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WHEN WILL CERTAIN RADICAL ANARCHISTS LIVE OUT THE TRUE MEANING OF THEIR CREED?
It's a puzzle. I mean, the way some hard-core, to-the-wall, apoplectic anarchists make their living from the very institutions and processes they claim to spurn and reject.
Anarchism is to theory of government as atheism is to theory of religion. Anarchists believe that government does not fulfill any legitimate function which the market could not fulfill better. Also that government is immoral through and through anyway. There should be no government, they say.
Some anarchists give little thought to the matter of alternatives. Others, particularly modern-day libertarians like Murray Rothbard, George H. Smith, and David Friedman, have given the matter quite a lot of thought and have even spelled out various principles and protocols they expect to be followed by the "competing defense agencies" of the government-free free market society.
But there is a problem. Anarchism is the ethic of opting-out. Which means that anarchists qua anarchists have no anarchism-based advice to dispense on how to deal with, say, a criminal who wants to secede from a proposed judgment against him and buy into a "competing" ethic and law code--the K-Mart or JC Penny brand of justice that says that the evidence against him isn't enough to convict, the glove don't fit, the jihad okayed it, whatever. If force is nonetheless wielded against said defendant, doesn't this constitute a monopolistic imposition that is brutally at odds with the anarchist-hallowed right of ultimate secession?
Either there is a meta-market mechanism (a.k.a. government) empowered to resolve such disputes when voluntary arbitration fails, or there is not. Either the defense agencies/Mafiosi/radical Islamic terrorists of the anarchist society are at liberty to sell whatever version of force they like, catering to all preferences...or they are not. Either we live in a society in which men are in principle governed by objective laws and judgments...or we do not.
Anarchists, bless them, may have no way to hack their way though the logical brambles propagated by their own presumptions. Let us not demand of them the impossible. They are more empowered when it comes to their own actions, however. Hence the riddle. For it is a fact that some anarchists insist that, given the state's moral status, it is wrong to sanction, support, or have anything to do with the state if one can at all avoid it. You're a bad guy, for example, if you work for the government, regardless of the type of work involved. That's complicity; that's being an enabler. Not to mention the little fact that you are being compensated with stolen money.
Not all anarchists accept this kind of reasoning, to be sure; but some do. It is also true that a certain percentage of that percentage say the one thing and do the other.
Now, one can grasp the reasoning of a voluntaryist who says, "Well, I want society to attain Ideal Condition X. But society as it is now is the society in which I must live and have my being. Why should I arbitrarily punish myself because I believe in something better? That is why I drive on government-controlled roads and mail letters using the U.S. Postal Service, visit the Grand Canyon, take the bus when the car is in the shop, etc."
Which is fine. Let's stipulate that even the most adamant repudiator of having-anything-to-do-with-government cannot get by without at least occasionally driving on the roads or visiting the Grand Canyon. Let's also stipulate that in a society cobwebbed with ever-growing controls, you can hardly remove your cat from your mat without having something or other to do with the state. A standard to which nobody can repair is not a standard you should rub anybody's nose in.
But if there are many shades of gray on the moral continuum pertaining to interaction with the state, you'd think that the bona-fide line-in-the-sand-drawing anarchist would at least draw the line at directly working for and scooping loot from the institution with which, he insists, any moral person should have as little to do as metaphysically possible. Even a continuum with many shades of gray includes a few areas that are dark-gray and black.
It's not as if there are no alternatives. We still have a huge and thriving private sector here in America. Able-bodied and intelligent persons in this country continue to enjoy many opportunities that slaves on a plantation or comrades under communism do not enjoy. Yet some of the smartest and most able-bodied anarchists I've known have also pulled down a regular paycheck from city, state or federal government.
Not merely on a temporary, emergency basis either--i.e., not merely because they're down and out and not otherwise able to eat at all, or feed their families at all, and thus have no realistic choice but to sign up at the local post office until something better comes along. I am talking about living off the taxpayer year in, year out, year after year, no end in sight.
I am pretty sure that voluntaryist folks like Carl Watner, George H. Smith, and Wendy McElroy have never held posts in any post office or public library. But I'm also sure that at least some anarchists, equally voluntaryist in asserted principle, and sometimes a lot more pushy about it, elect to sponge off the taxpayer indefinitely even when other means of survival are available. Por que?
There are anarchists who schlep for the district attorney's office. Anarchists who plow snow for the city. Anarchists who repudiate the very idea of intellectual property...and make their living practicing intellectual property law. Anarchists who serve as functionaries in the local state-owned, state-controlled, state-funded state university--and are willing to sue for even more taxpayer monies for themselves if they feel they've been shortchanged by the state's bureaucracy. Anarchists who are employed as professors at such public universities.
It makes you wonder. Not about libertarians who believe that government does have a legitimate function that may be rightly exercised even prior to the advent of ideally limited, voluntarily funded government. Not even about anarchists who disagree with their more radical compatriots about what kind of cooperation and "sanction" of existing social institutions is morally permissible prior to the advent of anarchist utopia.
It makes you wonder specifically about those unflinching radicals who do believe, argue and insist that taking and using tax monies to pay for the utilities, the rent, the food, year in, year out, year after year, no end in sight, can only be wrong, immoral, evil; can only be a direct and unconscionable breach of the axiomatic insight that thou shalt not initiate the use of force, nor delegate its use, nor fatten oneself indefinitely on the proceeds thereof, no way no how.
Yet who do it themselves.
What gives, huh? What the heck is going on?
For a New Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard. Billed as a "libertarian manifesto," this accessible work is actually an anarchist manifesto. GET IT
Law's Order: What Economics Has To Do with Laws and Why It Matters, David Friedman. Explains why laws often make things worse instead of better. GET IT
The Market For Liberty, Linda Tannehill and Morris Tannehill.
The first book-length libertarian case for the anarchist society. "Will stimulate and challenge your thinking on a whole range of issues," says Roy A. Childs Jr. GET IT
The Structure of Liberty, Randy E. Barnett. Described by Jim Powell as "a sophisticated case for a private, competitive legal system which would let people choose the best agencies to protect their rights." GET IT
--David M. Brown, 5/21/2002
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