Come thy minarchists...

I've been reading The Libertarian Reader by David Boaz, the Executive Vice President of the US Cato Institute. This is a series of selected essays or book extracts from authors the editor views as 'libertarian'.

I've always found the 'libertarian'/'liberal' thing confusing in the US since 'liberal' in the US can mean statist, and thus more akin to the UK Labour party than the UK Liberal Democrat party. The Cato Institute is, however, minarchist which comes from a similar tradition to UK liberalism but is really quite different from the UK liberal beliefs outlined in Young, Free and Liberal [now available for free to download here].

From reading an essay by Murray Rothbard (whose regarded as a radical libertarian by David Boaz and an anarcho-capitalist by wikipedia), I'm coming to the conclusion that the difference could lie in the way that minarchists regard the state. They regard it as uniquely oppressive because 'only the government obtains its income by coercion and violence... every othern person or group receives its income by voluntary payment... apart from criminal outlaws, only the government can use its funds to commit violence against its own or any other subjects'. The problem is that although this might be the case in practice or at the moment, if 'all goods and services, including law and justice [were] provided without coercive government' then other groups would soon fill the gap in provision. Yet private monopolies could be as much a danger to individual freedom as the government and unlike government are not accountable to everyone in theory, never mind in practice. This is the nightmare of the Blade Runner-esque dystopia. If you are going to argue that any welfare provision makes people unfree then what is the difference between that and a company town like Saltaire. Surely, a worker is just as unfree being given housing, education, etc. by their employer as by the state?

The only person who is theoretically more free is Sir Titus Salt who, in theory, was free to build or not build Saltaire but who is compelled to contribute to welfare. I say, in theory, because workers are less productive in the absence of healthcare, education, decent housing, etc. So factory owners who didn't build places like Saltaire and chose not to be philanthropic in the absence of a welfare state were just free-riding. During a recession, various wealthy and philanthropic people would voluntarily try to help the disadvantaged. After the recession, non-philanthropic businessmen would reemploy those people. The health, welfare and ability to work of these workers was at least in part a result of other people's charity during their difficulty. Thus, the 'freedom' to choose not to be charitable in the absence of basic welfare is actually just an example of blatant free-riding on other people's generosity and kindness. It's like freedom to pollute - all very well in theory but actually it's not a 'freedom' because someone somewhere has their freedom of action reduced by your smog. For free-riding problems, you don't need a minarchist state, you need a light touch arbitrator to ensure people play fair. How you organise that light touch arbitrator to avoid it becoming a behemoth is, of course, a different question.

The objection to state compulsion over tax is pretty weak too. If the minarchist state is going to force Titus Salt to pay taxes to provide a police force, then there can be no sensible objection (or I haven't thought of one yet) to the idea of further compulsion to pay for or subsidise services such as education or a basic welfare state. The Wikipedia article on minarchism points out that:

Some believe that minarchism is inconsistent with libertarian belief and is a contradictory philosophy. Libertarianism, by definition, opposes the initiation of force or fraud against person or property. In order for a state to fund itself, it would have to tax people, which requires coercion and thus an initiation of force. Some libertarians argue that anarcho-capitalism is the only logically consistent form of libertarian belief. But supporters of minarchism counter that the government could survive on private donations and the creation trust funds without any form of taxation whatsoever.

And the latter, of course, wouldn't work. Why pay for the state to pay people to administer your security badly when you can hire a couple of thugs to stand out front? So we're left with anarcho-capitalism... remove the state to leave a huge power void just waiting to be filled with some other pig... which chills an Actonian liberal to the bone. Anarcho-capitalism is much like communism... nice idea in theory, shame about the application.