Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is my friend Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute, that's independent.org.
And of course he also writes for the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
LewRockwell.com is a guest editor, often times at Strike the Root and plays guitar and all sorts of things.
Welcome to the show Anthony, how are you doing?
Hey Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing really good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Hey listen, so there's this article by Rothbard that's up on Mises, they were passing it around on Facebook or maybe it was on LewRockwell.com today or something, I forget.
The Tyranny of Government, Courts and Prisons.
And since Murray Rothbard died in 1995, I can't interview him about it, but it reminded me of this article that you wrote called Law Enforcement Socialism.
This is from December 22nd, 2006 and I thought it was really good and so I figured I would bring you on the show to ask you a basic question which is, how might anarchy look, and remember you're promoting it.
Most people, I think, including myself just from growing up in this society and whatever, were led to believe that if we have anarchy that'll mean one of two things or maybe both.
The top hat wearing, evil, greedy capitalists will do anything they want with the rest of us.
Or the poor people will run wild setting everything on fire and we'll all be in terrible danger from them.
And so I was hoping that you could kind of explain the anarcho-capitalist or a anarcho-capitalist view on how society might function without a state, and of course I know you're not some utopian talking about the new anarcho-capitalist man who won't commit crimes anymore or be a jerk anymore or anything like that, it's a realist philosophy here.
So I guess, help draw us a picture and then I'll try to come up with some good follow-ups for you.
Well on the question of these top hat wearing monopolists, we're dealing with a question of regulatory state.
I mean, an awful lot of people think that even with a small government this is what we would have.
They seem to also at the same time recognize that this is what we have even though we don't have a small government.
Or in fact they think that the big government makes corporate cronyism far more likely.
But on the question of this crime, certainly even many people who say they favor small government or perhaps actually do favor small government, they believe that the state needs to engage in a few limited functions, the military, the courts, and the police.
Now putting aside national defense, I guess for this discussion, I think that you don't need a state for courts and police, that in fact these are institutions that are so important that you shouldn't trust them to the state, and that the state uses these to commit all the other power grabs that we all oppose.
So the state has made such a mess of these areas that even if I didn't have an idea of how the market would handle them, I think that I would be willing to roll the dice.
However, I do think that there's a lot of reason, both in economic theory and history, to expect the market and communities without states to handle law just fine.
All right, well, for example?
Well, for example, law as we know it didn't really originate as a statist thing.
I mean, it's always been a mixed bag, and states have been involved, and certainly monarchs were involved in England and helping to form the law.
But a lot of the Western legal tradition was formed more organically.
The law merchant, for example, all of these laws regulating transactions between merchants emerged privately because the market actors were unhappy with the insufficient law provided by the government.
There were all sorts of overlapping legal authorities in the rise of law in the West, modern law.
We had merchant law, manorial law, feudal law, the king's law, and of course church law.
And the decentralized nature of the way that our law actually did emerge, I think, bolsters the case that a monopoly power is not necessary for there to be law.
Even though these particular legal structures were not perfect, you can have traditions of law and institutions of law and law enforcement without an actual monopoly provider.
It could be done through the norms of tradition and community standards combined with market transactions.
All right, well, so I guess from the Hanseatic League to 21st century America, I don't know, what if my girl had I Dream of Jeannie Powers and she could just make the whole state disappear tomorrow?
How well do you think that the market could, that individuals acting in a free market could come up with ways to provide real police security and fair trials and this kind of thing?
And what might it look like?
Well, again, I would emphasize that it would be much better than what we have.
We don't have anything resembling fair trial.
The vast majority of people who are sentenced do not get trial.
They're railroaded into plea bargains by the prosecution state, piling on so many charges that it's difficult to fight in trial.
For example, as far as security guards, I mean, most of the armed security in the United States is private.
We have all of these private security guarding hotels.
We have security guarding malls.
You know, you could say that these are not perfect institutions, but they're far better than the police.
The police are not, by and large, concerned with or tasked with protecting our rights despite the fairy tales.
Most of what the police do is enforce laws that shouldn't exist, like drug laws or other municipal codes.
Much of what they do is inherently aggressive in itself when the police arrest someone who shouldn't be arrested under moral law that's a kidnapping.
So this idea that under private law, we'd have corruption, it can't be more corrupt than the state because the state, once you have a state, you've already lost the game because what the state is is a gang that has the right to commit crime, as Albert J. Knox pointed out.
Everything the state does, if we did it, it would be illegal, you know, taxing, arresting, detaining, assaulting, counterfeiting, murdering.
This is what the state does.
It uses violence to achieve its end, and it's legal violence just because that's what it means to be a state.
So the state is the greatest criminal organization of them all, and it's the one that has social sanction, thus making it all the more dangerous and corrupt.
So you could have law enforcement, and you could have law that doesn't even rely mostly on enforcement.
After all, most of the time that people act toward one another in a peaceful way in our society, it's not because of government.
It's not because of a murder statute or the rape statute.
They don't even prosecute successfully many of these offenses in government courts anyway.
The thing that most matters is culture.
If the culture is opposed to crime, that goes the furthest, followed by private property and the institutions of private property and community.
This is what keeps our society as civil as it is, despite the state.
In fact, I would say that the state does so many things to ruin civil society and encourage crime that the fact that we don't live in total chaos is a testament to the ability of people to act in a lawful manner without the state helping.
And now here's my challenge to you, Anthony, and that is that you certainly have some valid complaints against state power, and you can even point out how they make everything they claim to be fixing worse.
But here's the thing.
You kind of sound like a utopian to me.
That's what I hear all the time, is that like the communists or something, yeah, that's fine in a perfect world, but really on Earth in the 21st century, there's a lot of violence between Canada and Mexico, and there's going to continue to be.
And so our task here is to have institutions, these permanent institutions that we work within through our democratic system in order to basically apportion that violence in a way that's as just as possible.
Use violence to lock up violent murderers, things like that, and try to protect the regular people so they can live their own life and pursue their own happiness, because that's the way it is.
So, you know, maybe the state helps the Wall Street criminals.
Maybe their drug war is counterproductive and violates people's rights from time to time and this kind of thing.
But what you're talking about, just getting rid of them and living without them altogether, is simply a dream.
It's not possible.
The drug war doesn't just violate rights from time to time, as Jeffrey Myron and Nola Friedman and many other economists have shown.
The drug war vastly increases violent crime.
I mean, it might double homicide rates.
And I think that there's no reason to expect the people in charge of the government to not be blind to this.
They don't care.
They're not out to protect our rights.
They're murderers and thieves.
Hello?
Anyway, the thing with the drug war is, by increasing the homicide rate, the state has hardly done much to cut down homicide.
I mean, this idea that the state, aside from its warfare arm and police arm, is diminishing murder, I just don't buy it.
Or any of the other crimes.
I mean, you want to talk about rape, well, let's really think about it.
What's the state do?
It puts people in cages where they rape each other.
This is a huge, disgusting, unspoken reality in the United States.
The rape rooms of the U.S. and state governments.
I don't think that the state decreases this crime at all.
I don't think the state decreases any of these violent crimes.
Of course, even if violent crime went up a little bit with no state, I think it'd still be worth it because of how much destruction the state itself unleashes.
But law enforcement is a total failure from the point of view of enforcing moral laws against violations of rights.
It's only a success if you look at it from the point of view of the state and its expansion and its connected interests.
People who wonder why the state is failing are asking the wrong question.
Maybe the state isn't failing.
Just as with everything else, the main purpose of the government program is that government program and sustaining it and hiring people in the case of law enforcement, prison guards, vast numbers of attorneys on the side of the government, police more every year, militarized forces in our midst, driving tanks around, pepper spraying little kids, tasing grandmas.
This is not what keeps us safe.
The fact that America is relatively civil despite all of this is a testament to the civility of the American culture, despite the state being so destructive.
All right, now I know Hans-Hermann Hoppe and other anarcho-capitalist theorist types have come up with theories and I guess some of this already exists in what is free of the marketplace right now, but they talk about insurance companies and security companies and how an anarcho-capitalist system would look in the long term, assuming never mind the part about the giant revolution and abolishing this state and whatever the hell makes it that way, but just how it would operate, how the average person would be able to leave for work in the morning and think that he's got security for his wife and kids back at home, you know?
Well again, most of the security isn't because of the police, but let's talk about dispute resolution or what if someone violates someone else's rights.
Well you know, Ross Bard and David Friedman and Robert Murphy and the Tannehills and many other market anarchists, Sam Conkin, have come up with theories about how the market would operate law enforcement.
Gil Guillory is doing a lot of great work on this today.
And I keep going back to how bad the state is just because I think people are somewhat asking the wrong question.
How could the market do better than the state?
If you replace the state with nothing, it would be better, but the market wouldn't replace it with nothing.
It would fill in the gaps.
People would have institutions that they would rely on, insurance institutions and rights-protecting institutions, and if their rights were violated, they could take the person that they accused violated them to something resembling a court, probably.
Everyone would probably have some sort of rights-protecting institution, and then there would be these intermediary arbiters that would have to be acceded to by both parties.
And you know, it would be the way that many international contractual relations are handled when there's a dispute.
But there'd be, you know, community law, and there would be contractual law.
And you know, if all of these theorists I named have fleshed this out, and I'm always reluctant to talk about how the market would handle this, although Gil Guillory tells me we need to take a stand and make some predictions to show that it can be done, you know, you'd have dispute resolution institutions, and you'd have patrolling institutions.
Gil Guillory talked about subscription-based patrol and restitution businesses.
And they would patrol the towns to make sure that there's nothing going on, which is what the police do probably at their very best.
Of course, most of what the police, you know, actually do upon finding people isn't really ideal.
But you would have that, and then when there's conflicts, there would be things that kind of resemble court.
But they wouldn't be monopolies.
They would only survive if they had a strong reputation for honesty, and if the various parties agreed to defer to their judgment.
Well, I mean, wouldn't somebody have to have a final say?
Well, someone always has a final say over anything, right?
You know, the way property is used, who's the last person to get to use force, it's a question of judgment or justice.
So yes, there would be someone with a final say, but it wouldn't be the same institution that always has the final say.
And most important, perhaps, the state is an institution that has the final say on all disputes in which it is a party to the dispute.
The state, whenever there's a lawsuit or any sort of conflict between a private party and the state, the state is the arbiter.
So yeah, there'd be someone with a final say, and it wouldn't be perfect.
I'm not a utopian.
But at least the state wouldn't be the final arbiter of everything, including disputes to which it's a party.
I mean, that's where the real corruption is.
You said that I sounded...
I seem to sound utopian, but, you know, as Robert Higgs has shown, this old James Madison quote about, if men were angels, you know, we wouldn't need government.
Actually, if men were angels, it wouldn't matter if we had government or not, right?
But since men aren't angels, we can't trust them to have a government, because government puts some people in power over others in a way that isn't really accounted for.
That's almost the definition of government.
They have this monopoly power.
We're taught from a very young age to oppose monopolies, although we're not taught in public school what causes monopoly, which is the government involved in the economy.
But monopolies of any kind are indeed inefficient, and there's a sense of injustice.
So why would we want justice handled by a monopoly?
All right, well, we're going to have to leave it there.
I will recommend all y'all to Anthony Gregory's incredible archive at the Independent Institute, at LewRockwell.com, at the Future Freedom Foundation, and this piece, Law Enforcement Socialism, at Mises.org.
Thanks very much for your time, Anthony.
