, total and absolute nature of the state.
what we have seen in the last few days is the truth. actual reality. when i suggest anarchism, total individual freedom, even after i explain that we can have (and have had in history) law, order, security, and police without the state people eventually object 'but without state law and order there would be nothing stopping me from burgling or murdering you in the first place!' to which i answer - there is nothing 'stopping' me doing that to you right now. the state does not act like gravity. it reacts to crime occasionally but it does not 'stop' it. the state is not an absolute force of nature or physics. the mere existence of the state police does not stop crime.
people think it does. they think law and order are perfect absolutes. you may have heard that people's fear of crime is massively over inflated in relation to actual crime levels. i worked in the physical security market encountering the effects and truth of crime on a daily basis for years and i can tell you this is very true. the reason why, on any given day in your entire life, you have not been burgled is not because plod were stood by your front door pushing away the violent hordes. it is simply because there just isnt very much crime. if youre reading this you must realise how woefully ineffectual the police are, surely. do you really believe they have any effect on anything? is the fact that you may never have been burgled purely and directly due to the actions of the police or is it simply because there just is not much burglary going on? is the fact that you may have not been mugged every day because a personal copper precedes you on every stroll you take? no its because there are not very many muggers and there is very little mugging. perception versus reality.
but all the sheep lie asleep in their beds safe in the knowledge that the state keeps them safe. it provides security. not even 'security forces' or 'services' but people truly do believe the state just envelopes them in a cuddly blanket of safeness. we've got a state - nothing bad can happen. this abstract notion of security that just emerges from the equally abstract state like a gas.
what these riots and their rapid and wide spreading shows is that even a tax funded national monopoly police force has near zero effect (not because theyre soft or the wrong person is in number 10 - the french riot police are fucking brutal and they still have immense riots). the state does NOTHING. the reason why we tend to have peaceful stable secure lives is because that just happens. i do not mean that there is no need for security services. on the contrary i imagine that in anarcho-libertopia there will be many more times private security personnel than there are now police - what i mean is that we do not need a state to protect us from a fear that is largely imagined. usually there are not riots. in new york when the police went on strike crime rates dropped. the london riots are almost because of the police. youve got a state and there is still looting!
the state does not exist. it is an abstract concept. i dont walk around knifing people left right and centre because the state is there. i just dont stab people. most people dont. most of the time. not because of the state. they just dont.
the state does nothing.
as we have seen it only takes the slightest little spark to reveal to some people this truth. i mean that it only took a few arabian riots in the news a month ago to create a general background thought. it only took the unopposed looting of a 'contraversial' tesco's in bristol's lefty epicentre a few weeks back to add a uk context to this background feeling. and then it only took a police shooting and the ever present fuel of race relations to kick off whole litany of deeply smouldering problems. the kids in birmingham saw that there just isnt anything stopping criminal behaviour in the events of the first night in london. and so they kicked off on the second night. they saw, in their unthinking miseducated ignorance, a truth that noone else can. blinded by a thousand years of the 'benevolent' state none of the academics, journalists, politicians, intellectuals, chattering classes or even bloggers can see that it is not the state that generates, nurtures or protects peaceful voluntary interaction. these fabian subsidised feral scumbags saw within hours that the state's justification from security is complete bullshit.
in a recent episode of some cop drama that my girlfriend follows there was the story of an evil lunatic who strolled into crowded public places such as railway station concourses and started smashing random people to death with a hammer. the truth is that there is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from doing this at any time.
anyway having laboured that rather abstract notion and probably failed to convey my point ill move on
could anarchy have been any worse than the state in the last few days? imagine...
noone to coercively prevent you from defending yourself and others
noone to coercively prevent you from buying, owning and operating any tool you want....
including tools for the job of defense (gun is a scary word but should be no more scary than hammer, kitchen knife, circular saw, spoon or any other lethal unlicensed tool)
noone to coercively limit where you can live through irrational, unjust and hugely overlooked 'planning' laws. cities are largely creations of the state but i shall leave this for another post. i imagine few people living in hackney really dreamed of ending up there.
noone to coercively extort your property, hard earned by yourself through voluntary transactions, and use it to subsidise socially and individually damaging policies. education, housing etc.
noone to coercively extort your property so that you can no longer provide the basic essentials of life such as physical security (the number of victims ive met that knew they should have spent on gates and fences etc but could not afford it on top of 40-60% taxes) and no im not just a gate installer)
noone with the power to unnaturally mix people up. all the talk about 'these kids must be coming from another area' is bollocks. everyone deceives themselves that they live in a nice part of town when in reality they probably dont and even if they do some socialist fifty years ago probably built a fucking 'estate' bang in the middle of a natural and functioning area (i detest the prevalence of the word 'communities' in the news - the only 'community' i want to be a part of is one that i want to be a part of. not one through accident of geography.) egalitarians may not like it but in a natural human world you would not have sink estates next to peaceful productive homes. every single part of the uk has a fucking council estate. every single village, no matter how fancy the other inhabitants consider themselves to be, has a completely unnatural enclave of alien problem causing, tax-subsidised people bang in the middle. i dont care what colour they are - im extremely egalitarian in my hatred - some of the worst scum i have ever seen are white. why this happened if not by some mad intentional political design of social engineering i have no idea.
so as i have briefly outline above there are several policies inherrent to every social-democratic state, no matter its team colours, that caused or at the very least exacerbated the recent riots. but now let us consider what may have happened in an anarchy in reaction...
remember back at the beginning some black guy was shot by some white guys in fancy outfits? now i am not about to speculate or politically revise what may or may not have happened in that case but my point is that what are the chances that a whole bunch of black people would continue to voluntarily subscribe to the services of a largely white security company with, at best, a history of dubious conduct and laughable public relations?
im not called milliband or livingston so i wont excuse or justify abuse of property rights (everything is based on property rights - from the security of your hubcaps to your arsehole) but i will say that without the possibility of voluntarily changing service providers and given the impossibility of political change (voting, blogging, campaigning, petitions, even revolutions - economic choice theory explains why they never work) these people had no way of changing anything. a pointless, irrational outburst of violence is only really understood from this point of view.
i mean if the trolley attendant at tescos runs over my foot i dont piss around trying to get him sacked - i just go to asda. it never comes to this because the pressure is always there. this pressure is not there with the state which explains why its always so unutterably shit at everything.
if my boyfriend was shot erroneously by my security service or they failed to uphold their contractual obligations regarding the protection of my shop i would immediately take my money elsewhere. if, on the other hand, they were free to force me to pay then they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. its a wonder why they dont really.
as with the egyptian protests (no i am not likening the mindless thuggery in the uk to political protest) the egyptian people realised that absent the state they could provide all the services we are continually told can only be provided by coercively funded uniforms. i posted back then (and ranty kindly reblogged it) that the egyptians were running their own refuse collections, providing their own neighbourhood security and even funding and operating a field hospital and media centre in tahrir square. in london over the last few days some people (notably not the anglo-saxon fuckers with the benefit of hundreds of years of indoctrination against autonomy) have provided their own neighbourhood security in response to the revelation that the state barely exists. what us pathetic statist whities have done is to piss around pretending to clean up ffs. yes, its lots of fun to jump on the trendy bandwagon of flash mob social networking 'happenings' and get in the paper holding a mop/broom but it is no more than childsplay. as with diy in almost any area these big groups of dumb fuckwits would have been better off doing what they are best at for that period of time and then paying the money they earned to people who are best at cleaning up. diy is the most economically insane thing anyone can do (with the only caveat being that if you actually enjoy it then it can be seen as an entertainment expense).
(i should leave it for another post but anyone who earns more than any given specialist should fucking well leave it to the specialist do do it faster, better and cheaper. from toilet cleaning to dentistry. economies of scale and specialisation of labour apply just as much to your personal life as they do to arguments against socialism.
anyway i ask you would you rather pay your council tax for the 'terrifying' british bobby or pay for an ex squaddy? yeah even if you like that bit of the state that wears camo, you could still do without the police. a pc costs way more than a squaddy but is undoubtedly less able to perform the core function of the provision of security the pc may have been on more fabian courses but the squaddy will be fitter, have better awareness, reactions and presence.
if, like me, you dont think the state is much good at anything and even if it were that would be as imoral as rape then go for the free market option. you can get 4 security guards for the cost of one pc. each and every street in the country could have a full time private security guard dedicated to patrolling just that area 24/7 for less than it costs to have one guy in an antiquated uniform sat in an office 'covering' a whole town.
or if, for some reason you dont like the rational choice of the market then why not go for the communties option - i would rather pay a super local community contribution or even reciprocate in kind in some kind of militia. i would rather have the amateur Turks, Kurds and Sikhs of london protecting me than the dumb fucks that enjoy dressing up like GI joe.
ill post some links to works explaining voluntary legal systems one of these days. the thing to remember is that once you break the rules you want applied in defence of yourself then your protection agency will no longer be commercially able to uphold those rules on your behalf. in short once you loot a shop noone will prevent the shop owner shooting you.
in short without the state this probably would not have happened.
if it had happened it would have been dealt with effectively, efficiently and expediently.
AND you, as an individual, would have been free to do as you fucking well wanted. there would be no need for 'consensus' no need for tedious media 'examination' no need for more money to be TAKEN from you.
if you wanted to change police you could do instantly. if you wanted to move to the country you could do. if you wanted to spend all your money on guns you could do. if you wanted to build a 20ft wall around your family you could do.
Could anarchy really be any worse than this?
To be honest I think Anarchy could be worse. I suspect crime is statistically relatively low (except for the victims of course!)partly because large parts of the population grew up when the police and judicial system was much more locally based and did (unlike now)appear to work.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that I would rather justice dispensed by the people (as was the intention) than what we have now, faux-justice dispensed by the government.
hello again and thanks for commenting.
ReplyDeleteits a good point that the majority of people are or were raised in an environment of effective state legal and security systems. obviously today's systems of Laura Norder seem to have been so mishandled as to appear intentionally so. i think you may be correct that crime is relatively low purely because the majority of people mistakenly believe that the forces of the state will bring some kind of meaningful consequences to their actions. as i was blathering on above i think that as people, like the rioters of the past few days, begin to realise that the state is, in some case, little more than an abstract notion, there will be plenty more problems to come.
i keep meaning to take some time and write a proper piece (rather than a pressure valve rant) about the immense strengths of voluntarist (non state) legal systems.
i dont know if youve read the following but they all offer very similar intros to anarcho-capitalist/voluntarist/market/polycentric legal systems:
David Friedman - 'Machinery of Freedom'
Stefan Molyneux - 'Practical Anarchy'
Robert Murphy - 'Chaos theory'
all available as free pdfs and audio files.
if you are unfamiliar with the legal insurance anarcho-capitalist model then very briefly it would be similar to how credit rating systems operate. perhaps the ebay feedback system could be a useful comparison.
i would argue that the main reason most people do not commit even petty crime (if they have ever considered the question) is not because they dont want to spend a few hours in a cell or pay a one off fine but because they do not want the impediment a criminal record poses to their employment prospects.
as was rambling on about above the state has largely removed this pressure from vast swathes of the population by subsidising joblessness. thus they do not feel the effect as you do.
now imagine that, absent the state and its 'welfare' policies, personal reputation and employment were greatly more significant as they no doubt would be. imagine everyone had a legal feedback rating, scored by each and every single successful, peaceful transaction - from employment to mortgage payments to vending machines. without the anti-discrimination laws of the state, individuals would be free to contract with whomsoever they wished. their legal insurance may well not cover them if they chose to enter into dealings with a criminal or even an individual who was in debt to many creditors. also remember that absent the state (we are now entering utopian futurology as critics contend) every single thing would be private. roads, water, power, communications. imagine the legal feedback rating of a rioter or a shoplifter. what are the likely effects of their ill behaviour? product and service providers will levy additional fees on transactions with such individuals to cover the extra insurance costs of dealing with such untrustworthy individuals.
imagine the pressure of not only losing your job but perhaps being refused entry to whole streets or having your water cut off because the pipe owners couldnt be sure that a riotous customer convicted of looting would necessarily pay their bills.
my apologies if this is all elementary Rothbardian libertarianism to you but im sure you know how difficult it is to discus things with strangers online when you have little knowledge of their background understanding.
thanks again for commenting
Hi Will,
ReplyDeleteNo I haven't read that list, 'fraid I'm not much of a political theorist! Basically I'm a pragmatist. Apart from a few years on a local council (ratepayer backed independent) in the distant past my background is scientific, physics, maths and a tad of chemistry which morphed into a career in IT and programming, but at a practical level not an academic one, while working in a social science setting.
It was seeing how academic research became financially and in career terms much more politically proscribed, plus experience of the naivety of social scientists’ (with no real training in logic) use of computers and statistical modelling that got me reading blogs, initially over the climate change issues. It was very obvious to me that the science was skewed and partly illiterate and a dependence on computers and programming analysis was something I knew to be dangerously unreliable.
The more I read the more obvious it became that the drivers of AGW alarmism were political and/or commercial, nothing to do with traditional science. You can lie with statistics but you can create a whole parallel universe with programming.
So, from there I started to open the can of political worms to try and explain to myself why politicians needed to behave in such a perverse manner, and that lead to my finding other doubtful issues, past and present, and to exploring alternative political ideas, and hence blogs like yours.
I am probably not what you would describe as an anarchist, I would like to be but don’t actually have enough trust in everyone out there to convince me it would work without some structure to control the excesses of some individuals. On the other hand I detest the centralised structure that is currently imposed on us so I’m probably closer to a libertarian localist democrat – if such a term can exist.
Woodsy, apologies for not replying sooner, i hope you get this.
ReplyDeletei commend you for getting off your arse and engaging in some form of action. alas i cannot say that i have enough commitment to do anything like stand as an independent and for that i applaud you. (anarchist applauds politician shocker!)
your route toward these kind of ideas is really interesting. it seems youve seen first hand the perverse effects the state has on incentives.
there are two or three different sources of individualist propertarian anarchism (political labels are more a minefield of misunderstanding than any useful form of identification/communication). (it may seem like there are as many different forms of anarchism as there are forms of political rule but i do truly believe the above form to be the most humanly natural, likely and actually inevitable.)
anyways - you have your consequentialist and your deontological anarchists.
consequentialists hold that a stateless society would lead to better consequences. this can be seen as the economic argument.
objectivist anarchists hold that by using evidence and reason to work back to a first principle we arrive at self ownership and the derivation of that principle - the non aggression axiom. thus, if it is unjust to initiate aggression against another self owning individual, any threat of aggressive force must be empty and thus the coercive state cannot be legitimate. taxation and involuntary law are unethical.
i hope this doesnt come across as woolly happy clappy wishful thinking and i hope the rational and objective reduction appeals to the scientific method in you.
i believe the two sources of individualist anarchism are in fact complimentary and basically the same. the reason why stateless solutions (free markets etc) can be seen to be more desirable than the results of state intervention (consequentialist argument) is because the state must, necessarily abrogate natural human incentives (deontological argument). economist Ludwig von Mises identified in his work 'Human Action' that humans react to incentives. when those incentives are perverted by force human action too becomes perverted.
ReplyDeleteMurray Rothbard built on that work and identified the coercion at the heart of the state as being contrary to human nature and the root cause of most of the world's ills.
so the reason why free competition amongst providers of goods and services results in more desireable outcomes (the consequentialist argument) is that this form of voluntary interaction gives rise to entirely natural and understandable incentives.
without being able to force a customer to recieve or pay for your services you must entice him to voluntarily patronise your business by appealing to his desires. thus you have an incentive to offer him an incentive. the free market truly does best reflect, reinforce and reward human nature.
you yourself have seen how something as rational and empirical as the scientific method becomes completely corrupted as soon as the coercion of the state enters the frame. this is the same with each and every area of human life that is affected by the state. he who pays the piper calls the tune. if the government takes your money and then pays the piper you might not like the tune.
i came across these ideas in a perhaps a similar way to yourself. i happened by chance upon a reference to Ayn Rand and, not liking the affront posed to my arrogance by the reality of my ignorance, rushed to wikipedia to find out who this Ayn Rand was. the biography there linked to objectivism, individualism, libertarianism and anarchism. ive spend the 18 months or so since greedily feeding upon all the writings i can find. (must admit ive never read a word of rand tho.)
this form of anarchism answers all my questions. IMHO Rothbardian historical analysis best explains how we got here and why things are the way they are and rothbardian theory offers the best solutions.
ive seen some people say that noone is ever really convinced to become a libertarian. rather you are born a libertarian and one day find the name, the idea set that matches how you innately feel about everything. this is how i felt when i first read those wiki articles. it was like a tidal wave of realisation hitting me. everything made sense. the more i read the more sense it made.
anyway as im sure you have better things to be doing with your time ill chop it there.
ReplyDeletei reckon you'd like David Friedman. he's a physics phd, professor of law and economist. it just so happens his latest blog post is about the dangers of computer modelling artic ice data! coincides with your interestes eh?
check it out http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Friedman
and please please please read one of the finest expositions of a logical human society and the first libertarian book i ever read http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
also something that might be up your street is economist Bryan Caplan's book 'the myth of the rational voter'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
here he is giving a presentation on the book http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKANfuq_92U
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
Caplan and other 'public choice economists' probably have the best answer to your search for 'why politicians needed to behave in such a perverse manner'. it chimes in with Mises' point about incentives. the whole of democracy and statism is built (whether by accident or design) upon and by very strange incentives.
public choice economists apply the (nearly scientific) discipline of economics to issues of politics. so perhaps that would be more inline with our background and avoid the naieve social scientists we may be more used to.
Macur Olson is a public choise economist i have heard mentioned in this context tho never read myself. Patri Friedman (son of David, Grandson of Milton - libertarian super family) is regarded as a bit radical by some but he's got it nailed i reckon. he explains the above incentival/public choice explanation of why government doesnt and never will work in a way you will never have heard before and wont forget after. its a slightly ropey vid - there is a vid of him giving the same presentaiton in a formal lecvture but i cant find it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG74Gmfd-9c
this might be it. i cant skip forward in vimeo but from memory i think he talks about macur olson in this presentation http://vimeo.com/19997578
ReplyDeleteyep, just watched it. click that vimeo link and skip to 8:10 for the bit about public choice theory
ReplyDeleteHi Will. Well there are some complicated and unfamiliar concepts and lots of long words there so a considered response will be a while coming.
ReplyDeleteYou are however spot on in describing what I saw, distortion created by governnment control, that's exactly what I watched happen - and no matter either if the control was applied with good intentions, it still distorted (road to hell paved with good intentions maybe). The more I look the more such distortion, and that's without assuming any ill intentions.
I'll be back.