The minarchist trap

Ivo Vegter writing for The Daily Maverick has taken a stab at making the libertarian position sound totally reasonable and sensible.  For that he should be commended.  It is often easy to forget just how plainly and obviously sensible free market and minimist-state solutions really are.  Vegter argues that by taking on too much and trying to do it all the state is failing miserably.  Instead the government should reduce its promised deliverables to an absolute basic minimum required to meet the most basic of needs of the people.

We here at Human Action cannot disagree that a smaller state is better than a larger one, and indeed this is why there is so much appeal in the minarchist position among libertarians like Vegter.  It allows one to maintain credibility at dinner parties in plush liberal suburbs – credibility from which one can structure good arguments for less state intervention in every area of life and actually elicit a few nods from the other side of the chocolate fondant platter.

But every intellectual movement has its internal factions, and for libertarians the biggest divide is whether we should have a tiny state (minarchist) or no state at all (anarchist).  Now it would be easy to argue that this is a fruitless argument.  After all, at this stage neither is a particularly realistic scenario any time soon anyway, and for many outsiders looking in the thought of no state is just too weird to contemplate.  This tends to be treated as an internal libertarian scuffle between the weirdoes and the even weirderoes, bearing little relation to real world problems.

That is why many minarchists tend to try and distance themselves from anarchists and sidle up to the economic and small-state mainstream conservatives to gain some political clout.  So how has that worked out for them?  Well, pretty badly actually.  Small state conservatives have had scant real impact on the broader polity, and minarchist libertarians have often ended up selling their souls, giving concessions, and lending their support, only to be tossed out on the political trash-heap anyway.

You would be hard-pressed to find a government anywhere in the world that has become smaller, barring the obvious examples in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, let alone so small as to satisfy the libertarian minarchists.  The minarchist position has been wholly rejected in the real world despite its adherents clamouring for credibility left, right, and centre.

This is why libertarian anarchists like to think of themselves as the ‘real’ libertarians and in fact have done a good job of wrestling the debate over to their side in the mainstream libertarian discourse in recent years.  Of course when you think of ’anarchy’ you immediately think of rapacious bloody-toothed madmen running around terrorising the old and defenceless, and society degenerating into a mass hedonistic orgy of consumptive waste and civilisational implosion.

But actually that is the type of society governments, not free people, tend to create.

Every instance of social decay, mass moral debauchery, and unchecked widespread violence happened when governments were in control and abused their power.  It has always been free societies, liberated from the shackles of formal institutionalised government, which have restored order, moral rectitude, economic prosperity and peaceful trade.

A read of the monetary collapse of the Roman Empire will quickly disabuse you of any notions that governments are inherently the bastions of civilisational order.

The minarchist trap is thinking that a) it is possible to arrive at a mini-state, and b) that it will stay mini once you’re there.  Unfortunately Ivo Vegter walks into this trap like so many before him.

There are some free-market advocates who would argue that if you oppose government, you should welcome government inefficiency. Not only would it support your economic argument, but it means government is less likely to infringe on your freedoms. While that may be true, the reality is that it means higher taxes, more waste, more corruption, and larger numbers of angry citizens. And no, they won’t vote for your pet free-market party (or even the official opposition) as a consequence. They’ll just riot and threaten lives and property, including yours.

No, welcoming government inefficiency is like welcoming the death of babies because it demonstrates the folly of government-provided healthcare services. In theory, you might have a perfectly good point, but in civilised company, it goes down like a lead balloon.

I’d like to propose the opposite: small, efficient government.

The ruling party should start by identifying a set of essential services that is as small as possible. If they can be limited to what economists call “technical public goods” – those few services that cannot easily be provided to one without providing them to another, and whose consumption by one does not materially impact on its availability to another – so much the better.

Then, instead of turning each service into a grand, world-leading project with bells, whistles, a fancy logo and a thousand opportunities for corruption, reduce it to its basic elements.

Take those elements, and execute them well. Do not begin new projects until those are delivered and run smoothly.

It really does sound great and rip-roaringly sensible, and yes, it would be an infinitely better governing reality than the one we have now, no question, but it still raises a heap of practical and theoretical problems that pertain points a) and b) above.  There is a lot to say about the above passage, but we’ll just keep it focused on the following two:

1. How does the state downsize in the first place?
   What are essential public services in an ever-increasing rights culture?  Will they be limited to border patrol, policing, and sanitation services, or will they keep encroaching into other service areas?  Food is an essential service, but the food market is privatised and feeds millions daily at a cheap cost and according to their needs.  The practical process of unwinding and eliminating certain departments is fraught with political turmoil.  No bureaucrat will settle for having their budgets cut and department’s closed.  Some may even have legal obligations to fulfil deliverables to communities that have been promised or enshrined in the constitution itself.  Government spends nearly 40% of South African GDP and the recipients of that cash, and the people depending on them, form a majority of the voters.  Will the voters even want a smaller state?
2. How to keep it small?
   Assuming a government can willingly and voluntarily shrink by say 95%, the next big question is how to keep it there.  Perhaps there are constitutional checks that can be introduced and so forth, but we are yet to see this actually work anywhere in the world barring perhaps to some degree Switzerland – but even the Swiss don’t have anything close to a minarchist state.  Even the much-vaunted US constitution, hailed for its libertarian ideals, has utterly failed to check the growth of government.  The fact is that, regardless of the starting point, the state grows.  Period.  And it is rather ironic that Ivo himself inadvertently admits as much when he says, “Take those elements, and execute them well.  Do not begin new projects until those are delivered and run smoothly“.  Ah, but there’s the trap folks, for in the minarchist utopia those projects will be delivered and run smoothly, and the state will be compelled and emboldened to take on more projects, and it’ll probably do those quite well, and then take on more.

The minarchist trap is that minarchism is essentially a well-intentioned and obviously better paradigm than our current heavy-state status quo.  But is it really the LONG TERM solution and can you even get there anyway?  We would argue, as one comment to Vegter’s article did, that the minarchist utopia is as pie-in-the-sky as socialist/communist dreams or the notion that we can spend and print our way to prosperity. It doesn’t stack up.

At least the anarchist view is grounded in a far greater degree of reality.  The state always grows, eventually implodes, and free people pick up the pieces.  Marx said that the dialectic progression of history would eventually arrive at a communist order, but ironically the exact opposite it true: the eventual progression is always toward a stateless anarchy where free societies run and manage their affairs without central and forced collectivised control.

The problem is not that the anarchist view is weird and crazy and unrealistic, the problem is that people do not grasp what an anarchistic order would look like and they cannot imagine such a world at all.  Because they cannot fathom it they are afraid of it, and because they are afraid of it they reject it.  In rejecting it they choose the statist order and in so doing impose their views and power on others and limit individual freedom.  The reality is that an anarchist order cannot be imposed upon anyone from above, but has to be the preference of a majority of the people.  The people will not change their preference unless their lives are made decidedly uncomfortable, an eventuality likely to come about as a result of state-driven chaos and disorder.

That chaos and disorder is not far off.  The real question will be whether, when the state fails and implodes, do the people try to institute a new state, whether large or tiny, or do they opt for individual freedom, private property, and local, private government and voluntary association?  History tells us they will opt for another statist experiment unless libertarian anarchists can educate and show the masses the virtues of living in freedom.

Libertarian anarchism is not chaos.  It is local, private government.  It is voluntary association.  It is private property rights.  It is personal governance and responsible resource stewardship.  It is peaceful trade and economic and monetary justice.

Libertarian anarchism is not anti-authority.  Indeed, most real authority arises naturally within families and communities and free people routinely choose to submit voluntarily to authority.  Libertarian anarchism is about the freedom to choose to submit to authority, the freedom to reject some types of authority and accept others.  It understands that authority structures are ultimately voluntary bonds we choose rather than dictates from coercive authoritarians.  Real authority is earned and lasts.  Fake authority is forced and crumbles.

Libertarian anarchy is not war and suffering of the weak.  It is taking the possibility of war away from a centralised repository of funds that can acquire weapons and inflate money supply fraudulently to wage conflict.  It is caring for the weak in families and communities.  It is the right for everyone to be armed so that evil people cannot prosper.  It is punishing criminals by excluding them and ostracising them from our communities, barring them from our private property, and if necessary, ending their ability to defraud, rob and kill us.

Conclusion

The libertarian minarchists and anarchists are mostly on the same team and fighting for the same ideals.  But the minarchist trap is to support an inherently failed institution just because it is smaller.  This position cannot satisfactorily answer how we achieve mini-government in the first place and how we keep it small in the long run.  The libertarian anarchists are in many ways more pragmatic and realist.  They know government can only grow, and that that growth eventually leads to outright implosion of the state and a return to the private order.  The libertarian debate should really be about how, when the collapse of government occurs, we can keep it that way.

The advent of libertarian anarchy is a ground-up revolution of ideas and love of freedom, not a top down revolution at the ballot box or from the halls of the Union Buildings, and it would seem that no minarchist ideals will change that.