Risks of libertarian societies
In this article, the technomadic packratt points out a risk of living in a libertarian society. To wit, involuntary servitude could occur in a place where laws against it and police to enforce those laws do not exist. As evidence, he cites four real occurrences; one in modern Florida, the Pullman strikes, Colorado mining communities, and the Ludlow Massacre.
The Packratt's post is extremely valuable. No matter how many times these stories and especially their interpretations are refuted, they bear repeating. It shows a high level of concern by the author to make sure that truth never goes unchallenged by compelling narratives.
One of the most instructive aspects of such narratives is the author's ability to distinguish between minarchy and anarchy. By pointing out that minarchists would not have laws, least of all against fraud, kidnapping, or assault, they find that minarchists are really anarchists. Then they argue that anarchist societies would look exactly like today's society, only without a police force. In this way, they can find the result they want: that large corporations would come to dominate anarchist societies, and from there, that large corporations would dominate any libertarian society.
It would seem that an obvious retort would seem to be that both the Pullman Strike and the Ludlow massacre depended not on a private army, but on the actual army (or national guard). Another obvious retort to this might be that we have such things as existing slavery despite the fact that we do not live in either a minarchist or anarchist society. Fortunately, people like the Packratt are here to show us that such rationalizations have no place in their understanding of the debate. We should not contemplate the fact that most slaves in the US today are caught on the wrong side of immigration laws, the fear of which is used to keep them in line. Neither should we consider whether workers could raise their own armies in an anarchist society. We should definitely not accept libertarians' hackneyed argument that fraud, kidnapping, and assault would still be illegal in a minarchy, or anarchists' dubious claims that management and owners would not be able to hide behind the the liability limiting legal fiction of "the corporation". For the Packratt and his fellow travelers, the fact that those four examples of slavery were real and that private actors benefited from them is enough to confirm the possibility that a minarchist or anarchist society would be a Dickensian Dystopia. That should be enough to persuade even the most committed anti-libertarian that we are blinded by our biases.
The Packratt's post is extremely valuable. No matter how many times these stories and especially their interpretations are refuted, they bear repeating. It shows a high level of concern by the author to make sure that truth never goes unchallenged by compelling narratives.
One of the most instructive aspects of such narratives is the author's ability to distinguish between minarchy and anarchy. By pointing out that minarchists would not have laws, least of all against fraud, kidnapping, or assault, they find that minarchists are really anarchists. Then they argue that anarchist societies would look exactly like today's society, only without a police force. In this way, they can find the result they want: that large corporations would come to dominate anarchist societies, and from there, that large corporations would dominate any libertarian society.
It would seem that an obvious retort would seem to be that both the Pullman Strike and the Ludlow massacre depended not on a private army, but on the actual army (or national guard). Another obvious retort to this might be that we have such things as existing slavery despite the fact that we do not live in either a minarchist or anarchist society. Fortunately, people like the Packratt are here to show us that such rationalizations have no place in their understanding of the debate. We should not contemplate the fact that most slaves in the US today are caught on the wrong side of immigration laws, the fear of which is used to keep them in line. Neither should we consider whether workers could raise their own armies in an anarchist society. We should definitely not accept libertarians' hackneyed argument that fraud, kidnapping, and assault would still be illegal in a minarchy, or anarchists' dubious claims that management and owners would not be able to hide behind the the liability limiting legal fiction of "the corporation". For the Packratt and his fellow travelers, the fact that those four examples of slavery were real and that private actors benefited from them is enough to confirm the possibility that a minarchist or anarchist society would be a Dickensian Dystopia. That should be enough to persuade even the most committed anti-libertarian that we are blinded by our biases.
Labels: libertarian, state-capitalism, sweatshops
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