theory, to priva-
tize law enforce-
ment or at least
the roads, but
the logistics
just seem so
tiresome.
This always
strikes me as
peculiar com-
ing from people
who will cheer-
fully sketch out their
20-year, 87-part, 50-state
strategy to transition from tra-
ditional public schools to charters.
The fact that I wake up each morning, spit on my hands, and
mentally hoist a black and yellow flag doesn’t actually reveal
very much about my practical politics—and there’s no reason
it should. At the risk of piling on an overly baroque series of
adjectives, the most defensible form of libertarianism is incre-
mentalist anarcho-capitalism. Revolutionary anarchism would
likely impose large amounts of harm to people and property.
Middling minarchism quickly sinks into intuitionist and irra-
tional line drawing: Why should trash pickup be privatized but
not policing? But the agorists—an even less well-known varietal
of an already-rare hothouse ancap political philosophy—are on
to something with their strategy of engaging in black market
counter-economic activity to undermine the state without vio-
lently overthrowing it.
It may well be, as Robert Nozick suggested, that anarchy
is fundamentally unstable, and that it would rapidly and reli-
ably evolve into a form of “minarchism”—a small-government
society featuring a monopoly provider of defense and law. But
that’s neither here nor there. We’re not going to achieve true
minarchism any time soon, either. And if my anarchy collapses
into your minarchy through voluntary interactions, well, that
sounds like a happy ending for everyone, doesn’t it?
For the nonce, there is no daylight between the policy pre-
scriptions favored by the gradualist anarchist and the minar-
chist. We should rightly be part of the same libertarian coalition
for free minds and free markets. I assure you, the lowest-priority
items on my government-smashing to-do list are the elements
of the night watchman state that most minarchist libertarians
would like to preserve.
But why anyone would hold out hope that the night watch-
man will turn out to be better or easier to restrain than the
jackbooted thugs currently working the day shift is an eternal
mystery to me.
NEGATIVE:
In Praise of a State That
Does a Few Things Well
NICK GILLESPIE
TO ME, THE three saddest words in the English language are
“taxation is theft.”
Over the past few years, that slogan has become a shorthand
way of announcing oneself as an anarcho-capitalist. It’s also an
excellent means of alienating people who don’t already agree
with you. In my experience, the same folks also usually declare
that the non-aggression principle (NAP), which holds that any
nondefensive use of force is morally illegitimate, should be the
whole of the law. Those of us who merely believe in limited gov-
ernment, rather than no government—such sketchy characters
as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises—
are deemed “fake” libertarians.
Minarchism is the belief that we should have a small govern-
ment that does a few things well. Exactly what those things are
will change over time and circumstance, but the general view is
rooted in a long tradition that virtually everyone on the planet
already buys into.
Confusing libertarianism with anarchism is no way to build
a successful, influential social movement, which is ultimately
what I’m after. We want to help make the world more free, more
peaceful, and more prosperous by reducing the size, scope, and
spending of government and empowering individuals to pursue
happiness as they see fit. At worst, “taxation is theft” is a bullet-
proof conversation stopper, like wearing an “Ask Me about My
Herpes” T-shirt to a swingers club.
At best, it immediately narrows all conversations to bor-
ing, tedious, and fundamentally irrelevant discussions about
hypotheticals, first principles, and extreme a priori-ism that
are light-years removed from anything to do with the world we
actually live in. Why bother figuring out what school choice
programs should look like? Haven’t you heard? TAXATION IS
THEFT, and nonvoluntary government institutions are not sim-
ply misguided—they’re absolute violations of the NAP. If that’s
true, then conversations about policy, much less libertarian
approaches to literature, art, community, religion, and every-
thing else humans do on a daily basis, might as well be planting
a flower garden in a concentration camp.
But if libertarianism is not synonymous with anarchism,
then what is it, exactly? My position is that it’s a pre-political
state of mind, a temperament, and an outlook that privileges
things such as autonomy, open-mindedness, pluralism, toler-38 OCTOBER 2018