Anarchy in Places Outside the UK

Dr. Murray N. Rothbard (smart guy) writing down some stuff about Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (another smart guy) on a chalkboard.

I've been vaguely aware of the takeover of a federal wildlife refuge building in Oregon (I haven't had a lot of time to noodle it, as I've been busy with work stuff [and I'm definitely not complaining]), and it's a good catalyst for writing a post I've wanted to write regarding the rights of government and thoughts along those lines. Please bear in mind as you read this that it's basically an executive summary of issues I'll delve into later. I just wanted to get this on paper (as it were) to have a sort of outline from which to work.

First off, I don’t believe in government. I don’t think we should have one. Let me explain why I think this and how I got to it. Growing up, I was Mr. Conservative. I was a dittohead full on. I never really thought about why I was, I just was because that is the thinking I grew up around. Not everyone takes his own politics, just as not everyone takes his own religion or other beliefs, and I was, at that point, no different.

This all changed in the fall of 2005. I was following the process to nominate the replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Since that was the “woman seat” on the Court (how insulting is that?!), George W. Bush was supposed to nominate a woman to fill that position, and he nominated Harriet Miers. And, as you may recall, that went over like a turd in the punchbowl. I remember her being criticized as being inexperienced and even characterized as a “bag lady” by Rush.

All of this Harriet Miers falderal was merely a catalyst in my political awakening. I mean in the chemistry sense of the word. The debate (such as it was) had nothing to do with my change in thinking, but for some reason it set the reaction in motion. I started realizing that there are a lot of things about conservatism that I profess but don’t really believe. So what do I believe?

Now the thought I had was, since conservatism by and large seeks to prohibit what they consider immoral, does making “sin” illegal make a person moral simply because he obeys the law? In the Christian theology as I understand it, the attitude of the person in question is what counts, not necessarily his actions. So if a person acts in a moral manner strictly out of fear of punishment, he would not have the right attitude according to Christianity. In that case, what’s the point of making sin illegal?

At this point, morality is divorced from legality in my mind. Then what is law? I find that people rarely question most laws, and most people accept that the law is sacrosanct. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. The people who make the laws in this country are politicians – a class of people almost universally reviled. Very few politicians, especially at the present time, could be looked upon as anything close to paragons of moral virtue.

And how is law made? It is, in a nutshell, the product of dozens, if not hundreds, of competing interests. It is usually the product of some sort of compromise. But, in the end, one side prevails, and their opinions become laws with penalties. So what’s special about the law? Nothing, except that it is an opinion that is enforced at the point of a gun.

That thinking got me to libertarianism. But thinking about the underpinnings of law and government got me to anarchist. I did it in a sort of Socratic Method.

What is government? Most modern governments say that they are the voice of the people. Our democratic tradition says that.

So government is basically the people coming together to do things in a collective manner that we couldn’t do individually. It basically works as an agent of the people, enforcing rights we’ve given it. Simple agency law says that an agent can’t exercise any more rights than his principal has given him.

That being the case, where does the government derive the right to, say, collect from me a tax I don’t want to pay? No single one of us can force another to pay us money, so, if government is our agent, where does it get the right to collect money by force?

When you break it down, the only real currency the government has is that force. Government makes nothing and has nothing of its own. Everything it has is taken by force. Nobody pays taxes voluntarily – everyone I know takes every single tax credit and exemption they can possibly find in order to limit his tax liability. In fact, most of us pay a person or a service to find as many ways to pay as little taxes as it can.

Now, having established that government derives its rights from the people it serves, and the people don't have the right as individuals to take from others by force, whence comes the right asserted by the government to take from others by force?

Unless and until I receive a satisfactory answer for that question, I will be an anarchist.

Rights, part I

Encino Man, late Holocene

I think about rights a lot. What they are, where they come from, who has them, how many and what kind there are, etc. When I think about these kinds of things, I try to do it as systematically as possible, using logic and reasoning as much as I can.

I think people use the terms "logic" and "reason" without really knowing and understanding what they are. It seems to me like the term "reason" tends to mean "common sense" for a lot of people, which is unfortunate, because when I try to explain to people how I arrived at a particular conclusion and I indicate that I reasoned it out, they take that to mean it was more of a gut feeling than a walked-through conclusion.

One of the most influential and overall best classes I took as an undergrad was Intro to Logic. As a Star Trek nerd I was familiar with the word and had an idea that the study must be of some importance, but I came to learn that logic provided the closest manner possible for the deeply flawed human mind to come to conclusions as rationally and dispassionately as possible. In a nutshell, I learned that logic is the physics of reasoning, and that it came as closely as possible to providing rules for arriving at conclusions that cut out the most bias possible.

So, this is my reasoning on the subject, walking through it in a way I think is logical.

§   §   §

In the beginning, there was man. Well, not the beginning beginning. At the beginning of man there was man, which is redundant, but helps me to define a starting point. I think it makes a good starting point regardless of where you think man came from. So, in the beginning there was a man, who was the first man. The first man brings no knowledge to the table. He can learn, but he hasn't developed what exactly it is he needs to learn. All he really knows is that he has the need to have shelter, sustenance, and to procreate. From Day One he will have to work to meet these needs every single day until the end of his life. He may get assistance from some other humans that spring up or from the hominids that birthed him, but the buck ultimately stops at him for meeting his needs.

In order to meet these needs on a daily basis, certain rules have to be in place. They are unspoken rules, and assuming the absence of written language, they are obviously unwritten. But there are rules nonetheless. The rules are not something he earns or qualifies for - they are too basic for that, and there's nobody around to do the judging. But these rules are so basic that, without them, the man can't continue.

The first rule is that he has the right to be alive. That rule is basically self-evident. Without the right to be alive, there's no point to anything. The first man doesn't know much, but he knows that he really likes being alive, and that being alive is the prerequisite to meeting all his other needs. Nobody has to tell him this. It's a right so obvious that even his body understands it without him having to tell it - his wounds heal, his sickness eventually goes away, and he continues living.

Once he meets other humans, he realizes that they also like to be alive. Therefore, he realizes that they would not like it if he were to go around trying to end their lives any more than he would like it if they did the same to him. He doesn't even really have to think about this, either. He assumes that they want to be alive simply due to the fact that they are still alive.

He also soon realizes that there are other humans that, for whatever reason, seek to encroach upon his right to be alive. Maybe they want to steal from him. Maybe they want less competition for women. Maybe they aren't right in the head. Whatever the reason, he discovers that, in order to protect his right to be alive and his property and possessions, he must also have the right to defend that right to be alive.

In order to exercise the right to self defense, he discovers that simply using his fists isn't sufficient, as some of the people he may have to fend off will come at him with clubs, or slings, or knives. So here comes another right - the right to have tools necessary to defend one's self.

To be continued ...