In case you missed it, this is a follow-up from The Day Government Stole My Dream Property. The gist is easy enough to summarize:
I have wanted to buy a piece of rural land for myself since I was five years old. I finally found the right piece a couple of months ago, only to discover that back in the 80s, the county government buried large quantities of toxic waste on the neighboring land—upslope, with a leachate system that drained onto the property.
More than one reader has written to tell me how moved they were by my account. While my goal was not to tug at heartstrings, I must admit it was an emotional piece for me to write. Having land of my own is the one thing I have consistently dreamed of for more than 50 years. Sure, there will be other properties to look at. But I had already gotten emotionally invested in this one, which was perfect in every other respect.
Argument from the Brochure
This experience was acutely galling for another reason.
As libertarians, we are regularly treated to a particular kind of statist argument that I have identified as an informal fallacy, which I call argument from the brochure. The argument takes different forms depending on the topic, but the basics are always the same. Arguing for the necessity of the state, the interlocutor says, But without government, how will we _______? and then mentions some particular problem to be solved or social evil from which we need protection.
The fallacy comes from the presumption inherent in the argument—that the government is actually doing a good job solving the problem in question. The government’s performance is cast in the best possible light, and any alternative is presumed, a priori, to have no possible hope of doing any better. In other words, the argument sounds like it is coming straight out of a marketing brochure that a government would write about itself.
Once you start unpacking this topic, it becomes clear that this fallacy applies to nearly every argument in favor of the state. And in many cases, the government not only does a poor job of protecting us from the social evil in question, it is, in fact, the greatest source of that evil.
Let us pick one at random and move from there.
Without government, who will protect us from crime?
Is government protecting us from crime?
Police do not protect you; they draw a chalk line around your corpse. The presumption is that they protect future victims by capturing and incarcerating perpetrators. It is true that there is some impact from incapacitating criminals and deterring others, and yet there is still an appalling amount of crime. In 2020, for example, there were over 21,500 homicides, 126,400 rapes, 921,500 assaults, and 6,452,000 property crimes in the United States.
Nonetheless, the statist presumption is that without government, crime would definitely be worse. Alternative solutions are ignored or presumed not to exist.
Also ignored is the fact that the government is the biggest thief there is. There is no way that criminals could steal even a tiny fraction of what the government takes in taxes … year in and year out, until the day we die and beyond. Even without the kinds of private protection agencies that anarchocapitalists envision, most of us would still be tens of thousands of dollars better off (every year!) mounting our own defenses against thieves and other criminals.
Without government, who will protect us from war?
Do we even need to do this one?
Government officials are constantly starting wars. They have no incentive not to, since they can entirely externalize the costs: taxing or printing money to pay for them and drafting soldiers to fight, kill, and die in them.
“Warlords,”—the oft-cited bogeymen supposedly waiting to emerge in the absence of government—would possess nowhere near the power modern states wield. They could not build or sustain vast military arsenals, nor maintain stockpiles of missiles capable of destroying the world multiple times over.
Large-scale, prolonged war requires the machinery of the state. At most, these “warlords” could engage in limited local or regional conflicts, and without the ability to tax populations endlessly, print money at will, or conscript millions into service, there is no way they could sustain them for any length of time. War is only profitable for government officials and their crony contractors.
Governments murdered 400 million people in planet-scale wars and democides in the twentieth century alone. Nearly half a billion people, across the lifespan of just one long-lived grandmother!
But by all means, keep telling us how government ‘protects’ us from warlords.
Without government, how can we have justice?
Government courts are slow and inefficient, and businesses avoid them like the plague. Most business disputes are heard and successfully resolved by private arbitrators, and the use of such mechanisms could easily be expanded.
How do we get disputants to abide by decisions without forcing a single court of appeals on them? Quite easily, as it turns out … if you actually try it. Private law systems worked just fine in the Hanseatic League for 500 years and in Brehon Ireland for a millennium. That is far longer than any so-called ‘democracy’ has lasted, for those keeping score at home.
Simply put, it is nonsense to claim that disputes cannot be resolved without a single monopoly ‘provider’ of justice. (And let’s not forget all the legal activity created by the government’s bottomless supply of unnecessary laws, which would never come up in a private court system.)
On the criminal side of things…
In a private-law system, judges and advocates would be hired (or not) based on a reputation for fairness, probity, and excellence. In a government system, judges and prosecutors are not accountable in any way that really matters, and prosecutors have terribly perverse incentives. Innocent people are railroaded, and career criminals are released to commit their 14th robbery, assault, or worse. Not occasionally, but systemically.
Actual victims of crime are rarely compensated for their losses. To add insult to injury, victims are forced—at the point of a government gun—to pay taxes to apprehend and incarcerate their victimizers. Criminals are said to be paying their “debt to society”—whatever that means—but their victims are never made whole or even partially compensated. The system creates jobs for politicians, police, and prosecutors, but in a sense, we are all its victims.
And where do criminals go to pay their “debt to society”? To prisons that are cesspools of violence, drugs, and sexual assault, where they learn to become more effective criminals, and few are rehabilitated. Non-violent “offenders” are crammed in with the violent, and inmates must form up into racial cadres for protection. All at taxpayer expense.
Numerous anarcho-libertarian thinkers have offered detailed descriptions of alternative mechanisms for incapacitating genuine criminals and securing real compensation for victims of crime. Most of those arguing from the government brochure have never bothered to look into any of these concepts, and yet they are sure—incandescently, and often dismissively sure—that no other viable solutions exist.
Without government, who will protect children from abuse?
Governments may punish or mitigate a fraction of child abuse, but they certainly don’t prevent it. Unfortunately, some children have the misfortune of being born to terrible parents, or to parents who have difficulty managing their emotions, and no system will do a perfect job of stopping that.
But the situation is far worse than mere failure. The government is, in fact, running an extensive child-stealing racket. As I wrote in “How Will We Protect Children in a Free Society?,” the problem is in the incentives:
All government operatives share the incentive to keep their jobs and increase their pay. As such, all government agencies have the same basic objective: to secure more funding. In the arena of government “protective” services for children, this produces an especially tragic result: agents of such bureaucracies have an incentive to invent pretexts for the seizure of children.
The government quite literally pays these agencies based on the number of children they seize, and even provides bonuses for making the seizures permanent. Plenty of egregious examples exist, but the problem is not malfeasance within an otherwise good system. The system itself is inescapably corrupt and irredeemably broken.
And still, the system fails to stop many instances of real abuse. In the brochure version, government “protects” children. In reality, child-protective services are as much a taxpayer-funded kidnapping operation as they are a source of succor for abused and neglected children.
Private agencies devoted to protecting children could hardly do worse. They certainly would not have the insanely perverse incentives of government officials.
Without government, how can we care for the needy?
From an anarcho-libertarian standpoint, government transfer payments (welfare) are even more problematic than the other functions enumerated above. Justice, security, and other protective functions at least have the virtue of protecting actual negative rights (the right not to suffer robbery, injury, and related harms at the hands of others). By contrast, there is no right to take property from another—or have it taken by a third party—no matter how needy you are.
Of course, that does not mean that we do not wish to help. We simply do not wish to help by means of violence. And ALL government welfare programs are violence. (If you'd like to see the violence, try refusing to pay your taxes for a while.)
In the past, charity was accomplished the way it ought to be—through churches, mutual aid societies, and other forms of voluntary giving. Rich people created and funded foundations, scholarships, and other charitable endeavors. (Bretigne Shaffer wrote touchingly about an example in "How Mutual Aid Cared for My Grandmother." Max Borders has written about it many times, including here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere.) It's a rich history.
Government welfare, by contrast, is a bloated, inefficient, impersonal system rife with corruption and perverse incentives. If I can get a job paying $20 per hour or take benefits that amount to $17 per hour, that job really only pays me $3 per hour. Why would I choose to work hard when I could take a little less money and do nothing at all? It’s nice to imagine that people would choose "the dignity of work" over dependence, but that has clearly not been the case.
Prior to the advent of the Great Society, the poverty rate had been steadily falling. Shortly after the programs took effect, the decline leveled off, and poverty became a permanent feature of American life.
Government welfare programs have a corrosive impact on motivation, social cohesion, and economic incentives. Government entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pensions, and other mandatory spending—will one day collapse the American economy. (It's a matter of when rather than if.) If payroll taxes were invested in indexed stock funds, truck drivers and waitresses would retire millionaires. And welfare programs have created entire cohorts for whom dependency is passed down as a generational heirloom.
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We followed this same line of analysis for government’s terrible roads a few weeks ago, and we could keep doing it for other areas. In our next installment, we will look at this through the lens of pollution.
For now, here's the bottom line:
The brochure is a lie.
Government agencies tasked with protecting children are the biggest kidnappers of children.
Government departments tasked with defending us from invasion end up enslaving us via taxation, inflation, and conscription.
Governments do not protect victims of crime; they victimize them a second time.
Governments do not alleviate poverty—they permanentize it.
Governments are the biggest thieves.
Governments are the biggest warlords.
Governments are far more of a danger to human life than the things from which they putatively protect us.
But by all means, keep telling us how we cannot possibly get by without them.
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(Stay tuned for Part 3. For questions and comments, feel free to email chriscook@theadvocates.org.)
