Goodbye to Anarcho-Capitalism

 

For those of you who may not know: the image here is not me. It is just what you get if you search for a stock image of a man waving goodbye. 

I am waving my own internal goodbye these days to the ideology of anarcho-capitalism, which for particularity I used to call Rothbardian anarcho-cap. It may come as news to some readers that there are varieties of anarcho-cap but, take it from me, yes there are. Rothbard's is different from, say, Molyneux's. I no longer care enough to try to explain why.

But I wasn't exactly a Rothbardian either. I understand now that my anarcho-cap was unique. It embodied chiefly a sense that (1) the myth of sovereignty is the source of most of the evil in the world, (2) by debunking that myth we can help move humanity forward to a new and (in consequentialist terms) a better equilibrium -- better than anything that can be achieved on a globe shared among nation-states, and (3) that new equilibrium will look like a lot like a supercharged capitalism. Most decisions would be made in response to prices, which would come about in reaction to demand/supply considerations unconstrained by the regulations of those nation-states living off of that myth.

So: what has changed? Do I now disbelieve in any of those points? My present state of mind is not so much disbelief as a conviction that the terms in which I formulated them are ambiguous and in much of life unhelpful. 

I have put online an essay about my views on ethics and meta-ethics, and there is near the end a passage that describes pretty well how my politics follows from those more foundational views. I'll reproduce it here. You don't really have to get the G.K. Chesterton allusion to understand.  

In some sense, surely, the ideal world would be a conflict-free globe upon which everyone knew what goods he wanted, formed a coherent project to pursue them, received cooperation from his neighbors, and extended it as well. But that world sounds eerie -- dream-like and frictionless.

 

In the real world, resources are limited, dreams are fitful, and friction is real. History is largely a record of the conflicts into which our passions and projects bring us. The great social need, the meta-right if you will, is the reconciliation of rights, the creation of such fences as will render right more or less compatible with right, and that will strike something that will seem to all sides a fair balance where full reconciliation is impossible. 

 

In just this respect, the records of history show that progress has occurred, the real has grown a tad closer to the ideal over time, and it is precisely because they represent some accomplishment in that direction that the existing mores and laws are deserving of prima facie respect, that conformity can be a worthwhile course of action. 

 

Laws about debt and indebtedness, for example, show the marks of such progress. It seems to us in hindsight obvious that the social systems that for a long time maintained debtors’ prisons were misguided. Yes, one knows why the “fence” was there. Creditors are often politically powerful and they have every interest in persuading the population that failure to make one’s payments will have dire consequences. 

 

Yet over time, through the great higgle-haggle of conflicting yet overlapping projects, of the right way versus the other right way, where the conflicting crusades have to learn to live with each other, it came about through much of the world that debtors’ prisons went out of style (the bail system to the side). And lo, debtors still found it necessary to strive mightily to repay their debts, even though a bad credit rating seems on its face less drastic than a period in the lock-up. 

 

And over time (this event too has a very complicated history on which it would not pay to dwell here), the law learned that it could extend forgiveness to some debts and some debtors, forgiveness of a sort that will give the exhausted a second wind. Bankruptcy it turns out works for everyone, even lenders.

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And there is much truth in that. Still, I suspect we're better off training our mental energies upon more localist or particular causes -- like the continued need to reform bankruptcy law, OR the bail system parenthetically referenced -- and letting go of grand notions of a global anarcho-capitalistic new equilibrium. 

I'm no longer confident that anarcho-cap (the kind of world one would try to describe in explaining that label) is a plausible equilibrium down this road, and I've completely lost my old confidence that exposing the mythic nature of sovereignty will advance the cause of reconciliation.  

 

So ... what IS the road ahead? And I still think the broad ideas I outlined in the meta-ethical essay -- which so far as I remember didn't mention sovereignty at all -- may be of some value in those nearer-term concerns. 

 

 My willingness to abandon the older label was sparked, or catalyzed, by the upcoming trial of Robert Telles, a former Nevada public official, for the murder of Jeff German. I discussed this trial in this blog last week.  

 

How does one have a free press, they ask, if public officials can seize notes of a reporters' work in progress? One might well ask in response: how does one have a free press if public officials can get away with shooting reporters who write unfavorable pieces about them? It is all pretty much a lose-lose for the whole idea of such an institution.

 

I just copied and pasted the last three grafs from an earlier post here.  What I do NOT say in that post is where my chain of thought goes from there. In expressing my abhorrence about this murder, am I saying something that really depends upon the fact that Telles was still in public office at the time of the murder? What if Telles had waited until he was officially replaced in the office and he was a private citizen before killing German? Would that make the act better or less bad? If so in what respect and to what degree?

 

The distinction between who is a public official and who is not, what is covered by the idea of sovereignty and what is not, may be less important than an anarchist, who sees his goal as the abolition of sovereignty, is inclined to think it is.