The Problem of Political Authority

The Problem of Political Authority⚑

Modern states commonly deploy coercion in a wide array of circumstances in which the resort to force would clearly be wrong for any private agent. What entitles the state to behave in this manner? And why should citizens obey its commands? This book examines theories of political authority, from the social contract theory, to theories of democratic authorization, to fairness- and consequence-based theories. Ultimately, no theory of authority succeeds, and thus no government has the kind of authority often ascribed to governments.

The author goes on to discuss how voluntary and competitive institutions could provide the central goods for the sake of which the state is often deemed necessary, including law, protection from private criminals, and national security. An orderly and livable society thus does not require acquiescence in the illusion of political authority.

Quotes⚑

This book addresses the foundational problem of political philosophy: the problem of accounting for the authority of government.

Nearly all political discourse centers on what sort of policies the government should make, and nearly all of it – whether in political philosophy or in popular forums – presupposes that the government has a special kind of authority to issue commands to the rest of society. When we argue about what the government’s immigration policy ought to be, for example, we normally presuppose that the state has the right to control movement into and out of the country. When we argue about the best tax policy, we presuppose that the state has the right to take wealth from individuals. When we argue about health care reform, we presuppose that the state has the right to decide how health care should be provided and paid for.

Let us begin with a short political story. You live in a small village with a crime problem. Vandals roam the village, stealing and destroying people’s property. No one seems to be doing anything about it. So one day, you and your family decide to put a stop to it. You take your guns and go looking for vandals. Periodically, you catch one, take him back to your house at gunpoint, and lock him in the basement. You provide the prisoners with food so they don’t starve, but you plan to keep them locked in the basement for a few years to teach them a lesson. After operating in this way for a few weeks, you decide to make the rounds of the neighborhood, starting with your next door neighbor. As he answers the door, you ask, ‘Have you noticed the reduction in crime in the last few weeks?’ He nods. ‘Well, that is thanks to me.’ You explain your anticrime program. Noting the wary look on your neighbor’s face, you continue. ‘Anyway, I’m here because it’s time to collect your contribution to the crime prevention fund. Your bill for the month is $100.’ As your neighbor stares at you, making no apparent move to hand over the money, you patiently explain that, should he refuse to make the required payment, you will unfortunately have to label him a criminal, at which point he will be subject to long-term confinement in your basement, along with the aforementioned vandals.

Let us begin with a short political story. You live in a small village with a crime problem. Vandals roam the village, stealing and destroying people’s property. No one seems to be doing anything about it. So one day, you and your family decide to put a stop to it. You take your guns and go looking for vandals. Periodically, you catch one, take him back to your house at gunpoint, and lock him in the basement. You provide the prisoners with food so they don’t starve, but you plan to keep them locked in the basement for a few years to teach them a lesson. After operating in this way for a few weeks, you decide to make the rounds of the neighborhood, starting with your next door neighbor. As he answers the door, you ask, ‘Have you noticed the reduction in crime in the last few weeks?’ He nods. ‘Well, that is thanks to me.’ You explain your anticrime program. Noting the wary look on your neighbor’s face, you continue. ‘Anyway, I’m here because it’s time to collect your contribution to the crime prevention fund. Your bill for the month is $100.’ As your neighbor stares at you, making no apparent move to hand over the money, you patiently explain that, should he refuse to make the required payment, you will unfortunately have to label him a criminal, at which point he will be subject to long-term confinement in your basement, along with the aforementioned vandals. Indicating the pistol at your hip, you note that you are prepared to take him by force if necessary. Supposing you take this tack with all of your neighbors, what sort of reception could you expect? Would most cheerfully give over their assigned share of the costs of crime prevention? Not likely. In all probability, you would observe the following. First, almost none would agree that they owe you anything. While some might pay up for fear of imprisonment in your basement and a few might pay up out of hostility toward the vandals, almost none would consider themselves duty bound to do so. Those who refused to pay would more likely be praised than condemned for standing up to you. Second, most would consider your actions

Let us begin with a short political story. You live in a small village with a crime problem. Vandals roam the village, stealing and destroying people’s property. No one seems to be doing anything about it. So one day, you and your family decide to put a stop to it. You take your guns and go looking for vandals. Periodically, you catch one, take him back to your house at gunpoint, and lock him in the basement. You provide the prisoners with food so they don’t starve, but you plan to keep them locked in the basement for a few years to teach them a lesson. After operating in this way for a few weeks, you decide to make the rounds of the neighborhood, starting with your next door neighbor. As he answers the door, you ask, ‘Have you noticed the reduction in crime in the last few weeks?’ He nods. ‘Well, that is thanks to me.’ You explain your anticrime program. Noting the wary look on your neighbor’s face, you continue. ‘Anyway, I’m here because it’s time to collect your contribution to the crime prevention fund. Your bill for the month is $100.’ As your neighbor stares at you, making no apparent move to hand over the money, you patiently explain that, should he refuse to make the required payment, you will unfortunately have to label him a criminal, at which point he will be subject to long-term confinement in your basement, along with the aforementioned vandals. Indicating the pistol at your hip, you note that you are prepared to take him by force if necessary. Supposing you take this tack with all of your neighbors, what sort of reception could you expect? Would most cheerfully give over their assigned share of the costs of crime prevention? Not likely. In all probability, you would observe the following. First, almost none would agree that they owe you anything. While some might pay up for fear of imprisonment in your basement and a few might pay up out of hostility toward the vandals, almost none would consider themselves duty bound to do so. Those who refused to pay would more likely be praised than condemned for standing up to you. Second, most would consider your actions outrageous. Your demands for payment would be condemned as naked extortion, and your confinement of those who refused to pay as kidnapping. The very outrageousness of your conduct, combined with your deluded presumption that the rest of the village would recognize an obligation to support you, would cause many to question your sanity.

What does this story have to do with political philosophy? In the story, you behaved like a rudimentary government. Though you did not take on all the functions of a typical, modern state, you assumed two of its most central roles: you punished people who violated others’ rights or disobeyed your commands, and you collected nonvoluntary contributions to finance your activities.

Governments are considered ethically permitted to do things that no nongovernmental person or organization may do.

Why do we accord this special moral status to government, and are we justified in so doing? This is the problem of political authority.

Political authority (hereafter, just ‘authority’) is the hypothesized moral property in virtue of which governments may coerce people in certain ways not permitted to anyone else and in virtue of which citizens must obey governments in situations in which they would not be obligated to obey anyone else.

For example, the law prohibits murder, and we have a moral duty not to murder. But this does not suffice to establish that we have ‘political obligations’, because we would be morally obligated not to murder even if there were no law against it. But there are other cases in which, according to popular opinion, we are obligated to do things precisely because the law commands them, and we would not be obligated to do those things if they were not legally required.

At the end of the chain must come a threat that the violator literally cannot defy. The system as a whole must be anchored by a nonvoluntary intervention, a harm that the state can impose regardless of the individual’s choices.

That anchor is provided by physical force. Even the threat of imprisonment requires enforcement: how can the state ensure that the criminal goes to the prison? The answer lies in coercion, involving actual or threatened bodily injury or, at a minimum, physical pushing or pulling of the individual’s body to the location of imprisonment.

On the other hand, many possible reasons for coercion are clearly inadequate. If you have a friend who eats too many potato chips, you may try to convince him to give them up. But if he won’t listen, you may not force him to stop. If you admire your neighbor’s car, you may offer to buy it from him. But if he won’t sell, you may not threaten him with violence.

Suppose you announce that you believe a neighboring town is building some very destructive weapons, weapons they might one day use to terrorize other villages. To prevent this from happening, you round up a few like-minded villagers and travel to the neighboring town, where you violently depose the mayor, blowing up some buildings and predictably killing several innocent people in the process. If you behaved in this way, you would be labeled a terrorist and murderer, and calls for your execution or life imprisonment would likely abound. But when the government behaves in this way, its behavior is labeled ‘war’, and many support it.

Suppose now that, amidst all your other unusual activities, you decide to start supporting charity. You find a charity that helps the poor. Unfortunately, you believe your village has not contributed enough to this charity voluntarily, so you take to forcibly extracting money from your neighbors and handing it over to the charity.

if citizens have agreed to pay the government for its services and have agreed to be subjected to coercion if they fail to pay, then it is permissible for the government to force its citizens to pay.

A third form of implicit consent is what I call ‘consent through presence’, whereby one indicates agreement to a proposal merely by remaining in some location.

Similarly, if one calls the police to ask for assistance or protection, if one takes another person to court, if one voluntarily sends one’s children to public schools, or if one takes advantage of government social welfare programs, then one is voluntarily accepting governmental benefits. It can then be argued that one implicitly accepts the conditions known to be attached to the having of a government – that one should help pay the monetary costs of government and obey the laws of the government.

Not necessarily. For example one could just want to recover part of what was stolen from them.

1.  Valid consent requires a reasonable way of opting out. All parties to any agreement must have the option to reject the agreement without sacrificing anything to which they have a right.

2.  Explicit dissent trumps alleged implicit consent. A valid implicit agreement does not exist if one explicitly states that one does not agree.

I announce that anyone who remains at my party must agree to help clean up. Suppose that after my announcement, you reply, ‘I do not agree.’ I then ask you to leave, but you refuse and instead remain until the end of the party. Are you then obligated to help clean up? You did not agree to clean up, since you explicitly stated that you did not agree (how much clearer could you have been?). Nevertheless, it is plausible that you are obligated to help clean up – not because you agreed to do so, but because I have the right to set conditions on the use of my house, including the condition that those who use it help clean it. This derives not from an agreement but from my property right over the house.

3.  An action can be taken as indicating agreement to some scheme, only if one can be assumed to believe that, if one did not take that action, the scheme would not be imposed upon one.

4.  Contractual obligation is mutual and conditional. A contract normally places both parties under an obligation to each other, and one party’s rejection of his contractual obligation releases the other party from her obligation.

2.5.1   The difficulty of opting out Begin with the first condition on valid agreements: all parties to a contract must have a reasonable way of opting out. What are the available means of opting out of the social contract? There is only one: one must vacate the territory controlled by the state.

To leave one’s country, one must generally secure the permission of some other state to enter its territory, and most states impose restrictions on immigration. In addition, some individuals lack the financial resources to move to the country of their choice. Those who can move may fail to do so due to attachments to family, friends, and home. Finally, if one moves to another country, one will merely become subject to another government.

We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.

how can someone be required to give up home and job and leave all friends and family behind to express disagreement with a contract?

Here is one answer: perhaps the state owns all the territory over which it claims jurisdiction.

For illustration, consider the case of the United States. In this case, the state’s control over ‘its’ territory derives from (1) the earlier expropriation of that land by European colonists from the people who originally occupied it and (2) the state’s present coercive power over the individual landowners who received title to portions of that territory, handed down through the generations from the original expropriators. This does not seem to give rise to a legitimate property right on the part of the U.S. government.12 Even if we overlook source (1), source (2), which applies to all governments, is not a legitimate basis for a property claim.

I conclude that the first condition on valid contracts is violated by the social contract.

The failure to recognize explicit dissent

The absence of mutual obligation

The state, in turn, is supposed to assume an obligation to the citizen, to enforce the citizen’s rights, including protecting the citizen from criminals and hostile foreign governments. Does the state ever fail in this duty? What happens when it does?

individual has no duty to the state under that contract. If the contract somehow holds only between the state and the public at large, then perhaps ‘the public at large’ owes something to the state, but no individual does.

If the contract somehow holds only between the state and the public at large, then perhaps ‘the public at large’ owes something to the state, but no individual does.

Perhaps you would have accepted the social contract if you had been given a choice. But you were not. This makes your relationship with the government a nonvoluntary, noncontractual one, regardless of whether you are actually happy with the relationship.

However, there are circumstances under which hypothetical consent is morally efficacious, circumstances in which the fact that someone ‘would have agreed’ to some procedure can render it permissible to perform the procedure, where the procedure is of a type that normally requires consent. Suppose that an unconscious patient has been brought to a hospital, in need of surgery to save his life. Under ordinary circumstances, physicians must obtain the patient’s informed consent before operating. In this situation, insistence on this principle would preclude the application of lifesaving medical care, as the patient is unable to either consent to or dissent from the treatment. In such a case, it is generally acknowledged that the doctors should proceed despite the lack of consent. The most natural explanation appeals to the reasonable belief that the patient would consent to the lifesaving procedure if he were able to do so.

Once we recognize the unfeasibility of achieving unanimous consent to any nontrivial social arrangement, we might turn instead to majority consent. Can the agreement only of a majority of society’s members – whether broad agreement to have a government or agreement to have specific policies or personnel – confer authority on government?

For example, is it ethically permissible to release air pollution, say from one’s automobile, or does this violate the rights of those who will inhale the pollutants? It is plausible that one may release certain levels and kinds of pollution but not excessive or excessively toxic pollution. But exactly how much pollution may one release and of what kinds? It is not credible that the natural principles of justice determine unique answers to all questions of this kind nor, if they do, that individuals can reliably apprehend these answers by reflection.

I claim that one may break the law when what the law commands is not independently morally required and no serious negative consequences will result.

would be bad if generally practiced. But in other cases, the principle seems absurd. Suppose I decide to become a professional philosopher. This seems permissible. But what if everybody did this? Everyone would philosophize all day, and we would all starve.

In the United States, it is illegal to provide legal advice to people without admission to the bar (even if you explicitly inform your advisees that you have not been admitted and they want your advice anyway). It is illegal to buy an hour of labor for less than $7.25. Or to buy sex for any amount of money. Or to sell packaged food without listing the number of calories it contains on the package. Or to run a private company that delivers mail to individuals’ mailboxes. It is illegal to sell stevia as a food additive, though legal to sell it as a ‘dietary supplement’. And so on.

The state has the right, at most, to coercively impose correct and just policies to prevent very serious harms.24 No one has the right to coercively enforce counterproductive or useless policies nor to enforce policies aimed at goals of lesser import.

The state may be entitled to collect taxes, to administer a system of police and courts to protect society from individual rights violators, and to provide military defense. In doing so, the state and its agents may take only the minimal funds and employ only the minimal coercion necessary.

The state may not go on to coercively impose paternalistic or moralistic laws, policies motivated by rent seeking, or policies aimed at promoting unnecessary goods, such as support for the arts or a space program.

Sam is opposed to cigarette smoking due to its severe health harms. Not content merely to avoid cigarettes himself, he issues a proclamation to his community that no one may smoke. After the proclamation, Sam catches you smoking, kidnaps you at gunpoint, and locks you in his basement. You share the basement with thieves, rapists, and murderers for the next year, until you are released. The person who sold you the cigarettes is locked in the basement for the next six years.

7.1.3   Rent seeking Rent seeking is behavior designed to extract wealth from others, especially through the vehicle of the state, without providing compensatory benefits in return.

Rent seeking is behavior designed to extract wealth from others, especially through the vehicle of the state, without providing compensatory benefits in return.

–  Prescription drug laws. These laws transfer money from consumers to doctors and pharmacists. If a person wishes to buy a prescription drug, he must first pay a doctor to see him and give him permission to buy it.

–  Subsidies for college education. These increase the demand for college education far above the market level and thereby transfer resources to colleges and universities. (The author is grateful for the funds that you have provided him.)

Archer asks Sam for some financial assistance, so Sam goes out, mugs some people, and gives the money to Archer.

7.1.4   Immigration Marvin is in need of food, without which he will suffer from malnutrition or starvation.8 He plans to travel to a nearby marketplace, where he will be able to trade for food. But before he can reach the marketplace, he is accosted by Sam, who does not want Marvin to trade in the marketplace,

Therefore, redistribution of wealth from high- to low-income persons will reduce a society’s total investment rate in favor of near-term consumption. This will reduce a society’s rate of economic growth.

The American poor, for example, are only poor relative to other Americans;

Some would object that if all police officers took my arguments to heart, then all would either quit or get themselves fired, which would be much worse for society than having police who enforce both just and unjust laws. But surely, long before all police officers had resigned or been fired, the government would accede to the need for reform and repeal the unjust laws that were causing it to lose its police force, or at least allow the police to refrain from enforcing those laws.

A soldier should likewise refuse to fight in an unjust war.

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.

In the absence of government, protection agencies would arise for the same reason that most businesses arise in a free market; namely, that there is a need which people are willing to pay to have satisfied.

One important kind of dispute occurs when a person is accused of a crime which he denies committing. Another type occurs when people disagree over whether a particular type of conduct ought to be tolerated; for instance, I may think my neighbor is playing his music too loud, while he thinks the volume is just fine. A third type concerns the terms of business relationships, including disputes about the interpretation of contracts.

violent conflict tends to be very dangerous for both parties;

Business managers, however, are considerably more uniform than the general population. They tend to share two traits in particular: a strong desire to generate profits for their businesses, and a reasonable awareness of the effective means of doing so.

Employees of a security agency have their own individual wills, distinct from the goals of the agency. If management decided to attack another agency solely to put a competitor out of business, widespread desertion is the most probable result. There are two reasons for this. First, most human beings are opposed to undertaking very large risks to their own lives for the sake of maximizing profits for their boss.

ii)  Due to their monopolistic positions, governments can afford to make extremely large and costly errors without fear of being supplanted.

But why should there not be agencies devoted to protecting criminals from their victims’ attempts to secure justice? What asymmetry between criminals and peaceful cooperators makes it more feasible, profitable, or otherwise attractive for an agency to protect ordinary people than to protect criminals?

10.4.1   The profitability of enforcing rights There are at least three important asymmetries that favor the protection of noncriminal persons over criminals. First, far more people wish to be protected against crime than wish to be protected in committing crimes. Almost no one desires to be a crime victim, while only a few desire to be criminals. Second, the harms suffered by victims of crime are typically far greater than the benefits enjoyed by those who commit crimes. Ordinary people would therefore be willing to pay more to avoid being victimized than criminals would be willing to pay for the chance to victimize others. In virtue of these first two conditions, there is far more money to be made in the business of protection against criminals than in the business of protection for criminals. Given that the two ‘products’ exclude each other – if one product is effectively supplied in the marketplace, then the other necessarily is not – it is the less profitable one that will fail to be supplied. If a rogue protection agency decides to buck the trend by supporting criminals, it will find itself locked in perpetual and hopeless conflict with far more profitable and numerous protection agencies financed by noncriminal customers. The third asymmetry is that criminals choose to commit crimes, whereas crime victims do not choose to be victimized. Criminals, in other words, intentionally engage in behavior guaranteed to bring them into conflict with others. From the standpoint of a protection agency, this is an unattractive feature in a client, since the more conflicts there are in which the agency is called upon to protect clients, the higher the agency’s costs will be.

Offering protection for criminals is analogous to offering fire insurance for arsonists.

10.4.1   The profitability of enforcing rights There are at least three important asymmetries that favor the protection of noncriminal persons over criminals. First, far more people wish to be protected against crime than wish to be protected in committing crimes. Almost no one desires to be a crime victim, while only a few desire to be criminals. Second, the harms suffered by victims of crime are typically far greater than the benefits enjoyed by those who commit crimes. Ordinary people would therefore be willing to pay more to avoid being victimized than criminals would be willing to pay for the chance to victimize others. In virtue of these first two conditions, there is far more money to be made in the business of protection against criminals than in the business of protection for criminals. Given that the two ‘products’ exclude each other – if one product is effectively supplied in the marketplace, then the other necessarily is not – it is the less profitable one that will fail to be supplied. If a rogue protection agency decides to buck the trend by supporting criminals, it will find itself locked in perpetual and hopeless conflict with far more profitable and numerous protection agencies financed by noncriminal customers. The third asymmetry is that criminals choose to commit crimes, whereas crime victims do not choose to be victimized. Criminals, in other words, intentionally engage in behavior guaranteed to bring them into conflict with others. From the standpoint of a protection agency, this is an unattractive feature in a client, since the more conflicts there are in which the agency is called upon to protect clients, the higher the agency’s costs will be. Ordinary,

Ordinary, noncriminal clients are aligned with the agency’s goals in this respect: they do not wish to be involved in conflicts any more than the agency wishes them to be.

10.4.1   The profitability of enforcing rights There are at least three important asymmetries that favor the protection of noncriminal persons over criminals. First, far more people wish to be protected against crime than wish to be protected in committing crimes. Almost no one desires to be a crime victim, while only a few desire to be criminals. Second, the harms suffered by victims of crime are typically far greater than the benefits enjoyed by those who commit crimes. Ordinary people would therefore be willing to pay more to avoid being victimized than criminals would be willing to pay for the chance to victimize others. In virtue of these first two conditions, there is far more money to be made in the business of protection against criminals than in the business of protection for criminals. Given that the two ‘products’ exclude each other – if one product is effectively supplied in the marketplace, then the other necessarily is not – it is the less profitable one that will fail to be supplied. If a rogue protection agency decides to buck the trend by supporting criminals, it will find itself locked in perpetual and hopeless conflict with far more profitable and numerous protection agencies financed by noncriminal customers. The third asymmetry is that criminals choose to commit crimes, whereas crime victims do not choose to be victimized. Criminals, in other words, intentionally engage in behavior guaranteed to bring them into conflict with others. From the standpoint of a protection agency, this is an unattractive feature in a client, since the more conflicts there are in which the agency is called upon to protect clients, the higher the agency’s costs will be.

are there forces that prevent a government from acting to protect criminals?

during the slavery era, government protected slave owners from their slaves rather than the other way around.

democratic governments function as tools for special-interest groups to steal from the rest of society.

no one should have to pay for justice. But what the objection points to is, not a flaw in the anarcho-capitalist system, but a flaw in human nature, for the necessity of paying for justice is created, not by the anarcho-capitalist system, but simply by the fact that criminals exist, and that fact has its roots in the perennial infirmities of human nature.

In a government-dominated system, people must pay for justice, just as surely as in an anarchist system. It is not as though courts and police forces can somehow operate without cost if only they are monopolistic and coercive.

10.6.1   Do businesses serve the poor? Unfortunately, there are no actual societies with a free market in security. We can, however, examine societies with relatively free markets in a variety of other goods and services. In such societies, for how many of these other goods and services is it true that suppliers cater solely to the rich, providing no products suitable for middle- and lower-income customers? Is clothing manufactured solely for the wealthy, leaving the poor to wander the streets naked? Do supermarkets stock only caviar and Dom Pérignon? Which chain is larger: Walmart or Bloomingdale’s? Admittedly, there are some products, such as yachts and Learjets, that have yet to appear in affordable models for the average consumer, yet the overwhelming majority of industries are dominated by production for lower- and middle-income consumers. The main explanation is volume: for most products, there are many more consumers seeking a cheap product than consumers seeking an expensive product.

In one sense, yes: as a result of imperfect protection, some poor people will become victims of crime. This is unjust, in the sense that it is unjust that anyone ever suffers from crime. The injustice inherent in crime, however, points to a flaw in human nature rather than in the anarchist system.

Some people will suffer from crime under any feasible social system. The question is whether anarchy faces a greater problem or a greater injustice than governmental systems.

10.6.2   How well does government protect the poor? Even if inequality in the distribution of crime is an independent injustice, this does not obviously favor government over anarchy, since large inequalities in the distribution of crime occur in all state-based societies as well, where the wealthy are much better protected than the poor.

According to FBI statistics, only about half of all reported violent crimes and a fifth of reported property crimes are solved by law enforcement agencies

On a theoretical level, it is not difficult to understand why government police might be less effective than private protection agencies. If a protection agency provides poor protection or charges excessive fees, it must fear loss of customers to rival agencies. But if the police provide poor protection at a high price, they need have no fear of losing market share or going out of business.

A plausible alternative approach would be to attempt to deny organized crime its most important sources of revenue. Criminal organizations are chiefly focused on collecting money, which they do mostly through the provision of illegal goods and services.

Thus, a powerful strategy for crippling organized crime would be to legalize drugs, gambling, and prostitution. I do not claim that this would eliminate all organized crime. It would, however, strike a blow to organized crime more devastating than anything the state could hope to do by way of wiretaps, sting operations, and indictments. The vast majority of organized crime’s revenue stream would dry up virtually overnight, forcing most of its members to seek other employment.

few people in fact think that a contract to purchase sexual services victimizes any person who merely finds out about it and doesn’t like it, and few are in fact willing to pay as much to prevent other people from engaging in prostitution as prostitutes and their clients are willing to pay to be left alone.

10.9.2   Extortion by government Now consider the analogous problem for governmental systems: why shouldn’t the government extort money from people without protecting them? All governments in fact extort money, though the practice is usually termed ‘taxation’ rather than ‘extortion’.

Imagine that a private protection agency somehow acquired a monopoly in a large geographical area and began to extract payments from the population by force. Few would contend that, once this state of affairs transpired, prices would drop and service would improve. Surely the opposite would occur. But that is precisely the position of societies with government-based protection.

What about the protection industry? The fixed costs for a protection agency are minimal. The business owner must have sufficient funds to hire a few employees and equip them with weapons and tools for enforcement and investigation.

All social systems are imperfect. In every society, people sometimes suffer from crime and injustice. In an anarchist society, this would remain true. The test of anarchism as a political ideal is whether it can reduce the quantity of injustice suffered relative to the best alternative system, which I take to be representative democracy.

Most of the objections raised against anarchy in fact apply more clearly and forcefully to government. This fact is often overlooked because, when confronted with radical ideas, we tend to look only for objections to the new ideas rather than for objections to the status quo.

property owners or local associations of property owners could specify the body of law to govern interactions occurring on their property.

Existing government-based criminal justice systems rely on imprisonment of criminals as a response to crime. It is thought that society as a whole benefits from this practice because it keeps criminals off the streets for a time and deters others from entering a life of crime. The victims of a particular crime, however, generally receive nothing in the way of compensation, and the rest of society is forced to pay for criminals’ upkeep during their terms of imprisonment.

The anarcho-capitalist justice system would most likely focus on restitution rather than punishment.

The victim of a crime is justly entitled to collect full compensation for the crime; that is, sufficient compensation to return him to the welfare level he would have enjoyed if the crime had not occurred. But what if a particular court regularly awarded excess compensation – say, twice what the victim was justly entitled to and twice what other courts generally awarded for a given crime? Wouldn’t the excess compensation court be favored by victims? And since almost everyone considers himself more likely to become a crime victim than to become a criminal, almost everyone would want any future disputes of theirs to be resolved by such a court.

These excessive awards would create powerful deterrents to crime, resulting in a dramatic drop in the crime rate. While this may sound like a happy result, it would put increasing financial pressure on arbitration firms. As the crime rate dropped, arbitration firms would continue to raise their compensation awards in the effort to collect a larger share of the dwindling market.

unduly tainting their reputation for integrity. I therefore think it plausible that in an anarcho-capitalist society, criminals would often suffer somewhat more than they deserved. This is a possible problem with the system, but it is not a terrible problem.

As an exercise, try to imagine an ideal legal system. Before reading on, try to estimate how many pages worth of laws that system would contain. There are many difficulties with making such an estimate; nevertheless, attempting at least a vague, order-of-magnitude estimate before finding out how much law actually exists may help to forestall the tendency to rationalize the status quo.

In 2009, the average American law firm billed $284 per hour, with a typical divorce costing between $15,000 and $30,000. To the average American, with an annual income of $39,000, any use of the government’s justice system represents an overwhelming financial burden.18 Why are legal services so expensive? One reason is the oversupply of law mentioned above. The complexity, technicality, and sheer length of the laws and legal procedures forces individuals to pay experts to handle any legal procedure, and it forces those experts to expend a great deal of labor on each case. Another reason can be found in the restrictions on the supply of legal services, which by law may only be purchased from government-approved sources (lawyers who have been admitted to the bar, generally after a lengthy and very expensive law school education).

it seems unlikely that an anarchic society could maintain anything like the military forces typical of modern governments. For these reasons, members of an anarchic society could not hope to defeat a governmental army in open combat, nor could they hope, as governments often do,

it seems unlikely that an anarchic society could maintain anything like the military forces typical of modern governments. For these reasons, members of an anarchic society could not hope to defeat a governmental army in open combat, nor could they hope, as governments often do, to wage an aggressive war against another country.

territory In one respect, conquering an anarchic society would be more difficult than conquering a nation-state.

In one respect, conquering an anarchic society would be more difficult than conquering a nation-state.

Some national governments are already in a position to drastically reduce their militaries without fear of endangering national security. The United States, for example, could cut its military budget by 83 percent and still remain the largest military spender in the world.