AFFIRMATIVE:
Private, Contractual
Methods Are More
Efficient and More Just
KATHERINE MANGU-WARD
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 privi-
lege 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-aggression principle, polycentric legal orders, agorism,
and confiscatory taxation. But it’s really a pretty simple exer-
cise: 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 indus-
try, 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 libertar-
ians 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 fail-
ings, 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 sys-
tematically 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 homeown-
ers associations, our credit cards, our Twitter streams, our chari-
table 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 enforce-
ment. 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 contracts offer a robust instrument
to help resolve disputes.
“Consent of the governed,” by contrast, is not actual consent,
and to mistake it for consent is to undermine the very definition
of the word. If 51 percent of women signed a document saying
they liked rough sex, that certainly would not give an individual
man permission to push any individual woman up against a
wall. Yet this is the essence of representative government. (This
example is purposely inflammatory and hyper-personalized,
since long habituation has made most people deaf and blind to
parallel harms imposed by the state—as in the everyday conduct
of the war on drugs, the collection of taxes, and the enforcement
of economic regulations.)
Unlike in a market, when the state provides a service, it has
the power to criminalize competition from private entities that
might be able to do the same thing with less graft, less cronyism,
or less collateral damage. This retards innovation in the name
of protecting the status quo, a phenomenon most libertarians
recognize as an outright evil.
Nonanarchist libertarians often treat the existence of the
state as an unfortunate inevitability. They would love, inIllustration: slowgogo/iStock REASON 37