Austro-libertarianism as political just war theory
Since the point of what I wrote previously (I recommend reading that first for context) may not be clear, I still believe Rothbardian/ Hoppean anarcho-capitalism, as I understand it, is basically correct and that any political or economic view, which does not hold this as a theoretical base, is incomplete. However, after continuing to see the same stupid arguments in which some attack libertarianism in the same stupid NPC-like ways, while libertarians defend it in even stupider ways, with both continually moving goalposts and refusing to understand what the others mean by what they say, I think it should be obvious that there needs to be a better way of articulating what is basically true and universally applicable in the theory. I am no authority on this theory. I want to give those who are a starting place for a more useful way of applying it which they can expand on. If what I say here is actually not consistent with Austro-libertarianism, then I am showing a way to apply similar logic and principles which still allows one to give contrarian takes on politics and economics, which we all know is the real reason why anyone likes being a radical libertarian.
Those defending libertarianism by saying it is not corporate cronyist, atomist, libertine, pacifist, or anarchist (in the colloquial sense) need to realize that they have utterly failed at preventing people from believing it is one or more of those things. “Libertarian” and “libertine” contain the same word. Anarchy means violent chaos resulting from the breakdown of the systems on which people depend. Calling for smaller government means rhetorically opposing whatever good things other people want the government to do and thus defending those who exploit the status quo.
It may be possible explain how liberty or anarchy, properly understood and implemented, do not have these problems, but, by going back to the basics, I think it is very easy to formulate a far more intuitive and compelling approach which requires less mental gymnastics and less arguing over the definitions of words, which, as I once heard it excellently put, is an absolutely nonsensical thing to do because the purpose of words is to agree on their meaning in order to argue about other things.
Yes, anarchism is the only theoretically consistent way of applying the underlying principles of libertarianism, and it resolves all of these problems. However, there is a fundamental disconnect between Austrian theory and libertarian rhetoric. Anarchy, meaning “no rulers“, means no action as far as rhetoric, is concerned. Saying that everything will be solved, if government were to get out of the way, does not work, especially if that means getting rid of all government. Attention is always on those who actually do the solving and they are the government in people’s minds.
All political discourse presupposes that the participants have some say over government. Such people are, almost inherently, not innocent by an anarchist standard and therefore have no reason to listen to you as you are necessarily an enemy to them. Stated another way, any serious discussion beginning with the premise that government is inherently criminal would necessarily be what is known as “fedposting”. Even those who totally disagree with what I write next should see its value in forming a rhetorical strategy by understanding that all warfare is based on deception. I will propose a way for libertarian principles to be used to rhetorically move politics in a better direction without needing to convince everyone of some ideal state most would find bizarre.
Those who view politics in terms of aggression can instead simply say that 1) politics is war by other means, but 2) it is also possible and preferable to make peace and achieve mutually beneficial solutions and… that’s it.
When radical libertarians argue about the morality of conscription, even in an otherwise justified defensive war, they say there is no obligation to defend other people which justifies forcing them to do so. I am suggesting little more than applying this consistently. Murray Rothbard’s button does not exist; universal political peace is not a possibility. All action occurs in the real world of scarce time, attention, and resources. It is impossible for anyone to not have preferences and priorities in regard to whom he defends and against what. There is no such thing as negative rights, outside of the context of argumentation.
With the approach of considering the actions which are actually available to oneself and applying just war principles, arguments about whether anarcho-capitalism is possible or what kind of people can make it work are absolutely and totally irrelevant. There is nothing utopian about saying simply that, in the present moment, we have political enemies who intend to make us worse off. We have a right to oppose them, but just war principles apply to such a conflict as they do to any other and we do not want to antagonize those who are not already hostile to us. There is no need to abstractly argue about a hypothetical different system for organizing society.
Since no one is innocent and everyone consents to varying extents, government can be considered an economic good which can be produced and consumed without conflict just as any other good can. This should not be a strange idea to anarcho-capitalists who try to imagine how private voluntary institutions can produce security, justice, and anything else. It should become clear when attempting to imagine what these institutions would look like in reality, they would act a lot like, not just states, but empires due to their infinite scalability. Instead of trying to destroy coercive empires and hope voluntary ones take their place, perhaps it is infinitely easier for existing power structures to be made marginally closer to such ideal ones. Such proposals could be presented as ways of serving the agenda of whomever you are addressing by showing new strategies for dealing with political conflict. This way, anarcho-capitalism has relevance to real politics, as opposed to classical liberalism, which is unable to properly account for the production of governance.
This is why I agree with the premise of libertarian purity spiraling against minarchism. When I say that my approach still allows one to give contrarian takes, what I actually mean is it allows one to give critical, high-dimensional takes which break unproductive paradigms. The question of “should dangerous addictive drugs be banned?“ is meaningless outside of a highly specific context which defines how, where, and by whom this would be done. I think it is uncontroversial to say the answer to the question of whether one ought to protect, in the ways he can while managing trade-offs, his society from the evils of drugs should generally be yes, and those who disagree are not friends.
I believe what I suggest here is in line with Rothbard’s Nations by Consent. Nation-states can be conceived of as corporations in the business of manufacturing the common good for a particular people and are only in need of better ways of resolving conflict. This contradicts Austro-libertarianism only if it requires seeking to undo the world’s entire history of conquest. If it does, then what I propose is different in this one regard. Perhaps this is what it means for there to be both a nonaggression principle and a nonvengeance principle, as David Gornoski calls for. It is still possible to simultaneously regard these corporations as highly suboptimal and to attempt to build more ideal institutions for producing the common good from the ground up.
The “common good” is not well-defined, but that does not mean it does not exist. The same is true for many, perhaps all, economic goods. It includes basic law and order, but can include a large variety of things such as social safety nets and standards of decency. All of these things can be produced nonaggressively. If one’s principles do not allow him to do and have anything and everything worth doing and having, then those principles hardly be called libertarian.
Like all other economic goods, people have different preferences regarding the common good. So, there is nothing unreasonable about proposing that people be able to fulfill those different preferences without conflict, or, at least, no more unreasonable than that those people have a vote over it. This is in everyone’s interest because no one is guaranteed to win any conflict. When conflict is initiated, victims defend themselves, find allies and retaliate, if they can. This is just Misesian utilitarianism restated.
There is nothing radical about resolving conflict, but views other than voluntaryism are unable to fully consider federalism, secession, privatization, or otherwise making it possible to opt-out of government, as ways of doing so. There is nothing unprecedented about any of these things. It is always possible for people to renegotiate their relationship with any institution, even if that means emigrating or winning a war for independence. This is far from necessarily an optimal outcome. Being forced to work for someone or buy his products is slavery, but one should want a job he does not want to quit and should want goods and services he does not want to stop buying. One should similarly want a nation he does not want to secede from. Decentralization versus centralization is a matter of trade-offs. Anything like secession can be a temporary negotiating tactic for a political minority to achieve a favorable compromise.
Seeing it like this, there is a better way to respond when some say there are hardly any historical examples of anarcho-capitalism. All of history consists of people attempting to resolve conflict. To the extent that you have a say over them, there is nothing radical or utopian about wanting those resolutions to be marginally more mutually beneficial. All large-scale institutions have had varying degrees of consent from the people they oversee. To the extent that you have a say over them, there is nothing radical or utopian about wanting those degrees to be marginally greater, especially if it is done in order to make a ruler’s position more secure by resolving conflict.
Of course, this requires separating libertarianism as a political identity from the almost theoretically trivial matter of conflict resolution. The latter is not something for a movement to be primarily based on. The power of market economies and the danger of escalating violence mean that humanity evolves toward non-aggression whether anyone wants this or not. This is not some naive optimism. Evolving toward non-aggression can mean evolving toward docility and submissiveness while ever more insidious parasites engaging in beyond fifth generation warfare also evolve. The actual difficult task is working for the success of one’s family, community, and nation and ensuring they are not unilaterally disarmed. Avoiding antagonism is an important, often neglected part of this, but it is far from the totality.
Voluntaryists do not need to oppose every proposed government policy for actively ensuring the common good. Policies, which would normally be considered unlibertarian, do not necessarily make opting-out less possible. It can be the opposite. Whatever benefits those policies provide and the costs they impose would be things to be negotiated over. If a government expressly serves a particular people instead of maintaining an illusion of universal neutrality, the need for superior means of conflict resolution, such as secession, become apparent.
Many government policies truly are bad and the conventional libertarian position can still be erred on the side of for the very non-ideological reason that there are infinitely more wrong ways than right ways to perform the business of the common good, just as any other business, but that business still needs to be done, and the costs of doing so can be worth paying. Of course, a general skepticism of government is still warranted by those outside of power for another very non-ideological reason, which also applies to any other business, that the people in power are probably not your personal friends in the most literal sense, but they could be, and if you have a say over government at all, then you can possibly say how this can be done right.
With this view, to refer to present issues, there is a sense in which a state allowing mass immigration and the outsourcing of industry, even if it is not subsidizing those things through unlibertarian means, is engaged in a form of anarcho-tyranny by stealing the well-being of its people and selling it to foreigners. A lower cost of goods and labor, with all else equal, is good for everyone in theory, but there are losers in the short term who may suffer irreparable damage as a result. People can organize in order to mitigate this in a free society. A homogenous cohesive nation with meaningful work for its people is an economic good which people are willing to pay some price for, but this would end up not looking very different than state action. If you personally are not working to organize people so as to help them adapt to such changes, then you simply are not a friend of the people struggling with these problems. No matter how much they could agree with you in theory, they do not owe you their limited time and attention.
Many have given more sophisticated takes on these issues and others, arguing that it is consistent with libertarianism to support a state action to solve them or not, but I am giving the most basic argument that one has a right to prefer certain outcomes for his society and that it is possible for there to be large-scale collective action, coordinated by authorities, in accordance with those preferences without conflict with those who have other preferences. However, if these disagreements are over matters of the good of a nation, it does not need to be taken as a given that it is worth making peace over them.
It is quite frustrating when libertarians seem to not acknowledge these issues associated with immigration and international trade, when they should be able to provide solutions no one else has. The fact that anyone complains about them is enough to say there is a problem subjectively, that they lack an economic good they desire. The only question then is what is stopping them from having that good. I was particularly disappointed in how Bob Murphy responded to what Curtis Yarvin wrote on this matter. He should realize that Yarvin is totally affirming an anarchist view by saying people are slaves of government. No one wants to be a slave, no matter the morality of the issue. If this view were to become more common, it would result in rebellion and heightened competition for power, which is dangerous and I do not necessarily want that. It should not be too hard for existing governments to just work right. I want to be careful about dispelling the illusion that people have a say over government, which is why the approach for serving both libertarian and nationalist ends I articulate here is better.
An obvious apparent shortcoming of this pragmatic case for voluntaryism is that it does not apply to people who are in no position to negotiate. Those with no power can be exploited without fear of retaliation. However, this problem exists outside of the context of argumentation, where there is no such thing as negative rights. This is the actual problem for radical voluntaryists overcome. Guiding people in gaining the power to negotiate requires real work and innovation. The actual utopian vision is that the price of sovereignty can be lowered to one anyone can afford. Insurance-based defense agencies give an idea of how this might work, but the end result would not necessarily be anarchy or decentralization, but government which truly serves its people. As much as I might like to fantasize about anti-empires deploying teams of teams of wizard-knights, the realistic way for such defense agencies to exist might be as lobbying organizations which serve people whom would not be profitable to serve otherwise.
Returning to the two simple points that 1) politics is war by other means, but 2) it is also possible and preferable to make peace and achieve mutually beneficial solutions, I hypothesize that all errors in political thought can be reduced to failing to understand either one or both of those. In this way, I can formulate a new kind of horseshoe theory in which everyone on the horseshoe is makes an error. Liberal centrist democrats tend to not properly consider the hostility in politics and believe governments are and ought to be neutral arbiters, while the “far right” and “far left” tend to ignore possibilities of making peace. Austro-libertarianism perfectly accounts for both in theory, but libertarians tend to make both errors by assuming everything labeled as “private” is peaceful and everything labeled as “state” is hostile, while also not considering the scarcity of their own time, attention, and resources and instead arguing about what one ought to vaguely “support” or oppose”, which is inexcusably stupid for those who purport to understand praxeology and methodological individualism.
This should raise the question of how valuable it actually is to have the correct theory, but I do not think it is difficult to get this right. It is only the web of nonsense created by modern democratic ideologies which stops libertarians from presenting a simple formulation of conflict and peace.