Private Law and Authority (reply to a reader)

Small Question: Do you see anarchism as a path to human beings living with zero government but with a common law, or as 90%+ of people living under a voluntarily chosen government+common law? [posted with permission, reply here has been formated as a general blog entry]

Small questions do not always produce short answers. There is no way to say a priori how the free market would work out. One can only say why economics and natural law is on its side.

The State is an evil; in fact, the greatest evil in society. It is a gang with a flag all dressed-up. It has no more moral and ethical legitimacy than a street corner gang that says Your Wallet or Your Life. The "path" I see is a path to a free and just society. A path that minimizes violence and maximizes liberties, even if it sorts out differently than what I envision. But through some deduction one can understand basic tendencies.

I understand what the gentleman, who has become an anarcho-capitalist, is asking and how these terms are being defined in the question, but I personally reject the use of the words "government" and "anarchy."

Most define what exists now as government. It has little to no relationship to how any private company would work in terms of private police, courts, and arbitration. Private enterprise cannot tax you, for example. Nor is it a coercive monopolist. Calling any business a "government," in my view, is a very poor choice of words. The answer is not to "privatize" government, but get rid of it. Capitalism and the free market is not the result of statism. It is the absence of statism.

Men of the Old Right, like Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, differentiated the terms "government" and "State." This is true, but see it of no use.

Secondly, I question the use of "anarchy." This neither serves the purposes of (paleo)libertarians. So I agree with Mr. Rockwell that we cannot use the word. For most people it means chaos and/or no laws. To others it means some form of communism.

As for the answer to the question, I do not believe the answer is as clear-cut as one might believe.

Security and law is a dividable thing. Hence it will be more "spread out," so to speak. A second factor, and equally important, to answering this question is in regards to how the current statism has amplified its coercive apparatus and authority vis-à-vis the individual by atomizing him, and in an egalitarian spirit "equalizing" him, to be helplessly connected and attached to it, the State. This therefore produces the picture of a society based on atom-like individuals with no attachments to each other and a communistic or democratic view on all men having "equal" authority vis-à-vis each other. This creates an image that private security and voluntary authority is as clear-cut as the question suggests. But it is not.

We, after all, grow up in a family. Children are under a kind of private patriarchal law. They are under their private authority. (But, of course, this law and authority cannot contradict natural law. In addition, in a free society children have the freedom to runaway if they so choose.) So a nuclear family has a sort of voluntary law and patriarch authority. There is an "internal" law to property; to all of private property. Voluntary authority also arrives from familial relationships in the extended family. For example, the extended family use to be a sort of large interconnected "insurance policy." This market-familial insurance policy, however, has been taken over and replaced by social security. Many of man's natural connections have as a result been shattered by the State. Results of which include diminishing many social and cultural constraints. This partially helps explain why under statist conditions man shifts into a more playboy lifestyle.

Covenantal, proprietary, and gated communities would also produce a private, voluntary law of another kind. As I have explained elsewhere on this blog, there are many reasons these arrangements would be formed. Economically speaking, they would bring economic stability as to keep property values from falling due to bad neighbors. There has always been a strong connection between private property and family. Thus it is to be expected that many of these relationships would actively promote such and discriminate against contradictory values, but the types of relationships or "packs" would be diverse. Furthermore, it can be predicted that these relationships would not typically be "democratic." They would be more hierarchical; just as private property, markets, and family are hierarchically structured. So they would be more aristocratic.

Voluntary authority and law outside would come from many competing, and loosely inter-networked sources. For example, you probably would see at least some communities with concordat relationships. Churches and their hierarchies would/could help provide a stronger role for society in the absence of the State.

Beyond this, it is my personal view that a natural aristocracy is required for freedom. Again, they would help provide voluntary authority and active judgeship in natural (libertarian) law. Man is content to go along with almost any current order. The mass-mind, the mob mentality, is easily deluded. If there are not natural market "elites," if you will, then freedom could collapse and society would move back to statist and democratic ideas. I am in the camp of people like H. L. Mencken.

But would people subscribe to private insurance companies as a more "external," so to speak, law enforcement agent? Yes, most likely. This renders law and security less costly than going to a private court or a private police company when one is in trouble. So that probably answers the question. And also, most people want more than to rely on self-defense as a method of protection and security. They want an agent to come by and check on things and so forth. To subscribe to such an agent, for the same basic economic reasons as is being discussed, the companies would want their clients to engage in peaceful activity. That is, they would require their subscribers to adopt such attitudes. They would also want them to be well secured from any attack by a criminal. Already, insurance gives premiums to clients. It is not hard to imagine that such defense insurance companies would give lower premiums to those who, for example, could show them by a private certificate that they own and know how to operate a gun in self-defense. Since this method, versus complete self-reliance, is less costly and is an actual form of insurance (i.e., it is economically compatible with insurance), and because people value insurance services in a free market, it would encourage those more hesitative to subscribe to subscribe or otherwise find themselves increasingly isolated from others. Either way, there would be great economic pressure for non-subscribers to adopt a non-aggressive life. Criminals, it certainly seems from this kind of system, would have a very difficult time----at least more so than now. Companies would want to have good crime statistics. And the companies would have an incentive to share them.

Consequently, due to the more heterogeneous or dividable nature of this scarce good, security and law would not just fall into one agent for a given person or family household. There would be a more complex, and even hierarchical, anarcho-"network." I do not think, though, that people would just go to a (unsubscribed) law enforcement agent when they are in trouble. Most people would subscribe. Outside of that subscription there would be "common law" (libertarian law) in "foreign" affairs with conflicts between men of different agents.