Will you compile all the accidents that occur on state-built roads and shift the blame accordingly? You monster!

First it’s The Wealthy, then corporations, now it’s multinational corporations. Now it’s IKEA, Johnny Walker, and Starbucks who are our overlords.

Sounds like a terrible dystopia, but no doubt the vision of our technocrats. My guess is they’ll destroy everything in an effort to save everything. As usually the scheme is enforced downwards while the benefit accrues upwards.

Where’s the state there?

You’d compare a list of workplace accidents to genocide, war, and empire.

If corporations are so powerful then you ought to start one, at least to fight back. You can start one by filing articles of incorporation with your state. It’s often pretty cheap, like $100. No doubt you’ll immediately achieve some sort of power. You’d control the state; you’d have the monopoly on violence; you can liberate workers; and you’d be able to use all that power for good!

We can make inferences from your comments. Notions of justice and equity do not loom large therein. The criticism of laissez-faire that you claim never to have understood centres on the continuation of inequity. Anything goes means everything stays, or more likely, gets worse.

There is no mechanism or force in the principle of laissez-faire that prohibits justice, though, nor does it entail “anything goes”. I just happen to be writing about inequities and injustices you remain silent about. Since your understanding of justice is so keen I must infer you avoid them for unscrupulous or bad faith reasons.

You don’t know what I understand, but assert it anyways. You are not just.

Suppose that there are two means with which man can satisfy his needs. One is the application of labor and voluntary exchange; the other is the appropriation of someone else’s labor and voluntary exchange—theft, robbery, extortion, exploitation. The state, having no wealth of its own, chose the latter. Whether it provides services or not, the underlying mechanism of exploitation remains. Adding on top of that the monopoly on violence, the regulation of its citizen’s livelihoods, and its jurisdiction over all land and properties in its dominion, we have a relationship that is tantamount to the master and slave.

I do believe in something like the rule of law, that all people and institutions should be subject to the same laws, principles, customs, whatever, but that’s just another reason why it bothers me that states can get away with theft, murder, kidnapping, imprisonment, but anyone else would not.

I’ve defined it as the organization of the means of appropriation of the labor of others, basically a system of exploitation. It’s known as the so-called “conquest theory of state”, which contrasts with the notion of the social contract. Voltaire said it best:

“The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to give to the other”.

Sit and spin. You have nothing.

Sorry, states authorize corporations. I appreciate the quibbling.

We can compare our naivety. If I’m so naive on the topic it should be easy for you to name a wealthy person who has committed murder and violence “just as much as the State has”; or name one wealthy person in Russia or China who has arrested someone and confiscated his wealth. I can give countless examples of States engaging in such behavior.

It’s a good thing there are compassionate, not-so-wealthy people such as yourself out there spending your efforts to help the elderly, disabled, the poor etc. to compensate for the lack of wealthy concern. But in effect you’re not helping, but advocating that the state and the wealthy—others—should help the poor wherever you refuse to. Equating compassion with tax-paying and statism is one of the greatest evils in the history of mankind, in my opinion.

The wealthy ARE the state.

Sorry, I’m not going to pretend the State is a one-to-one ratio with a single socio-economic class, especially one so amorphous, fuzzy and stereotypical as The Wealthy. Every private citizen, wealthy and poor, is under the jurisdiction of The State and its laws. That these laws often favor the wealthy or are not applied equally is not due to the wealth of the beneficiaries, but to State malfeasance, incompetence, and greed of state officials.

The implication of all this “the wealthy are the state” talk is that you’d rather be governed by The Poor. But we’ve seen all these so-called proletarian revolutions and what they amount to: usually genocide.

States create and control corporations. Corporations, like you and I, are considered legal entities, largely subject to the same state laws. Corporations, like you and I, are subject to taxation. You and I can create a corporation. We cannot create a state. We can run a corporation to beneficent ends. We cannot run a state towards beneficent ends. You and I can engage with a corporation on a voluntary basis. We cannot engage with a state on a voluntary basis. So you have it all backwards.

If by "potentially democratic" you mean we get to vote for another mammal to control how we live and to steal the fruits of our labor, I want nothing to do with it.

I disagree only slightly. Multi-national organizations are certainly growing in wealth, many of them having a GDP greater than many nation states. But power, to me, is different than wealth. Corporations can only beg and bribe for privilege, and regulatory capture and rent-seeking behaviors arise only when there is an institution willing to provide such privileges. Ordinary people, too, must engage in the same behavior to affect any end that satisfies their own needs, and there’s no shame in it. In my mind, the organization that has the final say in the matter, whether to follow the agenda of a corporation or ordinary people, has the power.

As for health and safety, it seems to me that if one doesn’t want its services he shouldn’t have to pay for it. So maybe something like a subscription or membership program could work. Whether it would work or not, I’m unsure, but it would at least be an ethical relationship.

Thanks for the honesty.

Protection rackets aren’t known for their voluntary association. But the underlying practice is extortion, which is exactly how the state funds itself.

It is my understanding that Grenfell Tower was the product of British “social housing”, the landlord being the the borough Council—the State.

Just to be clear, no laissez-faire has existed, so the “results” are difficult to come by. Virtually every activity occurs under the jurisdiction and oversight of a state.

You want the State to be the sole arbiter of safety. I do not. How can we reach a moral resolution to this impasse?

The idea that someone owns the state and has the monopoly on violence as soon as he hits a certain net-worth isn’t worth thinking about. Not even Moses could come up with a sillier scapegoat. I cannot be convinced that this monopoly will disappear as soon as a goatherd comes to power.

The state is not a social institution run anti-socially, just waiting about for some moral vanguard to bring it to its teleological purpose—no greater leap of faith can be found—it is an anti-social institution running exactly how it was designed to run.

Any discussion which begins with "I don't want to pay taxes" (paraphrasing) is deeply suspect in its integrity.

Any hand-wave that excuses the appropriation of wealth through taxation is incredibly obsequious. Clearly a desire to benefit from it inheres in these remarks?

Sure. But if some Americans firmly believe abortion is murder, that matters. Their opinion shouldn't be brushed aside in the name of someone's privacy. No one has a right to privately commit murder.

It should be brushed aside. What matters in this context is the constitution and precedent, and how well our supreme jurists can stretch the plain meaning of language to suit their interpretations. Public opinion doesn’t matter, or it ought not to according to the system it operates in.

It is

Because?

Obviously? Then it should be easy to say how this is the case.

The wealthy don’t posses the monopoly on violence. The state does. The state, not the wealthy, can murder you in the street with impunity, throw you in jail, or confiscate your wealth. Slavery is still legal in the United States constitution, for example, so long the slave is the property of the American justice system. But if you’re fine with being controlled by politicians and bureaucrats, and those politicians and bureaucrats turn out to operate in the service of the wealthy, I guess that’s just too bad.

I’m not sure why any community requires the wealthy or the state to help them. It’s not “a given” that this should be so. But I can go to any large city in North America, wherever the state is at its most powerful, and look around to see what your state help amounts to. Not a whole lot.

Ok. So to limit state intervention, you'd have to restrict the ability of the people to vote for state intervention. That requires far reaching state power.

I wouldn’t propose to restrict anything. It would be interesting to see what would happen in no one voted, though. Maybe we should start a “Don’t Vote” movement. But then they’d make it compulsory, no doubt.

I think the problem is not the end goal, but the means. I'm on board with the whole individual freedom thing, perhaps more than most here. I raised both my children without any rules at all, they were not required to go to school, attend lessons, no bedtimes, nowhere out of bounds etc... I take individual freedom very seriously. But the fact is that we are where we are. Individuals have not been brought up with any idea of responsibility, repressed, beaten, and stupefied. We have a disgusting level of inequality, in both power and wealth, we have massive problems with pretty much all of our communal resources, most of which have been caused by the ones who are now rich getting themselves that way.

So if we want our anarchist utopia, how do we get there from here? Government backing out of economics seems like a terrible first step. It's just going to magnify the inequality and worsen the problems with communal resource management because nothing has been done about the system of power relations that exist as a result of living in a non-anarchist system for ten thousand years or so. You can't just undo that kind of damage by walking away. Certainly not by just walking away in one aspect (economy).

I'm with you on that. To destroy it or walk away from it would be cruel. The only way such a state could be achieved, I think, is if people simply stopped thinking in those terms, like the decline of Catholicism. That could take forever, for all I know. But in the meantime one needn't participate in it, and as you have done, lead by example.

The problem here is historicism. You agreed there never has been any properly state-free system, so all you can show is that when the state are the most powerful weapon around, the rich use them to further their goals. If the state were not around, the rich would simply use the next most powerful weapon available (private armies, monopolising essential goods, private taxation etc), which may well be worse.

You're right. They'd try to become a state. But I think it would take them a while to achieve the monopoly on violence, and a group like the Regional Defence Council of Aragon could hold them back.

I'm nervous and tense about statism, which is both left and right.

It's no strange wonder that Roosevelt praised Mussolini, and Mussolini praised the New Deal. In a review of Roosevelt's book he said "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices, having recognized the welfare of the economy is the welfare of the people". The Nazis also praised it. And it's no strange wonder that Mao Zedung and Lenin praised state capitalism.

There never was any laissez-faire. The state caused much of the poverty, and the state caused all of the wars. It was the Inclosure Acts in England that forced people into the hands of the factory owners, for example. Having their property taken from them by the State, it was either work in the factories or starve to death.

I don’t think people are fundamentally moral, only that they have the capacity for it. I believe the moral conscience is latent in everyone, just not fully developed in everyone.

I posit that the communal resources can be managed sustainably because it is in their self-interest to do so. I believe it because I’ve seen it first hand in a local anarchist community. No rules, no management, no authority, no mechanism, just a community of people engaging in common enterprise on the land they loved. Their economy consisted of fishing and foraging, tourism, trading trinkets with other communities, and believe it or not, professional surfing. All of this occurred out of the prying eyes of state interference…or so they thought. As soon as the state caught wind of their dealings they were forced to leave and their dwellings were burned to the ground.

I don’t believe this goodwill extends to government because it is a fundamentally immoral and anti-social institution. Anyone who occupies a position in it, moral or not, will nonetheless be perpetuating immoral and anti-social behavior. They couldn’t do otherwise.

But what you wrote is a good argument, and I agree with it. It works both ways, though. If one rejects freedom on account of the capacity for evil and greed of man, one should repudiate government power for the same reason.

I think both are possible. Whether good or evil, I only wish that I could deal with them all on my own terms, and associate with whomever I choose. I neither need nor want any collective management to determine which actions I or others take in any given situation, and I don’t think others need it as well, no matter how dependant upon they may have become in the meantime.

I get a similar feeling about statists. Since there are ways to care for others that do not involve state authority, I lean to the belief that those who are dependant on the state to care for others don’t really care for others. It’s just that they’d much rather have someone else do it for them. This isn't a liberal or objectivist critique of statist charity, as far as I know, but a Marxist one. As I mentioned earlier, the absence of a state would lay bare your compassion for what it really amounts to, and so far it’s not looking pretty.

Even with that hypothesis (which I don't ascribe to), you haven't justified your preference for economic liberties over civil liberties. In fact, for most states it describes how the already rich and powerful conquered the masses and keep them down. The system is already working in their favour.

I don’t prefer economic over civil liberties. In fact I think the proper role of government is to protect human rights and civil liberties. I just don’t think the proper role for government is to meddle in the economy, and for the reasons I stated.

The state isn’t the only agent acting in any economy. There are black markets that actively work to avoid state interference and involvement, for instance. The delusion lies in believing the state and the economy are somehow the same or inseparable, as if all trade, production, consumption, and enterprise would stop should a bunch of bureaucrats suddenly stop going to work.

The argument made no sense. There is no economy without government therefor laissez-faire is nonsense. Not a strand of bubble gum can connect the premise to the conclusion.

It does, and it does so poorly and unjustly. So maybe it shouldn't.

I was using the phrase “separation of economy and state” to describe the fundamental principle, much like the separation of powers and the separation of church and state. Some have implied that such a separation is not possible, or that the fact of state intervention invalidates the philosophy of state non-intervention, though one has to struggle to find reason in these objections.

My theory of the state and state formation is the so-called conquest theory of state formation, as written by Franz Oppenheimer. In his formulation the state is the organization of the appropriation of the labor of others. It forms to maintain the power of the victors over the vanquished. The ISIS caliphate is one recent example which supports my image, but empire is another.

The state has no power or wealth of its own. It confiscates power and wealth. Exploitation is its means of subsistence, violence the means of maintaining it. One can try to keep what he has earned from his labors to feel the force of this. And voting is merely a concession because the transient power of our representatives is always negated by the absolute power of the institution itself.

I would think so.

I’m pretty sure you can enforce your own behavior, as can most adults. If you need an official caste of moral busybodies to govern how you treat and cooperate with others then you are no different than the warlord or gang member.

I don’t care for your points or your hypotheticals. Your system is fundamentally immoral, little different than the warlord or a gangs you describe, except you promote one form of despotism because it is preferable to the other. I’d rather take my chances and have none of it.

Nonetheless, despite our disagreement, your examples of why you fear of laissez-faire is all I really wanted to know. So thank you.

My reasons for preferring it are moral. I think it is wrong and unjust to control people, to confiscate the fruits of their labor, or to impose someone’s will upon another’s if they do not deserve it. Anything else is tyranny, injustice, oppression, exploitation, slavery. If you or I or any group of people acted as a state official or agent does, they’d be rightfully dragged through the street.

The same applies to matters of trade and enterprise. If anyone rigged the game in their favor as much as states have done—skimming, stealing, exploiting, extorting, racketeering, money laundering—he’d be thrown in jail.

Because of this, and because the state increases its own power in proportion to the decrease in the power of the people it rules, it is an anti-social institution worth opposing.

As for roads and government services, no government is required to flatten earth and lay asphalt. No government is required to tell me which products I should buy, or with which group of people I should engage in common enterprise with.

No laissez faire regime has failed because no such regime has existed.

So I’ve read your objections and still prefer the idea of separating the state and economy.

Sure, “the economy” isn’t a useful term or idea, and we can quibble about it forever. But the usefulness of the term doesn’t automatically justify regulatory behavior, nor does it negate minding your own business. Anyone can mind his own business, refuse to regulate another’s economic activity, refuse to be an interloper, so I don’t think the principle is as nonsensical as you make it out it to be.

It’s true that many people espouse principles that they refuse to abide by, and it is probably true that they do so in order to dupe others, to achieve power, to benefit themselves and their friends, and so on—this is the history of America—but again, none of these objections justify regulatory behavior, nor do they negate the idea that the state should mind its own business.

Protectionism, mercantilism, subsidies, corruption—this is state intervention in a nutshell. I could be wrong but it appears that you are more concerned about who benefits from state intervention rather then the behavior of state intervention as such. Speaking of nonsense, how many years and how many votes have you spent waiting for a return on your investment?

Well, no, protecting human rights is not “regulated capitalism”. Preserving human liberty is not a 1-to-1 ratio with regulating the economy, and it is neither rationally nor emotionally satisfying for me to accept such non-sequiturs. There will be instances where protecting human liberty will cross into the economy, such as in the business of slavery, but abolition is concerned with the freedom and dignity of human beings and not with the regulation of the slave trade.

I do believe people can be evil and that people can be good, and that the latter should learn to defend themselves from the former, with violence if necessary. One can and should do that without a state because, if history is any indication, the state is often incompetent in that regard and violates those same rights. According to author RJ Rummel, the body count for which the state is to blame in the 20th century is 262,000,000, and this is only acts of genocide.

I think it is morally wrong to tax people just as it is wrong to steal the fruits of someone’s labor. I think you are morally justified in refusing to pay taxes. That system is little more than a protection racket. The problem is the state disagrees with you, and because they have the monopoly on violence and you are but a serf to their power, you probably won’t get away with it.

Yes, and probably courts.

I just don’t think you have a right to interfere in the movement of others. And no, I don’t think a company has any right to pour poison in a river.