Posted on 01/14/2002 6:38:35 AM PST by SteamshipTime
Anarchy, I must point out, is not synonymous, at least in my mind, with bomb-throwing lunatics, or rioting in the streets. It is as placid as a pond, as peaceful as a park. There is nothing chaotic about it. It is certainly not the absence of government, but only of government imposed by strangers. The anarchist governs himself, based upon principles found to be enduring and valuable: the Ten Commandments, for example. Anarchy has been the basis of society, long prior to the existence of government. Does your family have bylaws? Are there regular elections, or meetings for the sake of writing new laws to cope with new problems? Do family members regularly charge one another with violations of the law, and demand justice, as meted out by strangers? Not in my family. Family members may disagree, of course, but these disagreements are worked out and eventually settled without recourse to written statutes or judges. No lawyers are necessary. God’s law, we have been taught, is written on our hearts. We don’t need to quibble about the precise meaning of words in laws because we all know, instinctively, what is right and fair, and what isn’t. It is only when we leave the family that we encounter the world of legalisms. As a physician, I am on the staff of several hospitals. All have staff bylaws. These are bulky multi-page documents, intended to deal with any and every circumstance surrounding a physician’s staff privileges. Before being accepted on the staff, you must sign the bylaws and agree to abide by them. Indeed, one hospital even affixes to its signature-line the jurat that the signer will be bound not only by these bylaws, but by any additions that may be made in the future. Astonishingly, this absurdity seems to provoke little reaction from the doctors. Perhaps that is because they realize that the bylaws don’t mean anything anyway, but exist mainly to provide the hospital with justification for acting against a particular physician if his actions might be considered dangerous to the hospital. Strangers from hospital-accreditation, who, ultimately, control the purse strings, require them. The laws of your local community, not to mention state and federal governments, are sufficiently numerous and complex that you cannot possibly know them, although ignorance of the law – an excellent excuse for any alleged lawbreaker—is considered no excuse by the lawmakers, who may profit from infractions. You manage your day to day activities quite nicely without reference to these countless regulations. Indeed, were you to consider them prior to acting, you would be reduced to inactivity; they would overwhelm you. In fact, the innumerable laws which are said to apply to all of us are out of our thoughts. That undeniable fact is, in itself, an excellent argument for anarchy. We have government, with its innumerable laws, but we function as though we didn’t, because otherwise we’d spend more time pouring over the statute-books, and haggling over definitions, than doing our work. Moreover, the government itself, though passing new laws with alacrity, pays little attention to them, at least where its self-interest is concerned. It does what it thinks it must do, and if its actions are prohibited by the laws, it ignores them. The proof of this is all around us. To wit: "No state shall make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender for debt." That constitutional provision would virtually eradicate our economic problems; the government not only ignores it, but violates it. Actions not specifically permitted to government by the constitution are denied it. Nearly all of the government’s actions are, by this constitutional standard, unconstitutional. Does anyone in Washington care? Do most Americans? The written laws are tools to be used, when it is considered desirable to do so, against individuals and corporations, except the federal corporation, which ignores any laws it finds oppressive. What keeps society together are not the myriad laws imposed by government, to be applied as needed; it is the law written on our hearts. The shootings at schools around the country have undoubtedly stimulated a new outpouring of laws, but there are already numerous laws prohibiting shootings at schools, or anywhere else. "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is the relevant law, and it’s already written, though not taught. Indeed, it is forbidden to be taught in many schools. Therein lies the problem! There is freedom in the law, we are told, but that is only true if it is God’s law, not that of some strangers who call themselves government. Those laws bring slavery. Indeed, that may be their purpose.
I believe it was Chesterton who remarked that Christianity had not failed; it had not been tried. And Ayn Rand described capitalism as the unknown ideal. I would like to suggest, in a similar vein, that anarchy has been tried, is being tried and is a universal success, but remains an unknown ideal. I’ll explain.
If the author is correct, whether or not people believe in God is immaterial. God exists and has instituted a natural order regardless of people's beliefs.
Personally, I think if you want to embody the natural order (assuming it exists) as "God" or credit God with its authorship, or just stop with the concept, "natural order," you're still on the right track.
Anarchy, I must point out, is not sysnonymous, at least in in my mind, with a placid pond or a peaceful park.
Anarchy may not be synonymous with violence, but there is little to suppress it. The author appeals to the inherent goodness in people and the self-correcting nature of communities, but ignores the also inherent evil in people and the apathy & ignorance of communities. The author is a doctor, familiar with intelligent & well-behaved people who are working together for the betterment of mankind; in his ivory tower, he does not experience the street-level crime of the anonymous thugs robbing & slaying the forgotten members of society. Lacking government, justice can only be doled out by vigilanties.
In his appeal to live God's law, the author forgets that God created of governments to deal with those who don't.
Perhaps not in your mind, but "anarchy" does conjure up images of bomb-throwing lunatics and riots. And with good reason: people calling themselves anarchists have employed violence (including bombs and riots) in the past.
If that is not what you mean -- and you want people to listen to what you have to say -- I would suggest you find a different label for your cause.
To rise above that level, one needs laws.
Try to think outside the box, ok? The private sector does everything better than government and everything which the government does has been performed by the private sector.
The only purpose of government is to defend you from other governments. It's a protection racket. And it doesn't even do that well.
A person is found on the sidewalk dead of foul play. No ID (wallet obviously stolen), no witnesses. Assuming the nation is governed by anarchy, how will he be identified and how will his killer be brought to justice?
I wish I could be more sympathetic with this point of view, but the author is (as most neo-anarchists) setting up a definition of anarchy that increases in defensibility the more it departs from the real thing. In logic this is known as "special pleading," and what it does is to force debate to follow terms whose definition is crafted to lead to only one possible conclusion.
The term "anarchy" has a number of possible interpretations, but it does in fact refer to absence of government in one form or another. It is not a new idea, but many of its modern adherents are treating the field as if Bakunin and Kropotkin, et al, never existed, and that's a pity, because they're revisiting old ground and missing some hard lessons of the past.
I am an enthusiastic adherent of a smaller, less powerful central government, but most of the neo-anarchists (and that strange amalgam that names itself "anarcho-capitalist") seem to me to be attempting to retain certain features of ordered society in the absence of those aspects of organized government that maintain that order. Those aspects are necessarily coercive - government is, by definition, coercion - and are necessarily restrictive of liberty as well. Gibbon spoke to this regarding the fall of the Roman Empire: ...the establishment of orer has been gradually connected with the decay of liberty...A long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches had migrated from the banks of the Tiber, was incapable of restoring or adorning the city [Rome]; and as all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance, every successive age must have hastened the ruin of the works of antiquity.
In short, what we saw in Rome and what we are seeing in this case is that order and liberty coexist in a continuum in which there is a necessary tension, and periodic fluctuation, between the emphasis of the two. Neo-anarchists are claiming that we can enjoy the fruits of order while enjoying the fruits of liberty as well, and while I won't deny its possibility I suspect, from a historical perspective, that it's pretty unlikely. More liberty and smaller government will, IMHO, necessarily mean less order, which we could live with more easily if we had the luxury of picking and choosing which aspects of order we can most easily do without. That, unfortunately, may be a luxury that is impossible to obtain.
You're still thinking in the box. What's a sidewalk? A place owned by government. Almost of this kind of crime takes place in "public" places.
How often are people "found dead" in shopping malls? Almost never. Unlike governments, private citizens take care of their property. What's more, if it did happen, you can be damned sure that the owners would want to get the perp. This kind of thing could be bad for business, don't you know?
The idea that government causes order is bizarre. Government is the single biggest cause of disorder, by far. We had order back in the days when we had small government. We lost it when big government came in.
One small example. Roosevelt brought in AFDC in the mid-thirties. It took a single generation to destroy the black family and bring disorder to the inner cities.
You're still thinking in the box. What's a sidewalk? A place owned by government. Almost of this kind of crime takes place in "public" places.
So we ban sidewalks -- and other "public" places -- and almost all murders will cease?
How often are people "found dead" in shopping malls? Almost never. Unlike governments, private citizens take care of their property. What's more, if it did happen, you can be damned sure that the owners would want to get the perp. This kind of thing could be bad for business, don't you know?
Three points:
1. Are you seriously suggesting that violent crimes "almost never" occur on private property? I would like to see some data to support this.
2. Why would the owners of a shopping mall necessarily be interested in pursuing the murderer of a stranger? True, a dead body can be bad for business. But if it the victim were not a family member, friend, or customer, the property owners could avoid bad press by simply disposing of the body quietly.
3. Suppose the owners of the shopping mall did decide to pursue the murderer. How much would it cost them to hire their own private investigator to do the job?
No, I am not. But mystery murders almost always involved public property to one degree or another.
Why would the owners of a shopping mall necessarily be interested in pursuing the murderer of a stranger?
Aside from the possibility that their actions might be discovered, malls want to be safe and pleasant places for their customers. This is a sign of serious problems, is it not?
Suppose the owners of the shopping mall did decide to pursue the murderer. How much would it cost them to hire their own private investigator to do the job?
Far less than it costs to get the police to do the same thing. Police are bureaucrats who spend almost all their time writing down what happened. Like all bureaucrats, they work inefficiently and stupidly. I was recently arrested on a trumped-up assault charge (later dropped). It would have been laughable to see the amount of useless activity, except for the detail that they were doing it to me.
I would also assume that mall owners would have insurance against this kind of thing, as a matter of course. Which would spread the cost around among all mall owners.
No, it isn't, and if you think it is you clearly are looking at it from a very restricted point of view - the one I meant by the phrase "special pleading." Try Rousseau on the topic, and Locke, and Hume. Try Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man and the book he wrote that as an argument against, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. It's a feature of nearly every theory of government and society from every side of the political spectrum; it is, after all, what government is for. If not that, then what?
That sounds like blasphemy to me.
The rest of these people argue for limited government. Might make sense. The problem with limited government is that it turns, sooner or later, into unlimited government. And unlimited disorder.
You totally avoided talking to my example, BTW.
This used to be a mantra for Republicans, until they realized that a majority of voters are perfectly happy to eat from the trough.
Restraining federal government means more than trying to hold budget growth under 8% per year. It means stopping and even reversing the intrusive trends of the last 30 years. That's hardly anarchy. State and local governments can and should do a better job of administering programs of all kinds. The problem is that state governments have become a piglet on the teet as well.
OH COME ON. You know what I'm getting at. You want to play silly games, fine: the body is found behind a dumpster at a grocery store (private property). Point is, someone has been murdered, and who it is & who did it is not immediately obvious to anyone.
In an anarchic government, it's in the grocery store's owner's selfish interests to just move the body from behind the dumpster to into it, and make the problem vanish. We could say noble things about the law of God being written on people's hearts and the inherent goodness in people and blather on about murder being bad for business, but fact is that dealing with a dead body by the dumpster is NOT in the manager's contract, and said body can easily be made to go away.
How often are people "found dead" in shopping malls?
You don't know, do you? Perhaps the seemingly low rate is because the brightly-lit, highly-monitored, carefully-watched-because-millions-of-$$$-in-business-is-happening location tends to deter shady behavior (such an environment cannot be extended everywhere). Perhaps it's because any "found dead"s are quickly and quietly taken care of.
But we dirgress.
Answer the question: a murder happens, and neither the victim nor perpetrator are immediately known - who notifies next of kin, and who apprehends the murderer?
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