(Via Austro Athenian Empire 2008-11-10 and a bunch of other places.)

Congratulations to Roderick for heading up a round-table discussion in the latest Cato Unbound on corporate power, with a fine introductiory essay on left-libertarianism, and left-libertarian takes on corporatism, the alliance of big government and big business, class, and vulgar libertarian conflation of freed markets with actually-existing capitalism. Our efforts to cover the world with lying, thieving mutualism proceed apace.

Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge?

No and yes. Emphatically no—because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical; genuine competition is big business's worst nightmare. But also, in all too many cases, yes —because although liberty and plutocracy cannot coexist, simultaneous advocacy of both is all too possible.

First, the no. Corporations tend to fear competition, because competition exerts downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on salaries; moreover, success on the market comes with no guarantee of permanency, depending as it does on outdoing other firms at correctly figuring out how best to satisfy forever-changing consumer preferences, and that kind of vulnerability to loss is no picnic. It is no surprise, then, that throughout U.S. history corporations have been overwhelmingly hostile to the free market. Indeed, most of the existing regulatory apparatus—including those regulations widely misperceived as restraints on corporate power—were vigorously supported, lobbied for, and in some cases even drafted by the corporate elite.[1]

Corporate power depends crucially on government intervention in the marketplace.[2] This is obvious enough in the case of the more overt forms of government favoritism such as subsidies, bailouts,[3] and other forms of corporate welfare; protectionist tariffs; explicit grants of monopoly privilege; and the seizing of private property for corporate use via eminent domain (as in Kelo v. New London). But these direct forms of pro-business intervention are supplemented by a swarm of indirect forms whose impact is arguably greater still.

. . . So where does this idea come from that advocates of free-market libertarianism must be carrying water for big business interests? Whence the pervasive conflation of corporatist plutocracy with libertarian laissez-faire? Who is responsible for promoting this confusion?

There are three different groups that must shoulder their share of the blame. (Note: in speaking of "blame" I am not necessarily saying that the "culprits" have deliberately promulgated what they knew to be a confusion; in most cases the failing is rather one of negligence, of inadequate attention to inconsistencies in their worldview. And as we'll see, these three groups have systematically reinforced one another's confusions.)

Culprit #1: the left. Across the spectrum from the squishiest mainstream liberal to the bomb-throwingest radical leftist, there is widespread (though not, it should be noted, universal)[10] agreement that laissez-faire and corporate plutocracy are virtually synonymous. David Korten, for example, describes advocates of unrestricted markets, private property, and individual rights as corporate libertarians who champion a globalized free market that leaves resource allocation decisions in the hands of giant corporations[11]—as though these giant corporations were creatures of the free market rather than of the state—while Noam Chomsky, though savvy enough to recognize that the corporate elite are terrified of genuine free markets, yet in the same breath will turn around and say that we must at all costs avoid free markets lest we unduly empower the corporate elite.[12]

Culprit #2: the right. If libertarians' left-wing opponents have conflated free markets with pro-business intervention, libertarians' right-wing opponents have done all they can to foster precisely this confusion; for there is a widespread (though again not universal) tendency for conservatives to cloak corporatist policies in free-market rhetoric. This is how conservative politicians in their presumptuous Adam Smith neckties have managed to get themselves perceived—perhaps have even managed to perceive themselves—as proponents of tax cuts, spending cuts, and unhampered competition despite endlessly raising taxes, raising spending, and promoting government-business partnerships.

Consider the conservative virtue-term privatization, which has two distinct, indeed opposed, meanings. On the one hand, it can mean returning some service or industry from the monopolistic government sector to the competitive private sector—getting government out of it; this would be the libertarian meaning. On the other hand, it can mean contracting out, i.e., granting to some private firm a monopoly privilege in the provision some service previously provided by government directly. There is nothing free-market about privatization in this latter sense, since the monopoly power is merely transferred from one set of hands to another; this is corporatism, or pro-business intervention, not laissez-faire. (To be sure, there may be competition in the bidding for such monopoly contracts, but competition to establish a legal monopoly is no more genuine market competition than voting—one last time—to establish a dictator is genuine democracy.)

Of these two meanings, the corporatist meaning may actually be older, dating back to fascist economic policies in Nazi Germany;[13] but it was the libertarian meaning that was primarily intended when the term (coined independently, as the reverse of "nationalization") first achieved widespread usage in recent decades. Yet conservatives have largely co-opted the term, turning it once again toward the corporatist sense.

. . .

Culprit #3: libertarians themselves. Alas, libertarians are not innocent here—which is why the answer to my opening question (as to whether it's fair to charge libertarians with being apologists for big business) was no and yes rather than a simple no. If libertarians are accused of carrying water for corporate interests, that may be at least in part because, well, they so often sound like that's just what they're doing (though here, as above, there are plenty of honorable exceptions to this tendency). Consider libertarian icon Ayn Rand's description of big business as a persecuted minority,[14] or the way libertarians defend our free-market health-care system against the alternative of socialized medicine, as though the health care system that prevails in the United States were the product of free competition rather than of systematic government intervention on behalf of insurance companies and the medical establishment at the expense of ordinary people.[15] Or again, note the alacrity with which so many libertarians rush to defend Wal-Mart and the like as heroic exemplars of the free market. Among such libertarians, criticisms of corporate power are routinely dismissed as anti-market ideology. (Of course such dismissiveness gets reinforced by the fact that many critics of corporate power are in the grip of anti-market ideology.) Thus when left-wing analysts complain about corporate libertarians they are not merely confused; they're responding to a genuine tendency even if they've to some extent misunderstood it.

— Roderick Long, Cato Unbound (2008-11-10): Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now

Read the whole thing. It’s great.

The post has already provoked a lot of discussion. Some of it — for example, from Wirkman 2008-11-10, Peter Klein 2008-11-10, and Will Wilkinson 2008-11-10 — is insightful and raises important issues. I’ll also be interested to see the upcoming promised replies from Steven Horwitz, Dean Baker, and the Danny Bonaduce of the Blogosphere. The commentary is a bit much to cover fully here, and is getting hashed out in comments threads, anyway; but I will say that I’m a bit puzzled about this from Will Wilkinson:

But this hints at a thicket of trickier issues. We want a system in which profit-seeking behavior creates the greatest net positive externalities (like continuously increasing the consumer's share of the cooperative surplus from mundane purchases). But positive spillover maximization within the constraints of a sub-optimal overall system is really desirable, despite the less-than-best incentive structure.

Dude, I just want Sam Walton to get his cold, dead hands out of my pockets. The rest is all details, as far as I’m concerned.

In any case, it seems to me that whether or not Wal-Mart and its business practices ought to be regarded with admiration, contempt, or indifference is really an importantly separate question from the question of whether or not Wal-Mart would have a sustainable business model under freed markets. If Wal-Mart as we know it could not exist but for State privileges, that’s reason enough for libertarians to be wary of reflexively defending Wal-Mart’s bidniz practices as examples of the free market at work, even if it’s not yet clear whether or not libertarians ought to find Wal-Mart objectionable (as a matter of thickness from consequences, and it seems to me that Roderick’s point has to do more or less entirely with the simpler point about sustainability, not the more complicated point about how to feel about the State-dependent business in question.

Meanwhile, Jesse Walker also kindly posted a notice over at Hit and Run, which provoked a discussion in which Hit and Run commenters were fully able to live up to their reputation for fair, insightful, and thought-provoking discussion of issues in libertarianism. For example, here’s the top comment in its entirety:

joshua corning | November 10, 2008, 2:14pm | #

If libertarians are accused of carrying water for corporate interests, that may be at least in part because, well, they so often sound like that’s just what they’re doing

Fuck you Roderick Long.

I mention the Hit and Run thread, though, mainly because it contains the nicest illustration you could possibly hope for of vulgar libertarian reasoning. Roderick wrote:

In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous

To which R. C. Dean replies:

I don’t see why. Just to take one example of a market that is pretty free of overt government intervention of the kind listed above: Bookstores. Most smaller, less hierarchical local bookstores are now history, replaced by Big Box Bookstores and on-line booksellers that have huge inventories and lower prices.

So, you see:

1. Big box bookstores are more successful than smaller, more localized bookstore in the (unfree, government-regulated, privilege-infused, development machine-driven) actually existing market.

2. …

3. Therefore, big box bookstores will be more successful than smaller, more localized bookstores in the free market.

Far be it from me to bag on Borders and Barnes and Noble — I like them each a lot. But this notion that we can just look at their current market success, under the constrained and distorted conditions of the actually-existing unfree capitalist market, in which their business model is fundamentally dependent on the use of government highways to ship huge piles of books, on the use of the government development machine to seize huge tracts of land and lucrative subsidies to artificially encourage big box retail outlets, and, lest we forget, on government copyright laws that forcibly restrict booksellers to a limited number of centralized, monopoly-priced suppliers; without them, any jackass with a printer or a Kinko’s card could start her own local bookstore for little more than the cost of ink and paper — the notion, I say that we can just look at their current success on the unfree market and immediately infer it to be the result of processes that would continue with no noticeable reduction in a freed market, is desperately in need of a substantive argument that has not been given. Economies of scale only seem to matter here because, as usual, the costs of scale (like, the freed-market cost of consensually acquiring big blocks of contiguous land; like, the freed-market cost of competing with hyperlocal, extremely low-cost competitors that current laws force out of business) are being ignored, and while the rest of the (artificially centralized, subsidized, monopoly-protected) corporate market is assumed to remain fixed just as it is, even though the whole supply chain would in fact be radically altered by freed markets.

See also:

• GT 2008-05-29: Dump the rentiers off your back
• GT 2008-10-24: How the United States government looks out for small business
• GT 2008-09-29: Not One Damned Dime
• GT 2008-09-12: What’s good for General Motors is good for American state capitalism
• GT 2008-06-06: Carson in the Freeman: Hierarchy or the Market
• GT 2008-03-19: Small enough to fail
• GT 2008-02-13: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism
• GT 2008-01-04: Cognitive Dissonance of the Non-Libertarian Left
• GT 2007-11-08: Sprachkritik: Privatization
• GT 2004-05-02: Écrasez l'Wal-Mart
• GT 2008-08-08: Proof by ostention
• GT 2008-01-26: In which I fail to be reassured

… But it must just be the summer heat, right?

In Maryland, a state police Red Squad spent a year and change infiltrating anti-death penalty and anti-war groups, and put the names of nonviolent activists onto terrorist and drug-trafficking watch lists:

The ACLU released 43 pages of [Maryland] state police summaries and computer logs Thursday – some with agents’ names and paragraphs blacked out — that it obtained from the state attorney general’s office through a lawsuit based on Maryland’s Public Information Act.

The files depict a pattern of spying and surveillance over a 14-month period in 2005 and 2006. During that time, agents infiltrated the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, a peace group; the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty; and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, a death row inmate.

Police entered the names of activists in a law enforcement database of people suspected of being terrorists or drug traffickers, the documents show. Police officials said they did not infringe on the protesters’ freedom; the ACLU said that nothing in the documents indicated criminal activity or intent.

Many of the spies’ reports seem innocuous. In one, an agent who attended a gathering of the Evans group noted that activists discussed the stance that a candidate for Baltimore County state’s attorney might take on the death penalty.

Yesterday, [former Maryland Governor Bob] Ehrlich said on WJZ-TV that he was sympathetic to the principle that police should not spy on groups when there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

But he added, We pay state police to make decisions, and obviously they bring discretion with them to their jobs every day, so their job on a daily basis obviously is to weigh the relative value of intelligence they’ve received and to make decisions accordingly.

— Jonathan Bor and Gus G. Sentementes, Baltimore Sun (2008-07-19): State police spying decried

For example, one of the decisions that cops accordingly make is to harass, assault, restrain, and imprison innocent people who try to photograph them and document how the cops are treating the people they interact with. (Apparently this intelligence thing isn’t a two-way street.) They are, of course, happy to invent completely fictional crimes based on nonexistent laws in order to do so. Thus, in Johnson County, Tennessee:

Nearly everyone carries a cell phone and it's hard to find one without that camera feature. It's convenient when you want to take that impromptu photo, but a Tri-Cities area man ended up behind bars after snapping a shot of a Johnson County sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop.

The cell phone photographer says the arrest was intimidation, but the deputy says he feared for his life.

… A Johnson County sheriff's deputy arrested Scott Conover for unlawful photography.

He says you took a picture of me. It's illegal to take a picture of a law enforcement officer, said Conover.

… The deputy also asked Conover to delete the picture three times.

He said if you don't give it to me, you're going to jail, said Conover.

Under the advice of the Johnson County attorney, the sheriff would not comment and the arresting deputy said he didn't want to incriminate himself by talking to us.

— Darius Radzius, WJHL (2008-07-11): Man Arrested For Unlawful Photography

Carlos Miller elaborates on the same case:

Update: I talked to Scott Conover Wednesday morning and he said they delayed his court appearance to Sept. 3rd, which sounds familiar because they kept doing the same thing in my case. (I was arrested last year for photographing cops against their wishes). In my case, I took it as a sign that they were hoping the delay would cause the media interest to die down.

After arresting Scott Conover for unlawful photography in Mountain City, Tennessee last June, Johnson County Sheriff's Deputy Starling McCloud threatened to arrest Conover's 12-year-old daughter with the same charge after she snapped two photos of her father getting handcuffed.

As it turns out, she is a better photographer than her father because she actually managed to photograph the camera shy deputy.

… It won't be the first time [Scott Conover has] faced off against the Johnson County Sheriff's Office in court.

A couple of years ago, we had problems with the sheriff, so we sued them and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, he said.

But the problems started even before that, after he witnessed deputies beating a man in front of the restaurant/bar he owns.

They beat the shit out of him, he said. The guy's lawyer came back and took witness statements. When the statements made it back to the sheriff's department, they came by and asked me why I was getting involved.

Not long after that, deputies started staking out his business, Jammers Rocking Road House, which he said is modeled after the Tiki Bar in Key Largo.

They were wolf-packing my customers, he said. They would lie and wait for them to leave and then pull them over to see if they had been drinking.

Conover struck back by suing them.

… On the night of his arrest, Conover and his family had left the Last Chance Saloon after picking up the nightly earnings and were on their way back to Jammers. His wife was sitting in the passenger's seat. His son and daughter were in the back seat.

Up ahead were a group of customers who had just left the bar. A Johnson County Sheriff's deputy, who was parked along side of the road, pulled over the car with the customers.

The lady who was driving doesn't drink, he said. Her husband, who does drink, was sitting in the passenger's seat.

Conover pulled up to the scene and stopped his Hummer in front of the traffic stop. He asked his son for his IPhone, then rolled the window down and said:

Hey fellas, I'm just getting your picture.

Then he snapped the photo. Deputy McCloud — who has been on the force only 18 months — told him that photographing him was illegal.

I asked, what planet are you from?, Conover said.

McCloud started threatening to arrest him if he did not delete the photo, which as it turned out, did not even capture the deputy.

Conover's wife even asked her husband to just hand the deputy the IPhone, but he refused. The deputy kept threatening him with arrest if he didn't delete the photo.

The deputy then ordered Conover out of his car.

I threw the phone back to my daughter and told her to keep taking photos.

By then, two Mountain City police officers had pulled up to the scene, including Kenneth Lane and Ben May, who is in the dark uniform in the above photos. McCloud placed two sets of handcuffs on Conover, who is six-feet tall and weighs 270 pounds, and apparently looked as if he could break out of a single pair of handcuffs.

Conover's daughter snapped two photos before McCloud threatened her with arrest.

He started trying to get in my Hummer and get to the back seat where my kids were. I told him, You better not go back there or else we're going to have some real problems, he said.

McCloud decided against arresting the daughter.

At the jail, Conover asked McCloud if had ever heard of the First Amendment.

He then turned to me and said, I’m charging you with disorderly conduct.

Thirty minutes later, after McCloud had left the jail — and had time to think of what other charges he could come up with — he called the jailer and added another charge against Conover; pointing a laser at an officer.

— Carlos Miller, Photography is Not a Crime (2008-08-05): Deputy threatened to arrest 12-year-old daughter for unlawful photography

Meanwhile, in Ohio, posturing macho paramilitary cops gunned down an unarmed woman holding nothing other than her baby boy. They fired high-powered rifles, blindly into a room they couldn’t see, because they saw a shadow on the wall during their cock-swinging commando SWAT raid. Please remember that cops are hired and trained to keep you and me safe, so obviously no matter how many unarmed women these heavily armed, trained professionals mow down in a wild attempt to save their own skins, the warrior mindset means never having to say you’re sorry.

A Lima, Ohio jury has acquitted police officer Joseph Chavalia of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson. Chavalia shot and killed Wilson and wounded her infant son during a drug raid last January. Wilson was unarmed.

During the raid, one of Chavalia’s fellow officers shot and killed the two dogs owned by Wilson’s boyfriend and the target of the raid, Anthony Terry. Chavalia testified that he mistook his fellow officer’s shots at the dogs for hostile gunfire coming from the bedroom where Wilson was standing with her child. Chavalia then fired blindly into the bedroom.

The jury concluded that Chavalia reasonably feared for his life when he heard the gunshots. I guess they were then willing to overlook Chavalia’s mistaking an unarmed woman holding a baby for an armed drug dealer, and the fact that he fired blindly into a room without first identifying what he was shooting at. It’s too bad that that same sort of deference isn’t given to the people on the receiving end of these raids when they too understandably confuse the police officers who wake them from sleep and invade their homes for criminal intruders.

— Radley Balko, Hit and Run (2008-08-05): Lima, Ohio SWAT Officer Acquitted in the Killing of Tarika Wilson

Over in Chicago, the arbitrary governor over the state of Illinois has declared that what Chicago needs is yet another elite tactical team to patrol inner city neighborhoods, complete with state troopers and military helicopters.

Calling violence in Chicago out of control, Gov. Blagojevich on Wednesday offered to lend state troopers and National Guard helicopters to the city to augment the Chicago Police.

The governor is considering forming an elite tactical team to help the Chicago Police fight gang problems, a source said, adding that the unit could later be sent across the state to deal with gang problems at any city’s request.

— Chicago Sun-Times (2008-07-17): Gov. says Chicago out of control

Meanwhile, the Fighting Uruk-Hai of Arizona proposes that we ought to combat inner city crime using the strategic hamlet surge tactics that have made for such a brilliant success in the occupation of Iraq.

We might look at what Rudy Giuliani did in New York City, when he became mayor of that city. … And some of those tactics, very frankly — you mention the war in Iraq — are like that we use in the military. You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement, etc, etc.

Do you feel safer now?

(Stories via Darian Worden (2008-07-18): Martial Law 2008, Manuel Lora @ LewRockwell.com Blog (2008-08-02): The Fascist McCain On Solving Neighborhood Crimes, Ali @ ThinkProgress (2008-08-01): McCain suggests military-style invasion modeled on the surge to control inner city crime, etc.)

See also:

• GT 2008-07-12: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#4)
• GT 2008-06-05: Neighborhood Safety Ghettoes in D.C.
• GT 2008-05-15: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#3)
• GT 2008-05-12: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#2)
• GT 2008-05-06: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter...
• GT 2008-04-28: Is it just me or is the water in this pot getting a little hotter?

(Via Jesse Walker @ Hit and Run 2008-06-05.)

Here’s a quick pull-quote from an interesting, if largely unremarkable — in the literal sense that I don’t find much of anything else to remark about in it — Leftist reappraisal of Hayek, in the Old Left warhorse Dissent:

Of course, a classical liberal would argue that single-payer health care funding would amount to controlling inputs and outputs by other means. But it is possible to imagine market forces at work under a social insurance plan, and the market distortions could not be greater than those produced by the health maintenance organizations we have now. In any case, no one argues that a government monopoly in a specific sector vital to the national interest—the military, say—must lead to totalitarianism.

— Jesse Larner, Dissent (Winter 2008): Who's Afraid of Friedrich Hayek? The Obvious Truths and Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right

No one argues that? Really?

Hell, I’ll argue it. Why shouldn’t I?

If government-planned monopolies in vital commodities like oil, steel, corn, cotton, etc. tend naturally towards invasive politics and, ultimately, totalitarian command-and-control, then why not also a government-planned monopoly in such an essential function as self-defense? Just because it’s somehow vital to the national interest [sic]? If we’re working from facts and not just from wishcraft, there’s no reason to believe something’s being universally desirable, or necessary for the general run of the populace, or whatever else that phrase might mean, offers any firm guarantee that it won’t be politically dangerous to provide, that its provision could not be used as leverage for regimenting and coercing individual people. Which is Hayek’s point about the danger of government monopoly.

The idea that the essence of the State rests in its monopoly on the means of physical force, especially military and police force, and in the corresponding disarmament of the populace, and that therefore the State as such naturally and ineluctably tends towards an ideal of totalitarian control over terrorized subjects kept in a state of absolute dependence on it, unless, and until, and only to the extent that its ambitions and usurpations are checked by external constraints from civil society, from rival powers, or from economic and technological limitations–that idea, I say, is bread-and-butter anarchist analysis. Maybe that analysis is right, and maybe it is wrong, but it is there, and if wrong it will certainly have to be addressed by argument, not blinked out of existence with a self-assured No one argues….

At Dissent, Hayekian limited-governmentalism is apparently considered a position which can be acknowledged as real, and grappled with, and treated as if it has something to teach us. But apparently the basic anarchistic position on government military and government policing is so far beyond the pale that it need not even be considered; nobody seriously believes that. But why not? What justifies the self-assurance? What places anarchism so far beyond the limits of acceptable dissent at Dissent that it need not even be mentioned?

(Via Kerry Howley @ Hit and Run 2008-05-15, via John Markley @ The Superfluous Man 2008-05-19.)

Robert J. Samuelson, in the Washington Post (2008-05-14):

Finally, let’s discuss poverty. Everyone’s against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration — new immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Unless we stop poor people from coming across our Southern border, legally and illegally, we won’t reduce poverty. Period. That doesn’t mean we should try to expel the 12 million illegal immigrants already here — an impossible and morally dubious task. Many families have been here for years; many have American children. We need a pragmatic accommodation: assimilate most people now here; shift future immigration to the highly skilled.

— Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post (2008-05-14): Truth Serum on The Trail

Shorter Samuelson: Let’s reduce poverty by forcing all the poor people to be poor in other countries.

See also:

• GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S.S. St. Louis
• GT 2007-11-12: Sin Fronteras

The other day, I posted some remarks on why the Freedom Train metaphor bugs me, and why I think that market anarchists should generally think about aligning themselves with, you know, anarchist organizations, rather than minarchist efforts like the Libertarian Party and Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution. Brian Doherty kindly took notice of my post over at Hit and Run. Like most posts at Hit and Run, it provoked a lot of comments, mostly from the usual suspects, and mostly not going much of anywhere productive. (Several minarchist commenters apparently didn’t bother to read the post, as they would rather spend their time rehashing the minarchist-anarchist debate from the get-go. Did you know that anarchy might work on the small scale, but will never work in a big, industrialized society? Or that anarchy will never work in practice because people will have to recreate the State to keep the Mafia from running everything? Man, I never heard that stuff before. Sign me up for some of that limited government!)

However, there are a few that are worth some remark.

NoStar offers the following encouraging thought on anarchist-minarchist unity:

How about we both fight and defeat them before we then turn and fight each other.

Think of Mao’s communists and Chang Kai-Chek’s nationalists combining to fight the Japanese.

Once the common foe is gone, we can nitpick the details.

— NoStar, 25 January 2008, 8:35pm

Call me a nattering nabob of negativism, but somehow I fail to be entirely reassured by the thought of being Chiang Kai-shek to the minarchists’ Mao Zedong. Or, for that matter, vice versa.

Moderate or pragmatist limited government libertarian Nick has this to say:

The way to effect change is to build a coalition of people who are dedicated to the change you want to make and then work to convince the normal people in the middle. Ron Paul is a great example of getting a coalition together, altho his campaign could use some work in convincing moderates to his side.

— Nick, 26 January, 10:24am

Well then.

In the interest of diplomacy, I will just kindly suggest that if Ron Paul’s triumphant single-digit, third-to-fourth place primary campaign is your idea of a great example of getting a coalition together and making change through the power of numbers, I will be holding out for a better proposal.

Meanwhile, limited governmentalists are just full of suggestions for how anarchists can help the cause of anarchy by … not talking about anarchy, and spending their time and energy on building up limited-government organizations instead. Apparently wanting to work on promoting your own cause, rather than other causes with fundamentally different ideas about ultimate goals, is a sign of a self-destructive fetish for purity. Of course, the fact that this going-along-to-get-along in the name of political realism only seems to go in one direction — I don’t hear any minarchists talking about how they plan to swallow their love of small governments in order to sign up for going anarchist efforts, like, say, CopWatch — might lead one to be just a little suspicious of the motives behind the appeal. But, anyway.

Brandybuck, for example, is not an anarchist. But he’s sure that if he were an anarchist, he’d be perfectly happy to spend his time working on achieving minarchy rather than anarchy. He asks:

He is unwilling to compromise any of his political points. But such an unwavering demand for pure anarchy is going to net him only misery. Is this a man who would reject a 50% tax cut because it would leave the remaining 50% of taxes in place? I think it might be.

— Brandybuck, 25 January 25 2008, 9:38pm

Brandybuck’s got another think coming.

I would quite happily take a 50% tax cut, if I could get it; and I would consider a 50% reduction in Leviathan’s pirated wealth to be a massive step in the right direction. I would much rather that the whole thing were done away with, but in the meantime, I will take what I can get.

But what I would not do is waste my time trying to build up a think tank or political party that are devoted to the goal of cutting taxes by 50% and no further. That’s hardly the only way in the world to make concrete progress towards cutting taxes by 50%, and if you think that it is, you need to think harder about how social change, or even basic negotiations, actually work in the real world. (As for negotiations, if you start out asking for what you actually want, rather than what you think you can get, you’ll often end up getting less than you wanted in the end. But you’ll do a damn sight better than if you start out asking for what you think you can get, and then bargain down from there. As for social change, there are a hell of a lot more movements that have made substantial social changes than there are political parties or party caucuses. If you think that the only way to get things done is to jump into a political party, then your lack of creativity is a problem for you, not a problem for me.)

Brandybuck is also incensed that I would claim that limited government libertarians actually do believe in government:

Personally, I have no desire to join any movement whose members [minarchists] will turn around and shoot me in the end.

This is a vile mischaracterization of minarchists. Minarchists are not statists. They are anti-statists. What makes them different from anarchists is the pragmatic realization that anarchy is not viable. If a state is inevitable, then let’s see to it that it will be as small and as unobtrusive as possible.

— Brandybuck, 25 January 25 2008, 9:38pm

This is, to be blunt, complete nonsense. If minarchists believe in limited government, then they believe in the right to make anarchistic arrangements not viable by prohibiting at least some individual people from seceding or otherwise withdraw their allegiance from the minimal state in favor of competing defense associations, or in favor of individual self-defense. If Brandybuck believes that I have the right to tell his limited government to go to limited hell, and to withdraw entirely from it to make my own arrangements, then his imagined minimal state is really not a sovereign state at all, but rather one voluntary defense association amongst many, and Brandybuck is no minarchist, but rather an anarchist. (In which case, welcome, comrade!) But if he does believe that a limited government has some right to make me use or pay for its services, even if I would prefer to withdraw from it and make arrangements of my own, then, like any other government program, this one is going to take the use of force or the threat of force by limited government cops. In which case my characterization of the minarchist political platform as including a plank on shooting anarchists, whether vile or not, is an accurate one. There is no third option. (Of course, minarchists accept a right of free speech, meaning that they will not shoot anarchists who just talk about anarchy. But in order to maintain a minimal state, they have to be ready to shoot anarchists who actually attempt to do something about it. And I care about the latter at least as much, if not more, than I care about the former.)

A bunch of people seem to have misinterpreted my argument as an argument for not doing anything, or for anarchists never to work together with minarchists on issues of common concern. Thus, for example:

Great. The metaphor’s nonsensical. Let’s stop working together against the great breadth of government power.

— Vent, 25 January 2008 7:43pm

Of course, if I had made an argument to the effect that working together with limited statists was always and everywhere destructive to the cause of freedom, then replying to the argument this way would be about as sensible as saying Great. Let’s stop trying to put out this fire by pouring gasoline on it. Well, yeah, that’s what you should do. If working together requires you to make trade-offs that actively impede the goals you’re supposedly working for, then you should stop trying to work together. The primary goal of libertarianism ought to be freedom, not maximizing the number of self-identified libertarians working together. The two are not the same, and if latter interferes with the former, then the former is always more important.

That said, that’s not the argument that I made. I’m not proposing that anarchists sit around and do nothing; I am proposing that they choose different means in order to get things done. Nor am I proposing that anarchists never work together with minarchists on anything. I’m willing to work with all kinds of people. I am proposing that we reconsider the scope of the cooperation, and the terms on which we do the work. As I said in the original post:

I would certainly agree that market anarchists should be willing to work together with coalition partners on particular issues of concern — the drug war, corporate welfare, the war on Iraq, etc. — whether those coalition partners are minarchists, or state Leftists, or whatever else. But who you’ll work with in issue-based coalitions is a different question from whose movement you’ll participate in, or what formations you’ll make the primary venue for your broader organizing and activism.

Here, as elsewhere, I’d argue that there’s a lot to be said for making things with small pieces loosely joined. There are plenty of times when it makes sense for anarchists to work together with statists of various stripes, as part of a common front for a common cause. But when we do, I’d suggest that the cooperation should be limited to fighting to win on the issue at hand — not spending years building up multi-purpose, long-term institutions or political parties whose goals have nothing in particular to do with anarchism. And I’d suggest that when we work in coalition, we do so through organizations of our own, on our own terms, and speaking for ourselves, not through centralized, non-anarchist smaller-government organizations that require us to spend our time talking about everything but, y’know, anarchy, in order to participate.

Probably the most common critical reply, though, is a claim that anarchists should work to build up minarchist parties because (1) in the current political climate, the practical differences between anarchistic and minarchistic politics are triflingly small (minarchists want to get rid of about 99% of existing government; anarchists want to get rid of the remaining 1% too); (2) where there are differences in ultimate goals, in the current political climate, the stuff that only the anarchists want to get rid of can’t realistically be gotten rid of, whereas some of the stuff that both anarchists and minarchists want to get rid of can realistically be gotten rid of (the war on drugs, or marginal tax rates, or whatever); and (3) once we have gotten rid of the 99% of stuff that anarchists and minarchists agree on, whenever that happens, then getting rid of that last 1% will be much easier for anarchists to pull off than it would be to get rid of that stuff now.

Thus Zeph, in comments here:

A minarchist system would have minimal ability to block the tracks, even if it had an interest in so doing.

Sisyphus old lad, would you rather push a pebble or a planet up a hill?

And Brandybuck, who, while a minarchist, is ever helpful to inquisitive anarchists:

I also suspect that it would be much easier to achieve true anarchy if you start from a minarchist state than from an maxarchist state.

On the train anarchist kerem tibuk:

Besides when the time comes when a minarchist government agresses against an individual it is much easier for that individual to fight back since the state would be much less powerless and the individual much more powerfull.

prolefeed:

Ummm, when we get to a government that is about 1% the size it is now, this will become a relevant question. Not exactly holding my breath over that happening. Until we effing reverse the growth of government, the 0%ers and the 0.01%ers and the 1%ers and the 50%ers and even the 99%ers should all be pretty solid allies.

But accepting this argument would depend on my accepting a number of premises whose evidence is weak at best, or which are definitely wrong.

I would, for example, have to accept that a smaller, more limited government would have a harder time suppressing anarchistic activity than a larger, less limited government would. It might seem like this is obvious: bigger governments have more money, more hired thugs, more surveillance spooks, and more tyrannical laws that they can exercise in order to suppress anarchists than smaller governments do. But, on the other hand, bigger governments also have much more to do than smaller governments do. Under the present system, government cops fritter away time, attention, and energy trying to enforce all kinds of asinine laws. Under a minarchy, the government police forces would still exist, but they would have basically nothing to do with their time other than (1) dealing with small-time property crime, and (2) suppressing anarchistic activity. I think there’s very little guarantee that it would be easier to establish and sustain institutions that counter certain kinds of state power when the state is lean and mean, than there is now when it’s large, bloated, and corrupt.

In a similar vein, I would have to accept that the most likely way to significantly reduce the scope and power of government is to spend the next several decades working from within the state system in order to prune away this or that invasive policy — drug laws, abortion laws, immigration laws, the war in Iraq, especially stupid provisions of copyright law, egregiously high taxes, the most outrageous parts of immigration law, or whatever — and then only to go after the supporting pillars of state power — government policing and prisons, government courts, government military, government border control, the existence of even minimal taxation, etc. — once all the policy issues have been cleared out of the way. That may seem obvious, but actually it’s a substantial claim in need of defense, and I have not yet been given any reason to believe that this is true.

Of course, it’s true that if you have already committed yourself to making change through the vehicle of electoral politics, then partial reform on the particular policy issues is going to be much closer to being within your grasp than, say, abolishing government policing in favor of voluntary defense associations. But that’s only if you’ve committed yourself to electoral politics already; it certainly can’t be invoked as an argument for jumping into the Libertarian Party without assuming part of what it needs to prove. In point of fact, if options other than electoral politics are allowed onto the table, then it might very well be the case that exactly the opposite course would be more effective: if you can establish effective means for individual people, or better yet large groups of people, to evade or bypass government enforcement and government taxation, then that might very well provide a much more effective route to getting rid of particular bad policies than getting rid of particular bad policies provides to getting rid of the government enforcement and government taxation.

To take one example, consider immigration. If the government has a tyrannical immigration law in place (and, just to be clear, when I say tyrannical, I mean any immigration law at all), then there are two ways you could go about trying to get rid the tyranny. You could start with the worst aspects of the law, build a coalition, do the usual stuff, get the worst aspects removed or perhaps ameliorated, fight off the backlash, then, a couple election cycles later, start talking about the almost-as-bad aspects of the law, build another coalition, fight some more, and so on, and so forth, progressively whittling the provisions of the immigration law down until finally you have whittled it down to nothing, or as close to nothing as you might realistically hope for. Then, if you have gotten it down to nothing, you can now turn around and say, Well, since we have basically no restrictions on immigration any more, why keep paying for a border control or internal immigration cops? Let’s go ahead and get rid of that stuff. And then you’re done.

The other way is the reverse strategy: to get rid of the tyranny by first aiming at the enforcement, rather than aiming at the law, by making the border control and internal immigration cops as irrelevant as you can make them. What you would do, then, is to work on building up more or less loose networks of black-market and grey-market operators, who can help illegal immigrants get into the country without being caught out by the Border Guard, who provide safe houses for them to stay on during their journey, who can help them get the papers that they need to skirt surveillance by La Migra, who can hook them up with work and places to live under the table, etc. etc. etc. To the extent that you can succeed in doing this, you’ve made immigration enforcement irrelevant. And without effective immigration enforcement, the state can bluster on as much as it wants about the Evil Alien Invasion; as a matter of real-world policy, the immigration law will become a dead letter.

When anarchists participate in compromise efforts, such as the LP or the Ron Paul campaign, those efforts pretty much always only allow one of these two routes: the policy-reform-first route. They don’t allow for the evasion-first route because to set up and sustain the kind of resources that are necessary to enable evasion and resistance of government laws, you’re already trying to take the train to a station where the minarchist passengers don’t want to go: that is, you’re creating counter-institutions that are directly competing with, and attempting to undermine, precisely those state functions (law enforcement, the courts, military and paramilitary defense of the state against its declared enemies) that minarchists intend to keep. But why should we prejudge the contest in favor of the minarchist-friendly route? After all, which of these is the better strategy for getting rid of immigration laws? Well, as far as effectiveness goes, I don’t actually think that that’s a very hard question to answer. Look at all the practical success that the immigration reform movement has had in liberalizing immigration laws over the past thirty years or so. Here, I’ll make a list for your convenience:

…

Now, compare the success that illegal immigrants, state-side family members, coyotes, good samaritan ranchers, off-the-books employers, et al. have had in getting people across the border in defiance of immigration law, while avoiding or minimizing government interference:

From a practical standpoint, if I’m looking for a going concern, I’d say that the root-striking approach seems to be making a lot more concrete progress than the branch-pruning approach, at least on the specific issue of immigration.

Of course, there are concerns other than practical success. For example, many minarchists are likely to believe that there is a moral advantage to working from within the political system, and convincing those around you to change their votes, rather than consorting with criminals and making an end-run around the law. That’s reasonable enough, and may be a reason to stick to electoral reform — if you are a minarchist. But, of course, I’m not: I’m an anarchist; I think that government laws have no color of authority whatsoever; and I don’t think that people who evade or defy immigration laws are criminals in any sense worth caring about. And my earlier post was directed mainly towards other anarchists on a point of anarchist strategy; so if your counter-argument starts out by presupposing a certain level of respect for government law, then it’s going to be a non-starter as a response to my argument.

Setting moral concerns aside, there is a pragmatic concern that strategies that bypass legal reform in order to evade the law are more risky. Electoral reform campaigns may not get the results as quickly or as extensively as black markets do, but they’re also less likely to get you shot or thrown in jail by the government. That’s true enough. But, on the other hand, it’s easy to overestimate the risks of black market activities; the fact is that tens of millions of people get away with this stuff every day already, and the more talented and resourceful people turn their attention towards evading and resisting tyrannical laws rather than pouring their resources down the toilet of political reform campaigns, the more people will be able to get away with, and the more reliably they’ll be able to get away with it. Moreover, just as there is far more to political campaigning than just the act of voting or declaring a candidacy or lobbying or filing suit — there’s also fundraising, crafting and running ads, house parties, holding debates, canvassing, op-eds, buttons, bumperstickers, and the rest — there is also much more to an evasion strategy than direct participation in black market activities. There is also moral agitation and advertising aimed at convincing people of the legitimacy, or at least the unimportance, of so-called criminal activity, with the usual set of op-eds, buttons, bumperstickers, debates, etc.; there’s legal education and legal defense funds; there’s nonviolent civil disobedience; there are grey market activities that provide arguably or completely legal services that nevertheless help black market operators evade detection; and any number of other things, too. No doubt lots of us can’t or won’t take the risks involved in direct black market activity — because our circumstances or our temperament prevent us from taking it on — but if you can’t take on that much risk, you can still do plenty of things to concretely aid the broader strategy, without putting yourself in the path of the law.

Now, for all that I’ve said, it still may be the case that, for some other issues, the branch-pruning approach is more likely to be effective than the root-striking approach. But if you are an anarchist, then I think it would behoove you to think carefully about whether this really is the case, before you start putting your limited time and energy into a branch-pruning political campaign. Certainly there are plenty of examples I could cite other than illegal immigration. Compare the concrete progress of lobbying and litigation for liberalizing copyright law to the concrete progress of music and movie pirates in simply evading the enforcement of copyright law. Or compare the concrete progress of lobbyists at liberalizing drug laws to the concrete progress of drug smugglers and drug dealers at moving drugs to willing customers in spite of the laws against it. However many policy issues there may be that will be more easily addressed by the route of legal reform, rather than by the route of undermining the state’s capacity to detect and retaliate against law-breaking, I think there is every reason that they will be few enough, and far enough between, that it just doesn’t make practical sense for anarchists to spend their limited resources on open-ended, long-term commitments to building up smaller-government institutions. Not if the price is deferring talk about the illegimacy of the State as such, or about the right of people to evade its laws, or about the right of people to create counter-institutions to defend themselves against its law enforcement, in order to keep our outreach palatable to more or less limited statists. Anything that is worth getting through that kind of co-operation can be got through limited-scope, issue-driven coalitions. And we can do that kind of outreach and activism without signing onto intra-party Accords that sacrifice anarchist rhetoric or practical action in the name of taking one for the party.

Anarchism is about anarchy. The activism, agitation, and organizing that we do ought to reflect that. If it doesn’t, then you may very well be wasting your time and talents.