On Political Authority and Civil Disobedience

Political theorists have spent a lot of ink trying to justify a general duty to obey the law. Other political theorists have shown that these theories are for the most part very good. Furthermore, the first set of theorists then tend to spend a whole lot more ink explaining why this duty to obey the law commonly ceases to apply if you call what you are doing "civil disobedience".

I'm with the philosophical anarchists - there is no general duty to obey the law. The fact that something is a law does not by itself give moral force to the command. That is not to say, however, that we are no obligated to obey many individual laws. In general, however, the laws we must obey are simply that codify either pre-existing rules of basic morality ("Thou shalt not kill") or certain social conventions where such conventions are necessary ("Thou shalt drive on the left", "if thou pollutest, shalt thou pay a fine of £80 for each tonne of CO2 that thou releasest into yon atmosphere.")

This isn't quite a natural law theory - I would argue that there are significant ways in which the moral conventions may vary without losing authority. And yes, some sets of conventions are better than others, but that doesn't mean that people living under inferior conventions can automatically behave as though the preferred conventions were in place.

To the extent that the law as enforced reflects the actual moral law, then, it will be reasonable to expect those who challenge it through civil disobedience to be willing to defend their actions. The moral justifiability of civil disobedience will, pace Raz, depend to a considerable degree upon whether or not the law they challenge is a just one. That said, if someone is wrong but was acting from good intentions, then it may be reasonable to punish them less harshly than if they were simply disregarding the moral law.

Under Anarchism, Who Will Build the Roads?

Previously most of my writing here has been a) as a record of my thoughts and b) for anyone who stumbles across it. I intend to link to this post elsewhere, so it is somewhat different from many of my other essays here in its formatting.

But if there's no government, who will build the roads? This is apparently a question which genuinely gets asked, so I'm going to attempt to provide my answer here. [1] Or rather, I'm going to respond with a question of my own: why are roads different to the many other goods which we agree are best provided by the market?

Pictured: a list of things best provided by the free market.

One possible response for someone who hadn't really gone into the theory would be simply to suggest that a) roads are in practice provided almost universally by governments, and b) there is probably a good reason for this, hence c) we have reason to believe that roads are best provided by government. (It's true that there are private roads, but given that they are nearly all on private land I don't think this constitutes a real objection to the argument).

Just as I am wary of Austrian economics de to the general disregard of its adherents for empirical testing, I am wary of this kind of argument due to its lack of a theoretical explanation - one may as well label the proposed mechanism by which government intervention improves welfare as "magic happens". (This isn't intended as a strawman - it is better epistemic practice, when one is confused about a mechanism, to label it as "magic" than to dream up some believable but probably untrue explanation or to attach a meaningful-sounding buzzword which may convince you that you understand it). That said, this doesn't mean it is wrong.

There are two counterarguments which occur to me. The first is simply that there are many industries which are systematically dominated by the public sector when it is far from clear that this is a good thing - the best examples being currency, law and education. The second would be to note that the industries which are controlled by governments are often very important ones for the purpose of controlling a society. A society would be worse off for the loss of its pasta industry, but such a loss would be survivable; the same could not be said for currency, rights enforcement, or transportation. (Education - at least beyond a certain level - is probably not on the same level of importance as these, but let's not pretend that the primary reason for state intervention in education is anything other than a desire to indoctrinate children).

With that out of the way, let's look at the actual theoretical objections. The Wikipedia page on Free-Market Roads gives two objections: that roads are a natural monopoly, and that road privatisation would adversely affect the poor. I'll explain why I don't take either of these objections particularly seriously, why I might have taken the first one seriously a few decades ago, and I shall raise a (to my knowledge) completely original consideration which I suspect may provide a significant tendency towards less competition, but has only just occurred to me while writing this and I need to think about more.

Are Roads a Natural Monopoly?

"In many parts of the world land use patterns mean that building two or more highways in parallel isn't practicable." Hence, the market cannot be contested and a monopoly arises. This is quite obviously nonsense, and to see why let's look at some of the most valuable land on earth: the Upper West and East Sides of New York City:

Do you see all of those roads in parallel? If they can get that many parallel roads on estate like that, I find it completely implausible that they can't do it pretty much anywhere else. After all, it's not like roads take up all that much space - if you turn a road into a tunnel you can always build on top of it. No, the idea that the roads cannot be built in parallel is rather silly.

It is true that there are significant costs to building a road so there may well be examples of local monopolies in formerly state-controlled areas with only one road. Suppose, however, that you were a private developer of houses or retail outlets. You would want to avoid large road fees nearby: retail and transport to retail outlets have joint demand, hence a rise in the price of one reduces demand for the other; similarly, houses and transport to/from those houses have joint demand. For this reason you would be keen to set up a competitive market for transportation to the places you were building.

A stronger argument would be that, rather than individual roads being examples of natural monopolies, networks of roads would be natural monopolies. It is not feasible to have a toll booth every time you move onto a new road, at least within an urban setting: having to show your card (or windscreen sticker) to someone at the end of every road would massively slow down your commute to work. Moreover, if one person doesn't have the relevant permission then this creates potential for a massive backlog which would hold up everyone behind him.

This would have been a good argument until the development of road cameras. In the modern state, these cameras are used primarily to catch people speeding; in Ancapistan, they would be used to check who was using a particular road so that they could be charged after the fact. There would of course be issues of people using someone else's number plate, but there's no reason why that problem should be any less rare in Ancapistan than it is in current societies. This would remove the need for people to stop or slow down excessively when moving between roads owned by different people.

This, my friends, is what freedom looks like.

There is still one possible issue: houses tend to be accessible to only one road, so we might expect these fees to be excessively high. The most likely answer is that residential roads would be owned by homeowner associations. These don't tend to exist in the UK and I've heard bad things about them from the US so I'm not entirely happy with this; all I can say is that monopolies cause deadweight loss, so if there is an alternative allocation of goods which leads to greater social welfare this will tend to be realised within the market - goods go to those who value them the most.

Would a free market in roads hurt the poor?

The description of this on Wikipedia is very vague. I'm not certain whether the objection is that markets cause poverty - in which case a) no they don't, and b) even if they did it would be far better to carry out redistribution purely in cash rather than through a single market - or that the tendency of pricing would be to make roads relatively more expensive for the poor. 

I'll come back to that suggestion, but first let's think for a moment: how much would road access actually cost? I can think of four costs associated with people using roads: the cost of building them, the cost of maintenance, congestion caused for other road users, and the rent on the land taken up by a road.

The cost of building a road will affect market structure due to sunk costs, but since it does not affect the marginal cost of a road it will not affect the price of a road for a given market structure. As established above, we should expect the market for roads to be competitive.

The cost of maintenance cannot be all that big considering the amount a road gets used. This document is unhelpful, which is hardly surprising given its origin; this report gives Highways Agency maintenance spending as £663 million in 2014-15, which even assuming that government does it just as efficiently as private actors would, adds up to about £10 per person in the UK - perhaps £20 once we filter out non-drivers. Remember that this is an annual cost; hardly breaking the bank.

Of course, the government is known for the efficiency of its road maintenance.

What about congestion? I have no idea how to measure it, but my intuition is that it is pretty large relative to maintenance. Why? When you contribute to congestion for others, you also suffer it yourself. Suppose that by spending twenty minutes in a traffic jam, you slow down 120 other people's journey's down by ten seconds; in that case, you will inflict congestion equal to that which you suffer. If anything, I would expect you to slow down a greater number of people by a similar amount of time, in which case it only takes two hours of being in a traffic jam in a year to make this exceed your share of road maintenance cost. 

Finally, rent. This is again hard to measure, to a large extent because of the extensive existing government intervention in housing and land causing the relative prices to be all out of whack. Furthermore, it's difficult to know exactly where roads would be built (affecting the cost of land) and whether they would be turned into tunnels (affecting the amount of land used).

Will any of these bias prices against the poor? The cost of road maintenance shouldn't, since that is determined to a large extent by weather patterns; rent should work in their favour, since they would a) tend to live in and therefore drive on cheaper land, and b) it would be more worthwhile for them to take a long-cut through cheaper land. The costs of congestion are largely non-monetary, but the biggest determinant of their value will be the value one places upon one's time - which will of course be smaller for poorer people. Hence, in a free market we should expect poorer people to face generally lower fees for road usage than rich people. This is because ultimately they are buying a different product - they are paying for access to a different set of roads, and so just as one pays less for a lower-quality car, a poor person in Ancapistan would face a lower charge to use the roads than a wealthier person.

A new consideration

Roads aren't just roads. The land underneath them tends to contain various pipelines and cables, because it's far easier to dig up a road than a house. It seems likely that in Ancapistan, ownership of the pipelines would be divorced from ownership of the roads above. But the owners of these will obviously have to interact - you can't just dig up someone's road whenever you need to.

"What's this about? Well, I just felt like digging up a road of a
Sunday afternoon. Not bothering you, am I?"

Furthermore, I would expect there to be a substantial difference between the average length of pipeline owned by a single firm and the average length of road owned by a single firm. If a firm owns all the pipeline between (say) the water treatment plant or reservoir on one end and people homes on the other, this will most likely go under a considerable number of roads.

I need to sleep before I think all the way through the implications of this, but it seems like there could be problems resulting from this. Suppose the existence of a pipeline from location A to location B would create value for pipeline builder Dana of £x. There are n road-owners, each of whom has the power to veto the pipeline. Dana must reach an agreement with every individual road-owner for them not to veto the project, and it seems like a sensible solution might be for Dana to pay each of them £(x/n). But suppose one of them decides to insist on receiving £((x/n)+y), where y > 0. Then it would be in the collective interest of the other road owners to reduce the amount they charge Dana by £y, but it would not be in the interest of any individual firm. Moreover, if one firm can raise its price and other firms will reduce their prices to match, then it is in the interest of every firm to raise its price and the pipeline will not be built because poor Dana has no way of making a profit.

I don't think a social expectation of not charging for pipelines to go under your road is in the least bit likely, since there are very real costs to their prescence. Tying ownership of pipes to the roads only creates the same problem in a slight disguise - you have a value £x being somehow split between homeowner Dan and his water-supplier, with n pipeline-section-owners having an ability to veto the pipeline.

Note that this problem disappears if n equals one: the road owner charges £x and the pipeline gets built. If there is only one possible route by which the pipeline could go and n is large (with "large" defined as "too many for them to effectively coordinate and impose discipline upon each other"), then it seems like it will not be built. If there are multiple routes then this improves the chances of one of them not having a large value of n, but note that essentially there is a significant tendency towards monopoly in that this gives the best chance of this water (or sewage, or whatever) pipeline being built.

This may be a more fundamental objection that the standard "roads must be a monopoly" arguments, since they rely upon ignoring the fact that roads must compete with trains, footpaths, cyclepaths and other forms of transportation, whereas this objection, having nothing to do with their use for transportation, evades those sources of competition.

If you don't have a pipeline to take away the sewage,

you end up with a house completely full of shit!

Conclusion

I have no doubt that roads could exist in an anarcho-capitalist society. However, I have serious concerns regarding their interaction with other utilities, which may lead to a monopoly situation and hence inefficiency. I have not put nearly enough thought into this to conclude that there is no solution, but I do not have a solution ready to hand either.

The author of this essay wishes to thank David D. Friedman for making generally available his paper "A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations"; much of the thinking in this essay was influenced by his discussion of the effect of trade routes on state revenue.

Meanderings

Something which has always fascinated me is how productive some people are. I don't mean that they are hard-working - although they undoubtedly are - but that there are people who can produce thousands, even millions, of pounds worth of value in just a few minutes. Meanwhile, the vast majority of us live in a single house, drive a single car, and visits to nice places (the theatre, foreign climes, etc) are an occasional treat.

I should say that I have never had any moral objection to this. While I envy the super-rich (after all, who honestly doesn't?) my response to seeing things like the One Hyde Park apartments and their owners is "Good for them. I hope I become rich enough to live there someday."

A related issue is that of political leaders. I have always thought it strange that we assume in our political system that the best party to manage the national economy will also be the best party to manage the foreign affairs brief, or to determine education policy. (This is actually a large part of why I am an anarchist - I will openly admit that there are problems, most obviously small-but-widespread externalities, which would in theory be best solved by government intervention; however, the democratic system requires us to vote on so many issues at once, that there is basically no reward to a politician for having an honest, intelligent position on this kind of problem). And yet we invest vast amounts of power in small numbers of people, perhaps rightly so.

But what is it that makes these people so much more productive than you or I? Intelligence is obviously part of it, but are they really so much more intelligent that this makes sense of the orders of magnitude of difference in our incomes? Luck is presumably a large part of it - after all, where luck plays a large role you can generally expect lopsided payoffs. I find this rather depressing. I also wonder: where are all the failures?

Natural Rights are insufficient for political libertarianism

A somewhat simplified version of the natural rights view of political morality associated with Rothbard and Nozick would run roughly along the following lines:

1. People have natural rights of life, liberty and property, and anything which breaches these rights is impermissible.
2. The state (or at least, anything more than the minimal state) inevitably breaches these rights.
3. Therefore, the state (or at least, anything more than the minimal state) is impermissible.

I shall demonstrate that this argument is unsound, on the grounds that we can within a natural rights framework justify a state vastly larger than the minimal state given certain empirical assumptions. I make no comment as to whether these assumptions actually hold in the real world.

Suppose there are two societies, living side-by-side. They start off with equal allocations of resources, neither is subject to significant outside interference, and in fact the only difference between them is that one, Ancapistan, has no government at all while the other, Trotskygrad, has a government which interferes in many different activities. Contrary to all previous human experience, this massive government intervention works and people in Trotskygrad enjoy a remarkable standard of living - so much that the most well off inhabitant of Ancapistan (itself a pretty pleasant place to live) is still worse off than the least well-off person in Trotskygrad. Given a choice between the two, would you rather be born into Trotskygrad or Ancapistan?The answer should, quite obviously, be Trotskygrad. (Any fellow libertarians who might be reading this: admitting you'd rather live in Trotskygrad doesn't harm your pro-liberty credentials one jot.)

Now, I should go into a bit of the history of Trotskygrad. It was formed by a socialist collective of a few thousand people who grouped together to buy some land and form their own nation, under an explicit social contract carved out of granite and displayed in the central square. Every individual member of the collective signed a paper copy of this social contract, and any person wishing to become a citizen of Trotskygrad must sign the contract. This commits them to paying heavy income taxes, to remaining a citizen of Trotskygrad for at least five years, and to obeying all the laws agreed by the General Assembly - some of which can be quite onerous. In exchange they are guaranteed a job, healthcare, education for their children, and various other benefits of many different natures.

It seems then that anyone with the mental capabilities of an adult may then be compelled either to sign the contract, or to live elsewhere. The argument that one has grown up in Trotskygrad does not compel the community to allow one to stay, any more than an adult may compel his parents to allow him to continue living in his childhood home. Signing the contract represents consenting to being dominated by a state, with all that that implies. If an individual does not sign the contract, then Trotskygrad is no more obliged to accept the individual than homeowners are obliged to let strangers into their house.

Perhaps there are certain inalienable rights, which a person may not transfer to another person or to a group such as Trotskygrad? Perhaps there are, but it seems far from clear to me what these might be. In any case, it is hard to see how many activities of the state could fall into that category. Taxation can be seen as a way of paying for a bundle of services - protection against crime, education, healthcare etc - and while having the price of a good based upon your income is a very strange idea, and a highly inefficient way of paying, it does not seem particularly morally different from paying a fixed fee. Committing to live in a place? Perhaps it might not be possible to commit to this indefinitely (in which case the planned mission to Mars is already morally scuppered) but I don't see why committing to live somewhere for a few years is different to either working on an oil rig (where you're stuck on a platform in the middle of nowhere for a couple of months) or for a football club (where you sign a contract to play for them for several years). Making decisions for your children about education and such? Well, that applies to private education, not just state education.

Most people believe that we have certain obligations to others who are not so well off as ourselves. Indeed, a couple of months back the Manchester chapter of GWWC hosted a talk by an ethicist who went through pretty much every moral system which is still taken seriously by mainstream philosophers, and concluded that with a single exception they all led to the conclusion that we are obliged to give at least 10% of our income to effective charities. Now what if the most effective way of giving to charity were through the state?

Suppose that, by consenting to the welfare state, I make myself slightly worse off but in doing so bring several beggars off the streets. Then, assuming there is nothing better I could do with the money, it seems sensible to conclude that I have a moral obligation to consent to the welfare state. (Alternatively, I could of course not consent and instead make a private charitable donation with the same effect, but why would I given that by stipulation I would be better off compared to this had I simply consented?)

And so, it might be that I must consent to the state even though I am worse off for so doing. If this is the case, is the state justified in presuming that I consent and acting as though I already had? I'm really not certain - I have a vague intuition that it would be, but this is of course no substitute for systematically thinking the problem through. And as I intend to explain tomorrow, the question is in any case moot.

To conclude, even within a natural rights framework, individuals may consent to the state and indeed may have a moral obligation to do so - however, this relies on certain assumptions about the state improving people's lives.

Holiday in Somalia

One popular criticism of anarchism is to point to the violent civil war going on in Somalia, and say that this is what happens when you have anarchy. Anarchists are of course used to this, and clearly we disagree or else we wouldn't - at least in general - be anarchists. I can imagine that there are some who take an extreme "government should not violate rights, regardless of the consequences, and if that leads to a Hobbesian nightmare then at least we are morally beyond reproach" line, but am personally confident that somewhere along the line I would be happy to give up rights if that were necessary to preserve a civilised society. There's a discussion of Somalia currently going on in the Anarcho-Capitalism subreddit, which led me to do a bit of reading up on the subject. This is my attempt to present the various arguments used.

(1) The war was caused by the state, in a particularly bad consequence of the fall of communism. Observe that all of the warlords, at first, were generals in the Somalian army before.

(2) Warlords are government - they violate the non-aggression principle as surely as any state.

(3) Somalia isn't really anarchy - it's a bunch of small states, all of whom happen to be at war with one another.

(4) Somalia really isn't as bad as we think - compared to other African countries, it is actually doing pretty well.

(5) Within any political system there will be nations which do better or worse within that system. Somalia is likely a particularly bad example of anarchism, and comparing it to developed countries (as tend to be done is grossly unfair). The best comparison would be somewhere like North Korea, and for all its violence most people would rather live in Somalia than North Korea.

(6) A functioning anarchy requires people to understand and accept anarchism - it cannot simply develop out of thin air. (I'm not presenting this well here, see here for a short but well-written exposition of the argument).

Without commenting on the force or truth of any of these arguments (hint: I agree with some but not all - in particular, (2) just seems like an attempt to redefine the word 'government' to include anything we don't like) it seems to me like there is a split between these arguments: arguments (1), (2), (3) and (6) all seem to say "Somalia isn't truly anarchist" whereas (4) and (5) say "Yes, Somalia is anarchist, and it really isn't so bad." There isn't necessarily a contradiction - you could probably argue that anarchy developed out of a failed state - but in general it seems like these are two different conclusions being argued towards, and the combination of the two - "The violence in Somalia is because they have a government, and because they're anarchist they're actually doing better than other countries in their situation" - is flat out contradictory.

Libertarian Fiction

Students for Liberty are running a fiction contest for a story, 1000-10,000 words long, "illustrating the positive role of freedom in human life".

I recently read a suggestion somewhere - I forget where it was - that it is impossible to write a great story advocating something, and that all the great political novels - Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps Atlas Shrugged if you're into that kind of thing - were railing against a system. I'm thinking that I might attempt to write an entry for this competition, and I'm thinking that I might set it in an anarcho-capitalist society. This, of course, incurs great danger in terms of literary quality.

I must avoid presenting it as utopian - partly because I don't see this as entirely realistic and partly because it's a story, and every story aimed at people above the age of six needs a problem. I could make the problem an evil, aggressive state which neighbours the anarchist society, but this seems rather close to the Ayn Rand-type "Freedom Good, State Bad" assertion that most libertarians secretly believe but tends to turn off the uninitiated. So, what I want to do is to, in a sense, normalise anarchy: to present it as a valid, workable alternative to our current socialist/corporatist hybrid with its own unique benefits and its own unique problems.

How can I best emphasise the difference between my fictional society and those which currently exist? My protagonist should fill a role which would change significantly in an anarchist society. The industry I would expect to change most is that of law creation and enforcement. And it just so happens that one of the great genres - the whodunnit - is entirely about people in this line of work.

So my main character should be a detective. I don't want him to be a Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes, because this is supposed to be realistic and believable. Deducing from a left-behind banana skin that the murderer was a left-handed homosexual with an interest in stamp collecting is beyond the ability of the average genius, let alone the average person who might possibly read my story.

I also need problems for them to overcome. I'm thinking that Creative Destruction could play a role - perhaps a company gone down the toilet, taking a load of data with it. I like the idea of the crime being investigated being the murder of a man with no friends or family - presumably he paid a company to commit to catching his killer, as an (unfortunately insufficient) form of self-defence.

That's about as far as I've got with thinking through it, so far. I'm also re-listening to David Friedman's talk "Vinge, Heinlein, the Sagas and Me", which looks at a variety of anarchist structures, both historical and fictional.

A discussion of tacit consent to the state

Suppose you live in a moderately large community - perhaps around 10,000 people - with a smoothly functioning market economy but few trade links with the outside world. A rich person then pays every doctor in that community a large subsidy to treat every other patient in that community, on condition that they refuse to treat you.

It is in the interests of every individual doctor to accept the subsidy, since the extra income from the subsidy significantly exceeds the revenue they would get from having you on their books. The result is that it becomes uneconomic to treat you, since this would require a whole new doctor to be trained, and the subsidy is only available to people who will not treat you.

In this case, you would not necessarily end up going completely without treatment - there would probably be some level of medical training which it would be economic for someone to obtain this and then treat you. (That is, providing there is no occupational licensing). Still, it is obvious that this rich person's actions have made you worse off, and probably quite significantly. Yet from a natural rights perspective, it is hard to see how you could have any kind of a claim against them.

Aside from being a potential weak point of natural-rights based ethics, this has potential real-world significance. Peter Steinberger, amongst others, has argued that actively accepting benefits from the state implies consenting to it, and provides numerous examples of activities he sees as fulfilling this condition. In many cases this seems intuitive, but there is an obvious counterargument for the philosophical anarchist: that the state has actively prevented citizens from obtaining these benefits except through the state, and therefore when it provides them with there benefits it is merely compensating them, rather than actually making an implicit offer of contract. This is actually a surprisingly wide-ranging objection. The state will not allow me to go about enforcing vigilante justice, and will not allow anyone else to do it on my behalf, so when I call the police to bring to justice a man who has stolen from me, I am merely calling upon the state to do what it is obliged to do - I am in no way consenting to anything. The state does not ban private healthcare, but it regulates it to such an extent that it can hardly be seen to be respecting my rights or those of my prospective doctor, and so when I go to the NHS for medical advice I am merely exacting recompense rather than seeking benefits. Even if I claim unemployment benefits, it is unclear that I accept any duties since state measures like the minimum wage, national insurance, and income tax all violate my natural rights and make it harder for me to obtain work.

But what if the state did not restrict me from obtaining these services other than through itself? I can't think of any indisputable examples of this offhand, but a strong example is education, where there are essentially three options - state schooling, private education (which is similar to the situation described in the opening paragraphs of this post) and homeschooling. Does the fact that, by providing free schools and so making it uneconomic to run affordable private schools, the state obstructs my obtaining of private education, make using state education for one's children invalid as an expression of tacit consent? My suspicion is that it doesn't: in the classic example of invalid tacit consent ("I propose that we move next week's meeting to Tuesday. Anyone who objects to this, chop off your arm. Oh good, everyone agrees!") the objection is not that chopping off one's arm is costly or difficult (that said, how many businessmen do carry around knives ready to chop off their arms at a moment's notice?) but that one has a right to keep one's arms. If the statement had been "Any employee who objects, raise your arm. Also, if you do then you must move into a different, smaller office," then objecting would have been costly but would not have entailed unjust loss, and so the tacit consent would have been valid. So sending one's children to a state school (obviously, since they were a minor at the time, the question of whether an individual himself/herself went to a state school is irrelevant) could reasonably be described as consent to the state. Except for two problems which are a problem for basically any theory of tacit consent to the state.

The first could be overcome if there were greater awareness of political philosophy among the general public, but is currently an obstacle to, I believe, every existing state: for consent to be valid, at least one of these two conditions must be met:

1. There is intent to be bound to that consent.
2. All consenting parties may reasonably be expected to realise that their action entails consent.

Suppose you own a historic mansion, and are in the habit of giving guided tours around it. My joining such a tour does not of itself imply that I agree to pay you for it; however, if you have a notice by the door indicating that there will be a charge, then I may reasonably be expected to pay even if I would rather not.

If someone intends to be bound to obeying the state, then sending their kids to a state school is probably unnecessary to achieve this. Hence, it is the second condition which is more likely to be useful for demonstrating that people consent to the state. But I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of people do not realise that sending kids to school can entail consent, and given that it is not clearly stated anywhere that "sending your child to a school owned by Her Majesty's Government implies that you agree to obey the laws set down by Her Majesty's Government" this is rather a problem for the validity of tacit consent.

That problem is tough but not impossible to overcome. The real problem with tacit consent is very similar to the problem with benefit theory: the idea that the state can obtain consent by providing benefits presupposes that the state had a right to provide those benefits. This in turn presupposes that the state had a right to the resources with which it provided those benefits, which presupposes that the taxes with which it gained the resources had been consented to by the people of the nation. Thus there is an infinite regress unless you have a situation in which either the state legitimately held assets without acquiring them from an outside source, or the taxed population consented in advance of receiving benefits. But no-one seriously believes the state began as anything other than a local warlord, which rules out the first option, and no-one seriously believes in an explicit contract with explicit consent, either present or historical, as the second option requires. Therefore tacit consent cannot provide a basis for political obligation in any existing state.

Perspective on Anarcho-Capitalism

One way I often like think about the goal of anarcho-capitalists is not so much that we wish to abolish government, as to create a free and competitive market in governance. Many functions of the modern state - defence, legal service, healthcare, disaster insurance, education - will continue to exist in the absence of the state providing civilisation remains. I personally think that it is unlikely that these goods really need to be provided by the same organisation, or even that it is efficient for this to be the case, but hey! It's possible!

Besides which, if someone wants to live in a socialist society then why shouldn't they, so long as they don't force anyone else to be part of that society? I don't personally want any government above me, but if people truly do want governments then why, in a state of nature, should they be prevented from banding together and forming one above themselves?

Even if you don't have a government, then I think it is pretty much inevitable that one will be subject to rules. Rules are not inherently necessary for a stable society, but I think it is fair to say that:

• A stable society requires people to have the ability to plan ahead.
• For people to be able to plan ahead, it is necessary for behaviour to be predictable within certain bounds.
• These bounds must either be determined ahead of time in some way - essentially becoming rules - or must be the same over time.
• While rules are not metaphysically necessary for behavioural norms to persist, they are an obvious and usually successful way of achieving this.

Sets of rules and enforcement procedures - governances, one might say - would in an anarcho-capitalist society be the products of governance firms, or governments. We already have these governments, but unfortunately the market for them is neither free nor competitive. There are massive costs to switching between providers, the link between payment by consumers and performance by firms is virtually non-existent, and there is little to no possibility for a firm to fail and go under, freeing up resources for a competitor.

This, along with some generally accepted empirical premises, should lead us to a few conclusions.

Firstly, since free and competitive markets are possible, it is likely that a stable anarcho-capitalist society is possible. There may be some difference between the current products of government and other products currently produced by functioning markets which makes this particular competitive market impossible, but then the onus is on the statist to demonstrate this. I may at some point write a debunking of various potential arguments of this type, but I'm rather too tired and alcohol-laden to do it properly right now.

Second, since the vast majority of new products in competitive markets - somewhere in the region of 90% - fail, we should expect most prospective governances in a anarcho-capitalist system also to fail. If a firm offers a bundle of goods (we'll say personal protection, protection of property and prosecution of any trespassers against the individual) for £2500 per annum and another offers the same or better services for £2000 per annum, then that first firm will fail as surely as we are enriched by international trade.

Given this explicit admission that I expect 90% of rights-protection agencies (or DROs) to fold within a few years of starting up, do I regard anarcho-capitalism as a terrible system? No. You see, there is rather a difference between failure for a governance and failure for an existing state. For a governance, failure simply means that it fails to provide the same value for money as its competitors - it is perfectly possible that purchasing a firm's services would make a consumer massively better off (in terms of consumer surplus) and yet the firm is still not efficient enough to survive. However, a state possesses a monopoly on violence and, more to the point, people are forced to pay for its services whether or not they consume these services. Hence, failure for a state means not only that it is failing to provide value for money, but it is producing so little value for the money which it extracts that people are willing to take on severe personal risk and cost  in order to overthrow this state.

I believe that, subject to the market test of anarcho-capitalism, almost every state currently in existence would fail. Hence, I believe that anarcho-capitalism provides a reasonable prospect for a better society. That said, if a small group of people were to form a single anarcho-capitalist society tomorrow, I would be sceptical of its chance of success. What I would wish to see would be numerous groups, each trying to create their utopian vision of the perfect state and society, with those which succeed to a greater extent attracting immigrants and imitators. That, I believe, is the way in which the truly good society is to be achieved.

Every Market Failure is a business idea

One accusations libertarians frequently face is that we are "utopian". I seek to demonstrate that the real problem is that non-libertarians are insufficiently imaginative.

To take an example: this is from Yvain's critique of libertarianism as a general approach towards the question of how much government there should be. (His position, as I understand it, is that each program should be evaluated on its own merits and according to its results; I disagree, considering morality to lie in procedure rather than outcome, but his is an understandable and eminently reasonable position).

2.3: How do coordination problems justify regulation of ethical business practices?The normal libertarian belief is that it is unnecessary for government to regulate ethical business practices. After all, if people object to something a business is doing, they will boycott that business, either incentivizing the business to change its ways, or driving them into well-deserved bankruptcy. And if people don't object, then there's no problem and the government shouldn't intervene.A close consideration of coordination problems demolishes this argument. Let's say Wanda's Widgets has one million customers. Each customer pays it $100 per year, for a total income of $100 million. Each customer prefers Wanda to her competitor Wayland, who charges $150 for widgets of equal quality. Now let's say Wanda's Widgets does some unspeakably horrible act which makes it $10 million per year, but offends every one of its million customers.There is no incentive for a single customer to boycott Wanda's Widgets. After all, that customer's boycott will cost the customer $50 (she will have to switch to Wayland) and make an insignificant difference to Wanda (who is still earning $99,999,900 of her original hundred million). The customer takes significant inconvenience, and Wanda neither cares nor stops doing her unspeakably horrible act (after all, it's giving her $10 million per year, and only losing her $100).The only reason it would be in a customer's interests to boycott is if she believed over a hundred thousand other customers would join her. In that case, the boycott would be costing Wanda more than the $10 million she gains from her unspeakably horrible act, and it's now in her self-interest to stop committing the act. However, unless each boycotter believes 99,999 others will join her, she is inconveniencing herself for no benefit.Furthermore, if a customer offended by Wanda's actions believes 100,000 others will boycott Wanda, then it's in the customer's self-interest to “defect” from the boycott and buy Wanda's products. After all, the customer will lose money if she buys Wayland's more expensive widgets, and this is unnecessary – the 100,000 other boycotters will change Wanda's mind with or without her participation.This suggests a “market failure” of boycotts, which seems confirmed by experience. We know that, despite many companies doing very controversial things, there have been very few successful boycotts. Indeed, few boycotts, successful or otherwise, ever make the news, and the number of successful boycotts seems much less than the amount of outrage expressed at companies' actions.

Upon reading this, my thought process was along the lines of: "OK, this seems like a reasonable model of the situation. Let's suppose I'm in that situation and there is no state. How would I go about solving it?"

Ultimately, the problem is lack of commitment from individuals. Talk is cheap, and the incentives and options available lead them to behaviour which fails to solve the problem. So clearly we want to change either the incentives or the options.

The first idea which came to me is that, since so many transactions are carried out by credit card, could one have one's credit card blocked from being used at certain stores? Then you would sign up to a campaign page which would work in a similar way to Kickstarter: you, and everyone else signing up, would enter your details and agree that upon the campaign reaching a certain, specified number of participants, some switch would be activated and none of you could use your credit cards at that particular store.

I won't claim this as a perfect solution: there would need to be more thought put into issues such as preventing the use of cash or alternate credit cards, and persuading people to trust the website with their details (though it should be noted that plenty of websites have managed to overcome this difficulty without any trouble). Perhaps these would turn out to be insurmountable and my idea wouldn't work. Fine then. Perhaps, with more and more websites moving online, there might be some kind of software that kept tabs on where you were shopping and would trumpet loudly that you had bought from someone you had pledged not to. The idea I am getting at is not that I have solutions - for all I know, these are both terrible ideas which could never possibly work - but that there do exist ways we can solve these problems without resorting to government.

Market failure exists, at least primarily, when individual rationality on the part of all actors leads to group irrationality. That is to say, any attempt by an individual to increase social welfare reduces their individual welfare. This creates a deadweight loss - it would be possible to make some (maybe even all) people better off without making anyone worse off. The classic solution is for the state to somehow mandate the behavioural changes which realise this increase in social welfare, but it seems to me that this model underestimates the ability of entrepreneurs to come up with new solutions.

What's more, technology is making these entrepreneurial solutions ever easier to realise. Perhaps 50 years ago, a stateless society would have had problems funding a road system. I don't know how it would have worked, but three ideas present themselves:
1) Roads are operated as a loss-leader by those selling cars and petrol. This seems unlikely, particularly in a competitive market system, partly because it is unclear that it would be worth the cost and partly because only a small portion of the increased revenue caused by a firm investing in roads would accrue to the firm making the actual investment.
2) Road users are charged a flat rate regardless of how much they use the roads. They would have to pay a fee for usage of a firm's roads, and would receive a windscreen sticker indicating a right to use that firm's roads; if caught by an agent of the firm using the roads without a sticker, they could be prosecuted. This is fairly similar if not identical to the statist system. and would have a number of problems - large economies of scale (in catching unauthorised users, logistics of road repair) leading to an uncompetetive market structure, poor incentives for road users, vast expenses for families driving on holiday.
3) Toll booths. These would also have problems - slowing down traffic, large economies of scale (because who really wants to pay twenty fares on the way to work) leading to an uncompetetive market structure.

There may well be other ways I have overlooked; I would guess that some combination of 2 and 3 would be most likely. (There might also have been a massive move towards public transport). However, the problem of funding would be ridiculously easy to solve nowadays. Something like the London congestion charge could operate, with cameras recording if you had been on a road, and if so then how often, and at the end of the month you would receive a bill. Alternatively, your car might automatically record where you went and send it to some agency.

This "failure of imagination", if you will, is common to many areas covered by the state. To take a quote from Clement Attlee (for non-UK readers, the UK Prime Minister 1945-51 and the chief founder of the modern British welfare state):

In a civilised community, although it may be composed of self-reliant individuals, there will be some persons who will be unable at some period of their lives to look after themselves, and the question of what is to happen to them may be solved in three ways – they may be neglected, they may be cared for by the organised community as of right, or they may be left to the goodwill of individuals in the community. The first way is intolerable, and as for the third: Charity is only possible without loss of dignity between equals. A right established by law, such as that to an old age pension, is less galling than an allowance made by a rich man to a poor one, dependent on his view of the recipient’s character, and terminable at his caprice.

Ultimately, the problem of supporting the unemployed falls into two categories: the short-term unemployed, and the long-term unemployed. It seems fair to assume here that Attlee refers purely to the short-term problem (which is just as well, for otherwise I should be lambasting him for his - ahem - uncharitable approach towards the issue of charity). For this problem, he completely overlooks the possibility of private insurance, most likely through a Friendly society although I see no reason in principle why it should not be done for profit. Indeed, given that at this time National Insurance was a genuine insurance scheme for workers, rather than the income tax by a different name which it has become, it seems odd that he failed to think of this possibility.

Ultimately, the best way to demonstrate that something is not a market failure is to find a market solution. Perhaps these market solutions do not always exist. But it does seem rare to find evidence that state advocates have tried to find those solutions before decreeing intervention.

The Primary Challenge of Political Philosophy...

...should be less to explain why the governments of liberal democracies, primarily in Europe and North America, are legitimate and that why we must obey them, but rather to explain precisely why less enlightened states are not legitimate, why there is no duty to obey them.

It seems to me to be beneficial to view political obligation as a number of sets of actions. There exists a set of acts which are morally permissible for an individual within the state of nature, and a set of acts which are morally permissible for the same individual when under a state. This essay shall discuss the relationship between these two sets, which we shall label the Natural set (actions morally permissible within the state of nature) and the Statist set (actions morally permissible when under a state).

The basic claim of the philosophical anarchist is that there are no acts in the Natural set which are not also in the Statist set, i.e. that there are no political obligations. The basic claim of the political anarchist is that there are no acts in the Statist set which are not also in the Natural set, i.e. that being a representative of the state confers no special moral status.

One of the key claims made by defenders of the state is that the legitimacy of its laws is content-independent: that is, that we have the duty to obey the laws of a legitimate state regardless of what those laws are. I take it as a priori that it is impermissible to murder or imprison someone purely on the grounds of their religion. It is a simple fact that many states, from various medieval kingdoms to Nazi Germany and the USSR to a number of modern states in Africa and the Middle East, have not respected this and have instead murdered many people specifically because they were of a different religion to that of the state's leaders. From these premises, it is obvious that either (a) the obligation to obey a state's laws is not content-independent, or (b) the citizens of many states, including a number which exist today, have no obligation towards their states. Otherwise the persecuted minorities would be required to hand themselves in to be killed, and if they did not then other citizens would be obliged to point them out to be rounded up and slaughtered.

If conclusion (a) is accepted, then the question becomes: even if a state is legitimate, what distinguishes its legitimate commands, which I must obey, from those which I have no duty to obey? This is likely to depend upon the specific theory used to defend the state. The question from the beginning of this essay may be formulated as "Why is it that I must pay a given proportion of my income to the state of the UK, while Jews under Hitler in 1944 were under no obligation to reveal themselves?" (1) If one appeals to Christopher Heath Wellman's argument from a "Samaritan Duty of Rescue", then one has a duty to obey laws only in so far as they are necessary to rescue people from the state of nature, which seems fair enough. If one appeals to a theory of Democratic Fairness, then one runs into problems - the Nazis were democratically elected, which makes it far harder to argue that they were illegitimate but that our existing governments are legitimate.

If conclusion (b) is accepted, then the question is much the same. This has slightly less of a problem, in that it need not explain why a state taking 40% of my income is legitimate while an otherwise identical state taking 100% of my income is not. However, it still needs to explain precisely why I must obey David Cameron, but no Syrian need obey Bashar al-Assad.

I would regard it as a failure of a theory of political obligation if it held that all people must obey all laws of their local state.


(1) The obvious, flippant answer is "Because the Jews would have been killed, whereas you just wouldn't be able to afford that new computer or whatever. Duh!" While not entirely impossible, this raises the issue of what exactly it takes for our suffering to be permissible for the state to inflict. Suppose that a 40% income tax is legitimate, but a 100% income tax will cause me to starve and die and is therefore impermissible. Given that a rate of 90% would leave me wallowing in homelessness and poverty but would not kill me, is this permissible? A rate of 70% would allow me to survive and to just about pay rent, but would leave me no security in case I fell ill; would this be permissible? Moreover, this answer fails to provide a positive case as to why the state has a right to even 1%, let alone 40%, of my earnings. It gives no substantive answer as to why the state could legitimately take 40% of my income, but I could not legitimate take 40% of your income.