SUNKSHIPCAPTAIN

This will be little more than a rant and an Australian specific rant, no less, but having read through the materials about s 51 (xxxi) in which the Commonwealth Parliament is granted the “power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to … (xxxi) the acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws” I feel like I have to let off some steam.

This section is to be contrasted with the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution which states “nor shall private property be taken … without just compensation.” This, of course, implies that a market value be considered, at least in some token form. But this is not the case in Australia. No, in Australia the High Court need only find that there are ‘just terms’. This means that there is no need for equivalent exchange, let alone voluntary exchange. There is nothing more simple theft, lauded as constitutional piety, in which the High Court considers not whether the ‘acquisition’ (a polite legal euphemism if I ever heard one) was fair for the person having their property ‘acquired’ but whether it is fair for all other parties. This means that the Commonwealth can take a person’s property on nothing more than the justification of “what is fair and just between the community and the owner of the thing taken.” (Nelungaloo Pty Ltd v Commonwealth [No 1])

Most propertarian systems advocate self-ownership (ie having property in one’s own body) as the fundamental starting point for rights. One ‘homesteads’ their body immediately and therefore they acquire property in it. This, however, brings up the uncomfortable question, “If we own our ourselves like any other property, can we be bought and sold as well?” After all, if we are basing our system of property rights on the fundamental starting point of owning one’s self, what is there to keep the buying and selling of people to return in a voluntaryist society?

The answer is that unlike property in a house, or the laptop I am typing this on, the property rights I have in myself cannot be alienated from me, it is the one true inalienable right. If I was to sell you this laptop and hand it over, the property rights, not only legal ownership but possession would pass to you. However, if I was to sell myself, I would still retain control over my actions. Yes, you can suggest, demand, even torture me and produce the results you want but you would ultimately remain alienated from the property you supposedly acquired. My consent, willing or unwilling, is still required for every action I make after “selling myself” leaving the concept a hollow one that should be struck down as unfeasible.

A person cannot be divested of themselves, it is contradictory. You could sell a body part if it had been separated from the controlling mind, you could sell your services (ie labour), but you cannot give another person the ability to exclude all others (including yourself) from control of you and thus the property you have in your body is inalienable.

When Abraham Lincoln said “secession is the essence of anarchy” he evidently meant it in the pejorative. After all, waging a war over the South’s secession is hardly a ringing endorsement of the concept. However, while I disagree with the sentiment I think Lincoln identified something crucial.

The right to secede, to self-govern, and to reject the tyranny of the majority is anarchy.

One group of people seceding from another does not necessarily entail an endorsement of anarchism. After all, the Confederacy was certainly not an anarchic association. It had its own constitution, a president, and other commonly accepted elements of a state. I am sure many individuals, in particular slaves were less than enamored with the laws of the Confederacy. But it was the idea that one entity had no authority over another that lay at the core of secession. It is ironic that there was no cry of irony as to the Union’s actions against the Confederacy, being a nation formed in the aftermath of secession from Imperial control.

It is this incoherent and patchwork application of secession (slavery in particular is the ultimate abrogation of secession) that is the only true barrier between our current world of statism and an anarchic world.

Taking a look at Ferguson at the height of the protests one could be forgiven for thinking it was a high-quality dystopian mockumentary, with militarily equipped police firing rubber bullets on peaceful protesters, tear gassing them, hauling up armoured vehicles with snipers mounted on the top, and declaring no-fly zones. All in the cosy midwest of America I might add. I’ve already written about the dangerous merging of military and police, so I’m going to leave that aside while I talk about something else.

What, if anything, is going to be achieved in Ferguson? In fact as I read the feeds from people on the ground as the police have rapidly de-escalated, one wonders as to whether people have forgotten that they were angry about something besides the heavy-handed police responses to this protest. Such rosy images of a policeman taking a selfie with a protestor, another hugging, and a general air of happiness and victory about the protest. Live feeds show people dancing on cars, a few “hands up, don’t shoot” sifting through the crowd.

This certainly is a race issue, there’s no sense in denying that. This is a town in which 5/6 council members are white, the mayor is white, the police chief is white, and most of the population is black. But at it’s core this is a government issue. It took thousands of people protesting across the country, burned out stores, and a lot of video footage spread across the internet just to put enough pressure on the government to get a possible release of the name of the officer who shot Mike Brown. If he is announced, prosecuted, and actually punished, then what? This is not a one off issue, this is endemic. Police brutality and state unaccountability is so ingrained that people cheer to find a modicum of justice in a single instance. In New York, NYPD threatened protesters with mass arrests and have gone so far as to already arrest people who were previously involved in the Occupy movement.

And this is to say nothing of the protest-for-protest’s-sake individuals who take it upon themselves to shout a lot, maybe trash some property, and call it a day, derailing movements simply for their entertainment. A person was gunned down and some people have used this as nothing more than a reason to loot stores.

Of course, the thing that has yet to happen is the worst to come. Give it a few days, maybe weeks, wait for another tragedy, another new “excitement” and the cycle will let Mike Brown fade. The world will go back inside and do nothing. There will be no change, no great social force sweeping aside resistance. Not when a new story breaks and the novelty of Ferguson wears off.

Depending on who you ask (admittedly there aren’t many you can) Panarchy will either fall into a Central (or statist) model and a Common (or anarchic) model. Central models, such as Zach Weinersmith’s Polystate have overarching statutory rules about when you can enter or leave an anthrostate, what happens when a criminal or civil incident occurs between citizens of differing anthrostates, and so on. One of the key points is that a person must be a citizen of a state, its simply assumed. Early academic articles discussing Panarchy similarly assume a bureaucratic body that might administer the registration and transfer of citizenship in Panarchy.

I am not going to argue in this piece as to which would be best (and I think some of these are downright terrible) and instead provide a handful of theoretical frameworks for administering a Panarchist system. I will start with the most anarchic and move to the most centralized with two intermediary models. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list and the variations you could perform on any one of these could probably fill a book in and of itself.

1. Free Association (Contractual) Panarchy

Contractual Panarchy bears more resemblance to the one found in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, in which ‘Thetes’ roam the streets, citizenshipless, right alongside those who are members of a ‘Phyle’. In many ways, provided systems of property rights remain in place as they would in an anarcho-capitalist society, there is no fundamental difference between this and voluntaryism. After all, the right of free association taken one step further by anarchists from their minarchist counterparts could really be taken again with the reacceptance of a state. It’s nothing more than a facet of anarchism in this sense, a brain toy in which people hypothetically utilize an association to protect their rights and provide them (possibly) services.

Any Common Economic Protocol or similar system used to administer differences between states would find itself working in a Friedmanesque polycentric system, one that might organically arise out of mutual benefit to the disagreeing parties.

2. State Registration Panarchy

SRP operates in a similar way to how many modern nation-states such as Australia and The United States of America have a register for corporations. A new state would register itself, lodging its constitution (regardless of whether it is a few lines or a ten volume civil code) with the International Bureau of States, who would only serve an administerial role, acting as an acceptable neutral agent to grant (and possible revoke) state licenses. Of course, there would need to be some body and method for determining whether or not to revoke a state’s license. An independent but official court whose role was solely to deal with cases involving a breach of a registered constitution (resulting in the state’s dissipation) or a conflict between state interests.

3. Fixed Number Panarchy

Fixed Number Panarchy, or FNP simply means that the number (and overarching organizational structure) of the states in a Panarchist system are fixed, subject to the ability for a convention of states to convene to create a new one, due to demand or agreement. The states then would have an organized way in which to resolve large-scale disputes, a World Congress of sorts, with the menagerie of states being able to democratically come to agreement on issues that are best suited to a central authority. These FNP states would ideally be anthrostates rather than geostates, not claiming sovereign monopolies on territory and the people therein. The primary issue at hand is representation in the FNP Congress. Is it proportional to the number of people within a state or are the number of votes fixed subject, again, to a ratification by the FNP? This might lead to skewed turnouts either way or the inevitable creep towards a two-party system found in democracies with anything but mixed-member proportional electoral systems. Simply choosing between the Republican State or the Democratic State would hardly be an ideal system for anyone.

4. Nominal Panarchy

Rather than choosing which state to subscribe to, Nominal Panarchy instead allows people to choose what “level” or “mode” of citizenship they want. A “Blue” citizen may be forced to pay high taxes but is given higher quality services in exchange. A “Yellow” citizen may pay little to no taxation, but may not be able to bring proceedings in publicly funded courts or have access to public healthcare. “Purple” citizens might be required to serve in the military for several years before receiving high priority services at a comparatively lower taxation rate but will also suffer the downside of being on active reserve status so long as they remain a “Purple” citizen.

In an ideal world, and I’m using ‘ideal’ as in ideologically perfect, I am sure most anarcho-capitalists would assert that the best course of action would be for the state to be dismantled immediately. This should occur after a final directive was issued shutting down all government services and agencies. After all, we assert that what the state can do, the market can do better. I am not here to refute that argument, only the argument that an immediate dismantling of the state would do more to violate the NAP and hurt the cause of anarchy than perhaps anything save the state remaining permanently.

The two reasons for which as well as my suggestions are outlined below.

One, we would have chaos due to the simple reason that homesteading all the things government had built (or contracted to build) would be taken over piecemeal.

Take for example the water mains, plants, and associated pipes. Let us imagine that after Directive X, government shuts down once and for all. So the government workers that actually handled the water lines before probably unionize or create a company in which they all have stock and homestead the water plant. Great. However the question arises as to who is homesteading the pipes that run under all the houses? The obvious answer is the people who own the land and attached houses above them would attain property in the pipes beneath them.

However, due to the fact that the government built these pipes in mind with a central authority, it would only take one person who could not be bargained with to rip up the lines or do something to halt the flow of water in one spot to conceivable shut the entire system down. I am not asserting this wouldn’t be within his rights, but starting anarchy off with a lack of any infrastructure is hardly ideal.

But this brings us to my second and primary point. Let us imagine that the hypothetical Water Union did homestead the plant and managed to set up an agreeable water pricing system for people whose homes were built above these lines. The result is now we have monopoly. Now I’m not going to cover ground on State v Natural Monopolies when people like David Friedman (in his book The Machinery of Freedom) have already covered this. But this is not a natural monopoly as would actually arise in a true anarcho-capitalist state. After all, any new society is not born in a vacuum, there are still all the things built and all the lives lived beforehand that will affect what happens now.

Is it really sensible that a company that has homesteaded a previously government monopolized industry should be given free rein to exploit the fact that the government created that monopoly? Of course not, all anarcho-capitalists loathe monopolies built on coercive violence.

Competing water companies or even garbage collection agencies are not formed in an instant, just as “Rome was not built in a day”. It is therefore only logical that if the ugly hand of state controlled monopolies were to be eradicated from an anarcho-capitalist society we must do so over a period of years.

To be sure, in some years a competitor might be able to build their own airport to compete with the sole one created and enforced by the state monopoly, but in the meantime the homesteaders of any airport given a prior government enforced monopoly would be free to use the after-effects of state power to their advantage, a sort of echoing cronyism if you will. This would not be permanent but would certainly allow government aggression to affect the economy, in perhaps a devastating manner.

I propose that in the transitionary stage, governments should gradually privatise industries with reference to how long it would take to create an effective competitor. Postal agencies and garbage collectors could quickly be formed, as they could easily have new vehicles constructed and repurpose current buildings to their designs. While airports, water mains, and other infrastructure heavy industries would require years to equitably transition over. Similarly courts and police agencies could rapidly be formed, bringing about a more robust system of polycentric law, taking much needed stress of an under-funded and overly bureaucratic state justice system.

To speed up this transition, governments could offer large tax breaks to anyone creating a competing agency in a field where previously the government held a monopoly. They could cut taxes generally to help stimulate the economy in a decidedly Austrian manner and use the revenue generated from the sale of current government property and equipment to make the transition smooth. The end result of which would be a more just transition to a fully anarcho-capitalistic society.

Of course, this all relies on the comical assumption that we might have a government that would wish to dismantle itself. It is far-fetched, I will not quibble on that, but far from impossible.

One might say, “It’s all very well and good to sit around discussing the fundamental immorality of taxation when the population starves because of automation. We need Universal Basic Income to ensure that the richest portion of society, who control the robots, do not simply let the rest die. Either that or we need to regulate robots for the common good!”

Ignoring the conceitedness of protesting the existence of methods of production that are better alternatives than you, let’s focus on the thrust of why the argument for UBI is not only the wrong response to automation but may in fact be disastrous in the long run.

Automation is not a binary switch, in fact it’s a process that has gone on, piece by piece since the dawn of time. From the first time someone used a stick to extend their reach, we have been using tools to do portions of the work for us. And for every great leap and bound, there has been a cadre of people shouting, “This spells the end.” I’m sure the scribes shouted this at Gutenberg and the reapers to the inventor of the harvester. In fact, history is a long sequence of jobs appearing and disappearing, though for most of it, as existence has been a mean thing, the primary share of them still remained in the province of survival.

Some people point to disparity of wealth as a reason for why we will need to adopt UBI in response to automation. However, this presupposes that wealth disparity is directly linked to the lack of wealth. Wealth, in this case I will use as a catch-all for both income and goods generally. And while income disparity is an issue (which I hope to discuss fully at a later date) it is not the issue that is at the heart of the fear. The fear is that people will not have enough to live, to survive, to prosper even. But while income disparity has increased, the standard of living has too. When computers first began to gain the public attention, they were big, expensive, specific things, far removed from the common American, let alone a person living in a “third-world” country. As time has passed though, these computers have found their way to such a wide audience that even areas such as Africa, a far cry from the economic conditions of the “first-world”, are showing a massive rise in cellphone ownership. These cellphones, in comparison to the lumbering and expensive pieces found in decades past, have exponentially more computing power and utility and come at an exponentially lower cost. Is it really out of the realm of reason that if computers have become so widespread that “automation” cannot either?

I say words like “automation” and “happen” (air quotes and all) because what exactly are computers but automation? Even the simplest cellphone does the work of hundreds of ancient people in sending a message across continents. And that is ignoring the thousands or millions of applications we have gotten computers to do in the last few years alone. Has this destroyed everyone’s lives? Has the ubiquity of technology ushered in a new age of despair? Even if you think we do live in the worst of times (in which case I urge you to take a look at how and for what length people actually lived throughout history) it cannot simply be blamed on technology. After all, technology is nothing more than a utility, a tool, an extension of our will and intellect. The adage of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” certainly comes to mind. However, if blame it to be laid at anyone’s feet, I’m not discussing that here.

Is it not inconceivable that in the same way computers only became more cheap and more useful, allowing humans to spend more time doing things that the computers now do, is it not possible (or inevitable) that the robots will undergo the same treatment. More and more we see robots finding uses in warehouses, where once it was cheaper to employ people and have them steer vehicles. If it’s not warehouses it’s supermarket checkouts or coffee-shops or even the floor of our own homes (I’m looking at you Roomba, you evil job stealing monster).

If these robots become cheaper, just as computers did, just as 3-D printing is as well, we will find ourselves in the place where the means of high-tech production will be affordable, decentralized, and convenient. As more low-scale producers arise, we will find ourselves given more choice as to any of the myriad things we want. This might have the effect of curbing the aforementioned income disparity. Where once a few kings owned the world and the means of production, we may find ourselves in a time when every home has the potential to be the new seat of a great entrepreneur, ready to tap into an unknown market, unburdened by the need to produce on a huge scale to make up his or her overhead costs. Setting up a factory, managing shipping deals, and employing many employees works might seem comically inefficient when one could invent a product, then print it, even sell the plans online.

It benefits nobody to see the rest of the world starve, least of all the businessmen. Henry Ford famously increased his workers wages so that they too could afford a Model T, spurring new growth in the industry. If, as some people believe, businessmen are dragons, merely interested in hoarding resources for their den, we would have to assume that instead of constantly lowering the cost of new technologies, endlessly improving them, and generally improving everyone’s lives, they would simply price everything as highly as possible, never innovate, and intentionally try to make everyone miserable. This is of course labouring under the assumption that the aforementioned behaviour would actually make any money at all. In fact, it would be such a bad tactic, that if they did decide to never cheapen robots and leave the world to burn in their wake, that they would live in constant fear of reprisal and would certainly lose the benefits of living in a healthier, happier world. After all, if we break it down to the most selfish and heartless motivations, a world starved and impoverished is unpleasant to live in, even if you’re rich as a king.

It is sometimes said in political discussions, that your civil policing authority cannot be the same as your armed forces. This is because when your Police are soldiers, trained to fight enemies of the state are also trained to arrest citizens of the state, the two become utterly intertwined.

Looking at images and videos from Ferguson, Missouri, one could be forgiven for thinking that a military incursion had begun. Snipers on armoured trucks, no fly zones, large scale SWAT teams, machine-guns and more feature heavily. But this isn’t the distant “War on Terror”, instead it is the protest of a young and unarmed man that was shot by police with no real accountability. When the people rightly protested a system in which they could be shot without facing repercussions, when members of their community are gunned down like enemy combatants, armed or not, they are treated like not just enemies of society (which they comprise) but more importantly enemies of the state.

The fanatical allegiance that the members of the state have for it are exemplified in the way that cops seem to unflinchingly deny that cops could ever be corrupt or engage in wanton brutality. They stop attempts at their ‘lawkeeping’ being filmed or they make excuses like the policemen who arrested journalists Wesley Lowery and Ryan J Reilly who “didn’t know any better”. They “Protect and Serve” the arms of the state, not the people they purportedly are comprised of.

First of all I want to say, yes, I know this was a game and not necessarily an accurate representation of what would happen in the case of a libertarian / anarcho-capitalist society. However, as someone who has both played Bioshock quite a few times and as someone who espouses a free-markets view, I feel like I should come to the defence of the Rapture that should have been.

Spoilers for Bioshock and Bioshock 2 below

Rapture did not fail because people engaged in free market practices, it failed because Andrew Ryan pretended to just be a businessman in competition but withheld state-like powers which he utilized when he thought the city was slipping from his fingers.

Even before the Civil War with Fontaine, when many people assert that Rapture went from a free-market to an authoritarian dictatorship, Andrew Ryan exercised tyrannical powers to imprison Sofia Lamb who spoke out against his philosophy. But his actions go further than that, making any importation of outside goods a capital offence, setting up propaganda vessels in Ryan Amusements and Sander Cohen. Later he not only nationalizes Fontaine Futuristics (which implies Rapture is certainly a state to own national property) but hunts and “kills” Frank Fontaine as well as other dissidents like Anna Culpepper who were openly critical of Ryan. His crimes culminate in following Suchong’s advice to alter the commercial plasmids to make the users of them “suggestible”, denying them free will and turning them into psychotic slaves.

Now I’m not saying that if Ryan hadn’t essentially been a hidden state that Rapture would have been perfect. We still had Fontaine using his particular brand of violence and thuggery in secret, the unscrupulous practices of Augustus Sinclair, and the issues that arose from living in an isolationist city with no sunlight. But even still, when people point to Bioshock and say, “It’s a denouncement of libertarianism, pure and simple” they are flat out wrong.

The greatest issues that ailed the city stemmed from the fact that Andrew Ryan, pure and simple, was a authoritarian statist who did not live up to the Randian ideals he thought he could embody. If Rapture had been built by many people, perhaps the state monopoly on coercive violence that Ryan embedded at the heart of Rapture could have been avoided.

The parties hereby swear (or don’t, obviously by remaining alive or in the country they’re consenting) to obey the laws of the state and pay the taxes they are ordered (I mean they “agreed”) to pay. In exchange, they are granted the benefits (sometimes) of citizenship. If any party wishes to leave, they’re welcome to, after they pay the fees and accept the social contract of another state in exchange. But we swear it’s a real agreement.

Signed     _____________________