Tag Archive for 'abolitionist'

In part, this piece is a response to these posts written a couple of months ago, to which I never fully responded in the comments.

Describing Government in Anarcho-Capitalist Terms
Where Anarchists Respond Wrongly to Government

But it is also meant to be a stand-alone argument for why coercive force is never “free market” regardless of the purpose, intents or motivations of those advocating or initiating force.

Government Arising From Anarchy?
Before I believed that a purely voluntary society was at least possible in theory, I took the position that governments were a natural creation of “anarchy” sometime in humanity’s past, and therefore were, at least in an empirical or pragmatic sense, legitimate. I may not have liked the way in which any governments work (none of them do “work” in any imaginable sense of the word) but it seemed that a lack of government had its chance and governments are obviously as inevitable as death and taxes.

But governments are not free market or capitalistic in any way because they are not voluntary. Any “government” that is voluntary ceases to be a government – that is a coercive monopoly on force. If a “government” does not prevent other agencies from providing services, individuals to provide their own services – than it is no longer a government.

Freeriders
The first argument that then comes into play is the freerider. This person benefits from defence services either directly or indirectly without paying for them. But the freerider is not aggressing against the service provider in order to steal service, rather he his being gifted this service by the imprecision of the provider.

The solution to the freerider is not to charge everyone because it is most likely that they benefit anyway. This is the provider’s problem – not the freerider’s.

The TVLA as an Example
In England, television is a public good and is paid for by a licence fee – about $240 per year. the TVLA is a corporation that has been empowered by the state to collect licence fees and also to investigate people who are “stealing” tv. Because tv is broadcast rergardless of payment, the TVLA has had to use draconian measures of intimidation, deception and fraud in order to seek out an prosecute non-licence payers.

All people in living in England are expected to prove that they are innocent of watching tv without a licence. Until they satisfy the TVLA, they are subject to constant harassing visits, letters, threats and searches.

But the fact that the tv is broadcast so widely is the government’s fault, not people who do not break any ethics by buying a tv, a box to receive tv and subsequently watching it. These freeriders are benefiting for free -but the fact that the government is losing its services and people are “salvaging” it from the commons is perfectly defensible.

The solution to the freerider problem is not a presumption of freeriding by all people until they prove they are not. Rather it is for the provider of any good or service to make explicit contracts with individuals and enforce those contracts accordingly. If a good or service cannot be profitable because of insufficient technology or infrastructure to handle freerider problems, then the solution is not to substitute force for this lacking – it is to abandon the service.

On Contracts
Regardless of the freerider problem, the basic ethics of voluntary society do not change. Contracts cannot be “presumed” or “implied” they must be explicit. Contracts with a large amount of people or a collective group, must be unanimous – otherwise they are not valid.

Llysander Spooner, great abolitionist, labour advocate and criminal for his daring to compete with the US Post office declared:

These facts are all so vital and so self-evident, that it cannot reasonably be supposed that any one will voluntarily pay money to a “government,” for the purpose of securing its protection, unless he first make an explicit and purely voluntary contract with it for that purpose.

It is perfectly evident, therefore, that neither such voting, nor such payment of taxes, as actually takes place, proves anybody’s consent, or obligation, to support the Constitution. Consequently we have no evidence at all that the Constitution is binding upon anybody, or that anybody is under any contract or obligation whatever to support it. And nobody is under any obligation to support it.

For a contract to be valid – regardless of whether it is verbal, written or even implied – there must be consent from all parties of the contract. For example, four of my neighbours could not all sign a binding contract giving them shares in my property if I do not sign it. If they brought such a contract and attempted to enforce it – I would be legitimate in protecting myself despite their “contract” or the democratic principles behind their action (four”votes” out of five).

However there are examples of purely voluntary contracts for millions of goods and services all over the world. Wal-Mart doesn’t bring me baskets of products without my asking – rather, they advertise their contracts and I only become responsible for the goods when I consent to purchase them. Just as Wal-Mart can’t force me to buy their groceries, I cannot stand guard outside of Wal-Mart all night, even defending it from thieves and vandals, and then expect that they must pay me the next morning.A government, of course, could make a contract with every single one of its citizens – but it has to be consented to unanimously for it to be valid. Every new immigrant or birth in the country would also require a new contract.

To my knowledge, there is no government on earth which has done this, and there never will be. This is because government, by definition, uses aggressive force. Its very existence breaks the non-aggression axiom (regardless how small or limited it is). Government is hardly “free market.”