Martin Elson
Right libertarians, who agree on nearly everything else, split on one question: should there be a government at all? The minarchist, Samuel Edward Konkin III’s word for a believer in minimal government, wants a state that keeps the peace, runs the courts and defends the borders, and does nothing else. The quarrel usually turns on that word, “government.”
The quarrel is a century older than Konkin’s word. Herbert Spencer and Auberon Herbert fought it in Victorian England over whether a government could do without compulsory taxes, which comes down to state or no state. Auberon Herbert said it could; Spencer, who had once defended a right to ignore the state, answered that such a position could not be told from anarchism.
By a state this chapter means what Max Weber meant: a body that claims a monopoly on legitimate force within a territory. “Government” is looser. It can mean the people running a state at a given time, which change while the state stays, or any organized way of making and enforcing rules, which a club or a cooperative has too.
The American founders had fought a narrower version. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress could only ask the states for money; the Constitution let it tax people directly and keep a standing army in peacetime, and the Anti-Federalists feared what those powers would grow into. But both sides wanted a state. The Anti-Federalists were not minarchists; they wanted strong state governments close to home, with militias instead of a national army. They argued over its size and its purse, not over whether it should exist. Benjamin Franklin’s most quoted line comes from an earlier round of the same fight. In 1755 the Penn family, Pennsylvania’s proprietors, kept blocking the Assembly’s bills to tax their lands for frontier defense, and offered a gift of money for defense instead if the Assembly would drop its claim. Franklin answered for the Assembly: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” The liberty he meant was the Assembly’s power to tax. The line is usually quoted against the state; he wrote it for one.
Anarchists reject the state; whether they reject government depends on which sense is meant, and that ambiguity is half the quarrel. In practice the claim comes as a package: a border, courts and police no one may compete with, and taxes taken from people who never agreed to pay. The minarchist keeps the package and shrinks what goes in it. The anarchist keeps the jobs inside it, settling disputes and protecting people, and drops the package: no claimed territory, no forbidden rivals, no compulsory funding. On the libertarian left the question was mostly settled long ago. The anarchist wants no state. The left-libertarian tradition, from Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty on, has been anarchist from the start, and its main exception, Chomsky’s “not yet,” comes up below.
This chapter argues that the line is drawn in the wrong place. The test from Consent of the Governed sorts the cases better than the word does: did the people an enforcer acts on agree to it, can they call it back, and can they leave? A minarchist who holds to that test ends up an anarchist. An anarchist who skips it can end up building a state under another name.
Anarchists say this of each other too. Individualists like Tucker warned that communist anarchism would need some body to make everyone share, which is a state by another name. Communists like Peter Kropotkin warned that markets and wage labor would breed the inequality only a state can defend. The test cuts through that quarrel as well. Whatever system people choose, markets or commons or both, the question is whether they can refuse it, recall those who run it and leave.
The case for a minimal state
John Locke gave the case its shape. In a state of nature everyone may enforce the law of nature, but everyone is also judge in his own case, and people are partial to themselves. There is no settled law, no impartial judge and no power to carry out a just verdict. Rational people, Locke argued, would leave that condition and set up a government to supply all three. Ayn Rand put it more sharply in “The Nature of Government” (1963). Retaliatory force has to be placed under objective control, by rules known in advance. Competing governments in one territory, she thought, were an absurdity: two agencies, two verdicts, and a gang war to settle which one counts.
Robert Nozick gave the strongest version in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Start with private protective associations, he said, and let them compete. Fighting is costly, so one association comes to dominate each area. It forbids independents to enforce their rights by procedures it judges too risky, and it compensates them by protecting them too. No one’s rights are violated along the way, Nozick argued, and the result is a minimal state, reached by an invisible hand.
Behind all three sits an older argument, the logic of sovereignty. Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes each held that a legal order needs a last word. If two authorities can summon you to two courts at the same hour, you must defy one of them, so one of them is not an authority after all. Someone has to decide, and decide finally. Minarchists today call this the need for a “final arbiter.”
The worry behind the case is a fair one. People who don’t share a judge still have disputes, and force used without rules is how feuds start. The minarchist wants force kept under rules. The aim is right. The question is whether a monopoly is the way to keep it there.
Where it goes wrong
Kiss a pig. Carl Watner cut through the debate with one question. In 2010 he asked Tibor Machan, a principled minarchist, what would happen to a minimal government if its citizens withdrew their support and took their custom elsewhere. Machan answered that it would vanish, like any other establishment that lacks support. Then it was never a government. A body that closes when its customers leave, and that can’t stop another agency from opening down the street, holds no monopoly on anything. Rand’s own proposal for voluntary taxation has the same result. George H. Smith pointed out that it turns her government into a protection agency that must satisfy its customers or close. When Auberon Herbert proposed voluntary taxation in the 1880s, Tucker welcomed him as an anarchist, and Spencer, a fellow minarchist, agreed that the position could not be told from anarchism. So the minarchist has two choices. Either the state taxes people who refuse and forbids rivals, and then it is a monopoly that fails all three tests, or it does neither, and then it is anarchism with a flag on top. Watner’s title is the joke: you can paint “dog” on the side of a pig, but it is still a pig.
The last word proves too much. Smith’s sharper point is about the logic of sovereignty. He rests it on Rand’s objective justice, knowable by reason, but it doesn’t need that foundation. It works as long as anyone may be wrong about justice, the sovereign included. It was always the absolutists’ argument. If the sovereign is the final judge of right, no one may resist it, because resisting means judging it. Bodin, Filmer and Hobbes drew that conclusion, and Alexander Hamilton drew a milder one in The Federalist, deriving a taxing power without limit from the needs of sovereignty. Locke tried to escape it with a right of resistance, but that right concedes the anarchist’s premise: each person may judge the state and act on the judgment. “Limited government” was always limited from outside, by the people’s right to resist and by rival powers. A minarchist who keeps that check has already granted that law can work without a single final arbiter. That is what legal pluralism claims, and it isn’t only a theory. For centuries medieval Europe ran on overlapping jurisdictions, with church law, royal law, feudal law, town law and merchant law side by side, and Harold Berman traced the Western legal tradition to that rivalry. Law Without a Monopoly picks up the question of how such law holds together.
The gang war is already here. Rand’s picture of rival agencies fighting over one territory describes the world as it is, with states as the agencies. Between states there is no last word. No world sovereign settles a border dispute or a fight over oil, water or sea lanes, and the result is war, paid for with taxes and fought with conscripts. A monopoly inside a border doesn’t end the gang war. It moves it to the border and makes it larger. Yet most of the time states keep the peace with one another without a ruler over them, through treaties, trade and arbitration. Students of international relations call that system anarchy, and they mean it literally; a minarchist who thinks anarchy can’t work owes us a world government.
The cost of fighting cuts the other way too. Nozick needs it to crown one agency, but the same cost gives competing agencies every reason to arbitrate. Roderick Long put it plainly in a 2004 talk. An agency that settles its disputes by force has to bill its own customers for the fighting, and a customer who prefers it will see the price in his premiums and have to ask how committed he is to “this Viking mentality.” Most will switch to an agency that arbitrates. David Friedman argues the same. A state has captive customers and taxes them anyway, so it can buy a standing army and pass the cost of its wars on to people who can’t take their business elsewhere. That is a security firm with no customers to answer to, and it ends up answering to whoever can bend it. Smedley Butler, a Marine general twice awarded the Medal of Honor, looked back in 1935 on thirty-three years of interventions from Haiti and Nicaragua to China and called himself “a gangster for capitalism”; his War Is a Racket, the same year, followed the profits. Dwight Eisenhower, leaving the presidency in 1961, warned against the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex. Without the power to tax, a firm that ran off on adventures like that would have to bill its own clients for them, and few would pay. Medieval Iceland’s Free State ran for three centuries with courts but no executive arm, no police and no soldiers, and both Long and Friedman hold it up as a working case.
Nozick’s invisible hand needs a visible one. Every step of Nozick’s story is a market step except the last. The dominant agency becomes a state only when it forbids other people’s procedures as too risky, and it alone decides what counts as too risky. That is Locke’s inconvenience, the judge in his own case, rebuilt at the top. Long turns Locke’s argument around. From “everyone should take disputes to a third party” it doesn’t follow that there should be one third party everyone takes disputes to, any more than “everyone likes some TV show” means there is one show everyone likes. And a monopoly is exactly what breaks the rule: in a dispute with the state, the state judges. Murray Rothbard and Roy Childs made this objection in the first issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies (1977). The prohibition is not something that happens to the agency. It is a decision, and nothing in the earlier steps licenses it. Up to that point Nozick has described a market in protection. At that point he describes a monopoly, and the people who would rather use another procedure never agreed, can’t recall the decision and can’t take their custom elsewhere.
The blur. The pseudonymous essayist brainpolice saw a further problem in 2009. Much of the quarrel, he argued, is about a word. If “government” means any organized way of settling disputes, anarchists want government too; if it means a body that rules people who never agreed, a consistent minarchist doesn’t want it. Scratch a minarchist, he wrote, and you may find an anarchist inside. But the blur runs both ways. Scratch some anarchists and you find an authoritarian, and he named Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) Hoppe pictures covenant communities whose owners may expel those who advocate democracy or ways of life the covenant forbids. A community you were born into, run by owners you can’t recall, that can remove you for your opinions, fails consent and recall at once. It is a state with a title deed. The old anarchist slogan is “No gods, no masters,” after the name of Louis-Auguste Blanqui’s 1880 paper, and a master who holds a deed is still a master. Hoppe’s owner is the master sovereign the slogan was written against. That is why this site doesn’t draw the line between government and no government. It draws it at unaccountable power, wherever that power sits, and the name on the door doesn’t change the answer.
The strongest case against
The strongest case against anarchism is not about words but about bodies. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), gathered archaeological and ethnographic studies of violent death and found rates in societies without states many times higher than in societies with them, even counting the world wars of the twentieth century. Hobbes’s Leviathan, he argues, is the first of the forces that pacified human life. It is the best empirical study on the other side, and it should be met head on.
Three things should be said about it. First, the comparison sets bands and tribes without any courts against states. It doesn’t compare a monopoly on law with law that has no monopoly; the merchant courts, the medieval jurisdictions and the other working examples of law without a sovereign are not in the sample, and anthropologists such as Douglas Fry and R. Brian Ferguson have questioned how the sample itself was chosen. Second, states account for their own share of the dead. R. J. Rummel estimated that governments killed well over a hundred million of their own people in the twentieth century, apart from war. Third, Pinker’s own list of pacifying forces includes commerce and the spread of literacy and cosmopolitanism, and none of those needs a monopoly.
Still, part of the point stands. Where a state collapses, what follows is seldom anarchy in this site’s sense. Warlords who tax and conscript are small states, and they fail the three tests as badly as large ones. Peter Leeson argued in 2007 that Somalia did better on several measures after its state collapsed than under Siad Barre; his critics answered that the comparison was against a brutal dictatorship and that the clans filled the gap with rule of their own. Either way, the lesson is the humanist one from the Introduction: no plan that treats people as test subjects is worth pursuing. Anarchism on this site is a direction, not a day of collapse. Shrink the monopoly where something people can refuse, recall and leave can take over the work.
The second objection is Tyler Cowen’s. Competing agencies, he argued in 1992, must cooperate to settle disputes between their clients, and a network able to cooperate is able to collude. A cartel of agencies that can shut out newcomers is a state again. David Friedman replied in 1994, and Bryan Caplan and Edward Stringham in 2003, that the cooperation needed to settle disputes doesn’t give the network the power to enforce a cartel. Refusing to deal with an agency that cheats its partners pays for itself; refusing to deal with an honest newcomer because the cartel says so doesn’t, and the same self-interest that formed the cartel tempts each member to cheat on it. The fair answer goes further: Cowen is right that nothing guarantees the market stays open. But nothing guarantees a minimal state stays minimal either, and the American one didn’t. No arrangement keeps itself. Exit has to be built and defended, the argument of Architecture, Not Weather and The Door That Stays Open. The question is which design makes the door easiest to keep open, and a design that starts with one door bolted shut is not the answer.
The third objection comes from the left. Noam Chomsky calls himself an anarchist, but in a world of concentrated private power he defends the state for now, as a partly accountable shield: labor law, regulation and the welfare floor are things people won through it. Dismantle it first, he warns, and corporations rule unchecked. Roderick Long answered in “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” that the state is the main source of that private power, so strengthening the protector strengthens the people it protects; the problem is monopoly, not who holds it. This site agrees with Long on the diagnosis and takes Chomsky’s warning on the order of events. Repeal the privileges before the protections. Kevin Carson’s rule of thumb fits: dismantle the state from the top down, starting with the subsidies, monopolies and licenses that serve the powerful, and only then the floor under everyone else.
Where this lands
Anarchist, then, if a label is needed. But the label matters less than the test. A minarchist who gives up taxing the unwilling and forbidding rivals has already crossed the line, whatever he calls his agency. An anarchist who would hand every territory to its owners hasn’t crossed it, whatever he calls himself. Ask of any enforcer, by any name, the three questions: did the people it acts on agree, can they call it back, can they leave? The minarchist’s real strength is the worry about disputes without a last word, and the anarchist answer isn’t that there should be no rules. It is that no one should own them. The minarchist has one more reply, and it is the best one: what if the monopoly is voted in, and answers to a majority? That is the question of The Limits of Democracy.
Sources
- Carl Watner, “K.I.S.S. A Pig! Anarchist or Minarchist?” (The Voluntaryist, Whole No. 149, 2011). The question to Machan; the pig. original · copy here
- George H. Smith, “In Defense of Rational Anarchism” (1997). Voluntary taxation as anarchism; the logic of sovereignty as absolutism; legal pluralism. original · copy here
- brainpolice, “The Anarchism and Minarchism Blur” (2009). The quarrel as partly a quarrel over a word; the authoritarian inside some anarchists. copy here
- Tibor R. Machan and Roderick T. Long, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?(Ashgate, 2008). Both sides at length, including Machan’s “Reconciling Anarchism and Minarchism.”
- John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), §13 and §§123–127. The inconveniences of the state of nature. Public domain.
- Ayn Rand, “The Nature of Government” (1963), in The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, 1964). Objective control of force; against competing governments.
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), part I. The dominant protective agency and the invisible hand.
- Murray N. Rothbard, “Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State,” and Roy A. Childs Jr., “The Invisible Hand Strikes Back” (Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 1, 1977). Replies to Nozick.
- Auberon Herbert and J. H. Levy, Taxation and Anarchism (1912), and Herbert Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” in Social Statics (1851). Voluntary taxation and its critics. Public domain.
- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, no. 30 (1787). An “unqualified power of taxation” for the federal government. Public domain.
- Benjamin Franklin for the Pennsylvania Assembly, Reply to the Governor, 11 November 1755, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6. “Essential Liberty” and “temporary Safety” in the dispute over taxing the proprietors’ lands. Public domain. Founders Online
- Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (Round Table Press, 1935), and “America’s Armed Forces, Part 2” (Common Sense, November 1935). “A gangster for capitalism.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address (17 January 1961). The military-industrial complex. Public domain.
- Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1983). Overlapping jurisdictions in medieval Europe.
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (Transaction, 2001). Covenant communities; democrats and communists to be “physically separated and removed” (usually cited as p. 218).
- Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (Viking, 2011), chs. 2 and 10. Violent death with and without states; the pacifying forces.
- Douglas P. Fry, ed., War, Peace, and Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2013). Critiques of the violence sample.
- R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (Transaction, 1994). Democide.
- Peter T. Leeson, “Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse” (Journal of Comparative Economics 35, 2007).
- Tyler Cowen, “Law as a Public Good: The Economics of Anarchy” (Economics and Philosophy 8, 1992); David Friedman, “Law as a Private Good” (Economics and Philosophy 10, 1994); Bryan Caplan and Edward Stringham, “Networks, Law, and the Paradox of Cooperation” (Review of Austrian Economics 16, 2003). The collusion debate.
- Roderick T. Long, “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” (The Art of the Possible, September 2008). The left’s case for the state answered. copy here
- Kevin Carson, transition proposals for dismantling “the infrastructure of state capitalism from the top down,” quoted in Michel Bauwens, “Markets without Capitalism as part of P2P economics (2)” (P2P Foundation blog). original
- Roderick T. Long, “Privatization, Viking Style: Model or Misfortune?” (2002), a reply to Jared Diamond, “Living on the Moon” (New York Review of Books, 23 May 2002); David Friedman, “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: A Historical Case” (Journal of Legal Studies 8, 1979). The Icelandic Free State. Friedman
- Roderick T. Long, “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections” (talk at Mises University, 6 August 2004, transcribed by Revi N. Nair). Agencies bear the cost of their own wars, states pass it on (objection 4); Locke’s judge-in-his-own-case argument turned against the state (3); Nozick and Cowen’s cartel (10). PDF