Finding Wholes: Part 1
Why I Stopped Being a Libertarian, and Became a…Not Libertarian
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9 minutes
About twelve years ago, an acquaintance who was also an Austro-Libertarian mentioned off-handedly that he thought there were serious problems with that philosophy. Being, at the time, a fellow devotee of anarcho-capitalism, I was taken aback, and asked him to elaborate on these “problems.” That he could make only vague statements irritated me, and confirmed my impression that he was just being soft-headed. Today I look back on that conversation as snapshot of a different version of myself, for I’ve also lost my confidence in libertarianism.
My Aims
I used to run a vlog with over a thousand subscribers where I promoted and defended Austro-Libertarianism, and anarcho-capitalism. I’ve since deleted all of my videos. Now I want to give a brief but fair account, first of what I believed before, and then of my reasons for cooling towards libertarian ideas. Given the vastness of the subject, and my desire to be accurate, yet brief, I can only sketch the main lines of both the positive and negative case. I will focus mostly on my own “school,” and will have to break my thoughts into two posts. In this first post, I will attempt a fair summary of my former position.
What Is Libertarianism?
Libertarianism, in general, is a form of classical liberalism, the philosophy predicated on the belief that liberty is the highest practical social good. It holds that most other social goods can be cashed-out in terms of individual liberty, or in some way depend on it. The anarcho-capitalism in which I believed holds that all social goods can be provided for without the State. Since this seems to me the purer, and more intellectually consistent form of libertarianism, I will not spend much time pointing out the defects of what we used the call “Beltway Libertarianism,” except to say that such libertarianism, with its “night watchman” state, and numerous compromises on principle, only served as an introduction for me to the robustness and intellectual rigor of the Mises-Rothbard-Hoppe school. So what sort of libertarian was I, and why?
The Austro-Libertarian Synthesis
Briefly, I was a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist, with an interest in agorism, and emergentism. I was attracted to this school of thought because I had a strong belief in natural law, and a conviction that positive laws are only valid if they are true. Finally, I believed in the supreme importance of freedom in human affairs. In contrast to the frustrating inconsistency of American conservatism, and to the weepy, creeping socialism of the American left, libertarianism proposed an integrated theory of law, morality, politics, and economics. It was precisely this ‘catholic’ approach that I was looking for, and it had the added benefit of being secular, making it accessible, in principle, to every reasonable person. Nor did it take long to discover that in the world of libertarianism, the “Austrian” anarcho-capitalists were the real deal, whereas the Cato-style libertarians were the compromised mainline Protestants. Having started out as a conservative constitutionalist with libertarian leanings, I discovered Mises, Murray Rothbard, Hans Hermann-Hoppe, LewRockwell.com, etc., and found myself an anarchist. But why an anarchist? To answer that question, I now give a brief sketch of my former worldview.
Key Principles of Anarcho-Capitalism/Austro-Libertarianism
Though it’s possible to be a devotee of the Austrian school of economics without necessarily being an anarchist, they tend to go together. To avoid clunky terminology, I will just say “libertarian” going forward, with the understanding that I mean total free-market libertarianism of Murray Rothbard and his heirs. This is more than a school of economics. It’s a whole theory of political economy. Here’s the thumbnail version:
1) Self-Ownership as the Foundation of Law and Economics:
Every person has the right to total ownership of his own person. This ownership cannot be alienated from him by some external power; it is intrinsic to him. Just being a separate, thinking, choosing individual, being this person, entails the need to be free. Freedom from coercion is proper to man, and is therefore required for his flourishing. It is right; therefore, it is the foundation of any and all rights. No one else but me can operate this body-mind unity that is myself. Therefore, any attempt to coerce another human being who is not committing aggression is illegitimate,* because it is contrary to what makes for human flourishing. Claims to such coercive authority are arbitrary, since they have no root in reality.
Now since human beings live in space and time, and since the maintenance of one’s life also entails putting matter into one’s exclusive use and care, property (personal ownership) is just an implication of self-ownership. Though what I own is external to me, it is, in some sense, a legal extension of me. I can obtain new property 1) by taking into possession material that no one has a title to, 2) by rendering material valuable through my own labor, or 3) as part of a trade or by gift. I cannot, however, come to own something just by saying I own it. The world pre-labor is gratuitous in the sense that it is just there, ripe for the working. Yet I cannot simply stick a flag in the ground and claim an entire mountain.
Now authentic law is just the collection and codification of natural law, and of whatever positive rules are necessary for everyone to exercise his right to self-ownership. Self-ownership is the only real positive right, whereas other valid positive “rights” (the right to freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom to bear arms) are just extensions of that self-ownership principle. Likewise, negative rights (freedom from illegal search and seizure, etc.,) are simply corollaries or consequences of self-ownership. And while a person may believe himself to have numerous moral duties, the only legally binding (that is, public) moral duties are those involving the intersection of one person’s self-ownership with another’s self-ownership.
I have a legal duty not to harm my neighbor, or read his mail, but only because those things are versions of respecting his self-ownership. Other moral duties may be real, but they are personal (that is, private.) It therefore follows that positive laws can only be legitimate if they are valid applications of the principle of self-ownership. But self-ownership goes further than this. Choice has a praxis, or a logic of entailed ends, which follows from its very nature. The very logic and capacity/necessity of human choice mentioned above forms the basis of the structure of economic reality.
Firstly, because man needs to put resources into use into order to live and thrive. Secondly, because those resources are limited. Thirdly, because they are scarce, since not only are they quantitatively limited, but the very act of choosing A over B, involves prioritizing A over B; setting one good above another in an ordinal scale of values. Trade happens because two free actors have their own value scales. Bob has more apples than he wants, but needs a hammer. Sally has more hammers than she wants, but needs two apples. Because of the law of diminishing marginal utility, each apple Bob acquires beyond his demand for apples is worth less to him. Likewise with Sally and her extra hammers. It therefore behooves them both to exchange unneeded goods, so that each can gain what he desires. This direct exchange, by the way, produces a “price” of hammers in apples, and vice-versa, and when such exchanges happen on a society-wide scale, a medium of exchange (money) will emerge, making it possible to engage in the more efficient indirect exchange where all goods are priced in terms of the same commodity (salt, silver, gold, dollar notes, etc.) The market price is just the intersection of many individual demand curves. Any attempt to legally impose some other price is therefore un-economical, as well as being a kind of theft.
As the above hopefully makes clear, the principle of self-ownership has enormous legal, economic, and even ethical implications. Rothbard called the study of the structure of human choice praxeology. Libertarians in his tradition argue that self-ownership (and private, voluntary action) would be sufficient to organize society, if not for the presence of their arch-nemesis, that alien institution called the State.
2) The State as a Legal Monopoly on Force
If a person legally owns himself, then all legitimate interaction must be voluntary. A valid law, such as “No one may steal,” is just a logical/social implication of the principle of self-ownership. The right to use force to repel a thief is also just the application of the principle** of self-ownership in a world where some people refuse to respect that principle. Force is a potential in any legal scenario, as implied by the very expression “enforce the law.” However, according to libertarianism, the State is that institution which claims, and effectively exercises, a legal monopoly on the use of force.
Now in first place, this very claim is held to be an act of aggression, since it is made indiscriminatingly over an entire geographical area, and over whomever happens to live there, with or without his voluntary agreement. Even if per impossible a state arose through total consensus of the governed, those governed ought to be able to withdraw their consent at some later time. Yet the state makes the arbitrary claim that having once come into existence, its monopoly on law is now in permanent force. That a given society is constitutional or democratic renders this claim more self-contradictory, not less, since the very institution claiming legitimacy through consent does not permit withdrawing that consent so long as one chooses to continue living in a certain region. But what makes this “social contract” so special that one cannot withdraw from it, and go about his business? No other voluntary contract entails the permanent surrender — or alienation — of one’s most basic right of self-ownership.
Given this precedent, it is no wonder — indeed, it is expected — that the State will also tend toward expansionism, and will gradually redirect and erode independent centers of authority. That states have historically sought to control religion, trade, the money supply, transportation, unoccupied land within their “borders,” law enforcement, communication, education, and so on, is a natural consequence of this primary illegitimate claim to a monopoly on force. Likewise, the claim that the state, masquerading as the abstract “public”, is itself the primary victim of crimes (rather than the individual crime victim) is another manifestation of the same. Again, the tendency of state agents (police, politicians, intelligence agents, government agencies, and so on) to avoid prosecution — or at least the same kinds of consequences — for crimes against “the public” is yet another expected outcome. The tendency of large interests to seek exclusive privileges from the State and to create barriers to entry is one more symptom of the Original Sin that is the State.
Given its legal monopoly, the State is a kind of octopus whose tendrils are deeply enmeshed in private affairs in such a way that it behooves private actors to game the system. If it can get away with it, the octopus will invariably expand, including past its own borders, and will invariably justify such expansion on moral grounds connected to its holy mission. Naturally, all of this has to be funded, and since most people would not choose to fund their own oppressor, the State takes its funds through coercive payments called taxes. Taxes are exhibit A of the state’s aggressive nature, since no private institution could force membership and then require those so forced to pay membership fees. The State, in short, is a criminal institution masquerading as the very source of law.
Naturally, it’s also something like a moral hazard machine. Should we be surprised that governments regularly lie in order to get into wars, and then lie throughout the course of those wars? Is it really shocking that governments seem to honor military men when drumming up the war effort, and yet struggle to provide for the same men when they return wounded? Should we be shocked that a man like Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on widespread illegal government activity, is now hiding in exile, while those who committed such crimes were not only not charged, but were able to retroactively change the laws in order to exonerate themselves? None of this is remotely surprising once we understand what the State is: the chief instrument of injustice in the world, a legal mafia masquerading as priesthood of law and order.
It’s important to understand then that from a libertarian point of view, the State is an essentially fraudulent institution. But if this is so, what alternatives are there, given that man needs law, order, transportation, money, etc?
3) Emergentism, Agorism, Polycentrism, Etcetera
While the mainstream libertarian works toward a minimalist government, and maintains a generally skeptical attitude toward the existing one, anarcho-capitalists (like other kinds of anarchists) view limited government as a Band-aid on a gushing wound. But since they hold that the State is unnecessary, and is itself is the root cause of many social ills, they need to explain how the social goods it does provide can be otherwise obtained in its absence. They also have to explain how to achieve this goal in history, given the plethora of states worldwide, and the fact that a voluntaristic order can hardly be achieved through revolutionary violence.
Now Austro-Libertarianism already provides an interesting and defensible account of the emergence of money and of markets. Its proponents also cite various historical examples of common laws and mutualistic legal and social relationships that were stable over some period of time. They also have a fairly good theoretical idea of what sorts of laws count as legitimate, namely those rules that the relevant parties make among themselves in order to render life livable. So a good bit of anarcho-capitalist writing is devoted to explaining how things would work in the absence of the State, and to collecting historical examples of stateless solutions to social organization.
Now if the State is a central power responding to the problems of social organization by acting “from the top-down,” a contrasting approach must be dispersed, and “from the bottom-up.” Whether or not they use the term, all libertarians, and especially anarcho-capitalists, argue for some kind of “emergentism.” In the absence of an interfering legal monopoly, it is held that voluntary means and systems can and do emerge as normal human responses to real human needs. Market anarchists are therefore interested in forms of social order that are fluid and adaptable, like the market itself. Rather than having a centralized power/authority structure, many independent centers of authority, none of which can force membership, will emerge, and will compete for allegiance based upon their performance with respect to providing said social goods. Without the shiny badge, the pointy hat, and the superstition of authority, people wouldn’t listen to the coercers.
Libertarians frequently detail the mechanisms of enforcement available in the absence of a state, which mechanisms they see as more than sufficient to maintain such a polycentric legal order. Agorism is another sub-discipline/approach within anarchism, which focuses on establishing such a voluntaristic order now. Rather than overthrowing the (inherently unstable) State through violence, the agorist refrains (when possible) from reliance on the State, and tries to establish the sorts of independent, voluntary systems that enable sustained personal independence in the present moment, and which can, in time, become so robust that they render the State irrelevant. If violence occurs then, it will be a matter of pure defense on the libertarian’s part against an aggressive, jealous tyrant, forced to show its true face, when its irrelevance and innate aggression has been made nakedly clear.
A Beautiful Idea
Libertarianism provides a well thought-out political and economic philosophy, and its proponents — often maligned as libertines — are among the most principled secular thinkers I’ve encountered. There is both a simplicity and an expansiveness to its approach, which qualities give it something of the ring of truth. In short, it’s a beautiful set of interlocking ideas, worthy of study. However, I have come to see that it has many practical and theoretical deficiencies, and some of these are fatal. In next week’s post, I’ll try to put my finger on where this philosophy seems to go wrong, and to defend at least some of the components of saner approach to liberty and society.
* This term needs further exploration; see part two.
** I’m not interested in libertarian internecine warfare over whether this a “principle” or an “axiom.”
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