Under the influence of youthful idealism, the idea of anarchism is easy to entertain on an admittedly emotional level. We're surrounded by authority early on, from what is perceived to be a rule by our parents to the forced-attendance laws of the schools we're stuffed into, essentially kidnapped from our homes against our will, and so naturally wishing to be free a rebellious spirit is unleashed in many of us.
It was through all this that I happened upon the subculture of punk, which from the beginning to me was always decidedly anti-state. It was a forum where one was free to express their sentiments regarding the world without the common ridicule we would get from mainstream avenues of society. Being a skeptic, always hesitant to accept anything the government said as true, and residing somewhere in the politically convoluted subculture of punk rock, I was poised to reach my natural conclusion of anarchism one day.
Eventually I would delve into serious logical thought about this. Frankly the stuff I had stumbled upon outside of the Classical Liberal tradition, which many punks are somehow exposed to, such as the nearly-worthless Noam Chomsky (with the exception maybe of criticizing U.S. foreign policy), failed to be convincing, often lacking severely in economics such as holding the incorrect Labor Theory of Value. Even worse, it came attached with all this revolutionary Marxism, "working class", anti-capitalist jargon that boggles the mind. None of it was powerful or explanatory enough to convince really anyone; anarchism was a Molotov-cocktail-throwing, private-property-hating philosophy as most had characterized it.
I couldn't make sense of anything coming from this brand of anarchism. It would seem that other anarchists, such as "anarcho-socialists", arrived at their theory believing that it [anarchism] would finally be the time they could actually steal property, seeing wrongly that "the State protects private property" rather than the State as the great violator of property rights, i.e., the authority with the exclusive right to rule and lay taxes upon the people of a given territory it claims as its own. They were emotional, too, not logical.
I continued to question where I stand, not being one to be indifferent on political matters. I knew I wasn't a Democrat, and it was out of the question to be a Republican. Looking back, I'm of the minority of those who consider themselves anarcho-capitalists today who came from a more sympathetic stance toward leftist-socialists. It's just easy to care for social issues first, not seeing as clearly the needed for economic freedom, or how all that works. Sadly, in punk, unable to see through the two-party paradigm, most just settle to consider themselves Democrats since they've adopted an "anything but the Right" mentality. This is similar in today's politics, of "Never Trump" or "Never Clinton", where it's not like anyone actually likes "their" candidate, but just hates the other one more. The good-old futile game of "lesser of two evils."
I began to see the lines between the two Parties blurring, becoming indistinguishable from each other. I knew a change of thought was in order. While never becoming a total statist, or anything of a "democratic socialist", as much of my "leftist" oriented peers among me were, my rediscovery of anarchism was through the political philosophy of libertarianism.
While the change came gradually, where I had since nearly abandoned my anti-statism for some sort of awkward minimal-socialism (minarchism) which I couldn't have defended, my line of reasoning that allowed me to take the final step toward giving up on the State entirely had to do with the American idea of "states rights", enshrined in the 10th Amendment, although very much so forgotten about today. This was the issue I found myself pondering.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
For context, the 10th Amendment Center says that it is
"...quite clear that the Tenth Amendment was written to emphasize the limited nature of the powers delegated to the federal government. In delegating just specific powers to the federal government, the states and the people, with some small exceptions, were free to continue exercising their sovereign powers."
What caught me was to the people. The early American idea was self-governance; it was self-ownership. It was that we could all take care of ourselves, and an overarching centralized government as we know it today, so prevalent in our daily lives, was unimaginable. Or if it was, predictably turns into everything we face in the politicized society of our present age.
The actual, specific moment of thought I had, regarding "states rights", which lead me to anarchism, was "if we should have fifty states, then why not one-hundred, or two-hundred, or why not one-thousand states?" Indeed, why cannot security, law, education, and everything be totally privatized among competing companies voluntarily offering their services in the market if it's believed that fifty can do it? Nothing has changed in my mind since. I see this as nothing less than the way out of this mess that has been created by placing power in the hands of so few, who claim to be our protectors.
Murray Rothbard, who I later discovered and who would come to be most influential upon me, eloquently described this very problem.
“Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary,
then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states?
If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being
denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South
secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City
from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighborhood?
Each block? Each house? Each person?”
I saw that government was involuntary, and that there was no way to keep people who earn their money through coercive means from growing at "the people's" expense. I saw that, if it ever even did, the present government did not have "the consent of the governed", where government supposedly derives its power from. There was no such thing as "limited government", i.e., limited socialism. Give them one inch, and they take a mile. I thought anyone interested in this "idea" of limited government must conclude, then, as a matter of historical fact, that statism was unable to be contained; that "limited government" was a failure.
As the mid-19th century American individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner said, who argued in his No Treason that the Constitution is binding to no living persons,
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another,
this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government
as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it."
He concluded sanely that
"In either case, it is unfit to exist."
Further validation was coming my way in discovering this vast tradition of thought among libertarians. It wasn't just emotional anymore, but there were real reason why the State is bad news for peace and prosperity.
The central principle of libertarianism is the Non-Aggression Principle, which holds that it's never moral to initiate violence (aggression) against anyone's property or person for any reason. Unfortunately many of self-identified libertarians would still stop short of what they see as the bare "essential services" of government, but a consistent application of this principle must end in anarchism. If taxation is patently coercive, as all libertarians should accept, then there is no amount that isn't. Every last dime is no one else's right to take from you. If there is no taxation, i.e., no property theft at the barrel of a gun, then there is no State. The State subsists on the theft of property, and does not live and thrive from some sort of voluntary payment. It does so because you and I are scared of what they will do to us if we don't cough up the dough upon their demands.
It felt stupid for a second to realize if I was against taxation, period, then this now meant I was an anarchist. But this was the case. Taxation was the equivalent of modern-day slavery. Giving up your income to someone else was the definition, even if they claim to give you come service in return. This, I reasoned, was contrary to any market transaction. No business takes your money first and then decides what product to hand you off the shelf. The State did not operate on the same principles as the voluntary market economy; it was its enemy.
Morally, then, there's no legitimacy for the State: It violates our principle of non-aggression. For me, I was less interested in ethics and such and more so in economics, and really reached the conclusion by economic means. I had read Economics in One Lesson and began to understand every reason why the unhampered market economy was preferable to the intervention of the government. I thought, if government shouldn't run the production of food, as most anyone would agree with now, then why should they produce roads, or defense, or education, etc? Wouldn't these economic laws apply anywhere? Does government abolish supply and demand? Can it allocate resources efficiently without functioning on profit and loss, without a free price system? These all seemed to be inescapable questions to me.
How could anyone reason that the market mostly works, but then there are areas where it fails and is in need of rescue by the government? It just isn't consistent to see a necessity for government-provision of some goods, but not the nationalization of everything. Surely few people in this world actually believe in outright Communism these days, and most all sit comfortably in the middle in the most widely accepted ideology of our time, "democratic socialism."
Walter Block, who was actually converted by Murray Rothbard himself on the spot upon meeting him, got there by economic reasoning too. To paraphrase his story:
"He [Rothbard] pulled a Henry Hazlitt on me...and asked
me if I thought the government couldn't do anything efficiently
then why would I think they would be good at defense, etc."
Murray Rothbard's own story on when he became an anarchist is similarly funny, saying that it was actually some socialists who he was hanging out with that said "if you believe the market works so well, then why don't you think so for defense", to which he thought, "by God they're right."
Moreover, then, I began to see the idea of "public goods" under the rationale that because there's no way to contain the benefits (the "positive externalities") to only the people paying the costs, that the government must allegedly monopolize these things, which gives rise to socialized roads, schools, etc., has virtually no end in argument. With this logic, anything could be said to be a public good, such as someone's beautiful rose garden or anything which someone else enjoys yet did not pay for. This argument knows no end, and leads to total socialism. Even supposedly free-market economists like Milton Friedman pushed this idea, which he called "neighborhood effects", in books that were even bravely titled Capitalism and Freedom, yet very much socialist in many ways too: a negative income tax (today called a "basic income guarantee"), the need for government to correct the market, provide "common goods", etc.
The idea to me that someone should pay a tax to the government, say, for schooling, since "everyone benefits from a smarter society", became totally bogus to me. Society is but an abstraction, and there are only individuals.
Therefore, everything—from police services, to education, to healthcare—became excludable in my mind. Anyone who didn't want these services couldn't be said to be a beneficiary. Even if they were, then everything anyway creates positive benefits to the world. I benefit from inventions other people had, yet which I took no part in. I benefit from technology even if I don't directly own it. There were then no services in the economy that are of special exemption, requiring government to own it. The solution, becoming clear as ever, was complete privatization.
The arguments made by statists became repeated and basic, nothing but contradictions to me. As for the idea of "National Defense", I just had to shrug off the idea that a monopoly on weaponry, who earns its property by stealing from us, is the entity that actually "protects" us from theft. The State was the thief. I applied this to anything suggested as a necessary evil, or good, that must be in the State's domain. I must give credit, again, to Murray Rothbard who really solidified my views in illustrating how the State is not "us", but nothing more than a gang; they're simply the institutionalization of theft that claims the right to rule over us.
There are certainly great things to be learned from all these thinkers who stopped short of concluding that there should be no state whatsoever, such as Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, F.A. Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, and such, but there's an even richer line of thought among the anarcho-libertarians who much more passionately hated the State and adamantly opposed it. The former thought it should be of a limited role, namely, to protect property and enforce contracts and that's it. The latter saw the impossibility for it to ever remain limited to this role, inevitably expanding beyond containment.
Today I take the much more simpler approach, emphasized in this brilliant piece titled "The Obviousness of Anarchy", by John Hasnas, of "look around." We earn our livelihoods in the private economy, not by way of government-assistance. Our jobs, our homes, our food, our daily living supplies, everything that we enjoy, are all provided by businesses; they're not given to us thanks to the government.
There are strands of optimism that liberty will prevail among my short-run reasons for pessimism, and the possibility of us achieving such a future is looking ever-more likely with the ascension of Donald Trump to the Presidency. The sudden realization by the Left that secession is not a "right-wing" thing anymore, but a means in which we could all live our own lives according to our own values, is being popularized. Upon "losing" the election, they see that they don't want to be ruled by someone else either; they don't want to pay taxes for causes they don't support, even though they too are usually happy to force their ideas upon others through government.
The way out then is to decentralize everything. We should go even further than the "states", breaking up these states in many different regions; allowing people to seek the representation that is best fit for them, escaping the now-weakened governments which aren't. Thankfully, to a limited degree, states are protecting their inhabitants from the Federal Government, such as Colorado allowing those withing "its" borders to ingest marijuana without being shot by the police or locked in a cage. If only they would take this nullification of federal laws much further and refuse to comply with any of the central government's dictates, taxes, or regulations, and truly stand up for the "citizens" of their state.
As it stands just doesn't go far enough. Why should democrats in urban Colorado cities be able to rule farmers of the rural areas? Why should Coloradans on the Front Range make laws for those on the Western Slope? We need radical decentralization of power, and essentially more governments or micro-"nations" as a means to tear down the almighty State, and to prevent its legislation from applying far-and-wide to populations of millions.
While I do think nationalism is preferable to globalism (the idea of a one world government, vested in these institutions such as a World Bank, the UN, EU, NATO, etc.), I am not a nationalist. The only way I'll ever be a nationalist is when there's 7.4 billion-something tiny little nations. This preference should be obvious for any anarchist, since, ironically, what we want is more states; we do not want a world government which is the conclusion for any socialist who thinks states cannot live in anarchy among themselves, in so far as they see this. Why indeed could competing states be ungoverned if the people cannot be, so their logic would go. There needs to be a One World Government; complete totalitarianism.
For Americans, fifty is not enough. Why cannot California secede as a whole from the U.S. Government, or break up into 6 different states? Why can't there be New Colorado? Or, how about allowing a "resident" in one state's territory to ask to join another, while remaining in the same place? What if Montana Mike asked to be protected by the Canadian government instead? This of course would expose government as nothing but a protection racket that has no interest in losing people in which it can tax to maintain its own power.
I'll conclude with borrowing the ending of Jeffery Tucker's How I Became An Anarchist, since it was well on point, all while showing how much work is left to be done.
"Anarchism is not some far-flung ideology that makes me long for a world
without the State but rather the practical realities of the human struggle to
make something of this world though our own efforts. Only human beings
can overcome the great curse of scarcity the world has imposed on us.
So far as I can tell, the State is, at best, the great annoyance that slows down
the mighty project of building civilization."