Trying To Talk Politics With Pre-Political Libertarians

It's never easy to talk about politics in fundamental terms since we are so apt to mistake custom for nature, rites for rights, contingencies for givens, but with libertarians of especially the anarcho-capitalist sort this difficulty becomes next to impossible since theirs is an essentially pre-political outlook that has come to be treated as a political one and in many respects even, disastrously and flabbergastingly enough, as political orthodoxy.

It is conventional for libertarians to identify the state with violence and to treat advocacy of government reform, even reform to address violence and abuse, as always only an advocacy of violence. It is crucial from the beginning to recognize that the mighty always may abuse and prey upon the less mighty or less lucky, and also that the beneficiaries of abuses are ever prone to rationalize might as right. But all of this inheres in the sociality of the human condition. It is not brought into existence by the state, but tyrannical governance can amplify these ills just as democratic governance can ameliorate them.

What libertarians fancy as a desirable demolition of government violence (and so, too, those Republicans who advocate the endless shrinking of government without indicating its proper function, who advocate deregulation without end, who advocate "starving the beast" through the elimination of ever more tax revenues) would neither disincline the mighty from violence nor disinvent the implements through which they engage in violence. Defensive and predatory associations would persist in their bloodymindedness, hierarchical fiefdoms presided over by brutal or charismatic leaders would persist in their misconduct all the while retro-actively rationalizing it all to themselves and to others whenever the occasion permits, mighty powers and organizations would rise and fall in a clash of muscular violence in their interminable gory pageant. It is not democracy that creates this state of affairs of course but seeks to respond to its waste and violence by creating alternative mechanisms for the comparatively nonviolent succession through regular elections of social leadership across many co-operating jurisdictional layers, just as courts create comparatively nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes but in so doing hardly bring disputation as such into existence.

It's true of course that state institutions -- legislative, judicial, administrative -- may rely in extremity on the violent potential of warden or police or army to abide in their legitimate work in the face of disruption or threat. Nevertheless, to treat the presence or absence of legitimate courts to which citizens may make equitable recourse with a reasonable expectation of justice as no different in respect to violence, or to treat the presence or absence of periodic elections of citizens to posts to which majorities are eligible to hold office by citizens majorities of whom are eligible to vote as no different in respect to violence is to treat with indifference differences that make all the difference in the world.

The issues extend deeper and wider than you might think. Public goods that are described as non-excludable (which roughly means they are accessible to all) and also non-rival (which roughly means they are not immediately consumed in use) like public utility infrastructure or a healthy, educated citizenry, and also common goods that are described as non-excludable but rival, like a stressed atmosphere or aquifer, can only be profitably privatized through the externalization of social costs in what amounts to a second order register of violence or abuse rendered visible only through the emergence of civic institutions, a register of violence and abuse that is equitably adjudicable only through their socialization. Of course, there's no reason necessarily to treat the overwhelming abundance of excludable goods as anything but private, whether as commodities for sale or products freely offered under other arrangements. But what matters here is that the private ownership of commodities will depend on the maintenance of a context of public and common goods that are not commodities and cannot properly be privatized at all, and that the socialization and public administration of these goods is still a matter of the creation of alternatives to violence and injustice (even if the connection are less intuitive, arising as they do in the context of complex civic arrangements).

So, too, I will add, do the provision of basic healthcare, education, reliable information, income, equal access to law and opportunity function to ensure that when one consents to the demands, risks, costs, terms of private enterprise, that the scene of that consent is actually informed and non-duressed, and therefore legitimate. In the absence of such guarantees (and they have never been more than partially fulfilled hitherto in history), and precisely to the extent that they are lacking, "consent" is all too prone as we well know to be an empty ritual concealing wage slavery and military conscription via poverty and precarity of a kind continuous with forms of human trafficking we pretend to be long behind us. Again, what matters here is that those who bemoan as a kind of "enslavement" the provision of welfare via a taxation that curtails their extravagance fail to grasp that this provision is indispensable to the scene of consent on which we all depend else we risk enslavement ourselves.

In other words, the provision of the sorts of public and common goods that are often denigrated as "positive" supplemental artificial extractive liberty as distinguished from "negative" neutral natural spontaneous liberty actually are continuous with one another, together delineating what is never more than a contingent artificial ritual production of a space of liberty all too easy to treat as spontaneous but all of which is a collective and historical accomplishment depending first of all on good government.

So long as many on the left glibly identify property as theft and taxes as the price of civilization, and so long as many on the right glibly identify taxes as theft and pretend the maintenance of public goods could be left to charitable generosity it will be difficult to be clear about the crucial differences that separate the categories of prices, taxes, charities, their different functions and what they differently depend on, and political discourse will remain profoundly confused and incommensurable by the pet "clarifying" analogies deployed on all sides.

Prices tend to arise in the give and take of private enterprise enabled through the public maintenance of international treaties, trade regulations, reliable banking and insurance institutions, commercial norms, material and ritual networks of transportation, information, and communication; -- taxes tend instead to reflect the arbitrary distribution of benefit from this public infrastructure in order to maintain equitable private recourse to it; -- while voluntarisms offer pleasures that are not reducible to the satisfactions conferred by the consumption of commodities available for sale at a price nor accomplished in commodity exchange but through signals of community belonging.

None of this is easy to telescope into a sentence or two, and there's plenty of reasonable dispute around the edges and on matters of detail. But "libertarian" formulations often turn on elisions or confusions on these matters in particular.

Now, to provide nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes among a diversity of stakeholders (via courts, elections, the maintenance of a scene of informed nonduressed consent) or an equitable reconciliation of the diverse aspirations of those stakeholders (via representative governance and the social administration of public and common goods) demands the investment of institutions that administer justice and welfare with clear jurisdictional authorities to which all can make equitable recourse in their diversity.

While this enables people to circumvent much strife and abuse, it also creates opportunities for strife and abuse and corruption at the level of the governance itself, in response to which political theorists and policy makers have experimented with a number of institutional arrangements. Among these are the horizontal separation of powers, meant to redirect tendencies to corruption inhering in government's necessary monopoly recourse to force instead into the competitive internal policing of corruption and abuse of force; vertical federalism, meant to facilitate the solution of shared problems at the most local level adequate to their demands; regular periodic election of representatives and officials by the people over whom they have jurisdiction, trial by jury, yoking the revenue on which governance depends to representation, all meant to ensure government remains accountable to the people in whose name it governs; and the administration of oaths connecting public office to the defense of a written Constitution circumscribing its powers and to the support of an open-ended bill of delineated human rights.

To respect these arrangements is to support good government not to abhor government as such. Liberty, after all, is a collective accomplishment enabled through the support of good government, and those who venerate liberty should surely be moved by that veneration not to smash the state, but to democratize it.

I find too many libertarians prone to declare whatever I say, however genial or persuasive in tone, to be essentially hateful, "contaminated" by its defense of a democratic governance they reduce to violence, willy-nilly, indifferent to the different forms government can assume, and all the while declaring market exchanges non-coercive by fiat whatever the real terms of inequity that may articulate them. Again in sublime indifference to realities on the ground, too often they refuse to address negative real-world impacts of arguments and policies by Republicans and conservatives that were conspicuously inspired by libertarians or often even when they are proposed by self-identified libertarians, declaring bad outcomes always the result of inadequate zeal, declaring their advocates always to be impure or phony libertarians, and yet they continue freely to use these arguments and this label even when their usage in the world includes and depends on wider applications they claim to refuse.

Politics is not engineering, it is not theology, it is not morals: it has a real, distinct content, it corresponds to real, unique experiences, and it has real problems and propositions proper only to itself. To reduce politics to the terms of another domain is to distort it, often beyond recognition, and to forget its content, experiences, problems and propositions may be to lose them, one fears beyond reclamation.

From all this, I can think of at least three key insights indispensable to the grasp of the political and to the achievement of political freedom, each of which can now be captured in a slogan, and all of which libertarianism renders unintelligible and hence impossible: First, the State Only Amplifies or Ameliorates the Violence that Precedes It. Second, Legitimate Consent Requires Public Investment in a Scene that Is Equitable and Informed. Third, Liberty Is A Collaborative Accomplishment that Depends on Democratic Government.

Libertarianism is the eclipse of the political, not a variation on the political. Privatization is a privation of the public, not an alternate provision of it. To declare as non-coercive by definition all market transactions the terms of which are beholden to incumbent elites is not to advocate non-violence, but to endorse an openness to total violence. When we treat life not as lived but as a commodity available at the price of a salary to be exchanged for the satisfaction of consuming still more commodities, we are dispossessed by our possessions, distracted by the mirage of satisfaction from the freedom of emancipation.