Now, I am not really interested, here, in the normal response: “Oh, we all do.  It provides, education, health, law enforcement...” Libertarians know this to be nonsense and there’s no point in rehearsing those arguments here(1).  I am more interested in what we libertarians tend to say:

“Oh well, lots of people: welfare beneficiaries, civil servants, politicians...”

But the point is: do they?

I mean, take Tony Blair.  There he was, Prime Minister for a decade, but was it really worth it?  Sure, you can dwell on the trappings of power: the fame, the central London address, the foreign trips, all those people being nice to you, ruining perfectly decent people just because you can etc, but you’ve also got to remember the hours spent in boring meetings and tramping the streets, having to say things you don’t really believe in and, in the end, the public revulsion.  Oh, and I might add having Gordon Brown as a neighbour.

OK, so what about the ones at the bottom of the food chain - the welfare junkies?  Now sitting on your arse and getting someone else to pay for your housing, food and everything else sounds like a pretty good deal.  But the state extracts its pound of flesh condemning you to a neighbourhood full of chavs with an anti-work culture and a crap local school.  What if there were no state?  Sure you’d have to work for a living but you’d almost certainly end up better off, living in nicer surroundings and with better education options.

Well, if top and bottom are rubbish, what about the middle: the civil servants?  Rubbish pay, good pension.  You might manage to wangle some cushy number with next to no work but you might not.  There are plenty of civil servants who have to work pretty hard.

So, who does win?

Footnotes

1.  But if you would prefer to have those arguments rehearsed see What I believe and Why I am a libertarian.

I first came across Professor Bruce L Benson when reading his excellent paper on the history of toll roads in England.  So, when I learnt that he was to be addressing the Liberty 2007 conference, organised by the Libertarian Alliance, I very much wanted to see if I could get him to agree to do a podcast.  Luckily, he did.

We decided to talk about private law enforcement.  While we managed to cover areas like how it would work and how you would prevent next door turning into a pub, time prevented us examining some of the other issues, like how the courts would work and what would prevent the re-emergence of the state.  But even so, I think it works pretty well.

This was my first attempt to conduct an interview with a handheld mike which accounts for some of the rustles and for the difference in the loudness of our respective voices.  I think it’s one of those cases where you live and learn.  I just hope it doesn’t spoil the listener’s enjoyment too much.

I mentioned Stefan Molyneux’s Free Domain Radio a few times last year.  I gave up listening to the anarchist libertarian’s podcasts after they started to get a bit samey and because of the difficulty in referencing them.  So, I was pretty glad when he took up blogging.

For the most part I am a minarchist - if the state could just confine itself to matters of national defence, keeping the streets safe and running the courts I would be happy.  But I appreciate the contradiction here.  If I accept that the state is useless and immoral everywhere else shouldn’t I also accept it in these areas?

I don’t because I am not aware of any precedents for it.  To abolish the state would be a huge leap in the dark.  So, it helps when someone offers to light the way.  This is why I am particularly grateful for two Molyneux pieces on dispute resolution and private defence. I think I should probably also add in his piece on why non-state defence organisations wouldn’t re-create the state.

All these pieces are well-argued, thoughtful and (most importantly) answer my questions and objections.  And yet… I still can’t quite bring myself to embrace them.  I suppose the reason is that if it were true that if the state were abolished it wouldn’t come back then why doesn’t it collapse right here and now?  To which, I think, the answer is that the vast majority of people continue to believe in it.  Now, if that’s true, then if the state were to be abolished tomorrow those millions of people who still believed in it would probably find a way of re-creating it.  So, if we want the state to disappear we have got a lot of persuading to do.

One, excellent way of persuading people would be to create some experiments.  As I understand it there were a number of attempts at this in the 1970s, in which free-market anarchists would attempt to settle on some remote unclaimed island in the Pacific.  On every occasion one state or another stepped in to crush it.

What were they scared of?