“Many feminists thought that the moral ideal of autonomy represented male but not female modes of moral reasoning,” Friedman says. “Most people saw autonomy as a separation of self from loved ones - a kind of selfishness. I see it in terms of self-determination, and I didn’t think it had to carry specifically masculine associations.”

“Autonomy has to be understood as embedded in social relationships,” Friedman says. “It’s about self-determination - living a life that reflects your values and wants and needs. The sources of self-determination include socially available options and socialization that enables us to be self-reflective about what matters most to us. If that means being in a committed relationship, or having children, it is still autonomy.”

The book [Autonomy Gender, Politics] addressed very real issues in chapters such as “Romantic Love and Personal Autonomy,” “Domestic Violence Against Women and Autonomy,” and “Cultural Minorities and Women’s Rights.”

“We need to change social institutions and practices so that women have a greater variety of opportunities to live fulfilling lives,” Friedman says. “But we should base those changes mainly on women’s perspectives on how their lives should be lived. Our culture needs to value autonomy for women, not just for men. If we followed these guidelines from a political standpoint, we would enlarge and diversify women’s social integration and improve the ways in which we socialize girls in our society.”

Friedman’s most recent research has shifted focus slightly. In one current project, she analyzes some of the work of Princeton University’s Philip Pettit, who promotes what he calls “non-domination” as an important political value in democratic societies. Friedman is examining such questions as what it means to be dominated, whether a political system should secure its people against all domination, and, especially, whether male domination is different from domination in general. Friedman plans to connect this new set of issues with the work she began in her book chapter about women and cultural minorities.

“What should we do when the traditions of cultural minorities in liberal democratic societies appear to be violating women’s rights?” Friedman asks. “How do we weigh the rights of cultural minorities against the rights of women within those minorities? These questions hint at how we are in the process of what I like to call a ‘globalization of morality,’ an emerging and progressive global dialogue about morality among people with diverse cultural and moral perspectives.”

Excerpts from Washington University in St. Louis [alumni magazine], spring 2006, pp. 16-19,
discussing Prof. Marilyn Friedman, author of
Autonomy, Gender, Politics
What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory
Political Correctness: For and Against
Women and Citizenship

But then RadGeek rebuts this argument by conceding that anarchies are not natural. To the contrary, RadGeek states that anarchies require “material and cultural preconditions” — even more elaborate preconditions than are required for existing forms of government.

Neither anarchy nor statism is natural. There is no natural political order, if “natural” means something like what we tend towards apart from or independently of culture; politics is a cultural artefact, and like all artefacts it has material and cultural preconditions. I didn’t say, and don’t think, that the material and cultural preconditions of flourishing anarchy are “even more elaborate” than the material and cultural preconditions of various forms of statism. They’re just different, and not all of them are currently present.

To the contrary, they create institutions specifically dedicated to the proposition that some people both within and beyond their borders will hold values OTHER than liberal democratic values; they call these institutions the “military” and the “police.”

Why do you think that anarchists don’t advocate participating in institutions for co-operative self-defense? They do (even pacifists; they just advocate different means). The only requirement is that those institutions not involve coercive methods and that they not make claims to sovereign authority. Actually existing stateless societies (medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland, Catalunia during the Spanish Civil War, etc.) had armed forces for defense; they just didn’t have standing government armies or police forces.

The problem that anarchists have with the military and the police are their aggressive and repressive functions, not their defensive function.

nobody.really:

I like wealth (among other things). In making my life decisions I considered various alternatives in terms of their likelihood of producing wealth, and I opted to pursue a professional degree.

I understand the concept of trade-offs. What I deny is that virtue is a good of the same sort that wealth or pleasure is (specifically, it’s what some ethicists have called a “side constraint” on the pursuit of goals, not just one goal among many to be pursued). The issue isn’t “going for broke” (which is just one more strategy, often a foolish one, for maximizing a good); it’s that you, personally, have a categorically binding obligation to do the right thing, not just to “maximize” the quantity of doing-the-right-thing going around in society as a whole. It’s about what kind of person you’re going to be, not what “quantities” of virtue you or your neighbors are going to accumulate. The nature of the thing is such that talk about trade-offs (and thus also talk about “going for broke”) does not make sense. Trading off a little bit of ethics now to get a greater quantity of righteousness later (how?), or worse yet more of other goods, is not prudent planning; it’s just moral treason.

[W]hen seeking to minimize (or maximize) a variable, the optimal strategy may be to pursue a second-best solution. So if you cannot tolerate any coercion - that is, if you draw no distinction between some coercion and total coercion - then I can understand that you’d pursue a strategy of avoiding a state. But if you want to MINIMIZE coercion, then I can well imagine that you’d want to consider having a state.

It’s not an issue of whether this maximizes liberty on the whole or minimizes coercion; coercion is something that each individual person is categorically obliged to abstain from, and liberty is something that each individual person has an inalienable right to exercise, independently of whether or not this “minimizes” the former and “maximizes” the latter on the whole.

Then I guess we understand each other. But just to be clear:

I like wealth (among other things). In making my life decisions I considered various alternatives in terms of their likelihood of producing wealth, and I opted to pursue a professional degree.

Admittedly, I did not think this was the best strategy for becoming the richest guy in the world. If I saw no distinction between being the second richest person in the world or being destitute, then I would have pursued a different strategy - perhaps buying every lottery ticket I could find. But instead I picked a “second-best” strategy, one designed to maximize not wealth, but likelihood of wealth. Sure, there will always be plenty of people more wealthy than I, but I’m reconciled to that.

I don’t mean to suggest that there are no circumstances in which I’d go for broke. I’m losing during the last seconds of the final game of the season: go for the Hail Mary play. The mafia will kill me if I can’t come up with a million dollars by next week: buy the lottery ticket. Incurable fatal disease: take the experimental drug. Wherever losing by an inch is the same as losing by a mile, go for it.

But for most purposes, I regard second-best as a lot better than 100th-best. Given the degree of freedom and diversity in the world, however, I’m not surprised to observe that people disagree about this. I sense that even if RadGeek shared my interest in wealth, I wouldn’t have seen him much during my long nights at the library, and he wouldn’t have seen me much while standing in line at the PowerBall window. Similar goals, different strategies.

I can’t fault RadGeek on the nobility of his aspirations. Please forgive the cliche, but good luck; you’re gonna need it.

Yeah, ok.

I was rebutting the argument that anarchies are “natural.” No one would argue that a French-speaking republic was “natural”; everyone would acknowledge that such a republic would have to be built. But if you assumed that anarchies are “natural,” then presumably no assembly is required! (Assembly - as in public meetings; get it? …anyway….) But the fact that we don’t observe any desirable anarchies suggests that 1) anarchies are not natural or 2) anarchies are not stable or 3) anarchies do not produce desirable places in which to live.

But then RadGeek rebuts this argument by conceding that anarchies are not natural. To the contrary, RadGeek states that anarchies require “material and cultural preconditions” - even more elaborate preconditions than are required for existing forms of government.

But RadGeek’s answer avoids the naturalism critique only by running headlong into the “freedom and diversity” critique. RadGeek correctly observes that liberal democracy does not spring easily into full flower; it requires a lot of cultural spadework. But liberal democracies do not deny the human impulse to freedom and diversity. To the contrary, they create institutions specifically dedicated to the proposition that some people both within and beyond their borders will hold values OTHER than liberal democratic values; they call these institutions the “military” and the “police.” It remains unclear how material and cultural preconditioning would control the Mafia or the Klan or the blitzkrieg.

But dear boy, you don’t have to think it. You don’t even have to be the one to do it. The point is that, faced with oppression or tyranny or banditry under anarchy, some group of farmers is going to get together, spit, and say “you know, if we each just gave 5 percent of our crop to a central body, and then the central body used it to hire soldiers to patrol each of our farms, that’d keep the bandits out.”

They’re welcome to arrange for the defense of their farms in this way if they want to do so. After all, those are their farms, so if they want to host armed patrols to protect it that’s their business. Although there are pacifist anarchists, I’m not one of them. You’ll notice that I listed armed self-defense as one of the options for ways to resist tyranny that don’t involve forming embryonic states. The important thing is that (1) farmers are not coerced into ponying up the money for the patrols, (2) farmers can refuse to allow the patrols access to their land, and (3) farmers can choose to arrange for a different means of defense if they decide that they’d prefer to. (N.B.: in the list of attributes I gave for miniature states, all of them are important. The example that you gave is not coercively funded, or violently enforced, and whether it’s permanent or unchallenged is thus far up to the farmers who support it.) Historically speaking, I doubt that they’d really want full-time mercenaries to tromp around in their fields; it’s expensive and usually unnecessary. This kind of stuff is what citizen militias used to be for.

Of course, you may very well be right that if you have a lot of organizations like this around, and people interact with them in much the way they interact with government police forces today, it’s unlikely to be conducive to maintaining liberty:

But I think they’re a lot more likely to just organize an entity that carries guns, and have it shoot their enemies. And once that starts, the entity itself will want to continue existing.

The difficulty with the approach you outline is that it assumes everyone is a trained theoretical anarchist with a distaste for hierarchy and a commitment to avoid statist solutions to their immediate problems. I don’t think that’s a realistic premise. You’re going to have folks out there whose first solution is “let’s form a government”. And governments have a way of growing.

But the simple answer to this is that anarchism has material and cultural preconditions for flourishing. That might seem like a liability, but it’s a liability that anarchy shares with most other political theories (democracy, for example, requires a population that’s at least minimally willing to, and interested in, participating politically in order to function; republican politics in general is supposed to work best when caste sentiment and class deference are weakest; most modern statist theories presuppose at least a certain respect for process and the rule of law; etc.). I certainly agree with you that a sudden transition to anarchy is not likely to be sustainable in the current cultural climate. But the current cultural climate will not always be current, and there are plenty of reasons to think that a number of the things you mention (lack of scruple about coercion, deference to ritualized hierarchies, adherence to traditional political forms, etc.) are not natural or inevitable facts, but rather facets of a culture that can and ought to be changed.

nobody.really:

I’m with you up until 3. But when seeking to minimize (or maximize) a variable, the optimal strategy may be to pursue a second-best solution.

You’ve actually misunderstood my argument if you think that I’m primarily making a point about how to “minimize a variable” or suggesting that the primary reason for anarchism is that it produces the least coercion on net in society. Some anarchists lean on that kind of consequentialist argument; I don’t.

To be clear, I think it’s true that anarchy is a necessary but insufficient condition for minimizing the total amount of coercion in a given society. But I don’t think that’s the primary reason to be an anarchist. The primary reason is (1) that it’s wrong for any one person to coerce any other peaceful person; (2) that the State, as such, exists by one group of people coercing another group of peaceful people; and (3) that peaceful people have no special obligation to defer to morally illegitimate commands. (1) and (2) together establish the moral illegitimacy of all governments, and (1), (2), and (3) together establish the moral legitimacy of ignoring, defying, or resisting arbitrary government demands. It’s not an issue of whether this maximizes liberty on the whole or minimizes coercion; coercion is something that each individual person is categorically obliged to abstain from, and liberty is something that each individual person has an inalienable right to exercise, independently of whether or not this “minimizes” the former and “maximizes” the latter on the whole.

… For if anyone demonstrated freedom of conscience and expression, it was Ayn Rand. …

Ayn Rand was not an anarchist. She said so in quite explicit and vituperative language (see e.g. her writings on Murray Rothbard). So her life decisions don’t say anything in particular about anarchism at all.

That said, the argument you offer is frankly a silly one. I’m pretty fed up with the U.S. government, but where else would I go, and why? All this tells you about anarchism or anarchists is that (1) anarchists have reasons, much like everyone else, to stay in their own homes rather than uprooting their whole lives to move somewhere else, and (2) there aren’t any stateless societies that are worthy enough of relocating to to overcome (1). Back around 1740 there were many French-speaking republicans, who opposed the absolute monarchy and feudal privilege in France, but who did not move out of France to live somewhere else without an absolute monarchy and feudalist privileges. So what? Is that supposed to prove that late Bourbon monarchy was the ideal political system at the time? Or does it simply prove that sometimes your options suck and you have to go with the least-worst that’s available until something new comes up?

There’s a lot of points that I haven’t answered yet; it’ll have to wait a while longer, I fear.

In the absence of a legal system, what are “principles of nuisance”?

Are you suggesting that people suffering the local effects of pollution would have an easier time demanding compensation in the absence of statutes and courts and law enforcement? Perhaps, through threats of mob violence. But then, mobs could always extort money from people whether or not they had a grievance. And - call me a pessimist - that’s pretty much what I’d expect.

Oh well; nobody promised that anarchism would solve all the problems in the world….

A fair concession. But what you fail to concede is that anarchy basically eliminates the tools by which these kinds of problems may be addressed.

People who have a rather simple concept of property - what I do is my business, and nobody else’s - may find this appealing. People who study property law know that property is socially defined, and what you do can very well be other people’s business. Anarchy makes dealing with other people’s business much harder. That’s it’s blessing and its curse.

But dear boy, you don’t have to think it. You don’t even have to be the one to do it. The point is that, faced with oppression or tyranny or banditry under anarchy, some group of farmers is going to get together, spit, and say “you know, if we each just gave 5 percent of our crop to a central body, and then the central body used it to hire soldiers to patrol each of our farms, that’d keep the bandits out.”

Fine, you think the farmers would be better off having a vigil or going on strike or some other non-coercive, non-statist method. But I think they’re a lot more likely to just organize an entity that carries guns, and have it shoot their enemies. And once that starts, the entity itself will want to continue existing.

The difficulty with the approach you outline is that it assumes everyone is a trained theoretical anarchist with a distaste for hierarchy and a commitment to avoid statist solutions to their immediate problems. I don’t think that’s a realistic premise. You’re going to have folks out there whose first solution is “let’s form a government”. And governments have a way of growing.

The primary arguments for anarchism are not strategic arguments, but moral ones….

Got it. 1. Coercion bad. 2. States use coercion. => 3. States bad.

I’m with you up until 3. But when seeking to minimize (or maximize) a variable, the optimal strategy may be to pursue a second-best solution. So if you cannot tolerate any coercion - that is, if you draw no distinction between some coercion and total coercion - then I can understand that you’d pursue a strategy of avoiding a state. But if you want to MINIMIZE coercion, then I can well imagine that you’d want to consider having a state - if for no other reason than to have a system for displacing more coercive states.

As people have noted, the fact that you are not coerced by your state does not mean you are not coerced. You note that, when faced with an oppressor, you’d shoot him. No evidence, no due process, no proportional punishment, no chance for rehabilitation. Just vigil ante justice. The definition of “oppressor” is “whatever the guy with his finger on the trigger sez it is.” And everyone is free to draw their own conclusions about you. How exactly does this result in a less coercive world than the statist world we live in today?

I hate to trot out the Love-It-Or-Leave-It argument, but aren’t US anarchists generally free to flee to whatever anarchy havens suits them? And if, perchance, they find no anarchy havens to their liking, perhaps that fact alone will express - more eloquently than anything I could say - something about the nature of anarchy. For if anyone demonstrated freedom of conscience and expression, it was Ayn Rand. She railed against the state her whole life. She was lionized; she was despised. Now, why do you suppose someone like her wouldn’t move off to some land with no central government and lots of good ol’ vigil ante justice…?

I believe in revealed preference: what people do means more than what they say. The fact that Rand chose to live in her adopted homeland of the US reveals something about her own conclusions on this matter.

Exactly right. If you dissolved government overnight, what would happen is that people would organize into defense collectives for protection. In time, mergers between these defense collectives would result effectively in small nation-states.

And about that air pollution thingy…?

What about it? Some forms of air pollution (e.g. pollution from small, decentralized sources such as automobiles) would be harder to limit under anarchy. Others (e.g. air pollution by large, centralized polluters such as oil, gas, and coal operations) would be easier to limit because the companies wouldn’t be subsidized and immunized from liability by the State. It’s currently very hard for people suffering from the local effects of polluters (in, for example, Port Arthur and other refinery towns in Texas) to demand compensation from the people who are poisoning them, because as long as the companies can convince bureaucrats that they’re dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s under the ex ante pollution regulations, they bear very little risk of being held liable for the actual effects that they are having on people.

The best thing to do about air pollution is use demands for compensation (under principles of nuisance and documented harms) to internalize the costs of air pollution and require the polluters to bear those costs. That won’t always be easy (some major sources of pollution are decentralized and thus hard or impossible to deal with through direct means. In that case you’ll have to lean on cultural criticism, moral persuasion, economic boycotts, technological development, etc. Oh well; nobody promised that anarchism would solve all the problems in the world; any political theory that promises to is guaranteed to be bunkum. All I suggested is that it will solve or ameliorate some of them; and in particular that putting questions to legislators who don’t personally bear any of the costs of their decisions is typically going to make free-rider problems worse, not better. (Again, check out the riders on any large federal spending bill if you don’t believe me. I can think of several big, politically-connected polluters, for example, who wouldn’t be receiving a cent of my money if I had a say in how my money got spent.)

I’d like to pull back from discussing resisting tyranny, and look more at the original topic of this thread (albeit applied to anarchy this time). You wrote:

For just about any form of successful oppression, it’s hard to see how introducing the State will dampen the problem rather than amplifying it.

Someone who is oppressed by lack of affordable medical care will have that oppression significantly lifted if they live in France, where there’s an effective state-orchestrated medical care system available even to poor citizens. Nor is France the only example of a state with effective universal medical care.

There are many states - France again, also Sweden, the Netherlands, and others - which have greatly reduced rates of both child poverty and elder poverty. Insofar as poverty is oppressive, this is an example of states acting to reduce oppression.

In an earlier post, you wrote:

You might say, “Oh, but if they wouldn’t put aside that money if they’re not forced to, because they have all these other pressing costs that they need to pay now.” There are certainly cases where that’s true, but it doesn’t follow from that that being forced to put the money aside is the best thing for them. Having lived on around $5,000 a year myself (due to a combination of low-paying jobs and long-term unemployment), I can tell you that when you don’t have enough money to spare for savings, being forced to put the money aside anyway has a direct consequence: debt.

When we were living like that, in Boston, we didn’t actually go far into debt - probably because no one would have given us credit, anyway. We did go into debt to our landlord, and to the phone company, but that’s not the kind of debt that follows you around your whole life.

If (ex hypothesi) I’m being forced to put aside money that otherwise could have paid off current bills, then those bills still have to be paid off somehow, and when I don’t have the money now, that means they have to go on the card. And the debt accumulates a lot quicker than whatever “returns” I’m supposedly getting on my “investment” in Social Security and Medicare.

Since Social Security, unless you become disabled, doesn’t kick in until fairly late in life, of course current debts will show up quicker. That doesn’t show that the return of a guaranteed income supplement for as long as you live won’t end up being more important to well-being in the long run.

If you have to live on $5200 a year (I changed the figure to make the math easier), that’s $100 a week. Payroll taxes will reduce that to about $ $94 a week. As someone who has lived on that kind of income (although not in many years, thank goodness), I know that the difference between $94 a week and $100 a week is negligible. In either case, you can’t afford to pay all the bills.

I don’t understand what replaces social security, in an anarchist system. Could you go into that in a bit more detail? And also, what prevents a community from deciding by informal consensus that no one will sell property to Jews?

There are lots of means (nonviolent civil disobedience, direct action, boycotts, general strikes, moral agitation, cultural criticism, armed neighborhood defense, etc.) that people have resisted oppression, sometimes successfully, without having to become some sort of emperium in emperio to do it.

Then let’s check that historical record. Could we get a list of the relentless tyrannies stopped by anarchists during the 20th century and compare it to the list of tyrannies stopped by states?

I am seriously suggesting that some people will be free riders if you let them.

The question is why you think that “people” have this problem but legislatures don’t (legislatures are, remember, made of people). Free-rider problems become more of a problem, not less, when the people making decisions about how money should spent bear no personal cost for how it is spent. If you’re seriously concerned about the free-rider problem, then you need to think harder if you think that externalizing costs for the decision-makers is the best solution to it.

Only if you think that the only way to resist oppression is to create or take over permanent, centralized, coercively funded, violently enforced, territorial, unchallenged power structures. I don’t; I don’t think this is even a particularly effective way of resisting evil under statism and I don’t see why it would be a particularly effective way of resisting evil under anarchy either. There are lots of means (nonviolent civil disobedience, direct action, boycotts, general strikes, moral agitation, cultural criticism, armed neighborhood defense, etc.) that people have resisted oppression, sometimes successfully, without having to become some sort of emperium in emperio to do it. I see no reason why these methods wouldn’t be even more important in anarchy, and no reason (other than double standards of the sort I mentioned) to think that there are special problems of defense against tyranny for anarchism that don’t exist under any constitutional theory whatsoever.

Many of the common lines of criticism against anarchist theories succeed only by holding anarchy and anarchists to higher standards than the State or statists are held to. The line of how anarchists intend to stop tyrants (petty or grand) is one of them. Nobody in the world, anarchist or statist, has a perfect theory of how to resist oppression; democratic states, republican states, aristocratic states, constitutional monarchies, absolute monarchies, grand empires, humble city-states, stateless societies (medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland), etc. have all, at some time or another, fallen into tyranny or into civil war; have been conquered in war; have systematized and ritualized forms of violent oppression by one class or caste or sex over another. Revolutions fail; societies decay; things fall apart. Judging from the results of the late unlamented century, most of the powers that be don’t even have a good theory of how to stop that: hundreds of millions of people were murdered because major powers engaged in tyranny and imperial warfare, civil war, terror famines, and genocide, and because even when they were not actively doing these things themselves, they were either powerless or unwilling to do anything to stop the others. So while these are reasonable questions to ask of any theory of social life, a bit of recognition that the topic is hard and that it’s unfair to hold any theory to the standard of needing a complete solution to the problem of evil, would go a long way.

That said, here are some things that anarchists typically stress.

(1) For just about any form of successful oppression, it’s hard to see how introducing the State will dampen the problem rather than amplifying it. If there is a discernible ruling class then it’s a matter of course that they’ll have disproportionate power over the apparatus of the State; if you have a centralized Leviathan that is able to assert and enforce its claims to sole authority then that means a corresponding increase in the capacity of oppressors to violently enforce their will over the oppressed. Without a central state, there is no guarantee that the oppressed will be able to successfully resist the aggression of oppressors, but when a central state with unchallenged police power, military power, intelligence capabilities, etc. is systematically turned against them, the prospects are correspondingly much bleaker. You might say, “But look, what that means is that the oppressed should have access to state power so that they can defend themselves. Wouldn’t that be great?” But then you need to (1) figure out how they are going to get it (magic won’t do) and (2) how whatever means help them to get it (organizing, moral agitation, cultural change, nonviolent resistance, etc.) wouldn’t work just as well, or better, if it were focused on direct action rather than on trying to influence or take control of government decision-making bodies.

(2) As a strategy for resisting potential new forms of oppression, a Leviathan state also seems like a risky strategy at the very best. Tyrants very often solidify their tyranny by taking over centralized structures of power that were already in place; it’s much harder to build an effective tyranny from scratch than it is to consolidate power over existing police, intelligence, military, etc. forces and then to turn them to your ends. In anarchy, any projects or organizations for self-defense are voluntary, decentralized, and don’t claim a monopoly on legitimate authority; that means that if a tyrant tries to subvert the existing structures there aren’t institutional barriers to withdrawing from them and setting up new ones that aren’t subject to her or his will. Under territorial states, no such option is available: there’s only one target that needs to be seized, and once it’s seized, the subjects of the state can’t do much of anything about it. The “stability” of an organized power structure is only a virtue if that power structure is, on the whole, benevolent; if it’s malevolent then the last thing you want is for its hegemony to be stable and unchallenged. The problem is how to protect yourself from the malefactors once you’ve already ceded your ability to resist back when times were allegedly good. Actually existing states don’t have a very good record on this count.

(3) To be quite frank, nearly no State in all of recorded history (certainly not the United States, for one) could seriously be claimed to be a bunch of ordinary people banding together to protect themselves from marauders. The band of slavers and genocidaires who founded the U.S. government, to take one example, were pretty explicit that they aimed for the federal government to protect and systematize their own marauding against innocent Africans, African-Americans, and Indians not taxed. It’s not much different elsewhere — the people who oversee the formation of states are typically powerful and concentrated interests who hope to, and do, turn the newly-formed State to the pursuit of their own interests at the expense of the less powerful. The popular liberal myth of government by compact wouldn’t morally justify the State, even if it were true of actually existing governments; but it’s not true. The only “compacts” made have been pirate’s codes, and nothing more.

(4) The strategic question of how to create, sustain, and defend anarchy is an important one to ask, and a difficult one to answer. But it ought to be understood that it is not, actually, the primary issue involved in whether or not anarchism is true. The primary arguments for anarchism are not strategic arguments, but moral ones; it’s not that anarchy is valued because it’s useful to attaining some other goods, but rather because violent coercion is wrong, whatever its effects may be, and the princes, potentates, and presidents of the world make claims of authority over other people that can only be, and are, backed up by violent coercion. So demonstrating that there are tricky problems for anarchists to solve doesn’t mean that anarchy isn’t the right thing to aim for; it just means that what you ought to aim for might be tricky to hit. But nobody said that the right thing has to be easy, or that achieving it has to be effortless. The emancipation of women, civil rights, the abolition of slavery, religious toleration, democracy, etc. have all been difficult propositions, tricky to achieve and difficult to sustain in the face of coordinated and unrelenting resistance. That raises questions about strategy and tactics, but it doesn’t provide any reason for thinking that the goal itself ought to be abandoned.

Which is how we got into this mess in the first place.

Shoot them. Jesus.

If your objection to anarchism is that it does not provide magic wands for resisting evil, then anarchism stands guilty as charged. But so does statism: magic wands like that don’t exist, and given the abattoir that was the 20th century, I hardly think that the State has a very good historical record of providing people with the means to stop relentless tyrants.

Who exactly would have stopped the industries from polluting at the maximum rate possible other than the government? And yes, even in places where the government doesn’t favor industries, the industries still pollute. Only when you reach the level of anarchy and chaos where it is pointless to try to build a factory because some one will tear it down for scrap metal do you stop getting polluting industry, and even then the smaller scale industry pollutes. Everyone tries to externalize their costs (often in the hopes that they can externalize them into oblivion rather than with full knowledge that they are dumping them on someone else), and lots of externalized costs end up as pollution. And if you think that I’m totalizing or universalizing when I say everyone externalizes their costs, find me someone who converts their CO2 back into O2, and who decompresses their foot steps as they walk through a forest.

I was once an anarchist, but I’m finding myself in complete agreement with nobody.really. Anarchist principles are good cautionary principles to use as limitations on statist power, and they are good guidelines for running small to middling groups, but there are too many questions concerning the structuring of larger groups that they can’t meaningfully answer, or that they answer incorrectly.

Nobody.really pointed out that there are always people who behave badly in the absence of government force, some of whom form the worst sort of tyrannical mini-governments. This doesn’t require any sort of innate predisposition to do so or anything along those lines, it merely requires a recognition that no community is ever successfully at completely inculcating all of its members with its beliefs and principles. People are capable of coming up with a very wide variety of ways of acting, and behaving horribly and seizing other people’s stuff can be an effective method of surviving. People who come up with it are able to make a mess of the lives of everyone around them, and are often enough able to push the culture over into one in which their behavior is acceptable. So, what do you do to stop that?

The anarchist response seems to be that you should form temporary voluntary associations for the purpose of doing violence to those who would do violence to others, and that is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. It is easy for such an idea to lead directly into clan warfare, where we do violence to you because you did violence to us and back and forth. Also, temporary voluntary associations of violence aren’t as effective as trained soldiers, so if one sub-group gets onto the kick of doing violence for power, it will quickly be better than most of the voluntary temporary associations that try to put it down. Finally, voluntary temporary associations arise on the basis of the perceived need, which leaves open the possibility of gaming that perceived need.

Creating a permanent structure for how to handle violence, who gets to handle the violence, etc, produces a more stable situation, where when my neighbor decides to take my stuff, I know who to turn to, and I know with reasonable certainty that the powers that be will side with the one who has the legitimate right to the stuff.

Obviously, the powers that be often end up being tyrants, but the question of how to prevent them from becoming tyrants (or how to stop them from being tyrants once they become them) is not really answered by saying let their never be powers that be in the first place.

How, under anarchist principles, do you prevent the rise of tyrants? How do you prevent the development of clan feuds?

In relation to taxes, it seems to me that taxes, when used in either an egalitarian redistributive manner to balance out developing inequalities, or when used to purchase public goods, or both, are one of the things that serve to reduce power imbalances which lead to governments becoming unjust servants of entrenched non-governmental power, and therefore they seem to me to be a good which should be balanced against ownership rights. The worse a state becomes, the more taxes have to be coerced, but in a fully functioning state, I think most people view their taxes as merely an inconvenience and at best as a fair trade of fees for services. However, fully voluntary taxes lead directly into a collective action problem, where everyone’s individual actions for their own minor benefit lead to everyone being worse off. This is why very few organizations have fully voluntary membership fees.

Concerning your argument about pollution…it may be true that the state has promoted laws to clean air…but will air be cleaner in the first place if the state hasn´t favored oil cartels and big buisness industries who contaminate it?