Written on June 18th, 2012
Edited in May 2014
Edited in May 2014
Most
people who are aware of Statism define it as – in Obama’s own
words – “the monopoly on the legitimate use of force”. I would
add that it is specifically a territorial monopoly (and modify it to
say “use and threat”). So we have four components: territory,
monopoly, legitimacy, and force / violence / coercion.
I
feel like most libertarians focus on the violence part (and even tend
to loosely define it) rather than the other three components. I'd
even go so far as to claim that force / violence / coercion only
occurs if and when either or multiple of the three other components
are present.
This
is why I’m considering the polyarchist / panarchist stance. If we
get rid of territories by dissolving nations’ borders or by letting
them overlap and allowing multiple governments to compete in the same
place, we solve a third of the problem. If we get rid of monopoly by
getting THE State to allow competitors, we solve another third.
If
we redefine legitimacy – by equating “authority” with
“authorization”, again redefine “authorization” as
“consensual delegation of decision-making power”, and again
redefine “consent” as “choice made in the absence of
significant restriction of alternatives, backed up by the threat and
/ or use of physical armed conflict”, we’ve allowed for the
potential that there can be enough choices of who governs us that we
can’t really say we have no choice in the matter.
We
don’t have perfect choice, but perfect choice would allow us to
govern ourselves, and potentially resort to armed conflict to defend
our decisions about disputes in which other people have (potentially
matter-of-life-and-death) vested interest, which would be less
"anarchism" than "universal autocracy", i.e., the
Lockean State of Nature.
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