Stop Being Part of the Problem

Let us define a political spectrum.

Those to the left of the center point want the government to be bigger. Those to the right want it to be smaller.

To the left, power is seen as a desirable good, to serve the aims of those who wield it. To the right, power is deemed to be at best a necessary evil.

Those to the left believe that the collective (the group, state, or tribe) has a claim on your property. Those to the right believe that your property is your own.

Those to the left want more decisions to be made by a central authority. Those to the right want more decisions in the hands of individuals.

You should recognize this (with all the necessary nuances, caveats, and exceptions) as the primary ideological divide in human society. This divide is not always reflected in politics, which often takes place within a narrower range somewhere to the left of the center point. But ideologically and philosophically, these dichotomies are how left and right ought to be defined.

And to some extent, they are defined this way. Ideologies and movements of the left (communism, socialism, national socialism, democratic socialism, progressivism, etc.) tend to hold the views enumerated above. And the same is the case for the classical-liberal right (conservatives and libertarians, in their many flavors and degrees).

This piece is addressed primarily to the latter group: To people who believe government ought to be smaller and control fewer aspects of life. To people who believe the government takes too much money. To people who believe that more decisions should be in the hands of individuals, and that the emergent order of markets produces better results than the edicts of central planners. To you, I have a simple question:

Why the half measures?

You know that markets produce better results than central planners, so why do you still want to leave some control in the hands of central planners?

You know that individuals can make their own decisions far better than any government official can do on their behalf. So why do you still want to take some decisions away from individuals?

Conservatives… In your reverence for the gains made by the American Founders, and the Enlightenment philosophers from whose wellspring they drew, you have frozen their conclusions in amber. At their moment in history, at their stage in the development of classical-liberal philosophy, they believed that it was necessary for humans to “surrender” some of their freedom in order to “secure the rest.” Are you sure they were right?

They held that it was necessary for people to surrender to an imposed “social contract,” and to pretend to believe in the demonstrably false notion that our consent thereto is “tacit” and “implied.”

Are you sure they were right? For all time?

Are you sure—really, really sure—that nothing else is possible? Are you sure that classical-liberal thought hasn’t advanced at all since the eighteenth century?

Libertarians… If you are not yet a full-blown anarcho-libertarian, why not? You understand that taxation is theft (or extortion or slavery). Why allow any theft (or extortion or slavery) at all? You have reasoned your way to the reality that government is quite literally a legitimized protection racket. Why allow any protection racket at all?

You have reasoned your way to the recognition that human consent is a fundamental moral requirement, and you understand that all involuntary governments violate human consent as a part of their normal functioning. Why accept any violations of consent?

You believe that the initiation of coercive force against peaceful people is always wrong, and yet you continue to hold that we need a (limited) government that does exactly that—every moment of every day. Are you sure that is the only way?

Your reasoning, which has been correct thus far, has brought you to the point of minarchism—to the belief that we must have a small “night-watchman” state. Are you sure you have carried your own principles to their logical conclusions? Really, really sure?

If we believe that power is, at best, a necessary evil, why allow any evil at all?

The arguments in response vary, but they all follow a theme: We cannot have peace and self-government because a few bad apples spoil the barrel.

These bad apples fall into a few subcategories:

• Psychopaths, sociopaths, and control freaks are drawn to power and will always seek to dominate others.
• Criminals who don’t care about social norms and will trample the rights of others to get what they want.
• Foreign enemies lurking beyond our borders, eagerly waiting to invade.
• Free riders who don’t pay their fair share.
• Corporations just waiting to be freed from the shackles of government so they can abuse and mistreat us all.
• Warlords just waiting to seize power and usher in a new dark age.

These arguments also always come with a corollary claim, whether spoken or unspoken: it’s always the other guy who’s the bad apple:

I’m perfectly capable of engaging in peaceful coexistence, self-government, and purely voluntary transactions. It’s those control freaks/criminals/foreigners/free riders/CEOs/warlords who are the problem. THEY’RE the reason why we can’t have nice things.

Working in this field, I regularly encounter these arguments and their attendant subcategories of bad apples, and in fairness to them, they do contain fundamental truths:

1. There definitely are bad apples in this world, and they do tend to spoil barrels.
2. The bad apples are comparatively few in number, so generally speaking, it usually really is the other guy.

Nevertheless, there is something problematic—or, at very least, something instructive—in the claim that it is always the other guy. If the absolute number of control freaks, criminals, invaders, bad CEOs, and warlords is sufficiently low that most of us believe we could cooperate pretty well, then how bad can the bulk of humanity really be? If most of us are good apples, then why are we always defining ourselves by the bad?

And if most of us are good apples, why on Earth would we choose to believe that the only way to save us from the bad apples is to give the worst apples inescapable, involuntary authority over all of us? How does that make any sense?

From this point forward, my tone may seem a bit harsh. Please understand that it is not my goal to berate, but to awaken. It was only a few years ago that I, too, believed many of the arguments I am about to critique, so I get it.

Nonetheless, it really is wake-up time, and if thick-headed me can wake up, you surely can.

When I (or just about anyone else) argue for self-government, market anarchism, voluntaryism, or any other flavor of true freedom, we are making two central claims:

• That what we have now—involuntary governance and its regularized initiation of coercive force—is fundamentally morally violative of individual human rights and consent, and
• That it is possible to solve human questions without resorting to this approach.

Some people do come to recognize the truth of the first claim (the moral problem of government), but after a lifetime of statist education (and given the weight of millennia of history during which involuntary government was the norm), they have difficulty imagining how else we could possibly do things. Understandably so.

There are numerous arguments for how each of our categories of bad apples would be handled in a condition of market anarchism. It has worked in certain times and places in the past; it is working in a limited fashion now; and there are numerous innovative concepts for how it will work at scale in the future. Describing those is not my current purpose, however.

Instead, I hope henceforward to make a simpler claim: namely, that

It is illogical to argue, a priori, that ‘none of these ideas can possibly ever work.’

By a priori, I mean two things here:

• Claiming market anarchism cannot work without doing any actual research

In my experience, the more loudly sure a person is that market anarchism “cannot possibly work,” the more I know that they haven’t spent even one minute actually learning about it.

• Preemptive surrender
Here, the person has learned something about the subject, but then gives up anyway: These ideas sound good, but THEY won’t ever let us do it, so we shouldn’t even try.

The upshot of this black-pilled viewpoint is heartbreakingly simple: the bulk of humankind will always be enslaved by a tiny number, and that’s all that can ever be. The bad apples will rule forever.

Take, for example, the fear that nefarious psychopathic supervillains are just waiting for the restraints of government to disappear so they can plunge the world into darkness. There are many ways to address this…

Without the ability to extract taxes or print money (abilities enjoyed by every government), where does the psychopath get the funding for his evil plan? In a condition of market anarchism, he would have to earn his wealth by providing things that people want and need. Thus, we are supposed to imagine that after decades of success in business, our psychopath then converts his wealth into five ICBMs and a high-tech submarine with which he plans, like a villain in a James Bond story, to blackmail the world. (Of course, without governments, whom exactly does he call with his ransom demands?)

Is this scenario possible? Sure. Psychopaths won’t disappear in a condition of market anarchism. But compare this scenario with what we have now.

It is a known fact that psychopaths and sociopaths are drawn to power at every level. We have ample historical evidence for the worldwide havoc they cause when they have control of governments, and thus have the power to tax, print money, compel obedience, and conscript soldiers: World Wars. Four hundred million people murdered. (That is nearly half a billion, in a single century, for those keeping track at home.) Trillions of dollars diverted from producing desirable goods that make life better into weapons that do nothing but destroy.

Those are all known realities. The history of government is the history of psychopaths restrained by nothing. By contrast, in a condition of market anarchism, psychopaths might still exist, but there would be far more restraints on their activities.

Why would we want to retain the known horror of all-powerful governments run by psychopaths out of fear of the possibility that some psychopath might someday arise, and get some limited ability to do harm, in a condition of market anarchism? How does that make any sense?

Is our fear of the unknown so crippling as to cause such a failure of basic logic? Or have we all drunk so deeply of statist propaganda that we believe the mythology that governments actually protect us from psychopaths, rather than the reality that governments collaborate with them and give them a platform to achieve ultimate power?

Why would you want to preemptively surrender to that reality rather than trying something new, or even just entertaining some new ideas in a serious and intellectually honest way? Why wouldn’t you want to entertain those ideas? Are we that fond of The Devil You Know?

The solution to the problem of psychopaths and sociopaths is not to preemptively give psychopaths and sociopaths inescapable, irresistible power. Yet so many people insist that is our ONLY choice.

A similar problem arises from the fear that without government, criminals would run amok.

The market anarchist patiently explains (for the 9,000th time) that anarchism, in this context, does not mean “chaos”—that instead of a government imposing a noncompetitive, involuntary, inescapable, irresistible monopoly of authority over a given territory and captive people, market anarchism would involve responsible private agencies cooperatively competing in a free and open market to provide security and justice services to willing customers.

He calmly explains the reasons why security agencies subject to market forces would be more respectful and efficient, and why they would produce superior results to the perverse incentives of government police (who are under no legal or fiduciary obligation to do a good job or protect you in any way).

He spends hours describing how it could and would work, answering every objection. And then, at the end of it all, many simply revert to the known and familiar. Ignoring the fact that governments do a pathetic job of protecting us now, they go right back to reading from government’s sanitized brochure version of itself:

Nope, you’re just wrong. Without government, criminals would get us all.

Tragic translation: I am afraid of the unknown; I am unwilling to consider any other possibilities; and I am not going to try. We cannot set ourselves free…because of criminals. The only solution is to trust in the “protection” of police forces for whom inefficiency and perverse incentives are the default.

Invaders

If not domestic psychos or criminals, then it’s the ones beyond our borders. We cannot set ourselves free from the government because foreigners will invade.

There are numerous refutations of this argument. Don’t you want to hear them? Do you really believe that the only solution is to trust in the “protection” of governments that are themselves the cause and provocateurs of such invasions? We cannot get rid of the government, whose stock and trade is invading others, because the government’s stock and trade is invading others.

How does that make any sense? Why the preemptive surrender?

Free riders

Or it’s the free-rider problem. Without government, how will we make free riders pay for public goods?

Once again, this is an argument straight from government’s own glossy brochure—conveniently ignoring the fact that there are tons of free riders now. (In America, a majority are net tax consumers.)

We cannot possibly try anything other than a coercive, involuntary monopoly government that initiates force against peaceful people every minute of every day because someone, somewhere, might not pay for a stop sign? Is that really the condition to which you want to consign all of mankind? For all time?

Corporations

Or it’s powerful corporations. Without governments to stop them, they’ll abuse and enslave us all!

So, let me see if I understand the plan. Right now, with the government, corporations…

• Receive government protections: limited liability, corporate “personhood,” etc.
• Capture government agencies, write the rules by which they will be governed, and use their influence to hobble smaller competitors.
• Get grants and goodies at taxpayer expense.
• Use the power of government to force you to buy their products, or force them on you for “free” through tax dollars (see the Covid vaccine and the 200 new pharma billionaires it made).
• Form monopolies with government help.
• Release their high-level personnel to work in government, or as lobbyists, and then return to the corporate world, in an endless revolving door of power, money, and influence that renders ‘democracy’ nothing but a useful illusion.

And you are unwilling even to consider trading that for a condition in which corporations have none of those benefits, and are subject to pure market forces?

Because why? Because of fear? Because of the unknown?

But someday, a corporation might get so strong that it becomes like a government.

Okay fine. Maybe so. And you are willing to surrender preemptively because of that small possibility?

To borrow from Patrick Henry…is the unknown so scary, and government’s brochure so convincing, as to be purchased at the price of preemptive surrender to permanent chains and slavery?

Warlords

Is our fear of what regional “warlords” might do so great that we are willing to preemptively surrender, forever, to the actual warlords who rule us now? Warlords who engage in world-scale wars and population-scale murder?

Are we willing to surrender, preemptively and forever, to government warlords because we still don’t fully understand how things like roads might get built in a condition of market anarchism? Or because we’re unwilling to take a couple of hours and read up on the answer?

If it seems like I’m scolding here, please know that I’m also scolding myself from just a few years ago. There was a time when I was unaware of the concept of market anarchism. Later, I became aware, but my devotion to long-held political (and statist) dogma left me unwilling to conduct any research into the many innovative ideas on how it could work. Eventually, I shed these and began that research, but for a while, fear of the unknown kept me from accepting the logic of what I was reading.

It took time. I truly understand how big a leap this is.

I also now understand that I was part of the problem. Part of a problem that humankind has had for millennia.

For thousands of years, the vast bulk of humanity has been ruled by tiny factions of overlords. Over the past two centuries, hiding behind the illusion of ‘democracy,’ the modern state has risen to the height of technological dominance and insidious pervasiveness. They have developed world-destroying weapons, and they manipulate us into fighting world-scale wars by getting us to believe that people we’ve never met are our bitter enemies.

Administrators have replaced aristocrats, and the pretense of majority rule has replaced monarchy, but nothing has really changed. We are still ruled, without our consent, by a tiny minority, under a system that naturally attracts the most psychopathic and sociopathic among us.

And you know what? It’s your fault. It’s my fault. It’s the fault of every person who has granted them the presumption of legitimacy for the last 5,000 years.

It is the fault of everyone who has argued that we are too rotten to govern ourselves, and that the only solution is to give inescapable power to the most rotten among us. It is the fault of everyone who insists that there is no other way.

It is the fault of everyone who begins each day with the assumption that he or she is a slave in need of a master. Or that he or she is fine, but it’s the other guy who needs to be controlled. Or that he or she ought to be one of the controllers.

If we are black-pilled, if we dwell in a state of hopelessness and despair, we are a part of the problem.

If we insist that nothing can possibly work but the system we have now, we are part of the problem.

If we are not aware of the alternatives, or if we continue to throw up objections without really giving those alternatives a fair hearing, we are part of the problem.

If we complain about oppression and then insist that the only possible state in which mankind can exist is one in which we are controlled, coerced, and ruled, then we are part of the problem, for we are the ones empowering our oppressors.

The problem is not corruption. The problem is not that we have strayed from some earlier golden age, some system that was once good, or some government that was once “limited.”

The problem is us. The problem is that we keep arguing that we must continue to be ruled forever.

We are doing this to ourselves.

Yeah, but bad people. Yeah, but psychopaths. Yeah, but criminals. Corporations. Free riders. Warlords.

Yeah, but nothing.

This won’t end until we change our consciousness. This won’t end until we come to understand, once and for all, that we are not slaves in need of masters.