Introduction: Economists vs.
Socialists
The costs of involuntary
subjugation to political association are literally impossible to calculate.
A major problem addressed by
market anarchism may be best summarized in the context of the socialist
economic calculation problem (and of the debate thereof), which was addressed
by Ludwig von Mises in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,
and by Friedrich Hayek in “The Use of Knowledge in Society”; namely, whether
economic planning or market-based tactics should determine the allocation of
the factors of production (the three classical factors being land, labor, and
capital). Another important and related issue is whether the primary concern of
“economic science” should be society or households.
Because States wield – as Max
Weber put it – “successful... claim[s on] monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory”, they wield the exclusive right to
initiate coercion against producers and owners for refraining from complying
with the various permits, license requirements, zoning regulations,
incorporation rules, and taxation demanded by government, such that governments
wield the predominant authority (and more authority than producers and owners)
to calculate prices, and to allocate the right to own property and to produce. That
whenever a legitimate (read: legitimized)
firm fails financially or victimizes persons, there are always one or more
State behind it with the aforementioned favors, is essential to understanding
the pro-market, anti-“capitalist” position.
Some theorists of political
economy – such as Gustave de Molinari, and some of the Austrian School – draw a
distinction between economists [an early term for those who became known as
"classical liberals"] and socialists. In "Letter to
Socialists", Molinari wrote, "What is the common goal of economists
and socialists? [...] a society where the production of all the goods necessary
to the maintenance and embellishment of life shall be as abundant as possible,
and where the distribution of these same goods among those who have created
them through their labor shall be just as possible [... o]nly we approach this
goal by different paths."
Those who sympathize with Molinari's
view contend that when governments have the ultimate choice concerning which
businesses and individuals win or lose – and when they intervene in the
“economy” by legalizing, sponsoring, protecting, and financially securing the
right to accumulate capital (in and as a consequence of property and production
privileges) in the hands of a select few – the combined costs of allocating and
planning the allocation of public-resource capital (i.e., administrative
and bureaucratic costs) are so high and influential on markets that they lead
to the distortion of prices, because prices are more or less dictated,
thereby making competition practically impossible outside of uniform, government-sponsored
“competition”.
Market anarchists view
“economics” as intrinsically oriented towards the subjective determination
(under rational expectations) of the interests of the individual, the family,
and the household; they reject the notion that societies and citizenries should
be perceived as possessing a singular economy. On the contrary, they reject the
idea of a socialist economic order, endorsing a dynamic order called
“catallaxy”, which Hayek defined as “the order brought about by the mutual
adjustment of many individual economies in a market”. This view on economics is
informed by the fact that the Greek "oikonomia" means
"rule, custom, law, administration, or management of the household".
The Market for a Just System
of Property Rights
Being that the modern American
libertarian and Republican political climates have increased the popularity of
perceiving governments as businesses – market-anarchists should think it
critical that the public maintain this conception. After all, government is a firm
– an organization involved in the trade of goods and / or services to consumers
– and the privileges and “rights” it affords us (including security of person
and property) exist in markets.
In “The Production of Security”,
Molinari wrote “…no government should have the right to prevent another
government from going into competition with it, [n]or to require consumers of
security to come exclusively to it for this commodity.” What little “privacy”
remains in modern government-protected private property rights must become as
independent as possible from the influence of government, so that competition
of independent agents and agencies with existing governments to allocate
goods to the public may result in diminution of the distortive effects of
“legitimate coercion“ on trade.
While to increase the
independence of property and the “private sector” from States requires that
owners come to evade government regulations, it also requires that they come to
adopt a more personalized form of property than the State-sponsored
“privatized” property rights they enjoy; they must reject, eschew, renounce,
abandon, and disown all utility- and exchange-value (subjectively determined)
which resulted from States’ assistance in the protection and securitization of
the property which they possess.
Essentially, to justify personal
property, a person or firm must work – and must have worked – to
maintain the rights and value of possession, assisted by only those who do so
of their own free will, and never by police or military agents of governance
agencies claiming territorial monopolies on legitimate initiatory force, nor by
State-licensed “private” security providers who essentially act as mercenaries
in a controlled “economy” featuring a reserve army of labor.
The resemblance of this idea to
the legitimate-property requirements set by the likes of John Locke, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, Henry George, and Kevin Carson (namely, that one may only appropriate
resources through one’s own labor) leads us to question to what extent
“market-anarchism” is “anarchist” with an orientation towards social anarchism
(the author of this article, at least at the moment, prefers the term “market-oriented
social-anarchism” to describe his philosophy). Much due to the influence of
Karl Marx, the aforementioned philosophers, and others, the notions and
nomenclatures of private property, capitalism, entrepreneurialism, and
especially “anarcho-capitalism” have been rejected by many self-described anarchists.
Is Market Anarchism
“Capitalist”?
While the mere fact of the
widespread rejection of the aforementioned terms requires that the ideas
evolve, the most common argument against the “anarcho-capitalist” nomenclature
– i.e., that “anarchy” is anti-hierarchical, hierarchy being perhaps the most
objectionable practice in so-called “capitalism” – is not invalid. Critics of
“anarcho-capitalism” often argue that anarchism and capitalism are
mutually-exclusive opposites, and that all anarchism is social anarchism, as
well as anti-capitalist.
While Murray Rothbard’s introduction
to Molinari’s “The Production of Security” appears to admonish C. Frederic
Bastiat for failing to antagonize Statism as thoroughly as Molinari did (“[…]
Bastiat declared that justice and security can only be guaranteed by force, and
that force can only be the attribute of a [‘]supreme power,[‘] the
State.”), Rothbard’s own admission that he did not perceive himself as an
anarchist (in his unpublished article “Are Libertarians ‘Anarchist’?”) makes
one wonder why Rothbard would describe Molinari’s market-anarchism as
“anarcho-capitalism”.
Nevermind Rothbard’s concession
that Molinari would have balked at the use of that term; awareness of this
cognitive dissonance gives rise to consciousness of a disagreement:
“market-anarchism” is not “anarcho-capitalism”, and should not (ahem) market
itself as such, being that it would be critical for the reconciliation of the
disparate anarchist schools of political economy for radical anti-Statism to
accompany radical anti-hierarchialization.
Market-anarchism is neither
Statist, nor socialist, nor chaotic; it is market-oriented social-anarchism
based on dynamic order, and voluntary, independent, and consensus-based
decision-making in the absence of intervention by States (and their
beneficiaries) in the determination of the prices of public goods through the
mutual adjustment of individual economies to one-another.
That the “private” Federal
Reserve Bank is called “independent” from the government, yet participates
in governance, shows that a personalization of “private property” is necessary,
and so does the American populist right’s increasing show of attention to
defending the possession rights of the State-privileged billionaire
corporate-welfare cases – who can bend laws so as to be made exempt from them –
who wield most of the right-leaning public’s political clout.
The right should accept that to
punish and demand compensation from the guilty – just like to defend oneself
against an aggressor – is not a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. They
should also realize that they share with libertarians the belief that
government funding should be collected – and government services distributed –
through voluntary and charitable means.
Voluntary provision of governance
is to market anarchism as voluntary protection of possessions is to social
anarchism; bureaucratic costs (including as political-association
transaction-costs) would be cut; allocation of resources based on natural,
mutually-adjusted price determinations would function without undue
intervention; and there would emerge a catallactic market for governance.
Specialization and
Independence in the Justice Market
Molinari asked, “What special
reason is there that the production of security cannot be relegated to free
competition? Why should it be subjected to a different principle and organized
according to a different system?” The provision of security of person and
property is to be performed by the firm(s) with the optimal combination of
efficiency, and specialization of skills, as determined through the mutual
adjustment of ostensibly rational and informed consumers to one-another’s
interests.
In the Anglo-American legal
tradition, accused persons have the right to represent themselves in court, the
right to refrain from understanding – and to contest – the charges against
them, with a provided or independently-chosen attorney, the right to interact
with independent and impartial judges and prosecutors, the right to be tried by
a jury of their peers, and the right to face their accuser in court.
However, the independence of
juries, attorneys, prosecutors, district attorneys, and judges has been eroded
through the administration of statute law and ordinances, tort reform,
regulations undermining the obligation of contracts; through the politicization
of the judiciary; through attorneys’ degrees of unquestioned freedom to
discriminate on the basis of bias due to legal knowledge in jury selection
pools; and through the pervasiveness of the darkness of legal knowledge in
which legislatures, bar associations, and public education administrators have
colluded to keep the public.
It is imperative to
market-anarchists that innocent individuals be free to represent themselves, to
defend themselves and their properties, and to choose who assists them in doing
so. This entails that political representatives not require citizens to
surrender too much of their powers of attorney; and that individuals remain
willing and able to assert their rights to represent themselves, and to defend
their own persons and properties.
Market-anarchism builds upon the
Anglo-American legal tradition by endorsing the notion that ostensibly
independent judiciaries are “not last because they are right, but right because
they are last”, rejecting the Lockean idea that certain agencies should wield
the exclusive right to aggress against suspects.
Similarly, Samuel E. Konkin III
endorsed independence of personal security and defense, detention and arrest,
detective and investigative, dispute-resolution (arbitration and adjudication),
restitution and compensation, and property protection and insurance. Indeed, in
the Middle Ages, Iceland’s criminal justice system involved the independence of
bounty hunters.
So what results when the
independence of the various branches and sub-branches of modern government
increases until they no longer require charter nor accreditation by firms which
have openly admitted the intention to oligopolize and oligopsonize on trade of
political services and consumer goods?
Many market-anarchists
distinguish “government” from “governance”, preferring to perceive of
“political association” as an action, rather than “political associations” as
potentially tangible things. As for what “governments” would be called, often found
in market-anarchist literature are terms such as “dispute-resolution
organization” and “private defense agency”. To the extent to which these
industries become increasingly independent on State control – and independent
from one-another – their production will be more specialized and efficient.
This is an important issue in
the legal debate between minarchists and market-anarchists: Should there be
monopoly-government-sponsored “independent” judiciaries whose decisions are
final, or can legal tradition regarding the appeals process be fundamentally
transformed, such that persons are free to exercise independent choice over who
represents and defends them, in a manner that results in potentially infinite
appeals to new arbitration agents.
Any real finality in judicial
decision-making would come only through jurisprudential precedent, arrived at
through agreement of all involved parties that a voluntary-acceded-to arbiter
would pronounce a particular decision which all parties would have to accept as
final. Aside from this, a semblance of finality would affect precedent as a
slowly shifting cartelized catallaxy, imposed by contemporary, recent, and
sustained trends in economic, social, and civic ethics.
That such a system fails to
materialize, risks that death penalty sentences are carried out (and that no
further appeals in such cases may be made), and that persons have no legal
recourse against agencies which have defrauded them; especially when that
agency is a government, or an appendage or beneficiary thereof. Examples
include various forms of contract fraud, including limitations on accession to
contractual political association, indirect representation and voting secrecy
in public elections, fraud by lack of disclosure of important information
regarding civil-justice rights in military service contract renewals, codes
complicated with legalese past the point of citizen comprehension, and
limitation of the rights of – and aggression against – agencies seeking to
compete to provide political association services).
This is why the rights to defend
and represent oneself, to compete against the government to do so, and to
provide the same rights and securities to one’s compatriots and loved ones, are
imperative; States cannot be trusted not to rule in their own interests any
more than appropriate, nor any more than judges can be trusted to recuse
themselves when the outcome of the decision would directly affect their own
personal, familial, and financial (i.e., economic) interests.
The Private and the Common
Lysander Spooner argued that the
solution to the problems of the “privacy” of voter secrecy was voter privity
(the right to be privy to information in contractual agreements); that
representative should be required to sign authentic and verifiable written
oaths to support the Constitution, and that the voters authorize candidates to
represent them by signing their ballots. Spooner contended that the tradition
of contract law required that the legitimacy of contracts of surety – oaths
included – requires that more evidence exists supporting continued mutual
fidelity to the agreement; the spoken oath, the voice-vote, and the robotic pen
which are typical of today’s American federal legislature would not have passed
Spooner’s muster.
Proudhon’s Mutualism aimed to be
“the synthesis of communism and property”. His philosophy has been pejoratively
referred to as “market syndicalism”, alluding instead to a synthesis of
egalitarian management by labor with markets in a system of property. Perhaps –
rather than communism and property – what we market-anarchists desire is a
synthesis of community with privity (“privy-ness”).
That is, perhaps we desire
knowledge and awareness of – and modest influence on – one-another’s affairs,
so as to ensure that the individual and the community (whether individual
refers to a person, or to an individual governmental jurisdiction within a
community of governments) retain their own sets of inalienable, negotiable, and
revocable authorities over certain subject-matter spheres. The individual and
the community must respect one-another more than they bow to
one-another.
Ensuring impartial and
independent arbitration of disputes between individuals and communities
requires that the right to revoke consent to be represented by an individual –
or by one’s community, to a centralized or foreign governing authority – be
exercised routinely. This is the only way to guard against the monopolization,
oligarchialization, and geographic concentration of decision-making authority
in the hands of adjudicators and arbitrators, who have it in the interests to
hoard legal information from accused persons and juries.
Finding common ground on which
individuals, individualistic communities, and societies can build a foundation
for synthesizing disparate strains and schools of anarchist political economy
would resolve an important issue in panarchism; namely, the issue of whether
the individual person or the community should choose which competing governance
agency provides them with protections and securities. This is especially
significant considering that market-anarchism, individualist anarchism,
Anarchism Without Adjectives / synthesis anarchism, direct-democratic
federalism, Austrian Marxism, and national-anarchism have all articulated
formulations of panarchism, a radical anti-Statist theory endorsing the “rule
by all”.
In addition to the synthesis of
community with privity, and the personalization of private (privatized)
property might best be accompanied by a communization of the public sphere, and
by a synthesis of common law with private law in the legal tradition of
contractual surety obligations in the economic and political realms.
Market-anarchist activity must
be directed towards providing for the voluntary, informed, and subjectively
evaluated accession to contractual political association (i.e., personalization
and privity in private law). Endorsing compromise in the issue of competition
against monopoly breeds oligarchialization; this is an enemy of those who
oppose both monopoly and hierarchy.
Market-anarchist activity must
also be directed towards resolving disputes between individuals and collectives
without undue interventions by – or wrongfully-assumed default “authority”
(without authorization) to issue final adjudication of – agencies wielding
disproportionate influence on the calculation of prices and costs of political
services, so as to severely limit the ability of non-State-assisted market
participants to trade, and to “compete” against State-sponsored and
State-permitted “private competitors” to assist in the allocation of resources.
Evaluation and Theory of
Value
To
paraphrase Henry Hazlitt, the private sector is the voluntary sector, and the
public sector is the coercive (or forceful, or violent) sector. Of course, the
private sector is not as voluntary, independent, subjective, personalized, or
oriented towards privity as it could be. Really, all “privatization” is
of the “public-private partnership” variety. The recent U.S. Supreme Court
decision in regard to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act confirms
that not only is crony capitalism a problem in terms of every-day corruption,
but that that problem is compounded when citizens may be ordered to purchase a
good from (or through) an oligopolized (or oligopsonized) set of firms,
justified as a constitutional “tax”.
In struggling to provide for the
subjective individual determination of whether – and at what price – to buy a
good or service, market-anarchists must take into account the subjective
determination of one’s own labor-value; the right to evaluate for oneself the
costs of working under given quality and safety conditions and for given
quantities of compensation.
The reconciliation of the
Subjective Theory of Value and the Labor Theory of Value presents itself as a
possibility in light of this idea, provided that the interests of the worker
and the workplace can be aligned; that a meritocratic system of opportunity to
earn stake in the production of the workplace by demonstrating that
alignment of interests may be fostered; and that an optimal balance between
specialization of task skills and substitutability between employees can be
found organically.
Also, workers must increasingly
perceive the representation of – and negotiation on behalf of – organized
labor, as existing in markets; and perceive of their unions and the parties for
whose candidates they vote as behaving like cartels. Additionally, the
interests of the unions and their members must be aligned, and directed towards
the reconciliation of the interests of the individual and the syndicalization
of the workplace.
If market-anarchism’s focus on
subjective evaluation may be construed to indicate that it is a school of
individualist anarchism, then the “Anarchism Without Adjectives” school of
anarchist political economy – which aims to unite Mutualists, syndicalists,
collectivists / communalists, and individualists – should include market
anarchists among their ranks.
This is provided that
market-anarchists do not promote, endorse, or sponsor the accumulation of
utility- and exchange-value deriving from the assistance of States in providing
for protection and security of person and property. Market-anarchists should
see themselves as existing in a “market for liberty” (as Linda and Morris
Tannehill put it), and as “free[ing] the market to abolish capitalism”; they
and the aforementioned schools exist in a market to redress State theft in
order to compensate those who have been made States’ victims.
The prospect of synthesizing
market-anarchism, Anarchism Without Adjectives, and panarchism, with synthesis-anarchism
itself – not to mention the prospects of synthesizing community with
privity, common law with private law, and the subjective and labor theories of
value – should excite anarchists of all schools valuing solidarity against
corporatism and crony capitalism.
For the aforementioned schools
to unite, would result in an alignment of tactics. In Gary Chartier’s
“Bleeding-Heart Libertarians for Redistribution”, he promotes five
market-oriented approaches to redistribution: radical rectification of State
theft (as discussed above), elimination of privilege (i.e., State privilege),
radical homesteading, acts of solidarity and mutual aid, and freeing the
market.
Although direct-action and
counter-economics may appear to have been left out of the list, each point
embodies both direct-action and counter-economics; that a market for anarchism
should express itself as an amicable diversity in competition to not only evade
State regulations for the benefit of themselves, but also to redress the wrongs
perpetrated by States and their beneficiaries, for the benefit of victims.
Just as we should not consider
tolerating States which do not appear sufficiently humanitarian, we should not
join the ranks of those who hoard State resources unless we deem it in our subjective interests – and / or the
interests of our communities (those not lacking solidarity) – that some benefit
will result.
However, this is the problem
that individual workers and entrepreneurs face when it comes to State
assistance of protecting their persons, properties, and rights; while the laborer
is at-odds with the union and / or the government, the entrepreneur is at-odds
with chambers of commerce and lobbying groups and / or the government.
Anti-Statist laborers (and entrepreneurs) find it necessary for survival to
subordinate the terms of contracts between themselves and their organized-labor
(and organized-capital) representatives to the whims of statute law created by
legislatures.
The significance of this is that
each worker (and entrepreneur) has his own method of ranking preferences concerning
whether the union (or the organized-capital representative) represents his
interests better than the government. When not promoting solidarity-unionism
against (or irrespective of) State intervention, market-anarchists should
promote members-only collective bargaining and minority-unionism in their
workplaces; this would aid in the alignment of the interests of laborers,
workplaces, and entrepreneurs.
If this alignment could lead to
antagonism of – and independence on – the State, if laborers and entrepreneurs
could cease to disparage one-another for having sought State assistance and
privilege to protect their rights and properties, and if each school of
anarchist political economy agreed to engage in its own specialized tactics in
order to rectify State theft (in order to provide resources to persons), we
could accentuate the starkness of the contrast between compromising with
syndicalism versus Statist capitalism, without contesting the subjective
determination of workers and entrepreneurs that the State did not help them
increase productivity or earn their wealth; i.e., without abandoning
State-aided and State-permitted gains.
Essentially, the best way to
guard against the ill effects posed to the ostensible interests of society at
large – risked by an inappropriately selfish defense of subjectively-evaluated
decisions in a market for liberty – is to refrain from formally addressing or
attempting to reconcile discrepancies in personal standards regarding
compensation and rights affecting one’s interests through organized negotiation
with governments. Given the ubiquity of irrationality in a Statist society, no
commercial exchanges – however voluntary, mutual, or reciprocal they may seem –
can be ethical or moral; they can only be immoral, or – at best – amoral.
Being that, unfortunately, (through their respective writings, and through the actions and advocacies of their respected readerships) Marx inadvertently abstracted
labor-value from laborers; Stirner inadvertently abstracted uniqueness and individuality from unique individuals; and Rand inadvertently abstracted objectivity from Objectivist individuals, and (seemingly) intentionally abstracted
rationality from rational persons – through the mere acknowledgement of
(and focus on) the commodification of labor-value, individuality, rationality, and objectivity – market-anarchists should be careful not to aggrandize or exalt any
one principle or thing (for example, “the Subjective” or “the Subjective One”) over
other non-idealized principles and things. This is so that such things do not come to be - in Marx’s language - held over and against us.
Market-anarchists should promote
diversity through competition; in the markets for liberty, for political
representation, for the abolition of capitalism, and for the negotiation by
organized labor and capital on the behalf of individual labor-market agents.
Additionally, the standards we have about how much freedom we have in our
workplaces and our political associations should be discussed in the context of
whether to boycott not only agencies representing organized capital, but also
governments and agencies of organized labor, as firms; because
they are too oligopolistic, hierarchical, or against polyopoly and polyopsony
(the states of there being many buyers and many sellers, respectively).
Too many self-described
anarchists focus on direct-action tactics such as stealing from large
businesses. Since the financial detriment of any theft can easily be guarded
against through planning and insurance – or covered-up through decreasing
compensation to laboring producers – not only is this type of direct-action
unsuccessful in punishing its target, but it may actually do more harm to
laboring compatriots than good, because the costs of the risks of theft can be
externalized away from the board members and managers (the intended victims of theft),
so as to diminish worker compensation.
This failure of this
direct-action “re-appropriation” tactic shows that it is imperative for
market-anarchists – as radical anti-Statists, and as radical anti-hierarchists
– to be focused and deliberate in choosing their targets and tactics in
attempting to provide formerly publicly-provided goods to persons through the
radical rectification of State theft.
After all, anarchists must deal
in a world of practice and consensus, and not of theory, idealism, and compromise;
we must deconstruct governments, not their philosophies. This truth – and the
truth that economists often find themselves disagreeing with the States and
politicians they advise (sometimes with potentially life-and-death
consequences) – prompts us to question why economists give advice to States in
the first place.
Rationality and Radicalism
After all, States are
irrational; they claim to be able to “compete” in ostensibly “capitalist”,
individualist, and market-oriented environments in which they are able to
condition the right – and to deny permission – to compete, all competitors
having to adopt similar standards to that of the State, which upholds a
credible claim on the monopoly to aggress against others (within its claimed
jurisdiction) to enforce its own order on other firms. This holds true even if
those firms aim to peacefully and amicably compete, in a manner which promotes
diversity, and promotes liberating from property any utility-value and
exchange-value which has been unduly derived and accumulated through assistance
by State-sponsored and State-permitted purveyors of organized violence.
Not only are States not
rational; they are also not radical. The
manner in which they attempt to solve problems does not go to the radical root
of things (for to be radical is to go to the root of a problem), and in that
they reject the specialization and the specialty – as well as the particularity
and the peculiarity, and the individual (i.e., undividable) particulates of the
Stirnerian “thought-world” (“I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am
full of thoughts, a thought-world") of the human mind, thought process,
and thoughts – involved in making decisions. The special and the peculiar are
cast by the wayside in the name of ensuring that nobody be an “exception to the
rule”.
But States are no more
irrational than the subjects from whom they withhold legal information, and
against whose enterprises the States largely refrain from sanctioning and
permitting truly independent competition. If individual persons – consumers
of public goods and services – are not free to be informed when they
consent to engage in financial and political transactions, then the expectation
that they are “rational” serves only to excuse their study and inadvertent
manipulation by voodoo-economists, bent on allocating all of “society’s
resources”, even at the risk of overburdening – and over-arming the
employees of – the bureaucracies, distorting prices and spreading violence and
ill will in the process.
This is why Mises and Hayek
promoted the mutual adjustment of many individual economies to one-another’s
interests, rather than allocation and distribution planned and administered by
various legislative and bureaucratic arms of monopolistic socialist States (which
Molinari would describe as practicing communism as an extension of monopoly); only
individuals make truly independent decisions.
Only individuals participate in
negotiations between representatives of labor and capital, only individuals
make evaluations and construct standards concerning the compensation and
authorities they receive in their workplaces and their governments, and only
individuals provide other individuals with political services.
Another reason to support
catallaxy against socialist order is that choice according to individual
self-interest leads to the most efficient utilization - and the least waste -
of the pertinent resource. In "The Four Ways to Spend Money", Milton
Friedman says, "[...] very few people spend other people's money as carefully
as they spend their own."
These ideas should not be
construed to suggest that individuals should discourage solidarity; on the
contrary, Max Stirner’s idea of a “union of egoists” is quite compatible with
market-anarchism. An “egoist unionism” which is practical and adaptable to
current trends in the labor market might encourage workers to make their own
interests known in the workplace, and impart to their fellow laborers thoughts and
subjective values regarding the diverse and distinct manners in which deferences
to individualism and solidarity might be made in a manner which leads to the
most optimal form of deténte with non-stigmergic government and with the
agencies of organized labor and capital which it charters.
These ideas should also
not be construed to suggest that there is anything inherently unethical or
anti-individualistic about collective bargaining or democratic processes in
political and business management. Problems therein only arise when agencies
using democratic processes externalize the responsibility to provide for the
funding of the planning and administration of public service provision programs
and systems, and when such agencies refrain from allowing individuals and
individualistic communities to revoke their consent to delegate their
decision-making authority in timely and routine fashions.
This is especially significant
in light of the debate between gradualism and revolution: we find both
classical liberals in the American tradition and followers of Marx endorsing
the right to frequently-changing representation as a form of peaceful
“permanent” revolution.
Similarly, we find Soviet
revolutionaries, the insurrectionary-anarchist Illegalists, proponents of
counter-economics (such as Agorists and market-anarchists), the
commercial-capitalist tradition of the Jewish diaspora (as discussed by Milton
Friedman) and Tea Party tax-dodgers, all sharing similar interests; to take
advantage of State permission, and to find loopholes in State laws in order to
provide for minimally-taxed and untaxed accumulation of capital, to promote the
interests of family economies and / or to finance revolutionary market, social,
and political activity.
Although it is in the interest
of extremists to provide themselves, their compatriots, and their loved ones
with the most efficient forms of defense of person and security of property, it
is in the interests of others to protect themselves and their
(subjectively-evaluated) duly-earned possessions, against aggression by those
seeking to externalize the costs of protection onto others (including adherents
of alternate political and anarchist factions).
To the extent that capitalism,
hierarchy, and oligopoly are conducive to providing for the independent
production of security and defense – and the impartial provision of justice and
arbitration – given the technologies currently available in the marketplace
which enable us to do so, a synthesis of “anarchism” with these anti-principles
is made, taking the form of a dynamic order (or state, as in “state of being”,
as contrasted against the violent State); the sum of the outcome of all mutual
adjustment of independent temporary economic preference-setting systems.
Boycotting States and competing
against States are viable tactics that all anarchists should consider as
options; this would make it unnecessary and irrelevant for social-anarchists to
ridicule a libertarian who considers that “charitable giving” can result in an
optimal allocation of resources. After all, donated capital gets lost in the
planning, administration, and delivery bureaucracies of charity organizations
and governments alike.
Anarchism in Practice
Socialists and libertarians
still participating in politics should agree that people could help guard
against these problems by instituting legislative and bureaucratic pay cuts,
increasing government efficiency through the elimination of waste and fraud,
increasing and reviving tax credits for charitable contributions, and the
operation of financial security firms on models endorsing minimal justifiable
transaction costs, should all be reforms on which American socialists and
American libertarians still participating in politics can agree.
Additionally, social-Democratic
support of antitrust laws could be paired with libertarian support of a
quasi-panarchist interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S.
Constitution, leading to the invocation of antitrust laws as prohibiting the
territorial monopolization of States over the industry of governance – as
commerce – being that travel is essential to the delivery of many political
goods and services.
This would achieve the
oft-extolled panarchist and market-anarchist imperative that people be free to
choose who provides them with political services, regardless of where they
live, and without having to move from their current location in order to
receive such benefits. Of course, this delivery would be limited to – and
conditioned by – the range of available governance-providers agreeing to
compete with others (including former territory-monopolizing state and local
governments) in the same territory.
Socialists and libertarians
still intent on finding a solution and a synthesis in the context of anarchism,
however, need look no further than the Fundamental Theorems of Welfare
Economics: any competitive equilibrium leads to a Pareto-efficient allocation
of resources; and any given Pareto-efficient allocation outcome can be achieved
by enacting a lump-sum wealth redistribution, followed by allowing market
forces to take over.
The tendency of the socialists
is to cite the Theory of the Second Best; to defend market interventions to
guard against market failure when one or more optimality conditions fails to be
satisfied, and to promote interventionism and gradual international economic
integration as alternatives to – but, unfortunately, often instead of and as
opposed to – free trade and free markets.
While Statists,
interventionists, market-abolitionists, socialists, and participatory-democrats
profess to oppose trade and markets on anti-capitalist grounds; the State in
facts fears any increased “socialism” or “capitalism” which it
cannot control, and the State is the polluting effect on the reputation
of trade and markets. Market-anarchists reject the Statist- and socialist-promoted
lump-sum wealth redistribution followed by catallaxy; they instead ask why not
let market forces perform the redistribution, so that society and
markets at no point have to be fundamentally changed practically overnight,
which risks disruption of society and markets themselves.
Market-anarchists – and, to some
extent, “free-trade” proponents – do not want Tripartism (the neo-corporatist /
neo-liberal joint State-capital-labor intervention in economic and political
markets). Market-anarchists do not want Statism; they want not to compromise
with States to aggress less against enterprises, but to instead associate and
align themselves with the agora – the open-marketplace societies – of
the various nations of people of the planet, to compete against the
violent States (which control and limit their access to productive capital) to
provide at least somewhat charitably-provided capital to families and
compatriots.
Furthermore, market-anarchists
do not desire a total lack of governance; they do not desire a “chaos of
markets”, but a lack of hierarchy, domination, and coercion therein. Mitt
Romney’s admission that “you can’t have a free market work if you don’t have
regulation” would ring oddly true in the views of market-anarchists’; markets
have to be self-regulating, they have to allow for regulations by consumers,
and they have to give rise to dynamic “order”.
In welfare economics, any
competitive equilibrium leads to a Pareto-efficient allocation of resources, a
state in which no person may be made better off without causing detriment to at
least one other person. This is a fundamental rule having to do with how to
align people’s economic interests in such a way that trade can benefit all
parties to mutually voluntary transactions.
To sustain a competitive
equilibrium capable of providing for a Pareto-efficient allocation of
resources, customers of political services must credibly demand from their
providers that intentional detriment (i.e., malice; aggression against person
and property) be defended against. Additionally, governance agencies must
intend to punish and extract compensation from those who hoard information,
suppress independent evaluation, retard the adjustment of prices, assist in the
concentration of market influence, risk of accidental harm (such as
moral-hazard and social-cost problems), risk of undue inadvertent benefit (such
as free-rider problems), impose unreasonable costs of transaction.
Of course, what is assumed in
all this – as stated earlier – is that the market actor is presumed to
subjectively rank his or her (or its) preferences according to rational
expectations. This is assumed for the purposes of science and study; of making
“economic” (individual; household) calculations for society as a whole through
socialist and Statist planning.
That the fact of the
irrationality of firms and persons under Statism is ignored only serves to
entrench the very causes of irrationality; under-education, misinformation, and
disinformation. The evaluation of (i.e., the process of ascribing value to) resources
– and of political and economic ideas – is manipulated through public
education, government-provided consumer advocacy, and public relations agents.
The socialists’ folly is that
information-hoarding “public” agencies do not “compete”; they use their
information to slow the adjustment of market prices and to create inhibitions
to access to capital and to the right to trade, thereby appearing to
successfully distribute resources when “private” agencies or markets appear to
fail. This makes truly independent competition impossible – as mentioned
earlier - outside of uniform, government-sponsored “competition”.
The problem of the economists,
however, is that it is assumed that local non-satiation (i.e., non-satisfaction)
of preferences and desire is insufficient. Unlike the assumption of
rationality, the scientific assumption that many people in many places are
dissatisfied happens to be true.
Economists must insist to regimes
that it is primarily the fault of the States and their interventions and
beneficiaries that people’s desires and needs are under-satisfied, especially
considering the hoarding of information by States, and the hoarding of
resources by State-sponsored “enterprises”, both hoarding away from the people
they supposedly represent to the remainder of the world and towards the elite.
Otherwise, they should fear that the regime they advise may turn against and
pursue them and those who agree with them.
The problem of market-socialism
is how to allocate all of “society’s resources” without breaking the bank,
overburdening and overwhelming the bureaucracies, and excusing too much initiation
of force on producers. The problem of market-anarchists (and economists)
is how to relieve the suffering and dissatisfaction of our compatriots and
loved ones (caused primarily through the hoarding of resources in the hands of
government corporate-welfare cases), while all this expensive, professional,
non-charitably-provided planning, administration, and delivery of political
goods and services at gun-barrel-politics prices, goes on, and at progressively
faster rates.
The costs of involuntary
subjugation to political association are
literally impossible to
calculate.
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