Free-market anarchists
Nineteenth-century Americans like Spooner and Tucker argued for an anarchism
that was an extension of liberalism: if individuals are free and equal, why should
they accept the compulsion of the state? Locke’s state of nature was seen as a world
in which individuals are not subject to external discipline: why shouldn’t things stay
that way? But whereas nineteenth-century free-market anarchists were concerned
about the structural inequalities that the market might generate – and they took
the view that everyone should be an entrepreneur – more recent free-market
anarchists have accepted capitalism, arguing that exploitation and coercion are
simply the product of the state. Substantial inequalities are inevitable in a free
society.
Free-market anarchists like Murray Rothbard (1926–95) take the view that state
welfare is as pernicious as state warfare. Any attempt to regulate production prevents
consumers from purchasing commodities that theywish to buy, while goods that
everybody wants, like sanitation, roads, street lighting, are best provided by private
enterprise. Disadvantaged groups, like the elderly, the unemployed and the disabled
(for example), should be catered for by charity since state provision is invariably
wasteful and open to abuse (Hoffman, 1995: 117).
It is not only the ‘positive’ functions of the state that ought to be ‘privatised’.
As far as modern-day free-market anarchists are concerned, the market should take
over the state’s ‘negative’ role as well. Rothbard contends that people could insure
themselves against bodily assault in the same way that they currently insure their
possessions against theft. Aggrieved parties could then seek compensation and
redress for injury through private tribunals, with the free market ensuring that
arbitrators or judges with the best record in settling disputes would be hired.
But how would these judgements be enforced? Recalcitrants who refused to abide
by tribunal decisions would be subject to boycott and ostracism, and, in more serious
cases, guards and police could be hired to defend injured parties and enforce
judgements. People who refused to comply with judgements could be placed in
private prisons, and aggrieved individuals might decide (with the help of friends
and relatives) to retaliate in person. Rothbard describes the state as ‘the great
legalized and socially legitimated channel of all manner of social crime’, and getting
rid of the state would strengthen the ‘good’ in human nature and discourage the
bad (Hoffman, 1995: 118). Humans remain possessive individualists by nature, and
it is this assumption that leads the libertarian thinker, Robert Nozick, in his classic
work Anarchy, State, and Utopia(1974) to make the case for the minimal state.
Nozick’s argument is interesting because he seeks to construct his non-anarchist
case on individualist anarchist principles. He argues that individuals have natural
rights, and their goods and bodies are protected by private protective associations.
However, unlike Rothbard and the free-market anarchists, he accepts that, through
competition, one of the protective associations will emerge as dominant, and when
it protects all who live in its domain whether they pay privately or not, it then
becomes a ‘minimal state’.
Some form of government seems to be essential if the problem of externalities
or spillovers, as they are called, are to be dealt with. Negative externalities arise
when, for example, a factory pollutes the environment and the cost that results is
much less to the individual than to society at large. Some kind of collective242 Part 2 Classical ideologies