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?