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Anarchy and law and order

That’s it. Anthony Gregory is my favorite political writer. Living, that is. I mean, no one could ever surpass Bastiat, Mencken, and Rothbard.

His latest achievement is a beautiful explanation of how anarchy would promote order and natural law better than Statism does. I urge everyone of every political variety to read it, to learn more about how libertarians think. Following the old adage that you’re more likely to buy the whole cow if I give you the milk for free, here is a large chunk of his essay:

In truth, we libertarians have no objection to rules. To the contrary, we see rules and indeed law as composing the cornerstone of a just, civil world.
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If we libertarians had no concern for rules, we would have no problem with the state overstepping its own constitutional and common law constraints. We would not champion that certain minimum standards of procedure, such as habeas corpus and divided power, be respected safeguards so long as there is a state. But indeed, we libertarians, even anarchists, are among the loudest in condemning the state for violating its own laws, and showing what this tendency reveals about the nature of statism.

In fact, it is the negation of law that leads to the chaos we expect from state administration. As Lew Rockwell has recently said, in reference to the Bush administration’s secret interrogation policies, “in a moral sense, these are not laws at all. Neither are the arrogant orders that pour out of legislatures and agencies. Genuine law, natural law, is unchanging, and we do not have to be told what it is by some politician: you shall not kill, steal, bear false witness, etc. What the state emits is anti-law.”

This hits the crux of the matter quite well. The state is the only organization that claims to be above its own rules. It enforces laws against murder, theft, counterfeiting, kidnapping, extortion and involuntary servitude, while conducting the same on a mass scale. And to enforce its millions of pages of other dictates, it necessarily tramples on the natural law and rights of its subjects, domestic and foreign.
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As for law itself, to learn how anarchy, as we define it, actually promotes the law better than the state, and how most laws we find universally appealing emerged not from the state but from voluntarism and community, see Edward Stringham’s great compilation of case studies and critical essays, Anarchy and the Law. The problem with the state is precisely that it interferes with this process. Consider the contrast between private and so-called public property.

On justly held private property, the owner sets the rules. There are limits prescribed by natural law – surely an owner may not legitimately trick people onto his land and then change the rules to the detriment of liberty. He cannot invite people onto his land, instantly declare them trespassers, and use deadly force to expel them, for example.

But private property encourages a society that respects rules as a necessary component of civilization. If extended further, private property rights would undo the chaotic tragedy of the commons that plagues so much of the public sphere.

On public property, the government sets the rules, but no set of rules can be completely just. Some standards are surely more egregious than others. So long as taxpayers are forced to finance the maintenance of public property, however, there will be competing claims as to what the public rules should be. Should the streets allow cyclists or motorists to dominate? Are parades and marches a just, temporary homesteading of the roads, or are they a socialized invasion of the people who have made most productive use to the land? Surely, the government shouldn’t conduct random searches of people for guns and drugs, but should every public park everywhere be mandated to allow assault weapons and crack cocaine use in plain sight?

The state’s attempt to set the rules for public space is perhaps among the greatest causes of social conflict. Questions on prayer in schools, the teaching of Darwinism or Intelligent Design, school dress codes, smoking and drinking outdoors, immigration, environmental use and pollution, entrance requirements for the military and higher education, road rules and a million other matters are not completely answerable under a socialist property order. What’s more, the attempt to set such rules politically encourages social tensions, animosity and great erosions of civil and economic liberties.
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Even when the state enforces the unquestionably just proscriptions against murder and theft, it does so with undue brutality and violations of the rights of third parties – those forced to testify and serve on juries, those forced to answer during investigations, those forced to pick up the tab, and those imprisoned non-criminals forced to live with the true predators housed in their midst. There is a lawlessness even in the state’s enforcement of natural law.
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Yet there can be no completely right answer for many of these questions. If on a public sidewalk, someone wants to set up a lemonade stand, while someone else wants to skate right through, there is no way the state can determine exactly who is in the right. Surely, there must be commonsense rules beyond and above mere property rights that the public mostly adheres to, just to allow civil society to live. Ironically, the more the government invades and expropriates private property, the more civilized, forgiving and respectful of one another we have to be just to prevent social disorder. And this becomes all the more difficult, as the state only encourages decivilization with its relentless attacks on property and liberty, its murderous wars and hypocritical social engineering, its shameless wholesale depredations on life and freedom through taxation, regulation, inflation and police state brutality. Even as the state requires more civility for society to survive, it encourages, subsidizes and indeed compels the opposite. The fact that society is as successful as it is, even given all this, is only a further testament to the importance of rules and the capacity of people to respect them, not just without state mandates, but in the face of state resistance.

It is a world of rules, social authority and law that we champion. We just oppose the arbitrary brand touted by politicians and legislators. What we defend is an order emerging naturally from civilized conduct, private property and individual liberty. We are truly the genuine defenders of the rule of natural law and a sustainable social order. Of course, we also are the ones favoring true tolerance rooted in private and community rights.