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.