Question about the feasibility of anarcho/libertarianism

by Stephan Kinsella on May 26, 2016

Email exchange:

Hey Stephan,

(Preface: I think I agree with you “in principle” on things anarchy/libertarian)

Quick question that I’d appreciate an answer to:

Setup: I’ve heard it said that the problem with minarchism is that any State will always turn into a big corrupt State.

The libertarian (read: anarchist) criticism of the state is not that it is big or corrupt. All states are too big and all states are “corrupt.” It’s not as if a small state is okay but a big one is bad. Even minarchists admit this: http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/05/ayn-rand-endorses-big-government/

The explanation is that minarchism requires a certain percentage of the population to maintain a belief and conviction about minarchism (“you now have a Republic… if you can keep it”), and that this is just not possible in reality – at least not for very long – given human nature, which generally leans Leftist/Statist for various reasons.

That’s not my explanation. I think the state does rest on public consent, but this includes all types of states, even the mini-states favored by mini-statists. See http://www.stephankinsella.com/2010/02/swinkels-and-hoppe-on-the-tacit-support-of-the-state/

I don’t think Minarchy is stable at all. Any state that is “small” is going to grow. This is part of its nature. On this see Hoppe. The minarchists may hope and pray that such a dangerous beast that they establish, a minimal state, can be constrained from becoming larger, by a written constitution or by public opinion, but this is foolish. Paper constitutions don’t prevent tyranny, when the state itself can interpret its own limits. And public opinion doens’t matter–the logic of a state is to seize power. The populace, if it thinks a mini-state is justified, has no sound ideological basis to oppose its expansion. They are already confused. The idea that we can finally reach libertopia in the form of a mini-state, if the people finally undersatnd that a state is necessary but only a mini-state, is ridiculous.

[continue reading…]

{ 6 comments }

David Kelley on the Necessity of Government

by Stephan Kinsella on May 22, 2016

Update: William Thomas, “Libertarianism and Objectivism: Compatible?“, Atlas Society (June 29, 2010): “One important difference is that Objectivism holds that man needs government, a point many libertarians deny. Freedom requires an enforceable system of adjudication that establishes, though objective principles, when force has been used and allows for the rational settlement of disputes on the basis of individual rights to life, liberty, and property. Only an institution that effectively dominates and regulates the use of force in a given geographic area can provide and enforce such a system of law. So we all need government to set us free from force.”

This is a good example of the danger of using using the term “government” instead of “state.” What the Objectivist believes is that government—the institutions of governance, i.e. law and order—is impossible without a state, just as many people believe that roads are impossible without the state. Thus when a libertarian anarchist says they oppose institutionalized aggression and therefore they oppose the state, the minarchist, in conflating the terms, hears that we oppose government, since they do not believe “government” is possible without a monopoly, that is, without the state. But this is dishonest equivocation. The minarchist is free to argue that government is not possible in anarchy, but the concepts are distinct and the difference between the anarchist and minarchist is on this issue: whether order is possible without the state and its monopoly on force. It is dishonest equivocation to use semantics to argue a substantive point just as it’s somewhat dishonest for anti-abortion activists to label their position “pro-life” and for the other side to call their position “pro-choice”, since there, the real debate is over whether fetuses have rights and whether it is a crime to abort a fetus. Thus to keep the debate on substance, the anarchist should make it clear that they oppose the state not “government,” to keep the mini-statist from falsely accusing us of opposing “government” i.e. law and order. Make the mini-statist, who claims to oppose aggression, explain why the state (not “government” which is ambiguous) does not commit aggression. This also helps make it clear why their claims that government is “necessary” is simply irrelevant; the question is not whether the state, or government, is “necessary”; it is whether aggression is justified and, if so, whether the state does, or does not, commit aggression. (See, on this, The State is not the government; we don’t own property; scarcity doesn’t mean rare; coercion is not aggression, What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist and The Irrelevance of the Impossibility of Anarcho-Libertarianism.)

And see: Nicholas Dykes, “The Facts of Reality: Logic and History in Objectivist Debates about Government,” J. Ayn Rand Stud. 7, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 79–140

From a Facebook post:

***

In a classic article in 1974, Objectivist David Kelley set forth a concise argument for the minarchist view of the necessity of government. See David Kelley, “The Necessity of Government,” The Freeman (April 1, 1974).

In this interview by minarchist Jan Helfeld, Kelley briefly discusses his views on the state—stating basically that we need a state because with multiple defense agencies, there might be war, because there might be disagreement. So, a state is justified, because it is necessary, and it is necessary, because the possibility of disagreement and conflict and war means it is necessary to have one single agency that has the ultimate, final say-so.

Of course, as I pointed out in an anarchy-vs-minarchy debate with Kelley’s colleague at PorcFest last year, which Kelley moderated, ¹ this would imply we need a one-world government—I’m sure Kelley recognizes this difficulty, which is probably why he asked Thomas to respond to this objection during our debate (of course, Thomas couldn’t answer this objection). ²

Another problem with this view is that there is no guarantee this minimal state would be right in case of a dispute with the smaller agencies it is able to suppress—mere “finality” is not a goal of libertarian justice; there would also need to be a guarantee that the “final” decisions of this one-world state are just, or, at least, more just than what its competitors might have decided. And of course such a guarantee is impossible—especially when this state has monopoly power and no competition….

In any case, at the very end of this video linked below, Kelley also points out that funding for a minimal state is a difficult issue. He notes that Ayn Rand also believed a minimal state was justified and necessary, but since she opposed aggression (what she called “the initiation of force”), and since taxation is obviously aggression–her view was that the state has to be funded voluntarily–i.e., taxation by the minimal state is impermissible.

Kelley says he disagrees with Rand on this—i.e., he seems to be in favor not only of the the minimal state, not only in favor of the state’s right to use violence to outlaw competing defense agencies, and apparently the state’s right to become the sole state in the world (so that it can have the “final say” and prevent war)—but it can also tax its … customers and force them to fund it. (And Helfeld says he agrees with Kelley.) ³

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58x4DuLmmRA&app=desktop

h/t Jack Criss

Upate: My previous “debate” with Helfeld on anarchy is at “KOL123 | Debate with Jan Helfeld on Anarchy vs. Limited Government.”

Update: “The question of how to implement the principle of voluntary government financing—how to determine the best means of applying it in practice—is a very complex one and belongs to the field of the philosophy of law. … Any program of voluntary government financing is the last, not the first, step on the road to a free society—the last, not the first, reform to advocate. … But still, a gradual process is required—and any program of voluntary government financing has to be regarded as a goal for a distant future.” Ayn Rand, “Government Financing in a Free Society,” in The Virtue of Selfishness. “I want to stress that I am not an advocate of public (i.e., government-operated) schools, that I am not an advocate of the income tax, and that I am not an advocate of the government’s “right” to expropriate a citizen’s money or to control his spending through tax-incentives. None of these phenomena would exist in a free economy. But we are living in a disastrously mixed economy, which cannot be freed overnight.” “The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 12 March 13, 1972, Tax-Credits For Education,” in The Ayn Rand Letter, Volumes I-IV 1971-1976.

See “KOL183: Stephan Kinsella vs. William Thomas: Anarchism: For And Against: A Debate (PorcFest 2015)“. [↩]
See my posts “Rand, Objectivism, and One-World Government” (Sept. 17, 2009) and “Objectivism, Bidinotto, and Anarchy” (Sept. 17, 2009). [↩]
Apparently, Ayn Rand’s attorney and IP-advocate Murray Franck also accepts the legitimacy of taxation. See Murray I. Franck, “Reply to Sechrest: Private Contract, Market Neutrality, and ‘The Morality of Taxation,’” J. Ayn Rand Stud. 2, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 141–59, responding to Larry J. Sechrest, “Rand, Anarchy, and Taxes,” J. Ayn Rand Stud. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 87–105 (the assholes at JARS don’t make their articles available free online); Marsha Familaro Enright, “Reply to Sechrest: On the Origins of Government“; Franck, “Taxation is Moral,” Full Context 6, no. 10 (June 1994): 9–11; idem, “The State, the Market, and the Morality of Taxation,” Full Context 11, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 1998): 14–16; also Peter Saint-Andre, “On the Road to Voluntary Government Financing,” Full Context (April 1994), and idem, “Voluntary Financing and the Nature of Government,” Full Context (Sept. 1994). So basically Franck was wrong on everything; bad on IP, bad on the state, bad on taxation. Update: Will Thomas also seems to favor taxes, William Thomas, “Organized Government,” Atlas Society (Sep. 28, 2010). Richard Salsman also agrees that taxation is justified. See Is Taxation Theft? with Professor Richard Salsman. See the Liebowitz tweet. [↩]

{ 3 comments }

What Sparked Your Interest in Liberty? (FEE.org)

by Stephan Kinsella on May 16, 2016

[Update: see various biographical pieces on my publications page, including Alan D. Bergman, Adopting Liberty: The Stephan Kinsella Story (2025).]

My short reminiscence, “What Sparked Your Interest in Liberty?” [archived version; repixeled below], was published last month at FEE.org (April 21, 2016). It augments an earlier piece, “How I Became A Libertarian,” LewRockwell.com (Dec. 18, 2002). ¹ Related biographical pieces are here:

***

What Sparked Your Interest in Liberty?

[FEE.org, April 21, 2016]

N. Stephan Kinsella ⋅ about 4 months ago

Unlike other libertarians, who moved from the left, or from the right, I moved from nothing: from a political vacuum. I was a smart kid from the country who loved science and technology and fantastical fiction but who knew almost nothing about economics, philosophy, or politics.

As Jerome Tuccille’s book vividly and humorously illustrates, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, and so it did in my case. A high school librarian at my Catholic high school in Louisiana sensed my growing interest in ideas, and told me to read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I devoured it, and many other works. As I discussed previously in How I Became A Libertarian, Rand’s ruthless logic of justice appealed to me. It complemented my growing skepticism of pseudo-science and religion, and fed my thirst for serious thought applied to important and interesting issues. I found it so satisfying that there could be rigorous thought and reason applied in areas outside the natural sciences. It fed into my nascent sense of justice that I had nursed as a victim of bullying as a small, bookish child. It stoked my passion for consistency; I can appreciate Rand’s contempt for the Emersonian bromide that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Rand and her passion for truth and ideas sparked in me a furious quest in my college years for as much information as I could find on these and related topics. As I was always confident and capable and smart, and felt I could accomplish whatever I wanted, the extreme confidence and individualism of her heroic characters appealed to me. Rand led to economics, both Chicago (Milton Friedman) and Austrian (Hazlitt, Mises, and the rest), philosophy, and so on. Eventually I discovered dozens of other provocative and inspirational thinkers, most significantly, in my case, Mises, Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and to close relationships and friends in the libertarian intellectual movement that have persisted to this day, and that have helped to shape my avocational life. And ironically, The Fountainhead to me now seems hardly libertarian—Roark is a strange narcissist who commits acts of intellectual property terrorism. [The Fountainhead and IP Terrorism; On The Fountainhead as IP Terrorism: “I designed Cortlandt. I gave it to you. I destroyed it.”]

Rand’s influence may be on the wane among current generations of libertarians. In the last twenty or so years we’ve seen the rise of Ron Paul as another significant spark for liberty, and the emergence of the Internet coupled with astounding growth in the number of libertarians and libertarian scholars, foundations, groups, subgroups, and events, both in the US and internationally.

What sparked my interest in liberty? I can name several things. The thirst of a young boy, unexposed to ideas, for more. The outrage felt at injustice, because of experiences with bullies as a small young child, leading to a strong desire for justice, right and wrong. The insightful and powerful suggestion of a librarian, Ms. Renee Reinhardt. But what really sparked my love and passion for liberty? Although the answer is by now a bit trite and uninteresting, because it is so common, the truth is: Ayn Rand.

Re-published as “Being a Libertarian” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians, compiled by Walter Block; Mises Institute 2010. [↩]

{ 2 comments }

Kevin Carson on Confiscating Property from the Rich

by Stephan Kinsella on April 26, 2016

On stupid and confused “thickism” see various posts under tag thickism, and Cory Massimino, “Libertarianism is More than Anti-Statism,” C4SS (April 8th, 2014).

A few years back, I had a disagreement with left-libertarian Kevin Carson who implied, I thought, that anyone who is “rich”—say, who earns more than $250k a year—earns his money illegitimately, by being part of the state’s exploiting class, and it would be just to confiscate his wealth. See, for example, our interchange in the comments thread to his C4SS post “I’ve Never Seen a Poor Person Give Anyone a Job”.

In some of his arguments (such as in this interview) he appeals to Rothbard for support. As far as I can tell, he is referring to Rothbard’s “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” from Libertarian Forum, vol. 1.6, June 15, 1969. Here Rothbard writes:

Let us now apply our libertarian theory of property to the case of property in the hands of, or derived from, the State apparatus. The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called “taxation” and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. In the case of the State, furthermore, the victim is not readily identifiable as B, the horse-owner. All taxpayers, all draftees, all victims of the State have been mulcted. How to go about returning all this property to the taxpayers? What proportions should be used in this terrific tangle of robbery and injustice that we have all suffered at the hands of the State? Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most morally deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State’s act of aggression. These people then become the “homesteaders” of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners.

Take, for example, the State universities. This is property built on funds stolen from the taxpayers. Since the State has not found or put into effect a way of returning ownership of this property to the taxpaying public, the proper owners of this university are the “homesteaders”, those who have already been using and therefore “mixing their labor” with the facilities. The prime consideration is to deprive the thief, in this case the State, as quickly as possible of the ownership and control of its ill-gotten gains, to return the property to the innocent, private sector. This means student and/or faculty ownership of the universities.

As between the two groups, the students have a prior claim, for the students have been paying at least some amount to support the university whereas the faculty suffer from the moral taint of living off State funds and thereby becoming to some extent a part of the State apparatus.

The same principle applies to nominally “private” property which really comes from the State as a result of zealous lobbying on behalf of the recipient. Columbia University, for example, which receives nearly two-thirds of its income from government, is only a “private” college in the most ironic sense. It deserves a similar fate of virtuous homesteading confiscation.

But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to “private” property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison state, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their “private” property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murdered [sic] must be “respected”.

[See also Rothbard on the “Original Sin” in Land Titles: 1969 vs. 1974; Murray N. Rothbard, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle (1969),” Panarchy; Jeff Deist, “Rothbard on Slavery Reparations,” Power & Market (July 12, 2019)]

But of course Rothbard later implicitly repudiated these views, as can be seen in his 1974 article “Justice and Property Rights,” as I’ve explained in Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts.

Anyway, if there was any doubt about Carson’s views, which I inferred from his previous writing as made clear in our discussion of the $250k issue, there can be little doubt now: in a recent Facebook post, leftish libertarian Nick Manley posted this from an email interchange with Carson:

“A not 100 percent converted but sympathetic radical leftist I know who respects your work and C4SS wants to know if you favor the kind of direct confiscation of state capitalist or capitalist property say Rothbard advocated in Confiscation and the Homestead principle. He seems to think you have a more Tuckerite “freed markets will solve it” attitude.”

Kevin Carson responded with:

“Oh, I’m totally in favor of confiscating it, at least if the actual occupation is carried out from below (e.g. by tenants, landless people or radical unions). No reason to wait for the market to take care of it. Given the near 100% of Fortune 500 corporations that are only in the black because of economic rents or environmental cost externalization, I’d be happy to treat all those companies as proxies for the state capitalist sector just for starters.”

For more, see:

my post Is Macy’s Part of the State? A Critique of Left Deviationists
See also “Appendix: Corporate America being “part of the state” and the calculation problem” to Corporate Personhood, Limited Liability, and Double Taxation
Discussion in this Facebook thread (Nick Manley)
Discussion in this Facebook thread (Nick Manley)
also: Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe on the “Original Sin” in the Distribution of Property Rights as well as Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts…

Update:

Stephan Kinsella

July 1, 2015 Houston

I loved PorcFest. Some people there i talked to wondered why I’m so anti-left-libetarian.

How about this, where Kevin Carson calls for BEHEADING cable company executives:

“Rather than net neutrality, I would far prefer a genuine free market reform based on removing all those privileges. I’d remove all legal restrictions on cheaper, higher quality wireless competition from municipal fiber-optic infrastructure — preferably with the local wireless service run as a consumer cooperative rather than by government. I’d also let ratepayers take back that $200 billion they were robbed of in the form of muni wireless cooperative equity in the telecom companies. Or maybe just seize the fiber optic infrastructure from Verizon, Comcast et al and march the boys in the C-suites to the guillotine — that’s always an option, too.”

https://c4ss.org/content/36145

Here’s another juicy nugget:

http://c4ss.org/content/37218
“I for one am not interested in working through the state to impose a higher minimum wage. I think workers, acting through grassroots labor campaigns and direct action, should hit employers so hard that they beg government to protect them from us.””

And another: Carson arguing anyone making $250k is a parasite – https://c4ss.org/content/4018 . [The comments for this are now deleted, either out of incompetence or cowardice, so see below, from the archive]

C4SS.ORG

“Net Neutrality”: a Net Increase in Statism, or a Net Reduction?

In an article I wrote several years ago (“Free Market Reforms and the Reduction of Statism,” The Freeman, Sept. 1, 2008), I stated some principles that are relevant to the current debate on “net neutrality”: Some forms of state intervention are primary. They involve the privileges, subsidies, and ot…

***

Carson arguing anyone making $250k is a parasite – https://c4ss.org/content/4018 . From the archived comments:

“I’ve Never Seen a Poor Person Give Anyone a Job”

Posted by Kevin Carson on Sep 16, 2010 in Commentary • 35 comments

“I’ve never seen a poor person give anyone a job.” The cliche is commonly repeated on the Right, in polemics against what they call “class warfare” — not that there’s actually much of it being waged by Democrats, except when they’re fighting on the same side as the Republicans. See also “Big corporations give people jobs.” It’s a really stupid argument, if you can even dignify it by using that word.

In every society in human history, the class that controls access to the means of production and subsistence, and hence controls access to productive work, is the class that provides whatever “jobs” exist.

Suppose some follower of Milton Friedman in the old Soviet Union thirty years ago had criticized their system of state-owned industry and central planning, and waged “class warfare” against the state managerial bureaucrats and planners. An apologist for that system could have said — with just as much truth as his American counterpart defending big business — “it’s state industry that provides all the jobs.” A Russian counterpart of Newt Gingrich or Dick Armey could have ridiculed the “class warfare” of people who “want jobs but criticize the state industrial managers who provide them.”

A member of the landed nobility in France seven hundred years ago could have said, with as much justice as his American counterpart, “It’s the great landlords who provide the peasants with land to work to feed themselves.”

All of these “arguments” accept existing distributions of property and power as a matter of course, with no regard to whether or not they came about in a just manner.

The state, by its nature, is the instrument by which some ruling class extracts rents from the labor of the productive classes. In every society in history since the rise of the state, the state has been controlled by some class that uses it as an instrument for living at the expense of the productive majority.

Modern capitalism is a huge advance on previous class systems in two ways. First, the ruling class has figured out how to allow just enough economic freedom to the producing classes to maximize the rent it can skim off the top.

Second, it leaves its predecessors in the dust when it comes to the kind of ideological legerdemain used to legitimize it in the eyes of its subjects.

In previous systems of class rule, like chattel slavery and manorialism, the exploitative relationship between the ruling class was maintained by direct coercion. There was no doubt in the mind of the slave or serf that he was on the weak end of a power relationship with those for whom he worked.

Modern capitalism, on the other hand, falsely masquerades as a “free market,” presenting the appearance of a neutral set of general laws that governs relations between free and independent contractors. But the appearance of a neutral legal framework is a lot like one of those old mechanical chess-playing machines, in which the “machinery” really consisted of a dwarf on the inside moving the levers.

The “neutral” rules of corporate capitalism are not neutral at all. They’re rigged to ensure that the house wins the overwhelming majority of the time. Modern capitalism was founded on the expropriation of the peasant majority’s land; to the present day the largest tracts of land are held pursuant to political title rather than homesteading by individual labor, and the great majority of vacant land has been politically appropriated and held out of use. Through legal barriers to competition in the supply of credit, through so-called “intellectual property” law, and through assorted regulations that impose entry barriers to competition, the state enables a privileged class of owners to control access to natural opportunities and collect rents from artificial scarcity.

As Hagbard Celine, one of the characters in R.A. Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy put it, when a series of apparently “equal exchanges” all result in what seems to be a predetermined result, “a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others,” it’s a fair bet “the system is not free or random” after all. Rather, background rules of the marketplace are set so that A and B “do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of state-granted privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses.”

Capitalism, Wilson says elsewhere, is “that organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it.” Capitalists occupy a position under capitalism analogous to that occupied by the great landlords under the Old Regime.

Or in Celine’s words: “There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain …”

Share and Enjoy:

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

COMMENTS (35)

Steven Handel· 50 weeks ago

I agree with most of everything you said here. But I’m curious, are you for extending the “Bush tax cuts” or not?