Stop talking about marijuana and atom bomb emporiums
Posted by davidncl on April 8, 2010
If asked I’d normally describe myself as a believe in free markets – radically free markets. For example I think many or all of the services provided by the state such as security, health, welfare and education could and should be provided by the market. I suppose that makes me some kind of market anarchist. I have even used that term to describe my beliefs but you know what? I don’t really give a toss.
I don’t think the kind of free market society that I’d like to see is that different from a minimal state. Stable institutions offering arbitration and justice, long respected agencies providing defence, a network of contracts and ownership. A stable, safe and wealthy place with a people who largely like and believe in the social order. I used to like to get into the details of how this could work. Then I realised that trying to sell this kind of utopian vision is pretty much pointless. Oh, from time to time it’s fun to think through the issues of private ownership of fusion weapons. It’s just a game though. Abstract politics, maybe.
I knew when I was twenty-five (and that’s twenty five years ago) that there will be no attempt to institute a zero state or market anarchy except from within a very minimal state. Further no very minimal state will arise without a not so minimal state transitioning and so on from our present situation.
If a stable market anarchy is possible and desirable then it will be adopted from a social order were large scale non state provision is the norm.
The historical transitions from a small state to a big state are not the result of some inexorable process but the result of a change in the belief system shared by the masses and the elites. Largely religious in nature.
What we need to be doing is to be putting our energy and focus into developing an accessible, simple case for rolling back the state, maybe not even dramatically. John Stossel is doing this kind of thing on Fox in the US and so are others.
Here’s a few of the very few things I’ve realised:
It has to be about the poor. We have to directly address the “poor will die in the streets” meme. We need to clasp the poor to our breast and prove we me mean it.
It has to be about the downtrodden, poor fucks stuck on benefits or stacking shelves or leading some other existence as a tax slave in a call centre. It has to offer meaning and hope.
It has to tap into the religious sentiments of the English psyche so it needs to be about about salvation or stamping out sin or service.
We need to rebuild the language so that it doesn’t sound like Thatcherism in any way. Thatch used the language of the free market to push unpopular efficiency measures in market socialism and in doing so wrecked the narrative of the classical liberals. Move on. No talk of entrepreneurs – build a new narrative.
It has to either ignore the intellectual classes or show them to be the class enemy of the masses.
(this isn’t a good post, but I’m going to stick it up anyway – I need to learn how to communicate)
David Friedman said
Your discussion seems to assume that a stable limited government acting in about the way you want is an option. It isn’t clear that it is. Public choice theory provides some explanation of why governments act as they do. Putting it more generally, we have no good reason to expect socialist industries to produce products with the characteristics we want–and that holds for the industry of producing (and enforcing) law as well as for others.
From that standpoint, a central argument in favor of market anarchy is that the firms producing law, like ordinary private firms producing other things, have an incentive to do it right.