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The Possibility for Anarchy (III): The Libertarian Alternative

Angelique van Engelen - 5/10/2005

In Moscow, cars are driving around with bumper stickers saying "Thou shalt not steal! The government doesn't like competitors". The thought is likely to speak more to Russians than to most others, but around the globe there are multitudes of people who also believe their governments take their possessions unrightfully.

The development of fair taxation systems keeps many minds occupied. Economists almost routinely visit the issue of government interference in people's daily lives in assessing how a given system works and of course the libertarians come up with the most pronounced ideas.

Alfred G. Cuzan, a prominent libertarian at the Department of Government of the New Mexican State University, points out the rather obvious fact that often gets overlooked by stating that every country ruled by a legitimate government in matter of fact boasts a sizeable degree of anarchy. Where? At the government level. He wonders who is ruling our rulers. The ruling class itself is totally anarchic. Cuzan is a one Libertarian who's putting forward the libertarian dream to the very limit for once.

Doing away with government, he argues, is more safe than keeping a government in place. In Cuzan's theory, there is what he calls the 'third view' in all government-ruled societies, which he equates with situations in which the relation between government (the substitution of political for market anarchy) and violence. The third view gets stronger when the structure of the government, measured along a centralization dimension is stronger.

"The more authoritative powers are dispersed among numerous political units, the more pluralistic the government. The more centralized the structure, i.e., the more authoritative powers are concentrated, the more hierarchical the government. [...and...] the more hierarchical the government, the more government is run on the assumption of an ultimate arbiter. In other words, the more centralized the structure, the greater the effort to creale a single "third party" inside the government itself in the form of a God-like figure such as a Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Castro. Such a "third party," however, remains in complete anarchy from the rest of his countrymen and the rest of the world", Cuzan says.

The more plural the politics of a country, the more the rulers behave without any reference to the so-called "third party" and thus the more society resembles natural anarchy. The less plural or more hierarchic the politics of a country, the more society appears to be ruled by a truly "external" element, a God-like figure sent from the heavens of history, religion or ideology.

Anarchic characteristics can be found in both communist and capitalist societies, yet there is less chance of anarchic rule to take effect in countries with strongly centralized, autocratic rule, says Cuzan. In passing, he gives and example of a great foundation for justification of anarchic principles that points conveniently toward the idea that the less government interference a country can do with, the healthier its society is likely to be.

There is a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the most potent ones pertain to mistakes made by rulers. When people in power make errors of judgment, these tend to be more destructive than when they are made by people who are not in power. Therefore, any reduction of power throughout the bank is advisable in almost any situation. The more powerful the person in question is, the greater the magnitude of the error will be. And the more pronounced its snowball effect, which is likely to take on dynamics that might also end up preventing the distribution of way sounder theories than the erroneous ones posited by government representatives.

Cuzan describes the dangers of political anarchy in highly centralized systems by wondering whether the degree of centralization is determining whether political anarchy is violent in hierarchical states such as China or Cuba, and relatively peaceful in pluralist states such as India and Costa Rica. He then says the answer may be simply in the fact that centralized states are more likely to make mistakes than decentralized states.

Political mistakes are in the form of wrong or false conceptions about the nature of bilateral relations in society and in politics, such as conceptions held about the relation between worker and capitalist in communist states. If judgments are wrong, they are not voluntarily accepted by one or by both of the parties to the transactions.

Under those conditions, the only way for the rulers to enforce their "third party" conceptions is to use force, which, under different conditions, will or will not be resisted by the opposition. In a pluralist government, wrong conceptions about bilateral relations in society are less likely to occur.

This is because there are numerous units independently interacting with each other and with the citizens and subjects, so that more and better information about the effect of these judgments on bilateral relations exist. Moreover, wrong conceptions are more easily checked as various autonomous political units, each capable of marshalling political resources of their own, confront each other in a successive series of political transactions.

By contrast, pluralistic societies have way lower violence levels. Examples are Switzerland, but this is also true in the communist countries, where countries like Poland or Yugoslavia used to be way less violent than the Soviet Union, which knew a more centralized form of government. The alternative, according to this economist, is of course market anarchy. It remains to be seen whether popular support for this can be cultivated. US people do not necessarily have immediate positive associations with anti tax ideas. In an economics poll by Zogby on Christmas and politics, many people branded Father Christmas a Democrat, while 8% thought Scrooge was a good fit for the Libertarian Party.

Perhaps the maxim 'live and learn' is meant for just the elite after all.