12/16/09 – Per Bylund – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And now we're going to go ahead and go to our first interview.
It's Per Bilen.
He is a Ph.
D. student in economics at the University of Missouri.
He's the founder of Anarchism.net, and he also has a blog called PerBilen.com, and you can find what he writes as well at LewRockwell.com and Mises.org.
Welcome to the show, Per.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
Very good.
Very good.
And I'm saying your name right, like Per Willender, right?
Yes, that's it.
Okay, great.
All right, so I like this article.
Interesting stuff.
Something that I kind of wish I spent more time on on this show, but don't usually.
The fallacy of public goods, libertarians, and national defense.
And I guess there are a lot of libertarians, I guess I could include myself if we go back in time a little bit, who have, you know, maybe two or three excuses left for having a state.
I was down to two until I talked with Dr. Hoppe, and then that was the end of that for me.
But before that, I had two, and that was criminal justice and national defense.
The state has to have that so that it's fair and impartial and you take the profit motive out and whatever, you know, for fair trials where even, you know, weak people get a government-paid-for lawyer, that kind of thing.
And then we have to have at least enough government to keep another government from some foreign place from coming and taking over our land.
But other than that, you don't need a state, I thought.
So, you know, that was my constitutionalist position, basically.
A minimal state, if we can get one.
And you argue here that, nah, you don't even really need a state to provide for the defense of the mass.
How's that?
Why don't you explain what your argument is here?
Well, the thing is, I think most libertarians fall into this trap.
They think in terms of state solutions, they think of the nation as the whole, whereas what we're really talking about is a bunch of individuals with their private property.
So what really needs to be defended is not a nation, which would be the state, but everybody's individual private property.
And you don't have to do that with a national defense.
Obviously, you don't need permanent bases in 130 other countries to protect my private property.
That's just ridiculous.
Well, now, let's see.
I guess at least since World War II, though, the technology of warfare is so advanced now that you do need some sort of massive organization to be able to maintain all those Apache helicopters and hydrogen bombs and what have you.
You can't just have the average goofball with his own tank like that James Garner movie, can you?
Well, the thing is, with technology, everything gets smaller and everything gets cheaper, too.
So it's much easier now, I would say, to defend yourself than it was before.
I mean, now you can have basically a small atom bomb in your basement if you really need that for protection.
Yeah, well, I don't know if it's that easy.
Well, nothing is easy.
The thing is, does national defense really protect our property?
Well, first of all, they violate our property rights through having that national defense because they need taxes.
So they need to take the property from us in order to protect it.
And I wrote another article about that before.
They're called Why Statists Are Always Wrong, which was published on Mises.org, which discusses just this of taxation and how that is a slippery slope and they will need to tax more and more and what is a fair tax, if you like, and that stuff.
But the problem with national defense and thinking in terms of national defense is that someone has to organize this and someone has to have the responsibility for this national defense.
And now in order to take over all the private property in the U.S., for instance, what you need to do is really to get the guys on Capitol Hill to wave the white flag.
And if they do, then everybody here has a new master.
That's it.
Whereas if you let every property owner protect himself, you wouldn't have this white flag phenomenon, if you like, because it doesn't really matter what the people on Capitol Hill do.
That has nothing to do with your private property.
You can still defend yourself and do it legitimately.
So you create this illusion that all you need to do is get the White House on Capitol Hill and then you get this nation and it's yours.
It's addicted to your will.
Which is not true at all, of course.
So, well, I guess what you're saying is, you know, basically it would be for any country to take over, any other government to take over our land, what they would presumably do is, you know, I guess what George Bush didn't do in Iraq would be to keep the government that already exists here, just, you know, have it run by our new insect overlords or whatever.
But the rest of the machine basically stay in place, right?
Exactly.
You need these structures and these hierarchies to subject people.
And I mean, this is a state game that we're playing.
We're talking about national defense, really.
I mean, what the national defense is there for is to protect the state and everybody subjected to the state.
So what you're talking about is really whether one state should make the other state suffer or not, and if one state is able to occupy the other state's land, if you want to call it that, or not.
What we're really talking about here is whether people get to have their property or not.
Well, so look at the American Indians, though.
They didn't, well, let me ask you this way.
Would they not have been better off if one of these chiefs or the other could have figured out a way to try to combine as many of the Indian tribes together as they could to fight off the European invaders?
They kind of fought a rear guard guerrilla war action and lost big time.
The problem with such an organization is that you have to hand power over yourself and your property to someone else before you can have that person protect your property.
So you lose your property in order to defend it, which is, it doesn't make sense at all.
Right, except that we know in this example, I mean, we don't know the counterfactual, but we do know that their manner of fighting and, you know, separate from each other, I mean, there were some alliances and what have you, but their decentralized method of resistance against the Europeans on this continent didn't help.
I mean, they were almost all wiped out.
There's some Navajo left, and, you know, if you look hard, you can find an Indian somewhere, but, you know, maybe you've got to go to Mexico to find some.
True.
I mean, what some people say as an argument against my argument, you could say, is that people would still defend their property and you would still have people acting as, well, defense terrorists, if you like, against this new occupying power in order to protect their property.
But that's not an argument for a national defense or a centralized defense structure.
I mean, that's my argument.
That is how you defend yourself.
You're saying that it usually goes without saying, and you're saying it shouldn't, but it usually goes without saying that you would need everybody to come together to expel any invading force completely off the continent together, either stop them at the beach in the first place or expel them.
And you're saying, no, just fight them neighborhood by neighborhood, keep them off your land.
If everybody keeps them off of their own land, then they won't have any land to sit on and we'll all be fine.
That's basically what you're saying.
We don't need a mass army, just guerrilla fighters, and we can protect ourselves.
That is what I'm saying.
I mean, now when we have a big national defense and people believe that that actually does protect them and their property, what they do is they rely on this national defense to actually do protect them.
And it doesn't.
I mean, if you just bomb a couple of these bases, you have no defense anymore, and people are not able to defend themselves anymore.
And, of course, they can't have guns and all that stuff, too.
I mean, the government has already taken that right from them in order to provide a defense, which also doesn't make sense at all.
So the only way to protect this country, if you want to talk about these obstructions, is really to have people defend their own property.
Because if some foreign power wants to occupy the United States or this land area called the United States, then what they really need to do, if there is no national defense, is go to each and every property owner and occupy his property.
And, of course, if everybody is armed or if people get together in militias, this is going to be very, very costly.
I mean, there is no public goods problem in the sense that people do not have to get together on the national level and organize something together.
What they need to do is act in their own self-interest.
And that's it.
Well, that's how the American Revolution was won.
In fact, I think Jeffrey Rogers Hummel in his book on the Civil War, Emancipating Slaves and Slaving Free Men, makes a pretty strong case that because the South didn't fight the war that way, because all their leaders were educated at West Point and they went and marched them all out into the field to be slaughtered the same way Washington had done fighting the British, that was one of the main reasons they lost.
Whereas if they had basically just allowed the North to invade and then just bogged them down with guerrilla sniping and fought them like Afghans, they probably would have been able to secede.
Right.
Afghanistan is a very good example.
I mean, how many foreign powers have not tried to occupy Afghanistan over the centuries?
I mean, no one has been able to.
And they all lose.
I mean, the Soviets were there for how long?
Ten years?
Yeah, the first one.
And they lost hundreds, if not thousands of troops and it cost them a fortune that they didn't have.
And then they had to surrender anyway because they could not get control over that country.
Whereas if you have a national defense and people believe in that national defense, what you need to do is make the politicians surrender.
And then you have this big structure of power where you have already subjected 300 million people.
It's very easy to take over a country with a national defense.
That's basically what I'm arguing.
It's not easy if you don't have this centralized structure.
Well, we've seen in Iraq where they did have a centralized structure, but then Paul Bremer threw it out, told the army to all go home and whatever, and it led to massive chaos.
And they basically have lost.
Now the structure that grew up in Iraq after all the chaos is one that's throwing us out rather than doing our bidding.
Right.
Which proves my point.
It sure seems to.
That's how you defend your land.
Do it yourself.
You and your neighbors together.
Well, it's interesting too.
All the examples here are of American aggression around the world and that kind of thing.
I can't imagine a situation at this point where America's in a war and it's one that our government didn't start.
You know what I mean?
Where we're the innocent victims.
How long has that been?
Has that ever happened?
I doubt it.
Well, that's an interesting case here.
Can you recommend some more arguments made along this level?
I think you know how it is.
You say the word anarchy and everybody pictures things on fire and maybe poor people with guns getting revenge against comfortable people.
People get scared a lot and they think of anarchism as a riot.
So you're saying that the state is a riot and anarchism is peace.
How do you get past the knee-jerk response here?
Right.
I think Mises called statism a planned chaos, which is really what it is, whereas anarchy is order.
How to get past this?
I think most people are still looking for some kind of guarantee that things will work out, whereas what people really need to realize is that there is no guarantee.
Government is absolutely not a guarantee.
You are the guarantee for your life and you can lead the life that you want to lead.
There's plenty to read on this.
I usually recommend Matt Stone's On the Steps of Central Asia.
It's a short book.
It's available on anarchism.net, by the way.anarchism.net slash steps dot htm.
What's the title again?
On the Steps of Central Asia.
It's about a guy from a student in the US who goes to Mongolia to work over the summer or something like that.
He realizes after a while that Mongolia does not have a central government.
You get kind of an insight into how they solve all these different problems.
It might not be the best solution, but it shows very clearly that it's possible.
That's a very good book for pushing people over the edge, if you like.
I take the final step out of statism.
Well, I'm with you.
I guess usually my problem is that I'm not good enough at all the technical arguments about free market anarchism.
I end up just falling back on what I guess is basically the emotional argument.
Well, it's a logical one, too, but it's the simplest one, which is that the government, our government particularly, but all governments, are, as Bill Hicks said, liars and murderers.
All they do is murder people all day long.
Really, if you're an anarchist, it seems to me like the burden should not be on you to have to explain why it shouldn't be like this.
It seems like the burden would be on the people who support a government that wages a holocaust every decade or two.
Absolutely.
That is absolutely the case.
If you argue for something, then you need to come up with the argument, not the people who say that this positive thing does not have to exist.
The statists have a lot to explain here, but the problem here is probably that we're so used to it right now, and we're so indoctrinated in different kinds of public schools and through the mainstream media, that we're just so used to it and we don't even think in other ways.
So it's very difficult to get along with this idea.
This is why you always get into technicality.
You talked about the emotional argument.
The emotional argument is very, very strong and persuasive, but the question you always get is, but how would this work?
What are the details?
Tell me exactly how this would be arranged.
There is no such thing.
Exactly how is it that that gallon of milk ends up on your table?
You have no clue, but it does.
That's how the market works.
It's very decentralized and you don't have to know everything.
Whereas a government, a state solution, someone has to know everything about everything.
And it's obvious that that does not work.
Yeah, it's obvious too that voting is basically a joke.
You could have a situation maybe where the American people, by some big number, really get it right and replace the Congress with a bunch of new House members that all agree correctly about, I don't know, ending a war or whatever.
I just have never seen it in history.
It seems to me like all just a big scam and everybody on both sides simply are voting for their American Idol popularity contest.
Or the high school student council vote or something like that.
Yeah, well, voting is a big scam.
I would refer to it as the battered status syndrome.
I mean, you go to place your vote and then for the next four years you're basically raised by the politicians who gain power because of you and then you go back there anyway and grant them this legitimacy through your vote.
And you do this over and over and over again.
But it seems most voters don't realize what it is they're doing, but they're still complaining about politicians and what politicians do and all these lousy policies that they vote for and enforce.
Well, now, what about left anarchism, which is, I guess, basically, if I can attempt to define what I think is the big dispute between individualist, you know, private property anarchism, as you're describing and as I believe in, versus more of the left anarchism point of view of, you know, I.B.
Bakunin or whoever.
It seems like the deal is that they think that private property owners actually need the state.
They need the socialist state to tax the little man in order to pay for the security forces.
We call them police in order to protect the private property of the few who own all the private property.
And that without the socialist state to make all that property, quote unquote, private, it wouldn't be.
So it seems to me like instead of using the state against private property owners, trying to soak the rich and make things fair for the little guy and whatever, it seems like if that's really true, then we ought to just, we ought to be able to agree the private property anarchists and the left wing anarchists that, well, let's get rid of the state then and try it out.
I mean, let's see if people can't really, if private property is only an artificial construct backed up by socialist taxation and police forces, then it's, you know, invalid and immoral.
And so if it is going to, you know, devolve to the people and mass ownership kind of thing, like left anarchists think, then that would, you know, in and of itself, I think, kind of prove that that was the only moral way to do it, right?
If it turns out that all the private property owners needed communism all along to back their ownership up, I say let's abolish the thing.
Why do we have to disagree about this?
That's exactly right.
I think there's a lot of confusion within the anarchist camp, if you want to call it that.
There isn't really not that much that separates left wing anarchism from right wing anarchism.
I really hate those terms, but...
Yeah, I do too.
I was trying hard not to fall into that trap, but I didn't know what else to say either.
Yeah, well, there isn't that much that separates us from them.
If you read, for instance, Proudhon, the mutualist, I mean, he's talking about the free market and how people would be free in a market where you get rid of the state and how people would, he's talking about mutual banking and stuff like that, where people can actually get together and pool their property, more or less, so that they get some cash for investments and improving their property.
So, I mean, the difference is not that great.
The problem here is that left wing anarchists, they have kind of bought the Ayn Rand version of libertarianism.
Ayn Rand also claimed that there needs to be a government, because otherwise there is no property.
There will only be civil war, as you call it.
I mean, that's what the left wing anarchists say as well.
You need, well, property rights advocates, they need the state to protect their property.
So you have both of these sides doing the same kind of argument, but for totally different reasons.
Whereas both are a bit confused, because property is not a construct of the state, but the state came a lot later than property did.
So property is just the recognition of something that is mine and that I have created, the value that I have created through my own labor and my own hardship.
And I mean, other people do respect me as a person and my labor in general.
There are some bad apples out there, but we can get together and deal with them.
Yeah, well, you know what?
I think that really rings true, too.
I mean, everybody learns from their mom and their dad and their siblings and whoever.
First thing is that you can't just go around taking other people's stuff.
You have to keep your hands to yourself, no punching anybody in the face and all that.
Right.
One of the first words that kids usually learn is the word mine.
It's mine.
I want it.
It's mine.
I mean, then we get a little bit more sophisticated than that.
I mean, we start recognizing that we can't just grab whatever we like.
And our parents usually help us with that.
But I mean, one of the first national instincts is that something that I hold in my hand, that is mine.
Nobody else's is mine.
Once you turn like four, then you recognize, or maybe even three, other people are people, too, and what's theirs ain't yours.
But now, wait a minute, though, because everybody is going to say that, well, this is just naive and silly and a metaphysical, you know, a fun argument, but that really the burden is on you, that you really are making an extraordinary claim here, saying abolish the state, basically, or repeal it all until it's all gone.
We don't need it.
Don't you, isn't the burden kind of on you to explain at least a pretty good idea of why and how this should work rather than, you know, I mean, I don't know.
I framed it exactly the opposite way earlier, that they're liars and murderers, so how can they justify that?
But still, this is the way it's always been for a long, long time anyway.
And so, you know, you're the one who's got the burden.
In that sense, I think people require some kind of explanation or guidance as to how this change could be brought about and what we're aiming for and how that could work.
I think that most people require some kind of guidance or explanation to take that step.
But the big problem here is that a lot of people, they want the government because they realize or they think that people are, at least to a certain extent, evil.
So you need some kind of external or higher kind of control.
Well, if this is the case, then you don't give control to a few people who seek that kind of control.
That will only make things worse.
It's better if you let everybody do their own mistakes, because then, if they are really evil, then the effect of their being evil is very small if they have only themselves to rule.
But if you have all this centralized power structure where people can actually seek power over other people, first of all, you can easily see that the people who want power over other people, those are not the good guys.
Those are the evil ones.
And then you hand them the power.
That doesn't make sense at all.
Yeah, well, and you know, this is kind of why I've always seen, you know, Democratic Party brand liberalism, even for the last generations as basically a big scam where they all are just, every program, this goes for the Republicans too, but I guess I'm thinking of the official Democratic Party ideology.
It's mostly get everyone dependent on the national government in some shape or form, so that if you or I say to them, wow, look, they murdered a million plus people and they're working on killing even more, boy, shouldn't we just abolish them?
People immediately think of, oh, no, because what would happen to my life?
Everything would change, because they're all so dependent.
I mean, hell, me too.
Even the cigarettes I smoke are subsidized by taxation as much as they're taxed on the other end.
Everything, every part of our society is influenced by this government dependence.
So if we abolish the state, it really would be a major change.
I mean, that's how heavily influential they are in every part of our society already.
Right.
I think most of us fail to realize how much influence the government has over our everyday lives and the decisions we make and how many choices are actually made for us by someone else and how many options, when we do make choices, are just taken away from us that would actually make us better off.
So there would definitely be a lot of change.
But I think we can also conclude that people would still choose to live their lives the way they like it, within that framework, whatever it is, just like they do now.
So people would not be very different.
They would be more self-dependent and more empowered, if you like, and stronger in themselves.
They would still choose to get together in certain organizations.
They would still drive on the same side of the road and everything like that.
What you would see is enormous wealth.
Of course, everybody can trade freely.
And you would see peace, of course.
There would be no national defense that needs to occupy other countries.
So you would have to have peace.
Whatever war or whatever you want to call it you would have would probably be a robber going into a bank.
That would be the kind of war you would have in such a society.
Nothing else.
And how would you deal with that?
Well, you would have your private police or insurance, and people would take initiative themselves to deal with these things.
Yeah, I think that's so funny that people say, oh, we can't get rid of the government because then you would have armed bands of robbers everywhere.
Jeez, these guys rob what, like three, four trillion dollars a year?
That's their official budget.
Never mind, off the books.
Yeah, I get that argument a lot all the time.
People say, oh, what would happen?
Then everybody would just keep killing and raping each other.
Right, I know.
That's what I would do immediately is just run outside and start shooting people.
Yeah, and my aunt...
Only the LAPD is keeping me inside right now, in fact.
Right, of course.
My question to them then is, well, who's first on your list of people to kill?
And they, of course, they respond with, well, I wouldn't kill anyone but everybody else.
And, of course, government, they keep everybody in check except you.
Right.
Everybody else is evil.
Freedom would be okay for me, but I saw on local news that everyone else would just run outside and commit murders and probably come straight here to murder me and steal my stuff.
There's something wrong with that picture, obviously.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I appreciate you writing and speaking the case against the state.
I think you do it well.
And I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Excellent.
Thank you very much.
Everybody, that's Per Beiland.
He's the founder of anarchism.net.
I'm going to have to spend some time looking around that website.
And also at perbeiland.com, P-E-R-B-Y-L-U-N-D.com.
And you can find him at mises.org and at lourockwell.com.