Sunday 6 February 2011

Anarchy and Utopia

People seem to think I am fighting for some sort of strange world where no aggression and no violations of property rights are possible. This is, of course, not true. I am an anarchist in the Rothbardian tradition, i.e. I apply the code of ethics that classical liberals and libertarians have to organizing society. I am pretty sure it is impossible to have a world where no aggression happens. Some people are violent and they will always remain so (NB. most of these people enter government in democratic states). Anarcho-capitalism or, as I prefer to call it, Individual Monarchism, has nothing to do with utopianism! We live in the real world. People need to sacrifice their absolute freedoms in order to gain the ability to live in a structured society. What I want, however, is for these sacrifices to be freely made and made on an individual basis. We cannot have dictators of any kind (whether democratic like Napoleon or autocratic like Caesar Augustus) determining our lives for us. This is why I do not call for the complete destruction of the state. All I call for is the absence of legalized violence and aggression. Note, this does not mean aggression will diappear, but violence perpetrated by states will!
In actual fact it is the statists who are the utopians. They say "If there is a problem, leave it to the government" or "If we can't deal with this naturally arising problem, government must". Such sayings are just pure rejections of reality. The government is composed of the same men as the general populace (except maybe of the more conniving variety). They cannot magically solve our problems. It is as Ronald Reagan used to say: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

I think Murray Rothbard, one of the greatest champions of liberty in the history of mankind, defined it best when he analyzed the non-aggression axiom and its relation to govermental structures:
"I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights."
The key is not aggression (aggression will always exist as long as man is not a perfect being), but LEGALIZED AGGRESSION. That is what we want to eliminate.

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