Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Moderate Anarchy

Even anarchist communities would quickly institute regulation against murder and theft.  Human rights must be inclusive of property rights, as the right not to be murdered or abused is your property, with theoretically your right to bargain it away.  Even leftist versions of anarchy that promote sharing, circles of trust, or gift economies are implicitly recognizing property rights as communal property, membership property, or the social esteem (assets) of expected returned favours.  A commune must retain the right to sell itself either in whole or in expanded membership, even if it may choose to gift those rights away.  Without the right there is no incentive to invest in the commune.

The only form of anarchy that doesn't recognize property rights whether or not they admit it, is nihilism.  The state/media portrayal of anarchists as destroyers of everything ostensibly under the pretext of wanting to loot property lawlessly.  While such people exist, and arguably the most militant revolutionaries are those that seek the greatest power or greatest power vacuum under which they aim to personally profit, anarchism is essentially an idealist framework founded on liberty and voluntaryism.

Laws against violence and theft are easy to accept voluntarily.  The alternative is amassing or joining the strongest armies to fight for what little property exists, and employing people in the security or brigandry industry means they are not employed in creating property and value.  Once we accept that there needs to be regulation and enforcement against violence and theft, we accept that there must be laws, police and courts.  Privatising these is an impossibility, because the rich white gated community protection force can only serve its clients instead of idealist law, and state oppression is simply replaced with private oppression.

Accepting law, courts and police doesn't mean accepting a state, even though hardly anyone realizes this yet.  One solution, is to simply prevent all other legislation than violence and theft prevention.  Legislation is the tool by which the state circumvents all mandates and checks on its power.  Its irrelevant that the original US constitutional convention specifically mandated federal law to be as minimal as possible, all opportunities to expand federal power through legislation are taken with impunity.  Its irrelevant that there are independent branches of government who pretend to act as checks and balances if politicians have higher loyalty to their parties, and if the branches and parties can gain more power through collusion rather than opposition.

Having accepted laws and enforcement against violence and theft are worthwhile, what do we do when 12 year olds drag race cars drunk through school zones repeatedly causing death to themselves and pedestrian children?  Legislating driving privileges based on maturity, sobriety, and perhaps proven capacity would become popular, with no obvious alternative solution to preventing the harm.  Similarly, regulating stock (and other) markets such that buyers and sellers have a minimum amount of cash or assets to place trades is better for the market than if people are constantly dealing with fraudulent or insolvent counterparties.  Also similarly, its normal for people to prefer regulation aimed at preventing pollution and industrial disasters over seeking compensation for union carbide bhopal or bp event horizon oil spill type events on the grounds that preventing harm is better than compensating harm, and there is no guarantee that a negligent party has the capacity to compensate fully its victims.

Even though we have strong arguments for popular legislation, there is no reason whatsoever for these regulatory bodies to be hierarchically structured under one executive.  By making regulatory agencies independent, and as much as possible, each individual regulatory (sub) legislation independent, we prevent a state aparatus from using all of its tentacles to oppress its citizens.  By making these regulatory or legislative silos accountable to the electorate, their efficiency and necessity needs to always be justified.

Natural governance uses the term natural in its sense of truth and correctness.  It presumes the primal value of freedom and presumes that society should be a voluntary association for the mutual benefit of its members, and not its leadership.  Rather than eliminating all leadership, the natural solution is to have justified and accountable leadership on narrow mandates.  This provides a natural balance in providing social services that are essential or at least of value, and limiting the power and expense of government.

No comments:

Post a Comment