Robert Kaercher, at Strike-the-Root, has responded to Carl Milsted’s “The Need to be Anarchists,” disputing Milsted’s assertion that establishing anarchy now is risky. Kaercher extrapolates from the fact that we see peaceful transactions in our day-to-day lives proves that anarchy could work.
“Anarchy works every day, to the extent that it is allowed to work. Thousands, perhaps millions, of various transactions—of goods, services and ideas both philosophical and spiritual—take place every day between individuals and voluntary associations with nary a government bureaucrat or law enforcer in sight.”
There are two problems with this argument. The first is that it confuses free market activity within the context of a welfare-state and rule of law, with the conditions which might prevail in the absence of government. Peaceful transactions should not themselves be defined as anarchy. The attribute is not the system.
Second, the argument assumes that more “anarchy” is always better. It suggests a linear relationship between “anarchy” and peaceful interaction – that increasing amounts of “anarchy” always lead to increasing amounts of human happiness. This misses the possibility of diminishing marginal returns to “anarchy” and that at some point it may become negative. Anyone who has gone on an all night drinking binge can testify to the superiority of the first few drinks to the last few.
Frederic Bastiat wrote about the seen and the unseen. He described how many people only see the things which government produces and not the lost opportunities that were the cost of government action.
“There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen,” wrote Bastiat.
This should apply to the creation of government programs as well as their destruction. We libertarians always see the bad things that governments do, but never question whether we are failing to see any positive aspects. In advocating the reduction in government we see the removal of costs without addressing whether we are also losing some benefits. We cannot see the peaceful aspects of our current society without wondering if the rule of law plays some part in fostering them.
-- Kevin D. Rollins