Proprietarianism

A gentleman named “Poor-Roy” on his blog at poorroy.blogspot.com posted his take on some things very dear to my heart.  As I have said, maybe not on this particular platform, I have a hard time not associating myself with the word “anarchy,” though I readily admit the word is not an entirely accurate description of what I believe.  None the less, I feel the need to opine about his opining.  :)

Let’s break it down…  Here’s the link to his post…  I will excerpt where applicable.

Mr PoorRoy starts off reasonably…

I’ve always been somewhat sympathetic to anarchism.  It is a very old political philosophy that says we can live well without a central government.  Our government would be localized, community-wide, small scale.  Anarchism often is popular in mining towns, lumber camps, and fishing villages–places where people who are interdependent realize they can live without a far-away government telling them what to do.

I stayed one night in Austin, Nevada, 90 miles from the nearest hospital.  Ten percent of the population of Austin, 90 out of 900 people, were certified EMTs.  Austin was the kind of place where anarchism might work.

Not too bad, right?  I am familiar with the Nevada desert.  Lived in that area for 12 years.  Parents worked in a city with no fewer than 11 casinos and virtually no police.  The casinos were booming enterprises, very popular, and relatively safe.  They had the same problems as everyone else with things like attempted suicides, domestic abuse, bathtub meth labs, petty theft, etc. etc. etc….  All this with two to three LVMPD officers in an outpost at the extreme north end of the city.  The casinos handled their own affairs pretty effectively.  And to the best of my knowledge, this is still how the city operates.  They all had private security in their employ.  They all had EMTs on staff.  They are the closest thing to a modern anarchist society I am aware of, and I am really very proud to have had the exposure to this place that I have.

Let us continue.

For anarchism to succeed you need three prerequisites.  The first is a small population.  A large population requires a power grid, turnpikes, sewage plants, what we call infrastructure.  Secondly, you’ll need a simple economy–preferably pre-industrial.  You won’t be trading with China, and you won’t have a Wal-Mart.  Finally, you must have  people who share the same values. People must really like each other for anarchism to work.

I’m not entirely sure I understand.  Why is the idea of a power grid, turnpikes, sewage plants and “infrastructure” instantly impossible if they aren’t created/maintained by government?  Why can’t these things be privately owned and maintained by user fees?  I agree that there won’t be Walmart, but why would folks need Walmart?  Is it because things are so expensive everywhere else?  Is it possible then that there’s something going on creating unfair barriers to entry into the market that Walmart serves, perhaps?  Would those barriers really exist in the event that there wasn’t a “government” to enforce those unfair anti-competitive practices?  I doubt they would.  And why on earth would people have to like each other?  At the very least, they would only have to not violate one another and be willing to protect each other from violation by others.  That would certainly mean closer-knit communities, but nothing about that precludes cities as they exist today.

Why exactly am I taking for granted that this guy is correct about the prerequisites for a free society?  I don’t know.

The Amish could do it.  They meet all three criteria, and they would hardly notice if the federal or state government disappeared.  The problem is, of course, most of us don’t want to live like the Amish.  We like our electricity, our cars, our imported wines, and our cities.

Here’s what I read…  ”I like STUFF so much that I’m quite happy to endorse whatever coercive and aggressive organization is willing to promise me that I can have/keep STUFF!”  So…  what is this if not a guy who starts off saying he sympathizes with the anarchist, then turns around and explains why he does no such thing.

Libertarianism has no relationship to anarchism.  Libertarianism emphasizes the individual over the community.  It preaches that any person can do what he or she wants just as long as that doesn’t interfere with someone else.

Now, up to this point, I thought this gentleman might actually understand that there are different flavors of anarchism.  Certianly, there are the collectivists whose position does require such silliness as everyone pulling their weight and more or less liking each other, like in “The Village.”  I can see why anyone could easily come to the conclusion that such a thing would require the dismantling of modern conveniences and techonology.  This, however, absolutely ignores that such folks as individualist anarchists exist.  Individualist anarchists are largely exactly what he describes here as “libertarian.”

If you make more than a million a year, Libertarianism may be the political philosophy for you, since you don’t need public schools, public housing, health care, social security, national parks, police protection, or any of the many other services government provides.  You can pay for them yourself.

There is much confusion between libertarians and Libertarians.  The former is someone who adheres to the Non-Aggression Principle.  The latter is someone who belongs to the Libertarian Party.  In order to belong to a political party vying for control of “government,” you must concede that government has at least some proper function in society.  Folks who are merely libertarians (AKA small-L libertarians) may or may not make such an assumption.  They desire a society that is free of aggression.  They are generally consistent enough to recognize that the single most aggressive organization on the planet is government.  The logical conclusion of an ethical objection to aggression is to call for the dismantling of organizations which exist as a result of aggression (like public schools)  and/or which commit such aggression directly (like police).  There are obviously some people who for one reason or another don’t take their libertarian leanings that far, but there are those of us who do.   We are not less libertarian because we do recognize and accept the logical conclusions of our positions.  Libertarians can and most certainly are anarchists, and vice versa, though there is nothing suggestion that one must be the other, ever.

The next question is how do we do things like protect ourselves or educate our children without the police or public schools?  It happens today, and it happens with single income, middle- to lower-class families without such cool things as vouchers.  It doesn’t cost nearly as much to educate a child at home as some people seem to think.  And truthfully, I would trust more people to educate their children than I trust the public schools, even in the instances of folks who are fundamentalist christian.

As for public housing or welfare…  who says those things should exist?  Who says I should be forced to contribute to them if they do exist?  Because the author suggests that they should?  Are there not private organizations that provide these sorts of things today?  Why wouldn’t they exist in a free society?  Who’s to say that more of us, upon being able to keep more of what we make (my family loses some $16k off the top, before we even see it), wouldn’t be more apt to donate to such folks like Planned Parenthood and (privately) subsidized housing?  What about what happened after Katrina?  Or 9/11?  Is there really so little reason to believe that humans are generally decent people?  I have a theory about why people seem to not give a crap about others, but I’ll refrain from that here until asked to provide my explanation.  My point is merely that I don’t believe that the poor would any more screwed over than they are today, and I have a feeling it would probably be less so.

Why ordinary middle class people would support a Libertarian candidate is beyond me. Ron Paul is not an anarchist who advocates community government.

Anarchists don’t inherently suggest “government” at all should exist, much less at a “community” level.

He is a Libertarian who supports a society where the rich live the high life and live in comfort, while the rest of us fight for the scraps.

As supported by the fact that they argue for more regulation rather than less, I suppose?  I mean, I’m not examining them as closely as I could, but I haven’t heard of either of them supporting more regulation.

The fact that he has raised millions of dollars, and his son, a U.S. Senator, preaches the same doctrine, are both illustrations that the U.S. is hurtling over the precipice.

People want to give them money because they think these folks will represent their interests better than the folks who do, and this is indicative of the fact that they want to live a life of luxury and leave the poor to rot?  I’m not convinced.  It sounds like a lot of empty emotional appeals.

I think there’s got to be a lot more than empty and emotional rhetoric here in order to effectively attack the position that libertarianism, anarchism, and Ron Paul how they are portrayed here.