DemocracyThe God That Failed (54 page)

Now, what if such a government should decide to attack or invade a free territory? This would be easier said than done. Who and what would it attack? There would be no state opponent. Only private property owners and their private insurance agencies would exist. No one, least of all the insurers, would have presumably engaged in aggression or even provocation. If there were any aggression or provocation against the state at all, this would be the action of a particular person, and in this case the interest of the state and insurance agencies would fully coincide. Both would want to see the attacker punished and held accountable for all damages. But without any aggressor-enemy, how could the state justify an attack not to mention an indiscriminate attack? And surely it would have to justify it, for the power of every government, even the most despotic one, ultimately rests on opinion and consent, as La Boetie, Hume, Mises, and Rothbard have explained." Kings and presidents can issue an order to attack, of course, but there must be scores of men willing to execute their order to put it into effect. There must be generals receiving and following the order, soldiers willing to march, kill, and be killed, and domestic producers willing to continue producing to fund the war. If this consensual willingness were absent because the orders of the state rulers were considered illegitimate, even
the seemingly most powerful government would be rendered ineffectual and collapse, as the recent examples of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet Union have illustrated. Hence, from the viewpoint of the leaders of the state an attack on free territories would be considered extremely risky. No propaganda effort, however elaborate, would make the public believe that its attack was anything but an aggression against innocent victims. In this situation, the rulers of the state would be happy to maintain monopolistic control over their present territory rather than run the risk of losing legitimacy and all of their power in an attempt at territorial expansion.

¹⁸
Etienne de la Boetie,
The
Politics
of
Obedience:
The
Discourse
of
Voluntary
Servitude
(New York: Free Life Editions, 1975); David Hume, "The First Principles of Government," in idem,
Essays.
Moral,
Political
and
Literary
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Ludwig von Mises,
Liberalism:
In
the
Classical
Tradition
(San Francisco: Cobden Press, 1985); Murray N. Rothbard,
Egalitarianism
as
a
Revolt
Against
Nature
and
Other
Essays
(Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, [1974] 2000).

As unlikely as this may be, what if a state still attacked and /or invaded a neighboring free territory? In this case the aggressor would not encounter an unarmed population. Only in statist territories is the civilian population characteristically unarmed. States everywhere aim to disarm their own citizenry so as to be better able to tax and expropriate it. In contrast, insurers in free territories would not want to disarm the insured. Nor could they. For who would want to be protected by someone who required him as a first step to give up his ultimate means of self-defense? To the contrary, insurance agencies would encourage the ownership of weapons among their insured by means of selective price cuts.

In addition to the opposition of an armed private citizenry, the aggressor state would run into the resistance of not only one but in all likelihood several insurance and reinsurance agencies. In the case of a successful attack and invasion, these insurers would be faced with massive indemnification payments. Unlike the aggressing state, however, these insurers would be efficient and competitive firms. Other things being equal, the risk of an attack—and hence the price of defense insurance—would be higher in locations in close proximity to state territories than in places far away from any state. To justify this higher price, insurers would have to demonstrate defensive readiness
vis-a-vis
any possible state aggression to their clients in the form of intelligence services, the ownership of suitable weapons and materials, and military personnel and training. In other words, the insurers would be effectively equipped and trained for the contingency of a state attack and ready to respond with a two-fold defense strategy. On the one hand, insofar as their operations in free territories are concerned insurers would be ready to expel, capture, or kill every invader while trying to avoid or minimize all collateral damage. On the other hand, insofar as their operations on state territory are concerned insurers would be prepared to target the aggressor (the state) for retaliation. That is, insurers would be
ready to counterattack and kill, whether with long-range precision weapons or assassination commandos, state agents from the top of the government hierarchy of king, president, or prime minister on downward while seeking to avoid or minimize all collateral damage to the property of innocent civilians (nonstate agents). They would thereby encourage internal resistance against the aggressor government, promote its delegitimization, and possibly incite the liberation and transformation of the state territory into a free country

X

I have come full circle with my argument. First, I have shown that the idea of a protective state and state protection of private property is based on a fundamental theoretical error and that this error has had disastrous consequences: the destruction and insecurity of all private property and perpetual war. Second, I have shown that the correct answer to the question of who is to defend private property owners from aggression is the same as for the production of every other good or service: private property owners, cooperation based on the division of labor, and market competition. Third, I have explained how a system of private profit-loss insurers would effectively minimize aggression, whether by priva
te criminals or states, and promote a tendency toward civilization and perpetual peace. The only task outstanding is to implement these insights: to withdraw one's consent and willing cooperation from the state and to promote its delegitimization in public opinion so as to persuade others to do the same. Without the erroneous public perception and judgment of the state as just and necessary and without the public's voluntary cooperation, even the seemingly most powerful government would implode and its powers evaporate. Thus liberated, we would regain our right to self-defense and be able to turn to freed and unregulated insurance agencies for efficient professional assistance in all matters of protection and conflict resolution.

13

On
the
Impossibility
of
Limited
Government
and
the
Prospect
for
Revolution

In a recent survey, people of different nationalities were asked how proud they were to be American, German, French, etc., and whether or not they believed that the world would be a better place if other countries were just like their own. The countries ranking highest in terms of national pride were the United States and Austria. As interesting as it would be to consider the case of Austria, here I shall concentrate on the U.S. and the question whether and to what extent the American claim can be justified.

In the following, I will identify three main sources of American national pride. I will argue that the first two are justified sources of pride, while the third actually represents a fateful error. Finally, I will go on to explain how this error might be repaired.

I

The first source of national pride is the memory of America's not-sodistant colonial past as a country of pioneers.

In fact, the English settlers coming to North America were the last example of the glorious achievements of what Adam Smith referred to as "a system of natural liberty": the ability of men to create a free and prosperous commonwealth from scratch. Contrary to the Hobbesian account of human nature—
homo
homini
lupus
est
—the English settlers demonstrated not just the viability but also the vibrancy and attractiveness of a stateless, anarcho-capitalist social order. They demonstrated how, in accordance with the views of John Locke, private property originated naturally through a person's original appropriation—his purposeful use and transformation—of previously unused land (wilderness). Furthermore, they demonstrated that, based on the recognition of private property, division of labor, and contractual exchange, men were capable of protecting themselves effectively against antisocial aggressors: f
irst and
foremost by means of self-defense (less crime existed then than exists now), and as society grew increasingly prosperous and complex, by means of specialization, i.e., by institutions and agencies such as property registries, notaries, lawyers, judges, courts, juries, sheriffs, mutual defense associations, and popular militias.
¹
Moreover, the American colonists demonstrated the fundamental sociological importance of the institution of covenants: of associations of linguistically, ethnically, religiously, and culturally homogeneous settlers led by and subject to the internal jurisdiction of a popular leader-founder to ensure peaceful human cooperation and maintain law and order.
²

II

The second source of national pride is the American Revolution.

In Europe there had been no open frontiers for centuries and the intra-European colonization experience l
ay in the distant past. With the growth of the population, societies had assumed an increasingly hierarchical structure: of fr
ee men (freeholders) and servants, lords and vassals, overlords, and kings. While distinctly more stratified and aristocratic
than colonial America, the so-called feudal societies of medieval Europe were also typically stateless social orders. A state,
in accordance with
generally accepted terminology, is defined as a compulsory territorial monopolist of law and order (an ultimate decisionmaker). Feudal lords and kings did not typically fulfill the requirements of a state: they could only "tax" with the consent of the taxed, and on his own land every free man was as much a sovereign (ultimate decisionmaker) as the feudal king was on his.
³
However, in the course of many centuries these originally stateless societies had gradually transformed into absolute—statist—monarchies. While they had initially been acknowledged voluntarily as protectors and judges, European kings had at long last succeeded in establishing themselves as hereditary heads of state. Resisted by the aristocracy but helped along by the "common people," they had become absolute monarchs with the power to tax without consent and to make ultimate decisions regarding the property of free men.

¹
On the influence of Locke and Lockean political philosophy on America see Edmund S. Morgan,
The
Birth
of
the
Republic:
1763-89
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 73-74:

When Locke described his state of nature, he could explain it most vividly by saying that "in the beginning all the World was America." And indeed many Americans had had the actual experience of applying labor to wild land and turning it into their own. Some had even participated in social compacts, setting up new governments in wilderness areas where none had previously existed, (p. 74)

On crime, protection, and defense in particular see Terry Anderson and P.J. Hill, "The American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The
Not
So Wild, Wild West,"
Journal
of
Libertarian
Studies
3, no. 1 (1979); Roger D. McGrath,
Gunfighters,
Highway
men,
and
Vigilantes:
Violence
on
the
Frontier
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

²
Contrary to currently popular multicultural myths, America was decidedly
not
a cultural "melting pot." Rather, the settlement of the North American continent confirmed the elementary sociological insight that all human societies are the outgrowth of families and kinship systems and hence, are characterized by a high degree of internal homogeneity, i.e., that 'likes' typically associate with 'likes' and distance and separate themselves from 'unlikes.' Thus, for instance, in accordance with this general tendency, Puritans preferably settled in New England, Dutch Calvinists in New York, Quakers in Pennsylvania and the southern parts of New Jersey, Catholics in Maryland, and Anglicans as well as French Huguenots in the Southern
colonies. See further on this David Hackett Fisher,
Albion
's
Seed:
Four
British
Folkways
in
America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

These European developments had a twofold effect on America. On the one hand, England was also ruled by an absolute king, at least until 1688, and when the English settlers arrived on the new continent, the
king's rule was extended to America. Unlike the settlers' founding of private property and their private—voluntary and cooperative— production of security and administration of justice, however, the establishment of the royal colonies and administrations was not the result of original appropriation (homesteading) and contract—in fact, no English king had ever set foot on the American continent—but of usurpation (declaration) and imposition.

³
See Fritz Kern,
Kingship
and
Law
in
the
Middle
Ages
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1948); Bertrand de Jouvenel,
Sovereignty:
An
Inquiry
into
the
Political
Good
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), esp. chap. 10; idem,
On
Power:
The
Natural
History
of
its
Growth
(New York: Viking, 1949); Robert Nisbet,
Community
and
Power
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).

"Feudalism," Nisbet sums up elsewhere
(Prejudices:
A
Philosophical
Dictionary
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982], pp. 125-31),

has been a word of invective, of vehement abuse and vituperation, for the past two centuries [especially] by intellectuals in spiritual service to the modern, absolute state, whether monarchical, republican, or democratic. [In fact,] feudalism is an extension and adaptation of the kinship tie with a protective affiliation with the war band or knighthood. ... Contrary to the modern political state with its principle of territorial sovereignty, for most of a thousand-year period in the West protection, rights, welfare, authority, and devotion inhered in a personal, not a territorial, tie. To be the "man" of another man, in turn the "man" of still another man, and so on up to the very top of the feudal pyramid, each owing the other either service or protection, is to be in a feudal relationship. The feudal bond has much in it of the relation between warrior and commander, but it has even more of the relation between son and father, kinsman and patriarch... . [That is, feudal ties are essentially] private, personal, and contractual relationships The subordination of king to law was one of the most important of principles under feudalism.

See also notes 8,9, and 10 below.