PROPOSITION: Be an Anarchist, Not a Minarchist.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: The Debate Issue

AFFIRMATIVE: Private, Contractual Methods Are More Efficient and More Just

I'M AN ANARCHIST because government tends toward ineptitude and consent is extremely important. If you describe yourself as a libertarian, you probably agree with both of those propositions.

The state is bad at doing things. Quite a lot of things, really. That's a claim most libertarians--and an awful lot of non-libertarians--would find uncontroversial. Everyone agrees governments are frequently annoying (see: the DMV) and often deeply unjust and immoral (see: slavery). These conditions occur because governments are composed of fallible human beings, who want to make a buck/gain the respect of their peers/do the right thing/do the easiest thing/get through the day. They persist because government actors ruthlessly stamp out would-be competitors, using violence and threats of violence, a privilege they reserve for themselves alone.

Which raises the question: Might individuals left to their own devices to act freely within a context of self-ownership, private property, and free markets do better than this messy, immoral, violent morass?

Many people find the next bit in the anarchist sales pitch off-putting--the part where we start throwing around terms like non-aggressionprinciple,polycentric legal orders,agorism, and confiscatory taxation. But it's really a pretty simple exercise: Imagine the ways in which nonstate entities can provide all the goods and services governments currently provide, and consider that maybe they can do it better, more efficiently, and more justly. While I like a good deep dive into the anarchic or quasi-anarchic systems of medieval Iceland or early British common law as much as the next gal, we needn't look to such exotic places to find evidence that a truly voluntary society can work.

Many sectors previously thought to be the proper business of governments alone have given way under pressure from new technologies or business innovations--the space launch industry, mail delivery, dispute resolution, recordkeeping methods up to and including money itself. And, of course, roads. (Many of these functions always had private competition, as libertarians well know, even if conventional wisdom held otherwise.) It is reasonable to anticipate that the list of things private entities can do better than public entities will grow, not shrink. The U.S. government gets bigger and dumber every day, but mercifully the realms just out of reach of state control are getting bigger and better much faster. These include gray and black markets, which flourish on the much-maligned dark web, but also exist barely sub rosa on the ordinary social media and e-commerce sites most of us use daily.

The anarchist seeks to shrink and eventually eliminate the monopoly state as punishment for its moral and practical failings, but we can and should revel in the way it is continually being outmatched and outpaced as well.

What's more, the absence of a government is not synonymous with the absence of order or even rule of law. Most people systematically overlook the ways in which their lives are already ordered by nonstate forces and in which the welfare of others is supported through noncoercive methods. Private legal regimes exist all around us; they govern our dating apps, our homeowners associations, our credit cards, our Twitter streams, our charitable giving, and a whole lot more. Yes, they are imperfect, but they are also more likely to fail when the money stops rolling in due to those imperfections, rather than stealing more of your money to grow ever larger as the state nearly always will.

Each of these examples contains an elaborate system of rules and conventions that the participants accept and follow, and sometimes amend, without government oversight or enforcement. The state lurks in the background, because such is the reality of our current world. But recourse to state courts and police is relatively rare when conflict occurs in these spaces, in part because walking away is almost always a viable option. Sticking around can, in fact, imply consent. And if that's not good enough for you, explicit...