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May 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:36
248 Hands Across the Slaughter - Anarchists and Libertarians
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And now, my friends, it is time for us to reach across the Great Divide, and to reach out to our former friends, those we call the Minarchists.
Hope you're doing well, it's Steph.
It's the 23rd of February, and no, you have not accidentally come into the old Southern Baptist Hour, my friends.
We are, in fact, reaching out to those who tease us with their opposition to the state, to those Who speak of the evils of government, yet still suffer it to continue existing.
And I would like to point out some things about minarchism.
Minarchism, for those who aren't up on the latest geeky lingo of an arc of capitalism and libertarianism, a minarchist is somebody who believes that the state has the moral right, nay, the necessity to exist, but...
That it should really only be allowed three functions, perhaps something like the police, the military, and the law courts, and nothing else is valid, but we need a government at its core to allow society to function, and so the government is sort of like a traffic cop, and that's about it, right?
So stop, go, but where you're going and what you're up to when you get there is completely up to you.
Now... The Minarchist position is something that I understand fairly well, having myself been yay for many moons up until about 18 months ago, exactly this sort of animal.
So, when it comes to dealing with Minarchists, I think that it's well worth understanding where they're coming from.
They oppose the use of violence, fundamentally, as does every sane human being that you will ever talk to.
But a minochist opposes the use of violence and opposes violence in general and believes that the optimal state for minimizing the use of violence in society is a small government.
So if you look at the...
imagine sort of a bell curve.
And imagine at what end, and the bell curve, the higher the number, the higher the curve, the less violence there is.
So it's the pacifism bell curve or something.
So a minarchist takes this position.
When you have a very big state at the left-hand side, then you have a lot of violence, right?
So totalitarianism is a lot of violence.
As you begin to reduce the state, Then you reduce the amount of violence in society.
By definition, minarchists understand, as do we anarchists, that the state uses violence, that the welfare state is based on violence, that the war on drugs attacks the peaceful, and so on.
And the minarchist is the person who believes that as you make government smaller and smaller, The uses and profits and spread of violence decreases.
So you get rid of the welfare state, violence becomes less.
You get rid of the war on drugs, violence becomes less.
And so you continue to reduce the size of government until you end up with what a minarchist views as the optimal level of peace within society.
So this is the top of the bell curve.
When the government is maybe 1% of the size that it is today, or maybe 5%, or, you know, who knows.
But as you reduce the size of the government, peace increases, violence decreases.
However, if you continue To reduce the size of government past the sort of holy trinity of the minarchist mindset, the police, law, courts, and military, if you continue to reduce the government past that, oh, lo and behold, lo and behold, violence begins to increase again.
So a metaphor that, if you're not of this mindset, might be helpful to you is something like this.
So if you look at the government as a dangerously obese person, well, obviously that person needs to be put on a strict diet.
So they got to stop pigging out on whatever they want.
They got to get their hormones checked out.
They got to start exercising. They need a radical lifestyle change.
And so you want to remove from them the cheesies and the chips and the chocolate and the cookies and the cake and the fatty fried food or whatever it is that's making them gain so much weight.
You want to put them on a diet.
However, If you eliminate all the food that that person can eat, then they'll just die.
And that's how the minarchist views the state.
Too much state is bad.
Too little state, which, given how small they want the state to begin with, too little state is bad.
In both situations, You get an increase in violence.
So the fundamental thing to understand about a minarchist is that a minarchist is focused on an argument from a fact.
And the argument from a fact is that we want violence to be minimized within society.
You could think of the phrase minarchist not as just minimal government, but as minimizing violence.
And so for a minarchist, much like somebody who's dieting, says, great, cut back on my food, no problem.
Get rid of all my food, I'm dead.
So if I continue to pig out, I'm going to die.
But if you get rid of all my food, I'm going to die.
So what we need is to put the government on a diet, but not eliminate the government completely.
Now that is the approach that the minarchist takes.
And if you understand that, If you understand that, then there's a few things that you can do to begin the process of helping them to understand the illogic in their position.
Now, first of all, I would say something like this.
Look, you and I, brother, sister, agree that we want as little violence as possible.
Clearly, we are not interested in a system that would increase or exacerbate the problems of violence within society.
Now, clearly, we're on the same page of about 99%.
Because you think that the government is about 99% too big or 95% too big.
And I think that the government is 100% too big.
Now, let's look at what we have in common.
First of all, we're not saying that the government is too small.
If you said the government is 99% too big and I said the government is 99% too small, then we would really be in opposition and we wouldn't have that much to debate.
However, you and I believe that the government should be reduced.
You're not saying it should be reduced 99% and I'm saying it should stay exactly the same size.
So we're both fellow travelers For 99 out of 100 steps.
So let's respect and honor that as something that we have in common, because we anarchists don't have as much in common as we'd like with the majority of people we talk to.
So being 99% in common is, I think, something to celebrate, something to be happy about, something to respect and to honor and to appreciate.
Now, there's two approaches to take to working with a minarchist.
The first is to accept the argument from effect.
And Minarchists tend to get all hot and bothered by those sort of nude calendars of the Founding Fathers.
They just love the Enlightenment, they love the Founding Fathers, they love the idea of the minimal state that was created and imposed after the Revolution of 1776.
So they're very big on the Constitution, they're very big on the minimal state, and they just love it all to death.
Now, the question to ask Minarchists, there's sort of two fundamental questions to ask Minarchists.
One is to take the argument from a fact at face value.
Let's just say that a minimal government, a government that is 1% of the size of the existing government, that a minimal government is wonderful.
You can ask them if they felt there was ever a better minimal government that was put in place than the one that was put in place, I mean accepting, and not insignificantly, but accepting things like slavery and so on.
The government that was put in place after the American Revolution, the original constitutionally bound republic, was there really a better, is there going to be a smarter group of people or a better group of people Who are going to be able to come up with a better limited government than the Founding Fathers.
Now, because they do like the Founding Fathers, and don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot to be said about the Founding Fathers, except I've got to tell you, I really hate that name.
They're just a bunch of guys.
Founding Fathers, my butt.
What is this, a theocracy?
Oh wait, it's America. To some degree it is.
But, since they do have a great deal of respect for the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, and given what came before, I can certainly understand that.
The question is, could there have been a better minimal state that could have conceivably been put into place?
Now, they're going to say, well, it would have been tough.
Maybe tweak a little here, tweak a little there, maybe a bit more states' rights, maybe a bit more restriction on the power of the federal government, maybe a few more limitations so you don't get this whole...
Interstate commerce nonsense at the edge of the wedge to bring in lots of regulations.
But overall, I think they're going to have to say that it was a pretty damn good shot at a minarchist state.
Now, if we sort of say that after the dust was shaken off the Constitution and things kind of chugged along, we can sort of talk about late 18th, early 19th century that this system of government can be really said to be up and running.
Now, within 50 years or 60 years or so, you have an absolutely catastrophic civil war with 600,000 young men and women and older men and women and children get slaughtered like pigs on a spit.
And this, of course, we would consider to be an enormous disaster, a complete catastrophe of the First Order.
And out of that, You get, you know, crazy Lincoln with all of his fiat currency and the imposition of federal rule over states' rights, and you get just this whole catastrophe of the state power that grows during war.
And after that, it really could be said that there was no chance of a minarchist state returning to existence.
And, of course, there never has been an example of a state that shrinks in size in any significant manner over any 50 to 75-year period.
I mean, after a war, there's some retrenchment of the state in the size of the war, but that's only because the state needs taxpayers now, somebody to help them at least pay off the interest on the national debt.
So, it's fair to say, I think, that...
The US government, as a minarchist wet dream, is fairly close to being...
Climactic? I'll try not to work that metaphor too hard, just because I'm driving.
But it's fair to say, I think, that the minarchist state, as envisioned by minarchists, was fairly well represented by the U.S. constitutionally bound Republican democracy.
And it took like 50, 60, 70 years to break the bonds of the Constitution, to have civil war.
It also survived quite nicely on slavery, thank you very much.
And... Also, within 60-70 years of the foundation of the Republic, in any meaningful sense, you have government schools, which is the beginning, which is actually the end of the end of independent thought.
And then within 100 years, 110 years or so, you have the founding of the Federal Reserve, which is what funds the U.S. government through World War I and World War II. So it's absolutely done by the mid-to-late 1800s.
Absolutely and completely and totally done.
So even if you're just interested in the argument from effect, we would generally say that after 10,000 years of human history, the pinnacle of enlightenment thought and the evolution of the state to its smallest and most constrained conceivable manner that has ever been seen in human history That the minarchist idea of that state lasted about 50 to 60 years.
Let me just understand why anarchists have a certain amount of questions regarding this approach of sort of minarchist society.
That it's going to work, that it's an effective way of restraining the state.
So... You've got 10,000 years of human history.
Everybody's refining the state.
You've got the Roman experiment.
You've got the Greek experiment. You've got the Peloponnesian experiment.
You have Carthage. You have the Carolingian experiment.
You have King Arthur and his round table.
Not square, but round, you see?
So everybody's sword length is the same from the center.
And you have the Magna Carta, you have all of the developments in the technology of government, and it culminates in the smallest conceivable government that has ever been known to exist in human history,
which, after 50 to 60 years, completely self-destructed in an orgy of civil war, And after that, you get the rise of state-sponsored mercantilism with the robber barons, you get the creation of the Federal Reserve, you get manipulations of currency that would just make any chancellor of the exchequer choke on his own tongue, anyone from the Middle Ages, that is.
And so the culmination, the very best conceivable solution to the problem of government was the American system.
50 to 60 years, it completely eats itself.
And after that, it's just become like every other single government in the history of the planet.
And so, if minarchists understand that, it doesn't mean that we say that we're right and you have to become an anarchist.
I mean, yes, you do at some point, I think, to be consistent.
But let's just say for now, it's just a question that's out there.
If that's the best possible solution that a minarchist Theory can come up with.
And we're talking 50 to 60 years before 600,000 people get murdered.
And then the slaves really aren't freed, and there's two world wars, and millions of people dead, and the expansion of foreign policy, and huge crushing national debt, and choking bureaucracy, and 40% taxation.
If it's only...
If all of that effort, all of that revolution, all of that violence, all of that shaking free of King George and setting up your own shop, if all that achieved...
With the exception of slavery and certain missing elements of property rights from the Constitution, if all that achieved was 50 to 60 years of relative freedom, I gotta tell you, it's not a cause I would feel worth fighting for.
It's not a cause that I would take to the barracks to defend.
Oh, if we could only reverse!
The entire growth of the federal and state government system over the past 150 years or 200 years, if we can reduce the size of government back down, wrestle it and beat it back, back down to 1% of its current size, we get about 50 years before it all self-destructs again and the whole thing has been sort of pointless.
It's not something that I think is a real rallying cry, and that's why it doesn't work.
That's why it doesn't get people really motivated, because deep down everybody understands this.
Oh, so that was the best conceivable system, 1776, the Constitutional Congress, all of the rich white guy geniuses getting together to come up with the perfect government.
Even if we could get back to that, we're talking less than two generations before it all chokes on its own vomit again.
And that's really not something that I think is something worth fighting for.
I mean, even if we discount slavery and other not inconsequential moral flaws in the whole basis of it.
You know, blood in the streets, the revolution, restraining the civil service, beaten back the tax collectors, dismantling the IRS, dismantling the Department of Defense, 99.9% of it dismantling the Department of Public Education, and you've got to love that acronym.
All of that, dismantling foreign policy, withdrawing and disbanding all the US troops.
Whichever country you're in, it doesn't matter.
All of that to gain what?
Less than two generations of relative freedom before it all happens again.
It just doesn't seem quite right.
It's like tiring yourself out, beating back the tide with the flat of your sword.
It just feels like a little bit sort of pointless.
So that would sort of be the one approach that I would take to the Minarchist.
Just to say, yes, we absolutely are together, brother to brother, sister to brother, brother to sister, cousin to cousin, and so on, standing arm in arm against the bloated monstrosity we call modern government.
You and I are absolutely arm in arm on the barricades there.
It's just that what you want is a reprieve.
What I want is freedom.
What you want is to beat it back for a generation or so.
What I want is permanent and perpetual freedom from this hissing hydra, this choking, venomous catastrophe we call the state.
See, you want fewer slaves to be owned.
I want there to be no slavery at all!
So, we're close, but the difference is fairly significant.
And given that the difference is you want the next generation to be free, but I want all generations to be free, The difference is not insignificant.
Because you want one free generation, and I want all free generations.
And given that the human race is going to last another couple of billion years, it seems to me that the generation that you want that's free relative to all the ones that will be enslaved after your minicus state overspills its boundaries and takes over society again, it doesn't really add up to a whole lot.
And it's not a rallying cry that is going to make people particularly excited.
And that in a nutshell, of course, is why libertarianism as a political movement doesn't work.
It doesn't work because it's not going to work.
Because there's no example in history.
Even if we were to get magically back to 1776, we're talking the Civil War, what, 100 years later, 80, 90 years later?
So that's not a rallying cry that's ever going to work.
So that would be one approach that I would take to the Minarchist.
Now the second approach that I would take to the Minarchist, of course, is something like this.
Well, on what moral grounds do you believe that the state is too big?
Well, the state uses violence and the violence is bad and blah, blah, blah.
Okay, fantastic.
So the state should be eliminated because the state uses violence.
No, we should not eliminate the state because a certain minimum amount of state existence is required in order to, so society doesn't turn into a warring mob of tattooed and mohawked thug gang leaders and, you know, all of this sort of Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome, Tina Turner's hair kind of stuff.
And that is a very interesting switch in the argument, right?
And it's sort of important to understand when people do this.
You've got to watch for this switch in the argument.
Because if the minarchist says, and I think rightly so, that the government is wrong because it uses violence, well and good.
We're all together on that same page.
However, if you then say, by what right do certain human beings exist calling themselves the government in any form?
That have the right to use violence against others.
And the minarchist says, well, but you've got to have those people to prevent general violence.
Well, that's a switch in the argument.
That's a switch in the argument.
And you've got to make sure that that doesn't pass unnoted or unnoticed.
So you don't start off using the argument from morality and then immediately switch to the argument from effect.
I mean, don't get me wrong, every single human being does it except for we happy few, but it's not something that you can let pass unchallenged.
So you say to the monarchists, the government is evil because it uses violence.
Yes. And so the moral principle is that violence is evil.
Not that violence should be minimized and this and that.
Because once you get into the whole argument from effect, it all becomes sort of pointless.
Because violence could then be minimized by having a dictatorship where everyone obeys, right?
Then theoretically there's no direct and covert violence.
It all just gets very complicated, right?
And, of course, there's no way to prove what is the right size of government.
There's no way, oh, this budget of a billion dollars is good, but man, when you get to a billion and one, the whole thing, even the original billion, just turns evil.
Or you start paying, you know, the government gets one dollar extra over the minarchist idea, and it's like, oh, well, this portion of my paycheck is good.
This extra dollar, that's evil.
That's bad. This is not blood money, the first, you know, thousand bucks of my paycheck, but the thousand dollar and one, that's blood money, and that's bad.
Obviously, there's no way to draw a line, which is why governments continue to grow, why governments will always break out of the bounds of the existing system.
As soon as you accept that some people get to set up shop and use violence against others and nobody else has that right, of course it's going to grow because where do you logically draw the line?
You can't. Absolutely and humanly and intellectually and morally and logically impossible.
So if the minarchist is taking the argument that violence is wrong...
Then they are inevitably going to be drawn into the argument for morality, and they're going to have to understand that if violence is wrong, then for any state to exist is evil.
Now, if they then say, well, but violence has to be minimized, well, that's a very, very different argument from the argument that violence is wrong.
If violence is morally wrong, then that's a universal statement.
If violence should be minimized, then that is a local, subjective, and conditional argument.
Very, very, very different.
Very different.
Very, very different.
It's a complete opposite argument.
One is an argument for morality.
The other is a utilitarian argument for effect.
So, it's just important not to conflate the two.
Make sure that you separate these two when you're talking with minarchists.
Because if they're talking about minimizing violence, of course, you look at the dispute resolution organization model, and you look at all of the arguments that we've made over the past quarter of a thousand podcasts, and all the stuff that's on my blog, and on mises.org, and all of the other stuff that's out there, there are significantly powerful arguments to be made that the Libertarian Society Sorry, that the anarchist society is the one that minimizes violence the most and the most permanently.
Because if a human being is interested in minimizing violence, then the first thing they need to understand is that violence arises the most and the greatest when you have a disparity in force, in the capacity to use force.
And that mutually assured destruction and well-armed neutrality is the only way that human beings have ever, ever, We've been shown to achieve a lasting peace.
No nuclear power attacks.
Another nuclear power, the balance of power in Europe, has been relatively, throughout the 19th century, was relatively peaceful.
And so there's simply no way to ensure a minimal level of violence unless you have a relatively balanced competing group of interests with a fog of war, an unknown amount of arms.
There's just no other way to do it.
And as soon as you create a state...
With a monopoly of taxation and defense and the law courts and the military and so on.
Then you have automatically created a situation of disparate capacity for violence, which is going to lead to an increase in violence.
And this is, of course, what led directly from the Constitution all the way through the Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Literacy, and all the...
I mean, there's a direct line.
As soon as you create a social agency with a monopoly on the use of force and a largely legally disarmed population, even if they're allowed to have handguns, it still doesn't quite count against the Scud...
Then you have created a disparity in the capacity to effect violence, which will cause an escalation of violence.
Absolutely inevitable, because there are evil people in the world, and they want to get away with stuff, and they will end up inevitably taking control of the state and using the state to inflict their will and agenda upon a helpless, dependent, and disarmed population.
So you can make that argument if you want.
But still, fundamentally, the contradiction that the minarchist is facing is this.
One, violence is evil.
Two, in order to minimize the evil of violence, we must legislate the use of violence.
So you understand this is a very, very important contradiction in the minarchist position.
Violence is evil, right?
That's why we want a small state, because it's violent.
A large state is violent.
Large states create wars and foreign policies and taxation is evil.
So the minarchist says violence is evil.
That's why we need to reduce the state.
However, when they say that we can't get rid of the state, we're saying that a monopoly on violence is essential for minimizing violence.
So violence is both evil and And we're not talking about self-defense here.
The government does not exist in a state of self-defense.
The government uses taxation which it inflicts upon a helpless and largely disarmed population.
So the government is not a situation of self-defense.
The government initiates the use of force.
And every minarchist in the world worth his salt will be able to admit that.
So there you have the basic contradiction at the heart of minarchism.
Violence is both evil, and therefore needs to be minimized, and good, because you need to use violence to minimize violence.
So violence, the initiation of the use of force, is both a moral evil and a moral imperative.
In other words, it's evil for citizens, but good for people in the government.
Violence is evil for your Joe on the street, but really good for a cop and a soldier and a politician and a prison guard and the guy, the bailiff at the court.
Violence is both evil and good for exactly the same species.
And so that's the fundamental contradiction at the heart of minarchism.
That's why minarchism is never particularly compelling.
That's why it doesn't get people excited.
That's why a lot of minarchists that I speak for myself as well when I was a minarchist tend to be a little boring, tend to be a little pedantic, tend to be just a little bit overread on the history of the Constitution, just a little, and tend to be profoundly unmotivating.
In fact, I would say, in my experience, most minarchists are completely demotivating, because what they're asking for is that the devil not be eliminated, but be reduced in size significantly for time, and then let free in the world again, and that we should take every single possible stance and then let free in the world again, and that we should take every single possible stance to achieve this rather short-term reduction In the brutal evil of the state.
And I just don't think that's ever going to be compelling because it's neither logically coherent nor morally coherent nor technically possible.
So I hope that helps at least explain my position on this whole question of minarchism.
I look forward to your responses at freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D and your donations at freedomainradio.com Where you can find a nice tasty little donate button.
And I certainly, surely and totally appreciate any money you can send my way.
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