United Liberty
Market Anarchism and the Future of Libertarianism
Tue, 02/07/2012 - 12:19pm | posted by Nate Nelson
Yesterday, I read a scathing critique of the anarcho-capitalists associated with the thought of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Lew Rockwell. Here’s an excerpt (the post itself is no longer available):
Anarchists are to libertarians as Occupy Wall Street is to the Tea Party. They’re both basically pissed off at the same thing. Their solutions are radically different.
Just as the occupiers have a Christmas wish-list of insane Marxist fantasies, the anarchist libertarians (see: anarcho-capitalists, Rothbardians, and people who read LewRockwell.com) have their own catalog of misguided utopian fairytales about smashing the state. And they will be happy to prove to you just how great the world would be without any government, if you would just read one or two of Ludwig von Mises’s 1500 page pedantic treatises, or Murray Rothbard’s confused polemics (imagine reading Nietzsche’s Tumblr if he were into economics).
While I agree with the impracticality of anarchism and the basics of his critique of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, I note a glaring omission in his piece. He doesn’t even touch upon the existence of left-libertarians, like the market anarchists associated with the Molinari Institute and the Center for a Stateless Society.
Market anarchists, for the most part, aren’t Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists. Rather than looking to the thought of Mises or Rothbard, a market anarchist would be much more likely to draw on the mutualist ideas advanced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner’s egoism, or the American individualist anarchism promoted by Benjamin Tucker, Josiah Warren, and Lysander Spooner, among others. Some market anarchists reject the label anarcho-capitalist altogether, arguing that free markets and capitalism are not synonymous. They argue that capitalism implies an authoritarian collusion between government and business that actually undermines free market principles. Many libertarians today have taken to referring to this phenomenon as crony capitalism or corporatism.
It could be that Zach made no mention of left-libertarians or market anarchists in his piece because they are currently a minority within a minority, a small contingent of libertarians. But there’s reason to believe that won’t be the case forever. As we’ve seen in the Occupy Wall Street protests, many younger Americans are just as alarmed by the power of big business as they are by big government. Market anarchists would argue that the two go hand in hand, that government will always favor big business and that big business will always be looking for a handout from government. Market anarchism could find a receptive audience among younger generations, and if so it could have a much greater impact on the libertarian movement further down the road than it is having today.
At the end of the day, I agree with Zach that anarchism is impractical and thus undesirable whether we’re talking about Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, Proudhonian mutualism, or Tuckerite market anarchism. But we ignore the ideas of market anarchists at our peril.
They’re offering a critique of crony capitalism that one doesn’t often find among more right-leaning libertarians and alternatives that — however infeasible they may be — could appeal to a younger demographic. If minarchist libertarians are going to compete with them, we’re going to have to deal substantively with both their critique of crony capitalism and the alternatives they offer. We should consider incorporating some of their more feasible ideas into our agenda. And we should above all shift our focus away from fighting statist socialism, which is not a serious threat in the United States, and toward combating big government capitalism.
This whole debate about anarchist Libertarians is a waste of everyone’s time and highly decisive to the liberty movement as a whole.
Most libertarian anarchists (and I am one) understand that anarchy can only be peacefully achieved by first moving through extremely limited government. Anarchy is a philosophical position that recognizes that any government must be to some degree coercive. Since rejecting coercion is the heart of libertarianism, I believe that only anarchy is totally consistent with libertarian political philosophy.
Can we make it work? I don’t know the answer to that but rejecting the concept out of hand gets us nowhere.
Step one is to make it possible for non-government solutions to societal problems to compete with government programs on an equal basis. That means you should be able to opt out of any “service” the government supplies and use the money forcibly extracted from you to fund your alternative choice. Or to just take back your money and do without. This will open up a world of competition to let us find out about what does and doesn’t work.
After that we can talk about how far we can push the envelope.
For real libertarians anarchism is merely a thought experiment to test the justification & limitations of state power. www.taxkilla.com
taxkilla, that is a baseless and highly fascist statement. Anarchy is the ultimate in libertarianism. By definition, any ‘ruler’ means less freedom
If you really were a libertarian you would not impose such a limit on thinking, nor assume that you have any right to speak on behalf of other libertarians. It is not necessarily a 100% percent philosophy, though personally I am at the 100% level. Plato summed it up best:
“Laws are pointless. Good men do not need laws to behave justly and evil men will simply ignore the law”
Freedom of action requires freedom of thought. What you probably don’t realise is that there are many small anarchist communities scattered across the globe that are self sufficient and live without laws, police, prisons, politicians etc. It can be done and it has been done many times and for a very long time. There is a world outside what you have experienced.
Anarchy is libertarianism taken to its logical conclusion.
I don’t know of any libertarian groups that have had any serious divides over anarchy and minarchy (or what ever you want to call it). The divides I have seen have mostly been cultural on a level that tends to fall outside the scope of libertarian thought. In other words, we have the “cosmos” who often have a libertine or close to libertine personal philosophy, and the “paleos” who tend to think that humans should adhere to what they see as sensible, usually “conservative”, values, but only on a voluntary basis and only as a personal philosophy.
Its totally understandable that these people often have trouble getting along on a personal level since their social interests can often be radically different. However, as far as I can tell there are anarchists and minarchist on both sides of the divide who are getting along just great.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, after all there are no short term or even foreseeable medium term conflicts. Minarchists want more localism, less war, less taxes, and less regulation. So do Anarchists. That they differ in degree is irrelevant in the modern world.
Maybe someday we will become a minarchist state and conflict will begin, but I think we can all agree that would be a much better battle to fight then the one we are fighting now.
“He doesn’t even touch upon the existence of left-libertarians, like the market anarchists associated with the Molinari Institute and the Center for a Stateless Society.”
Thank ‘god’ for that!
But it’s probably because the anarcho-capitalists have already chopped up, packaged and sold off those two camps, to the lowest bidder, KWIM?
Nate Nelson is a zionist whose only purpose here is to fragment and derail the cause of libertarianism. He is an anti-goyite who believes jews are gods chosen people destined to rule over all others. Its all proven by the number of jews he quotes as expert authorities and mentions in his articles.
Is that a fair assessment of reality Nathaniel (see its a jewish name, and Nelson is a common name in the Rockefeller family…) or am I just taking a few unrelated facts completely out of context and distorting them to make you appear to be something that is not even close to the truth in order to discredit you and your message because I don’t want to see you taken seriously by the majority of Americans?
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