Authors Forum: "Anarchy and Law"

0:00I'm very excited to be here. I'm very excited to introduce this new volume, Anarchy and the Law, the Political Economy of Choice. I'll read the first quote on the back of it. It's by P.J. Arorick. He says, finally, a fit rejoinder to people who begin sentences with there ought to be a law. Rod Long had a very complimentary description of the book. This nearly 700-page book is quite simply the definitive collection on free market anarchism. This, here and now, is it.

0:45This book is an edited volume containing 40 of the most important ideas discussing the Many people have this very skeptical view of government, skeptical view of politics, but when it comes to law, when it comes to police and courts, many people somehow assume that government is going to be automatically working in the interest of the public. Private property anarchism, on the other hand, and that's what this book is about, says that, look, just as markets provide bread, so too should markets provide law.

1:30If someone were to argue to you, food is so important, so therefore the government needs to provide food, most people would respond, that would be a total disaster. And what private property anarchism does is it applies this logic to police and courts as well. It says because the protection of property rights is so important, it's the last thing we should leave the government. We should leave it to private enterprise. So when many people hear the word anarchy, they say, oh, there's no law. There's not going to be any private property rights. No. Under private property anarchism, there would be law. There'd be private property rights. There'd be market forces, there would just be no state. So police would be provided as it is privately, as it is in colleges, in casinos, hotels, shopping malls.

2:24Courts would be provided privately as they are with arbitration and mediation today. So this current volume brings together a sampling of the major essays explaining, debating, and Stateless Orders. It's 700 pages. You can see it's kind of big. Some people ask me, why did it need to be so long? Actually, it was hard to actually limit it to only 40 articles, because there's a lot more that could have been included. But the main reason I wanted the book to be so big was I wanted it big enough so people could use it to help smash the state. Before I put this book together, there was a lot of great work out there on anarchism, but it was difficult to track down a lot of it.

3:24I found a lot of people were aware of some of the writings but unaware of whole areas of other research. So what I wanted to do is get this all together in one place. The book is organized into four sections. The first section presents the major theoretical works that argue in favor of private property anarchism. The second section contains the writings that debate the viability of private property anarchism, and it contains criticisms by political liberals, and then it contains responses by anarchists. Section 3 contains some of the early works in individualist anarchism, the precursors to modern libertarian anarchism.

4:11And then it contains a couple of modern articles outlining the history of anarchist thought. And then finally, the fourth section contains some case studies and historical examples of societies that functioned without government law. So let me just go through and I'll give you just a quick preview of some of the articles in here. I won't be able to summarize all of them or all of the arguments in there, but I want to just give you an idea of some of the major ones. In the first section it starts out with Murray Rothbard's statement about how police and courts can be privatized and how he argues how it could function and how this system would be much more in line with natural rights.

4:58The next chapter is by David Friedman who also argues that private law enforcement could work. He talks about how competing groups could function within the same jurisdiction. And he gives a more economic efficiency based argument in favor of private law enforcement. Also in this section is work by the Tannehills who published in the 1970s 1970s, very speculative account of how the market might look. It's not as worked out as some of the later writings, but this is some of the earliest work on this subject in the 1970s that before now was kind of hard to find. Also in this section are articles by Randy Barnett. He argues that criminal law is largely unnecessary. Let's just rely on restitution, where the victims get compensated rather than focusing on punishing criminals.

5:57The next chapter is by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. The next chapter is by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and Don LeVoy. All of these people address the question, how can you protect your property rights? Roderick Long has a chapter on defending a free nation where he talks about various ways you can have a national defense without a state. And finally in this section there's a great article by John Hasnas called The Myth of the Rule of Law. Many people, when they first read it, they like it as much as I did. The idea that we can somehow tell the government to enforce an objective set of libertarian laws is not going to be very likely, because government courts are ultimately always going to have to interpret and enforce the laws.

6:47And when the government courts are doing it, they're more likely to be interpreting it in their own favor rather than in the favor of liberty. of Liberty. So, there's some great articles in this section. In the debate section, it starts out with Robert Nozick. He has a famous book, Anarchy, State, and Public Choice, where he posits an invisible hand theory of the state, where he says out of a state of anarchy, government would just naturally form, a monopoly would form, and then a government would form, and if it follows For people who don't like the fact that this government is forming, as long as the government compensates people, they will be no worse off than without the government, so everybody will be okay.

7:38Next chapter in the book is by Roy Charles, and he basically gets to a really important criticism. What is Nozick willing to offer us as compensation? He is generous to a fault. He will give us nothing less than the state. So what Nozick proposes is, for those of you who don't like the fact that we're creating police as compensation, we're going to give you more government police. Thank you. So that's a great article by Childs. Next one by Rand, sorry, Rothbard is excellent criticizing Nozick. And then the next section in the book is on Ayn Rand, where she also criticized the idea of anarchy. She said, if you have multiple agencies in one area, there's going to be conflict and war. And as a response to that, Roy Childs wrote an An open letter to Ayn Rand and said, really, if you believe in your principles of individual rights and markets, you should be an anarchist rather than a limited government classical liberal.

8:48And this kind of set off this interesting debate. Apparently, he had his subscription to the Objectivist magazine cancelled. And unfortunately this still is happening. I wanted to include the Rand chapter in this book because I thought it was important and so I had to get the copyright permission request and I sent it to them and they said, the state of Ayn Rand said, The request for permission to include the nature of government by Ayn Rand in your book Anarchy and the Law is denied. The estate of Ayn Rand refuses to associate with any book or project supporting anarchist or libertarian agenda.

9:35Touche! So we get to include the criticisms of her, and she can't speak for herself, so I'm sorry, Ms. Rand. Also in this section is a great article by Alfred Couson. Do we really ever get out of anarchy? He says, the idea that we're all going to be underneath one overarching authority is never the case. We're always going to be in some type of anarchy, and the question is, what type of anarchy? He argues that private property anarchy is superior to any other forms. Later critics of anarchism included in this section are Tyler Cowen.

10:24He says law is a public good, the economics of anarchy. He doesn't really say that government is necessarily a good thing, but he says that the way law enforcement works, if you're going to have multiple agencies, they're going to have to to somehow cooperate, and the ability for them to cooperate is going to enable them to collude. So he argues that market forces are going to lead towards monopolization and the eventual formation of government. In response to that, David Friedman has an article critiquing that, and then there's an excellent one critiquing that by Kaplan and Stringham. And then we also have Cowan and Sutter responding to Kaplan and Stringham.

11:14Another couple of articles we've got are Anthony DeJaze. He basically accepts a lot of the Hobbesian arguments, but he says anarchism is still superior. Andrew Rutten basically says no, even though government isn't created for good reasons, Government is unnecessary, but inevitable. Government is not moral, nor is government created to create public goods. But, he says, whether we like it or not, we're going to be stuck with it, so we might as well stick with arguing for limited government.

12:02And then, in response to that, there's a brilliant response by Leeson and Stringham, which is awesome. The next section is the History of Anarchist Thought, and in that it starts out with a great piece by David Hart, who basically outlines the history of individualist anarchism, how did it come about, and he talks about how there was this classical liberal tradition that emphasized individual liberty and eventually people started pushing it to its extreme that said, if we believe in individual rights we should push markets all the way and he talks about that such as the early authors like Gustav de Molinari.

12:50Also, one of the earliest works included in this book is by Edmund Burke, who's often considered a conservative, but he's got this excellent piece called The Vindication of Natural Society. Rothbard said this is a great piece. Many people say that it's a satire. It was written anonymously by Burke, and when it came out that he wrote it, Careful reading reveals hardly a trace of irony or satire. In fact, it is a very sober and earnest treatise written in his characteristic style.

13:39You legislators, you civilizers of mankind, with respect to you, it be spoken, your regulations have done more mischief in cold blood than all the rage of the fiercest animals in their greatest terrors or furies have ever done or could ever do. Next we've got Gustav de Molinari, who many of you know was one of the first people to propose how a system of competing law enforcement agencies might function.

14:24From there we've got a bunch of American authors talking about anarchism in the United States. The United States, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, Volterine DeClair have some great pieces in here. Also included is 19th century preacher David Lipscomb, who basically makes a moral case against government. He says government is force and if we believe in Christianity, we should oppose force. And he says that Christians should not participate in politics, they should not vote, they should not work in government administration, or participate in juries or in war.

15:10So it's a really fascinating piece as well. And then finally concluding that section is an excellent article by David Osterfeld, where he basically, he's a modern writer, where he gives an overview of all the different types of anarchism. libertarian anarchism, how does that compare to syndicalist anarchism and he says that there are certain aspects that are compatible as long as they're not willing to use force against business and he contrasts that to the communist anarchists who are willing to use force against business and so this is just a great overview comparing the different anarchists to the different types of non-anarchists, classical liberals, etc. And then final section in the book, to me this is one of the most interesting sections is on case studies of non-state legal systems. Bruce Benson has an excellent article, Our Public Goods, Really Common Pools. In this one he talks about how in England a thousand years ago there was a very worked out system, well developed system of private dispute resolution. People would be members of these groups

16:19called hundreds where they would pledge, if you're part of this group you're The King of England started observing this, and they said, Oh, there's lots of restitution being paid to victims. Maybe, in addition to paying restitution to the victims, maybe you can pay some of the restitution to the king as well. So they started passing these laws that said, not only did you violate the victim's rights, but you can also pay some of the restitution to the king as well. So they started passing these laws that said,

17:21And then the government says, look, it's a market failure. Markets don't work. So they stepped in, ex post, and said, we need to provide public law enforcement. But it wasn't because the market wasn't doing it. It was because the government intervened. Other chapters in this section, which are excellent in my opinion, is Joseph Peden, Property Rights in Celtic Irish Law. He talks about how it worked in medieval Ireland. David Friedman's Private Creation and Enforcement of Law, a historical case where he documents how it worked in medieval Iceland. Also included in this is Paul Milgram, Doug North and Barry Weingast, who talk about the law merchant, private judges and champagne fairs, where you had contracts enforced privately.

18:15And finally, we've got a couple others. We've got one by Bruce Benson, Legal Evolution in Primitive Societies, where he moves forward in history and says there's lots of societies in the world today that don't function with law enforcement as we know it, and this is quite common. Also in this section is PJ Hill and Terry Anderson, an American experiment in anarcho-capitalism, The Not-So-Wild Wild West, this is their classic article on this, where they said that governments in America's frontier had yet to be established in many cases, but nevertheless people created ways of creating and enforcing property rights through things like cattlemen's associations and miners camps, different things like that.

19:06And the last chapter in this section is Robert Ellickson's portion of his Order Without Law. This is just a document that stateless order is all around us. What Robert Ellickson did is he went to rural Shasta County, California, and he interviewed farmers and ranchers, and he said, he looked on the books and the law said, this is what the law says, disputes must be settled in such a way, and he interviewed people and everyone said, what law? What are you talking about? Because they settled things completely differently. So people find ways of settling disputes independently of the state. So that one is another just a fascinating article as well.

19:59Okay, so that's basically a summary of some of the chapters in this book. And I'm excited that they're in one place. It's 40 chapters, but I view it as really just the tip of the iceberg of work that can be done on the subject, the section on the debate that's ongoing. There's more and more articles coming out, more and more brilliant authors writing on the subject that I highly recommend that you read. And the debate is continuing and the section on the historical and modern case studies is only, you know, one quarter of the book, but that really could be expanded to much more.

20:45So I wanted to put this together for people to be able to A, read it, say, okay, there's a lot of stuff out there, and to encourage people to start realizing this is something we could work more on. The state has been working for years trying to indoctrinate people saying private law enforcement, that's impossible. Well, the articles in this book suggest otherwise. So economists have done a very convincing job to many people saying that markets and private enterprise are desirable in other areas. And I think now we can start applying this logic to the law.

21:37All right, I guess we've got a few minutes left for questions. Yes. Yeah, Steve. Could you summarize a little bit of the, since we have Randall Mulcombe here, I want to summarize a little bit of the Leithen and Stringham response to Randall Holcomb, because the story of those hundreds in England and how that broke down and the violation of the King's Treaty, that sounds like a Randall Holcomb kind of story, where government was just kind of inevitable. We agree that currently we have government in most places in the world, but we say just because it exists, it doesn't prove it's inevitable.

22:22So someone could have said 500 years ago, monarchy exists all over the world, someone might come up with an alternative proposal. We want mass democracy and people say, well, that's a nice idea in theory, but it's just impossible.

23:07Another point on Birk. It speaks on the affiliation of the colonies between the American and the Muslim. You mentioned that in order to punish the rebels, the British government suspended the local government in the colonies in order to fill them with payout. Yeah, it's a great quote. Yeah, thank you. Yes.

23:54As we've had discussions and e-mails on this, I am struggling for any system which will offer me has to be in accord with the perennial philosophy. And the perennial philosophy says that government is a perfect society and other things like that. By that I'm struggling to reconcile the two things. The conclusion I'm coming up with is that it's a mistake in vocabulary. I don't think anarchists are against government. We are for government, but the kind of government we're for is a de-sexualized government.

24:44Individual, individually chosen government, individually chosen court system, fleet system, defense system. We are in favor of government. I don't think we should be saying we are against government. We are for government, but a different kind of government. And saying that, I'm in perfect accord with the perennial philosophy. I would like comments from the audience on my... Okay, great. I'm glad you agree with me on everything, Joe. I appreciate that. I do agree there's some questions about what the right wording is, and certainly you're right. We do believe in voluntary governing organizations, whether you want to call those governments is another question.

25:33Most people think of government when they think of the state, as in the coercive state. But certainly you're right, if you want to call a voluntary, non-coercive governing body, a type of government, maybe a non-coercive government, I won't call it a government, but if you want to use that terminology, then we can discuss that, but I think it doesn't disagree with the main point of this. All right, yeah, we're exactly at 12. Thank you.