Anarcho Nonsense
Anarcho Nonsense
What may seem to be inconsequential errors in the short-term can have devastating consequences in the long run. Details matter. Logic matters. Reality matters.
Doug Casey: “As long as the State exists, you’re either the ruler or the ruled. That’s why I ‘identify,’ to use a currently fashionable word, as an AnCap or anarcho-capitalist.”
Well…
Shut my mouth and call me Charlie.
**sigh**
I agree with the vast majority of positions that Doug Casey holds. (Though his obsession with using the word “Jacobins” rather than “statist” and/or “collectivist” is a tad annoying…) And newly-minted president of Argentina, Javier Milei, echoes Casey’s self-descriptor, so Casey is certainly in good company. But…
In the past, Casey has, for example, declared that Ayn Rand’s view of businessmen was naive and unrealistic. I contacted his assistant with a (very mildly worded) correction. But, of course—surprise!—I never heard from either Casey or his associate. I guess you have to be one of the inner circle or ask some innocuous question that does not find fault with Casey for these guys to deign to acknowledge your existence, let alone offer a correction for an obviously flawed judgment.
Whatever.
In the above quote from his newsletter, Casey commits a beginner’s logical error. Without embarrassment or hesitancy, he gives us a False Alternative Fallacy as though it is the unshakeable truth.
But the only two options in regard to understanding the proper nature of government are not “ruled” or “ruler.” This is as ludicrous and blind as stating that the people of the world are and must be divided into two and only two camps: chattel slave or slave master…which is, in essence, what he is suggesting.
Sure. Governments have created and been associated with a plethora of negative, destructive actions and consequences…and those that have done these horrific and unconscionable things should be loudly and widely condemned and punished.
But—fuck me—FAMILIES have “been associated with a plethora of negative, destructive actions and consequences,” as well! By Casey’s “logic,” we should simply abandon the very existence and concept of “families” as untenable and unviable, as an institution that can never be a positive in anyone’s life.
Might as well add MARRIAGE and SCHOOLS and BUSINESS and CAPITALISM and a host of other such all-encompassing entities that have existed for millennia.
No one—and certainly not a SINGLE “AnCap”—has EVER demonstrated that the very idea, the very concept, the very notion of “government” is, by its innate nature, integrally and inevitably and irreversibly destructive and abhorrent and incoherent to anyone desiring a truly “human” existence, i.e., it is a false concept, a fantasy not reflecting reality in any way, shape, or form.
Why have these people never given us this demonstration? Because they cannot. These charlatans would prefer to start in medias res and simply assert what they will not and cannot prove. That is, these “anarcho-capitalists” are mired in a giant Circular Argument/Begging the Question logical fallacy.
(See my Amazon articles on anarchy for an extended explanation and analysis of this fact. And, while we’re at it, let me add that—in the short-term—arguing about limited government versus anarchism is a silly tempest in a teapot. The world is lightyears distant from anything even vaguely resembling limited governments, let alone anarcho-capitalism.
(So why do I get so worked up about this stupidity and what, to some folks, is a distinction without a difference? Glad you asked. As Bastiat and his modern-day equivalent, Henry Hazlitt, made crystal clear, proper epistemology and critical thinking require that one examine and evaluate the full context in judging ideas and principles and policies. And, indeed, as Ayn Rand and history make abundantly obvious, the tiny inconsistencies in the positions of freedom-lovers are precisely the cracks that the statists, collectivists, and mystics use to pry apart liberty and transform what was once an honorable idea—e.g., “liberal”—and transform it into something foul and abhorrent.
(It is impossible to reach the right goal if you can’t properly identify in the first place where you are and should be headed.)
But, hey! Why let the principles of logic and critical thinking stand in the way of a good grift, right? As long as these “anarchists” can suck in undeserved applause and bask in the glow and glory of their (relatively tiny) spotlight as they wallow in their bilge, then screw epistemology and consistency and believability.
Jesus Fucking Christ on a Shingle. How utterly short-sighted, naive, ignorant, and disgusting.
Grr!
Pardon my boiling exasperation, but I have been listening to these yahoos and their willing dupes spout their piles of bullshit for longer than most of them have been alive.
I mean. Ayn Rand was right long ago about these fools.
Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction:…a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.
If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.
The use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice—the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.
A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.
Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.
One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms “competition” and “government.” Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.
The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.
If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.
This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.
A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.
“The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness.
The common denominator of such [advocates of “competing governments”] is the desire to escape from objectivity (objectivity requires a very long conceptual chain and very abstract principles), to act on whim, and to deal with men rather than with ideas—i.e., with the men of their own gang bound by the same concretes.
“The Missing Link,” Philosophy: Who Needs It
As you can see from Rand—and as I detail in much greater detail in my three articles on “anarchism”—anarchy is, at its core, irrational. It is ANTI-FREEDOM, ANTI-RIGHTS, ANTI-LOGIC, ANTI-CAPITALISM and suffers from the very charge it hurls at the idea of “government”: it is an incoherent, destructive, and ultimately impossible goal for which to strive. .
I know I’m spitting into the wind here. The “AnCaps” are good at schmoozing and publicity, especially since the media folks who give them platforms from which to spew their evil bullshit and abominable garbage are too ignorant or uncaring or corrupt themselves ever to challenge the lies of these intellectual doofuses.
“Evasion” is the word of the day for these ultimate enemies of liberty.
But maybe someone, somewhere will read my take on Rand that disputes Casey’s glib dismissal of her legacy and worth, and, in this article and the ones to follow, how and why “anarchism”/AnCap/anarcho-capitalism, whatever, is nonsense on stilts. Certainly, no one who would really benefit from the truth, i.e., the people who “identify” as AnCaps, will pay what I say any heed or question their “fashionable,” condescending take on government.
Contradictions? Fuck it!
Consider that current “darling” of some libertarians and libertarian-leaning “conservatives,” Michael Malice. I agree he has certainly managed to garner kudos and prominence among a portion of presenters in this area.
But any cretin who proclaims with smug, smirking satisfaction that “laws are just implements of power, and there’s nothing objective” about them [see Rand’s comments above about laws and objectivity…] simply reveals his fundamental nature as a lightweight, shallow “thinker” who is a philosophical illiterate spouting cliches and overly-broad generalities, someone who studiously avoids wrestling with the roots of this issue and of freedom itself. Adopting his pogrom, er, program would destroy, not strengthen, freedom.
Malice views himself as a wit. Well, as the saying goes, he’s half right…
In other words, these charlatans get the crowd drummed up by pretending to be “radicals.” But the stark reality is that invariably they fail—miserably so—to grapple with what being a “radical” actually means: getting to the root of an issue, i.e., focusing on and analyzing the fundamentals, the foundations, of ideas and principles, especially those of philosophy in the areas of epistemology, morality, and politics.
In the final analysis, “AnCaps” share the same fundamental ideas as the worst statists and collectivists polluting our universe.
They simply refuse to see—or at least, acknowledge—their brotherhood-under-the-skin with the rankness of authoritarians and tyrants.
Lordy, lord. Save me from anarchic dreck…
An as a final aside, it is absolutely amazing—but utterly unsurprising—that so many anarchists also blithely dismiss the legitimacy of intellectual property. But then, crappy intellectuals tend to commit to and commit the same logical errors again and again and again in a wide array of arenas.
Detailing and destroying the bonkers notion that “intellectual property” does not exist will, however, have to wait for another day…
(As an interim offering, consider this:)
Over the next few days, I will be posting my three main articles— “Government and Anarchy”; “Government and Anarchy, Part II”; and “Anarchic Contradictions”—that detail and analyze the nature of government and anarchy and the relationship between the two ideas.
The full articles will be for paid subscribers. Free subscribers will still be given access to generous excerpts from these pieces. The complete articles are, of course, on Amazon.
I also will be posting “‘Imposing’ Freedom,” a relevant article regarding the role of government in a society.
A 2500 word essay examining some of the basic issues raised between those who support libertarian-style anarchy and those who support a Jeffersonian-style limited government.
There is nothing inherent in the structure of a limited government that inevitably leads to disaster any more than there is anything inherent in guns that inevitably leads to murder. But there needs to be a set of objective political principles anchored in an objective morality that can be applied to everyone, whether all individuals accept those principles or that morality or not. Anarchism fails in that requirement. A properly limited government does not. In either system, there remains room for problems to occur and for people to violate the rights of others. Unfortunately, the underlying rationale for an anarchist society is self-contradictory and must therefore be rejected.
“Government and Anarchy, Part II”
A 1900 word essay that looks at objections to limited government and addresses errors made on the part of anarchists.
Governments should and must be extremely limited. But it is almost as though anarchists expect that a government should automatically continue to operate on the basis of limited, delegated power once it is established without continuous feedback and control placed upon it; that any deviation from its original intent condemns the very idea of “government” itself. But when people—such as they do today—forget what freedom is; when they condemn objectivity, rationality, and morality; when they forget TANSTAAFL; they create conditions for a government to run amuck. Don’t blame the very concept/idea of a limited government for what results; blame the individuals who seek the easy way out, who don’t engage in the work of maintaining the extremely important value that is freedom.
Keeping and retaining any value—especially one as important as freedom—requires constant and continual work. Compare this to a marriage: a marriage won’t function properly if the couple goes on autopilot once the marriage vows are completed. Same goes for a government. Both will go astray without work. But I would not say “marriage is impossible” or “inherently” evil simply because much evil and suffering can result from individuals who are married. Nor should such untenable a claim be laid at the feet of the concept of limited government.
A 2400 word essay examining the inherent contradictions in the concept of political anarchy.
The main contradiction in libertarian anarchy is that its foundational ideas are based on a circular argument (assuming as a premise what is supposed to be proven as a conclusion). The arguments for this style of anarchy rely on a variant of what Ayn Rand termed “the stolen concept fallacy,” that is, they use “concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using.” (Rand, For the New Intellectual, p. 154)
The irrefutable inner contradiction of anarchy is this: one cannot engage in free-market competition in a non-free society.
Another relevant article is “‘Imposing’ Freedom.”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0106PW2HC
A 2000 word essay analyzing the claim that those who seek freedom are no different than others trying to establish a particular morality via the force of government. Such a claim, however, is wrong. Liberty merely establishes the conditions required for any viable ethical code to operate. It does not favor any particular morality over another.
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