Alternatives to Taxation

Auberon Herbert, the founder of voluntaryism, famously claimed not to be an anarchist, saying that anarchists do not understand themselves, and that government would continue to exist even in an anarchy.

Thus, Herbert advocated what he called the “Voluntary State.”  Nevertheless, many anarchists often call themselves voluntaryists and, as did Benjamin Tucker, cite Herbert as a fellow anarchist.

Can we make heads or tails of this?

The state is classically defined as an institution that maintains (or attempts to maintain) a monopoly on the use of force within a given region.  All states either (A) raise money through exproriation (taxation); (B) enforce, at gun-point, regulations that would not spontaneously arise on the free market (or would arise in a manner wholly different from that which arises under a system of institutionalised force); or (C) maintain a monopoly on the administration of justice (monopoly policing and monopoly courts).

Yet Herbert’s “Voluntary State” would do none of these thing.  Thus, the form of “government” that Herbert supported was not, properly understood, a state at all!  It is, instead, a voluntary organisation that raises money without coercive taxation; that refrains from telling consumers, workers, and entrepreneurs how to run their businesses and their lives; and that does not prevent competitors in the fields of arbitration and protection services from competing with itself on the free market.

It is, in short, the only sort of “government” that anarchists can comfortable support, for it is the only form of “government” that does not violate the non-aggression axiom.

But then the question arises, how would such private organisations fund themselves if they have no power to force people to surrender their savings?  There are three general ways a private or voluntary organisation can raise revenue, and they are as follows:

1. User fees
2. Lotteries
3. Endowments or general donations

User Fees

It is my general belief that any function of government that we believe is vital to civilisation can be provided for by the free market, so let us first consider user fees.  Of course, if there’s demand for a certain service, then there’s money to be made.  Someone will naturally create a supply.

Let’s take for instance something most people generally agree is a necessary service of government: police protection.  Could the free market handle this?  In fact, the free market has already handled this in some areas where the government was doing an overly poor job.  Protection agencies can easily be created, since there is undeniably a demand for protection from rape, theft, and murder.  And, it’s quite arguable that such a private system would function even more efficiently than out current system.

Consider what happens in our current system if the police do a poor job and crime rates rise:  People say, “We need to give the police more money.”  If you were to get paid more when you don’t do as well, what incentive would you have to improve?  Competing protection agencies, for example, know that if they don’t do a good job, they’ll lose you as a customer, that you’ll purchase the safety provided by another agency.  So, to ensure they get as much money as they can, they’ll provide the best police protection they can.

Desire for profit (what some decry as “greed”) is an amazing motivator.

User fees can be applied to all sorts of areas, in fact.  Take for instance roads.  Currently, with government ownership of the roads, we find pot-holes everywhere.  When the government does try to fix these things, the construction crews they hire often take their sweet time getting the job done.  And then there is the traffic conjestion caused by the same forces that led to long lines at the gas pumps back in the 70s.  By allowing private roads to charge user fees, we can alleviate these problems.  (Most road companies would want to offer some sort of E-ZPass system to make driving more convenient for customers, since those roads without such a system will be much more likely to drive customers away.)  And where private roads, bridges, and tunnels have been adopted, they have far outperformed government-controlled roads.

Lotteries

Lotteries are easy to understand.  People buy lottery tickets in the hopes of winning a cash prize.  The government or organisation pays out the cash prize to the individual that wins, and the rest of the money collected goes toward funding the activities the organisation or government wishes to pursue.  People, of course, have an incentive to play even if they do not care about the organisation’s operations because playing affords them the opportunity to win some amount of money.

Endowments or general donations

In his book Libertarianism in One Lesson, David Bergland writes that one way to pay for national defence without having to resort to taxation is to set up a National Defence Endowment.  (Personally, I am more pursuaded by the War Destruction Insurance idea that Bergland also discusses, but I digress.)  With such an endowment, people could donate to the cause of national defence and know that their money will be spent on that purpose, and not diverted to other government activities.

But would people donate if they are not forced to do so?  Ignoring that a system of donations does not rule out the possibility of also employing user fees and lotteries, I still must say yes.

Certainly, if the only means an organisation or “government” uses to fund itself is through voluntary donation, it will very likely be the case that said organisation or government would take in far less money than it would with a compulsory tax, if for no other reason, the free-rider effect.  But, this is no reason to believe that a compulsory tax is necessary.  After all, there is no reason to believe that the state “needs” to be taking in as much money as it does now, or really any money at all (considering that the free market can provide all demanded services currently provided by the state).

But more importantly, I see no reason why even those who believe a state is necessary must also believe that the government cannot take in as much money as it needs to perform its few “vital functions” through purely voluntary means.  After all, for those things in which people believe very strongly, campaigns invariably do grow, and they grow because people are willing to donate money to this or that cause.

For example, let’s say Californians are very much in favour of government-provided education.  In such a scenario, there will then be a handful of Californians who will work very hard to get people to donate periodically to the cause of funding Californian public education.

This would function in the same way that any special interest group functions today.  The ACLU, for instance, does not, unlike the state, get money by forcing us to surrender our money to it; rather, it raises revenue by encouraging donations from voluntary contributers.  The ACLU sends out emails periodically about the campaigns they’re working on, why said campaigns are important for this or that reason—and it works!  People donate because they believe in the cause, and the organization thrives.  The same would be true of any programme the government offered.

Such a set-up, coincidentally, provides a good citizens’ check on government.  Let’s say the teachers in California start slacking off and the grades of student begin to suffer as a result.  Some people may choose to stop donating to that cause, perhaps for a specified length of time, perhaps indefinitely.  Because teachers want to make sure their jobs are secure, they’ll work all the harder to educate the children.  And because the public-school supporters don’t want to see the school system lose money, they will apply pressure on whichever teachers are dropping the ball to either get their act together or resign.

The people of another state, let’s say Montana, may choose that public education simply isn’t worth it when there are private schools which can handle the function of educating their children.  In this regard, the people would have more control over what their government does and does not do.

Of course, there’s also the matter of how government functions will themselves work with less money.  Let’s say New York has a welfare programme.  Whereas their welfare programme currently probably focuses on getting as many people on welfare as possible (as doing so ensures jobs for bureaucrats), the new voluntary welfare, because the funds are limited, will have to give out their funds more efficiently.  In this set-up, instead of trying to get people onto welfare, their primary job would be to help get people off of welfare, to help people become more self-sufficient.

Thus, there are a variety of benefits for everyone which would be derived from rendering taxation voluntary.

Conclusion

Not everyone who supports the abolition of taxation is an anarchist.  Objectivists, for example, correctly argue for the abolition of taxation, recognising it for the unethical violation of property rights it is.  However, they usually do not draw the conclusion that the state itself necessarily violates natural law (with the notable exception of the anarcho-Objectivists such as Roy Childs, the Tannehills, and Angela Keaton).

Ultimately, the anarchist’s primary goal qua anarchist is to abolish the entire state apparatus.  The state, as I have defined it in this piece, is any organisation that requires the use of aggression (the initiation of force) in order to exist and attempts to maintain a monopoly on the use of force within a given region.  Such an organisation is necessary criminal, even if it is voluntarily funded, for the same reason a voluntarily-funded gang of rapists is naturally criminal.  Merely abolishing coercive taxation will not alone, therefore, abolish the state, although it is certainly a desirable interim measure nonetheless.  Thus, it stands to reason that the anarchist libertarian naturally supports the replacing of taxation at gunpoint with voluntary alternatives such as user fees, lotteries, and endowments.

But there is good reason why all libertarians, not simply the market anarchists, ought to be critical of the existence of taxation.  After all, taxation is the aggressive taking of the fruits of a person’s labour without her consent—in other words, theft.  It sets up the precedent that it is lawful and just for the state to engage in aggression against the individual and the voluntary collective.  And if this weren’t bad enough, tax collection agencies tend to be wasteful to boot.  In conclusion, I encourage all libertarians, of all stripes, to consider the issue of taxation.  Perhaps in so doing, you will find even better alternatives (in addition to user fees, &c.) to this evil institution.

Political Party or Debate Club?

It’s often asked, do we wish for the Libertarian Party to be a political party, or a philosophical debate club?  The person asking is almost always implying that the party must be a party and thus not a philosophical debate club, although conceivably, one could ask the question with the purpose of promoting the idea of having the party be not a party at all, and only a philosophical debate club.

But the question is problematic.  It implies that a party can only be one or the other, that it in fact cannot be both.  But is that true?

No, this is a false dichotomy.  A party can still be an organ for promoting campaigns and electing public officials and be a healthy forum for discussing and working out political philosophy.

No two libertarians are ever going to fully agree with one another.  That’s a given.  For that matter, not even any two anarchist libertarians are going to agree with one another on everything.  We anarchists have disagreements on a litany of topics, ranging from copyrights to abortion.  We have disagreements on tactics, whether an incrimentalist or abolitionist approach is most effective.  So it shan’t be surprising that we are going to have disagreements with our minarchist sisters and brothers as well.

For the Libertarian Party to be an effective organ for libertarian activism, it will have to be both a political party, with an eye focused on campaigning and an ear trained on philosophical discussion.  To focus solely on one or the other will either cause the Libertarian Party to cease being an effective outreach vehicle or to cease being a vehicle for the promotion of a specifically libertarian ideology.  One of the things that makes the Libertarian Party unique is that, unlike the Democratic and Republican establishment, we are interested in ideas, that we are looking for fundamental and systemic change, not simply a means to line our own pockets or gain control over the citizenry.  (Disclaimer: this is not to say that all Democratic and Republican politicians are simply power-hungry swine, only that both parties tend in that direction.)

The Libertarian Party is constantly bringing in new members, both in the form of libertarian-leaning liberals and libertarian-leaning conservatives.  This is, of course, not something to get angry about, but rather to celebrate.  Nevertheless, it is important to remember that merely getting these persons to join is not the end goal of the movement or even the party.  Rather, the goal is to move society toward the full embrace of liberty.  We Libetarian Party members would be quite remiss to say, “Okay, you have joined; I shall ignore you now and not bother to explain why government regulation of human migration is also destructive and uneconomic.”  No, discussion should be always kept alive.

This is not to say that internal debate should be or must be hostile.  Far from it.  Respectful debate is always the most effective way to win people over to your view, since hostile debate causes otherwise-open-minded people to simply stop listening.  No one wants to agree with the person who calls her an uncaring fool, for example.

Anarchists and non-anarchists within the Libertarian Party are, of course, going to disagree with one another.  But this is not a bad thing.  The position that the Libertarian Party cannot be both a political party and a “philosophical debate club”—insofar as it is used to promote the view that internal discussion should be eschewed—thus implies that anarchists within the Libertarian Party should simply never bother to discuss the ideas promoted by anarchism.  After all, if we discuss anarchism, then we become a debate club and cease being a political party.  But this is, of course, utterly silly, for as pointed out above, the position is based upon a false dichotomy.  The Libertarian Party loses nothing from having anarchists within its ranks, and actually stands to gain, given the radical dedication of the anarchist to libertarian goals and the free society.

Anarchists must remain welcome within the Libertarian Party.  Like the labour activists in the Democratic Party and the hardline Christians in the Republican Party, anarchists are the Libertarian Party’s base.  We serve the vital role of ensuring that the party does not sway too far toward centrism.  For third parties in particular, not swaying too far toward centrism is vitally important, for no one wastes her vote on a third party that looks identical to the Establishment party.  A third party is only ever effective and merits existence when it offers something offered by no other party.

Although non-anarchist libertarians disagree with us fundamentally on the desirability of replacing the state entirely with voluntary organisations, they nevertheless should not have difficulty in seeing the utility of an anarchist base within the Libertarian Party, all things considered.  Sure, that means they may find themselves listening to us, from time to time, discussing the merits of private protection agencies replacing state-monopoly police, but as long as we keep in mind that the Libertarian Party can (and must) be both a political party and a place for lively exchange, we shall lose nothing.

Posted by Tom Knapp at http://knappster….

Posted by Tom Knapp at http://knappster.blogspot.com/2009/07/of-ways-and-means.html

Reproduced under Creative Commons License

Daniel G. Shorthouse @ FR33 AGENTS:

It should be self-evident that the attainment of condition x by action exclusive to condition x is a self-defeating philosophy. Unfortunately, many of those who share the same goals with [Agorists] do not recognize that fact. Minarchists, partyarchists and others who believe that freedom can be gained through the political process are no different from those Muste was criticizing by that saying: those who believe that peace could be attained by violent means.

First, I’d like to separate the categories “minarchist” and “partyarchist.”

Minarchists do not share the same goals with Agorists. Minarchists define freedom differently than Agorists (and other anarchists) do. Their definition of freedom allows for the existence of a minimal state; Agorist and anarchist definitions of freedom do not. Minarchism doesn’t treat the political process as a way to freedom; rather it includes includes the (or at least a) political process in its definition of freedom. The inclusion of minarchists in Shorthouse’s argument is, in other words, a strawman (presumably an unintentional one).

Partyarchy, on the other hand, is a more complex phenomenon. Canon:

Partyarch: [T]erm coined by [Samuel Edward Konkin III] in 1972 to denote “anarchists” who had rejected the State (head of the octopus) only to embrace its tentacle, a political party.

I can’t blame Shorthouse for incorporating a naive ipse-dixitism fallacy in his argument — as far as I can tell, all of SEK3’s arguments against partyarchy rested on the same fallacy.

The fallacy in question is the assumption that affiliation with a political party necessarily implies acceptance of the proposition that “freedom can be gained through the political process.” As a matter of fact, the coining and usage of the term “partyarch” specifically as a pejorative seems to me to have that fallacy built into it.

In point of fact, I can think of at least two reasons for an anarchist or Agorist to join a self-described libertarian political party, neither of which in any way imply acceptance of that proposition.

The first reason is that a self-described libertarian political party is a prime recruiting ground. Even at its worst statist extreme, a party like the Libertarian Party is chock full of people who are already at the point of questioning the efficacy, and perhaps even the morality, of the state.

Yes, some of them will remain minarchists (or even “smaller-good-government” types), but they’re dawdling just barely inside the door of the Temple of the Cult of the Omnipotent State. Some of them are bound to respond favorably to the guy who persuasively points them to the EXIT sign. Minarchist libertarians are low-hanging fruit for conversion to anarchism or Agorism — and libertarian political parties are where minarchist libertarians gather. Anarchists and Agorists can reasonably join libertarian political parties for the same reason that military recruiters visit high schools … because that’s where the people they’re seeking are to be found.

The second reason is that nothing makes for a better demonstration of the political process’s inefficacy at securing freedom than … well, a demonstration of the political process’s inefficacy at securing freedom.

When an anarchist or Agorist joins a libertarian political party, dons a suit and tie (or pants suit), gets all the talking points down, puts in an honest effort, runs the best campaign for political office that he or she knows how to run … and gets 2.4% of the vote … what you have there is — guess what — a demonstration of the political process’s inefficacy at securing freedom. And that demonstration takes place right there in front of all those aforementioned prospective recruits, the ones who’ve been knocking on doors and stuffing envelopes and buttonholing their neighbors.

And if the Agorist or anarchist actually wins an election? Even better! Now those recruits get to see that libertarian politician turned into a human lightning rod, fighting valiantly for a 1% reduction in the tax levy or a looser interpretation of zoning rules and coming away with metaphorical third degree burns over 80% of his or her body every damn time.

Nothing turns an open-minded minarchist into an outright anarchist faster than a window office over the floor of the sausage factory. If you don’t believe me, ask former North Kansas City councilman Brad Spangler.

There may be reasonable arguments against “partyarchy” on grounds of strategy, i.e. that anarchists’ and Agorists’ time would be more productive if spent in direct counter-economic activity than in recruitment of new anarchists/Agorists from the ranks of libertarian political parties. The standard arguments — of SEK3, and now of Shorthouse — however, fail because a key part of their premise is fallacious.

[Update, 08/26/09: Shorthouse responds in turn, and it’s quite an interesting one. I may come back at him again, but I’m going to want to chew on it for awhile first. Well done!]

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The Obviousness of Anarchy

Many sincere limited government libertarians object to market anarchism because they’re unable to imagine how a free market could provide law, security, and defense.  But this isn’t just a theoretical claim by anarchists: it has already been achieved both in the past and the present:

Law – The commercial code of the United States and most other developed countries derives from the Law Merchant, a purely voluntary legal system set up in the Middle Ages by international merchants dealing in contracts their governments were unwilling or unable to enforce.  Virtually the entire body of law advocated by all libertarians, whether anarchist or minarchist, was present in the customary law and early common law systems of England and other countries, which originated and were operated without central planning.

Security – Professional police are a relatively recent invention in society, spend the majority of their time enforcing victimless crime laws or raising revenue for the government through traffic regulations that have never been shown to produce safer streets and highways, and are now outnumbered by a factor of 5 to 1 by private security personnel hired by businesses and homeowner groups who no longer see the point of relying on the police for protection.

Defense – Volunteer militias, essentially equivalent to National Guard troops but without the obligation to fly overseas, defended this country effectively for most of the history of the US.   To this day, the Swiss “military” consists almost entirely of the able-bodied male population of the country, learning basic techniques of local defense but not offense, and threatening no other country, allowing it to remain untouched by 2 world wars in their backyard and all terrorism.  Costa Rica has no military in a very dangerous neighborhood, and does just fine.  True, it is unlikely that a voluntary defense force will be able to maintain a worldwide empire: this is one “service” that an anarchist society probably couldn’t provide.

John Hasnas contributed an excellent essay entitled “The Obviousness of Anarchy” to a recent book, Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Party of a Free Country, edited by anarchist Roderick Long and minarchist Tibor Machan.  The book costs a pretty penny, but Hasnas’ article only costs a mouse click.

Anarchists take seriously all the concerns expressed by people who think it is impractical.  Hasnas’ article is not the last word on the subject, but is certainly a terrific first word.  Take a look.

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