Anyone who recalls the 20th Century horrors of anarchism knows that we need a State to assure none of those things can happen. Since we cannot allow these things to exist, and must remain prudently aware if to prevent them, I've compiled the following, non-exhaustive list of what would happen without government, which indeed is why one is needed. Just imagine:
- Members of interconnected political dynasties, with names like Bush or Clinton, would rule over and have us live under their laws, expropriating our property for the use of war, subsidizing their buddies in special interest groups, and make us submit to their every command. (That would be awful.)
- A centralized, all-powerful authority with a gun-monopoly would engage in endless warfare, threatening the world-over with their military might, establishing an imperialistic hegemony in all areas of earth, and provoke and start world-wars with other powers. (Inconceivable!)
- A gang of people would tax us fifty-percent and point guns at us if we don't give up our property! (No way, Jose.)
- These people in blue costumes would pull us over on the road, search our cars, rob us, beat us up, steal your vehicle and impound it, and take you to a jail if you didn't obtain permission to drive on their roads. (Can't have that.)
- Men with guns would kick down the door of your home, throw a flash-bang grenade in your baby's crib, shoot your dog, hurt your family, and steal your marijuana plants if they felt so inclined. (Thank you, Police.)
- People would take money from successful people and businesses and transfer it to failing unproductive ones, making us all poorer as a result. (Gosh that sounds uneconomical.)
- There would be corporate consolidation of power in every industry and the people would be beholden to them. (Good thing we have those regulations in place.)
- Crony capitalist fractional-reserve bankers would form a cartel so they could inflate indefinitely and run the financial sector of the economy to enrich themselves at our expense. (The central bank really saves us here.)
- Someone would take a monopoly on the money, forcing us to accept its inflated, devalued notes as our medium of exchange even though we don't want to use it. (Could you imagine?)
- There would also be no one to make sure the national names for monies, like "Dollars" or "Pounds", would remain true to their weight in gold. (Good thing there's a Treasury to assure redemption of this paper.)
- There would be a super-rich "one-percent" with a vast, growing wealth disparity between them and the poor. (Thankfully that's not the case and we're all more equal.)
- There'd be big, privileged pharmaceutical monopolies that would restrict competition to shorten the supply so that they could raise prices on consumers for life-saving drugs. (People would die!)
- People would take our children and force them into compulsory schooling, and cage the parents if they resisted the kidnapping. (Intense!)
- The kids would all be ignorant of history, economics, and entrepreneurialism, and this would have a great effect on economic prosperity and liberty. (Good thing they aren't.)
- The roads would be potholed, congested, and construction would seemingly never be completed. (Yep)
- The cost of tuition in higher education would be skyrocketing and out-of-reach for the poor. (Gratefully it's not)
- There would be mass-shootings and criminals everywhere, neighborhood gangs, etc. (Scary.)
- There would be homeless people everywhere. (I've never seen a single one.)
- The housing market would be inflated to high-hell and the up-and-coming generations would consider home-ownership to be completely out-of-sight, unreachable for them. (There'd be no American Dream!)
- You would be forced to buy unaffordable healthcare insurance and be penalized if you didn't. (Crazy!)
- We wouldn't have anyone to guide us on our nutrition and there would be an obesity epidemic and people dying of diabetes and heart disease. (I love that we're thin and healthy.)
Oh wait!
Okay, you get the point
If you haven't determined, "oh wait" means that already happens. Anyone with half a mind may quickly notice the above was satirical, and the just-mentioned things are of course happening with, or because of, government; not because of the lack of government, which proponents of the State concede cannot be allowed, and so therefore at least agree that we do have one, although not fully understanding that we don't have capitalism.
When debating with socialists, sometimes though it's as if they've fully neglected the premise that there is a government, leaving them to derive absurd conclusions about the state of affairs in the world. They point out issues in the world, say EpiPen, for example, where the drug company Mylan has obtained a patent on the design of the injector, where the FDA allows them to be the only seller, and say "that's you guys' system!" This wrongfully assumes that this is capitalism, and this is why, in my mind, it's helpful to consider the only genuine capitalism to be anarchism to see if this is true. As we know, it's not: there's government.
Politically, this all makes them quite incoherent. On one hand they acknowledge correctly that "corporations have taken over the government", and the next minute they're telling us that "corporations (a government creation, mind you) would take over without government!" They want it both ways. You can't please them. Their "philosophy" is not falsifiable. It [socialism] has either never been tried, or just wasn't implemented correctly and needs to be tried again.
What is government?
In short, it's the institution that claims to be the sole authority in a given area having the moral right to steal property. Government is the institutionalization of everything that is cited as a reason that being without one (anarchy) wouldn't work.
In the anarcho-capitalist view, that statism is socialism and capitalism is contrarily a lack of political order, "but without government" means "with capitalism." The statist, however, has no problems referring to a government-failure as "capitalism" when something goes wrong with their policies, and this is why we as libertarians should insist on the incompatibility of statism and capitalism and the impossibility of their coexistence. America is not laissez-faire capitalism as it is assumed. When convenient for argument, they consider it a "mixed economy", already having generous amounts of socialism; when things aren't going so well, the plan is always to flip-flop and blame the non-existent capitalism.
Corporations use government—"the political means"—to do everything socialists say they would do without government—with capitalism. Rather than seeing that the market is corrupted because of government, they think that the market would be corrupt without government, although it is right now and there is a government.
So what are socialists arguing?
They are simultaneously arguing two things against anarchism, that: (1) "without government, everyone would rob everyone" (even though everyone plundering each other is exactly the system of democracy); and that (2) "without government, who would [build the roads, schools, etc] rob everyone? Therefore, their need for government isn't to prevent the theft of property, but to ensure it. Of course, theft as an institution is precisely the goal of the socialist; protection of property, or privatized property, is what must be prohibited.
All the statists do is name something that the government currently does to us and then tell us it would exist without them. And by the mistake of thinking government solves problems, they have, unwittingly or not, instituted everything they thought would happen without it.
Thus there's necessarily two options that follow from their "but without government" claim. They say:
- People will [name something government doesn't prevent].
- People will [name something government does to you].
Whatever follows "but without government" must always be invalid anyway. Anything the government could have ever allegedly given us was in the first place stolen. Even if we could imagine the government's spending isn't wasteful versus what it could have been if privately invested, then it still isn't the producer of anything, and still hasn't given us anything that it didn't previously take away through the means of expropriation.
If they hold the incorrect premise that capitalism is what we have, and is compatible with the State, it will allow them to conclude time-again that the cause of these effects they sometimes successfully have identified are not due to their own workings, but of that of "capitalism". Other times they'll usually agree that "corporations run the government", it's just that somewhere along the way, adopting bad economics or other incorrect premises, they conclude that the solution is not no government, but even more! Things went wrong only because there wasn't enough regulations, not because the regulations in the first place are what allowed these established businesses to attain protection in the market via government's forceful arm.
The contradictions of the socialist's proposal for government
Although it wasn't born by voluntary contract, the idea of government here is that it essentially jumps the gun in fear of the unknown and "legalizes" the theft of property (taxes) everyone feared may occur without one. Since these things must happen, there should be an entity representing "the people" to control it all. Never mind it has predictably degenerated into a small, oligarchic ruling-class; they're still persistent it's the "necessary evil" in the world, where the hope for humanity rests.
Their mind-numbing, circular-logic goes something like: "We need a government to protect us from government because without a government there'd be a government." Their strategy is to name something that happens with government (taxes, i.e., theft) and say it would happen without them doing that very thing to you. I hate rape analogies too much to even emphasize the hypocrisy in this one, so I'll leave you to make it.
But how is it that something potentially becoming a monopoly without government is an argument for definitely having a government, which is in fact itself a total monopoly? They institutionalize what it is said shouldn't be allowed to exist, I guess reasoning that "there would be a monopoly on the use of force without government, so we're going to monopolize it." Solving monopolies with monopolies! Right.
Perhaps semantics are involved. But if socialists only substituted "the statists" for their worn-out target "the capitalists", then they would probably be right most of the time. Example: "The statists are taking over and wish to exploit us." They're unable to recognize that "corporations" are able to do these things to us with the assistance of the State, despite acknowledging too that they run it. Since anarchism is off the table of viable ideas, they opt of "democratic socialism" to fix it all.
The State, or statelessness?
Governments can do a million evil things to millions of peaceful people and statists will sit and wonder how we could solve about five things without it were we left free. Most are sadly unconcerned with the things government actually does, instead remaining in this state of being unable to imagine life without it. They imply, for example, that: "Well, I know they blow up brown children in other countries and cause us a lot of trouble at home, but what about the roads?" Throw a dog a road, apparently, and he'll be your slave forever. If I had a dollar every time a socialist asked me how we're going to build roads without government, I would have shown them already.
I'm willing to risk the alleged subjugation that is supposed to exist without government over the obvious coercion that exists with one. Any alleged robbery that would take place without government would pale in comparison to the socialist's epic plunder of the people going on right now.
Many things are easy to see. Asking how there could be a "gold standard" without government is like asking how there will be a sixteen-ounce pound without them. The "gold standard" isn't a government-ran monetary system, but a natural one of freely trading individuals who have agreed upon such a medium. Other conceptualizations of a stateless society are harder to accept, but nonetheless the burden of proof is not on us, and it isn't our place anyway to make predictions of what market arrangements and norms may arise out of liberty; this is the way of the central-planning socialist, not the anarchist. We should't have to conceive of the way we'll solve every problem in order to have liberty. Nevertheless, there is a vast body of work out there describing how things may turn out. (See here for a short example.)
It is our anarchist contention that whichever way man is ~ evil or not evil ~ that the introduction of coercion won't help; it won't be of benefit. If man is "bad", then no amount of government, made up of these bad people, is going to make it better. If man is "good", and is "lawful" under government, then what we seek to prove is that he will remain so without that government; that government aggression is not what keeps man good, and that even if he were not then he would still be lawless with it.
Essentially their argument is that since these things – theft, murder, rape – are inevitable that we may as well have a State do them to us. Conceived in original sin, what they come to claim to protect us against are exactly the things they must do to us first, before ever even being around to present such promises of protection and justice, law and order, welfare or equality.
What they're saying, then, since anarchism is only conjecture being that the State does exist and there is no free-market in the world in which to make comparisons to, is that without government, someone might do all the things to us that the government absolutely does to us. I'll take the possibility of being ruled without a government, please. At this point, anyone who thinks anarchism ~ a spontaneous order lacking political institutions of theft ~ is scarier than a Trump or Clinton presidency is, in my mind, the one who's insane.
State-crimes would not be privately possible without this false front of legitimacy that allows "government" to coerce us into submission. If a crime occurs without government, statists would blame its absence. When their government commits crimes, though, they're absolved completely of any responsibility. Anyone would consider a private company gone rouge as obviously criminal, denouncing them immediately, but what the State is able to get away with under the cover of consent and legitimacy is a true threat to human sustainability.
Conclusion
Basically, one can safely assume that the bulk of criticisms against anarchism are precisely true of the statists. They are the monopolists, the thieves, the murderers, the liars. If they say it would happen without them, it is most likely happening because of, or in spite of, them. If government says you can't do it, they probably do.
What apologists (socialists) for aggression (government) wish to avoid is the exact system they propose: monopoly and power through the political means.
It's like the bigger government grows, the less people can imagine anything it allegedly provides without its impoverishing monopoly. How are we supposed to give a proper answer to their question here, of "without government", anyway, seeing as they don't allow for the capitalist competition of ideas in innovation and prefer instead the monopoly of government? It's safe and fair to say, in answering what the future of freedom might look like, that "I don't know." My faith is placed in free individuals, not those parasitical psychopaths heading the departments of the State's many bureaucracies.
There is no system better suited for prosperity than no system, meaning no centralized authority to dictate how it is we'll organize our private lives. Allowing free people to come together without government interference is imperative for progress. Getting rid of the State in our lives is how we'll get rid of those things said to occur when there isn't one, rightfully understood as with capitalism, that we all know too well to currently stand.