Revisiting that Rwanda Slaughter
Jun 16th, 2010 @ 09:26 pm › Jeffrey Tucker
Tonight at the Acton University, I heard a lecture by Immaculée Ilibagiza, a Tutsi refugee from the Rwandan slaughter from 1994, when tribal genocide left some one million people dead. In particular, it was the Hutus who were killing the Tutsis and certainly she was among the targets. She survived by living 91 days in a tiny bathroom, hiding with other women, emerging weighing 65 pounds to hear news that her entire family had been hacked to death. By now, she is rather famous, having been interviewed on 60 Minutes, CNN, and many other places.
As Rothbard has noted, the whole conflict between the two groups stems from the absurdity of colonial borders forcing these two groups to live under one state in which domination of one by the other is an inevitable. What I had not realized until tonight is the extent to which the Hutu government had actually promoted and even ordered the mass death of the Tutsis, in radio broadcasts following the death of the Hutu president. In other words, the genocide had been legally condoned and promoted. In some sense, why should anyone be surprised to see the hand of the state active in such bloodshed? The state, far from promoting a peaceful world that would otherwise be a Hobbesian nightmare, actual promoted a nightmare that Hobbes himself would not have believed.
Home
RSS Feed
E-Mail
Del.icio.us
Digg
Technorati
Magnolia
Newsvine
Reddit
61 Responses
when states go wild, we have the u.n. sleep easy, folks.
Jeff,
And now the Rwandans are “proud” of their universal healthcare. Did you see the NYT story?
“A Poor Nation, With A Health Plan” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/health/policy/15rwanda.html
Oh, of course, it takes in less than it costs and it’s actually funded by outside donors, but still, EVEN POOR OLD RWANDA HAS (NEARLY) UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE! Geez America, get with the program!
(ps, this would be a great place to flip the tired statist adage “We’re rich because of the State” on its head by offering that “Rwandans are poor because they have universal healthcare”)
Of course the rebuttal is that those who were offended by what went on were free to pool their own private resources and try to stop the Hutus and/or protect the Tutsis. After all, in Libertopia if one group wants to exterminate another group what’s that of any business of everyone else?
I read somewhere that the land system is at fault- custom dictates that they keep dividing the land between all sons, no matter how small the blocks get! If some people conveniently died from any cause, then more land was available for others….
Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Jeff – I have also had the good fortune of being present for an Immaculee Ilibagiza “lecture”. Too bad the real focus of her talk couldn’t be incorporated into your post (though I’m sure you would have liked to have discussed that other aspect as well.)
Hope that’s sarcasm.
☺
Well, she is deeply religious and that’s a wonderful focus, and it certainly could be incorporated into my post but that isn’t the focus of this blog and I wasn’t writing a comprehensive post on her life.
Let’s not leave out that Tutsi militias re-invaded Rwanda and went on their own revenge killing sprees. There’s also the matter of the conflict encapsulating the entire border region with Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo, a conflict which would claim millions of lives in more than a decade of fighting. It’s Africa’s worst conflict and, of course, almost nobody knows of it…
Her book, for anyone who may be interested.
Left to tell: discovering God amidst the Rwandan holocaust
by Immaculée Ilibagiza
http://books.google.com/books?id=U0DzeifB9UAC
Thanks for sharing. Excellent points. To quote, “As Rothbard has noted, the whole conflict between the two groups stems from the absurdity of colonial borders forcing these two groups to live under one state in which domination of one by the other is an inevitable.” To further add, it would appear that the so-called “enlightened” global interventionists who uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as “gospel truth” would ensure this phenomenon to perpetuate. Such as the inclusion of the right to
nationality in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which no individual or groups of individuals should be “stateless.” This premise stems mainly from the atrocities faced from the outcome of the second World War and the global interventionists devised a plan that ultimately is merely an example of coercion and forced migration for the “good” of the people. In the end this example is another “noble lie” glorified by the global interventionists. Truly sad.
In “Collapse”, Jared Diamond details this as a major cause of Hutus killing other Hutus during the genocide.
I think Mises and Hoppe have talked about the logical progression of dividing scarce land amongst a continually growing population, and this seems to illustrate it. This is why division of labor is so important to a growing population.
Yes, the U.S. is behind the the times–when are we going to have our mass slaughter? To save on healthcare costs, of course…
The groups were not tribal nor ethnic. They involved something more like class groupings that existed prior to colonialism. The Germans, then Belgians, enamored with the brutal nonsense of the then current racial science, confused and fossilized the population into more or less two groups. Although the traditional boundaries separating the groups were porous, the Belgians began to harden them by instituting identity cards that indicated so-called ethnic group status.
Tutsi were the traditional rulers and nobility while Hutus were farmers and laborers. The Belgian colonial rule rooted itself in the older hierarchy that favored Tutsi. Nonetheless, prior to independence there was no inter-class/ethnic violence. That all stems from post-colonial independence with the jockeying for power and settling old grudges stemming Belgian colonial rule (and favoritism). Hutus took and held power from independence til the Tutsi dominated RPF rebels drove them out and ended the genocide. The genocide was driven by fear and manipulation. The fear was not unfounded since the fate of Hutus in Burundi perversely paralleled that the the Tutsis in Rwanda. Burundi is firmly under the control of the ruling Tutsis even though they constitute a small proportion of the population (similar to Rwanda).
The Tutsis who “entered by force” Rwanda in the early 1990s were themselves the children of the refugees that fled Rwanda in the 1960s and 1970s following Hutu-led mass killings. These Tutsis in exile in Uganda became de facto stateless persons there. Whether you call it an invasion or return hinges on one’s support for the genocidaires.
The state did sanction the genocide as indicated by war crimes convictions for government officials. And the colonial state laid the foundation and structured for the ensuing conflict. But this wasn’t a textbook case of state-led genocide.
Gil,
In Libertopia there are no groups, only individuals. But if one self-proclaimed “group” decided to exterminate some putative group, the rest of Libertopia would be free to sell the other group the weapons for self defense. It would THEN be someone else’s business, after all!
I hope this doesn’t come across as too low ball, but the next time some statist leftist brings up the petty myth that Somalia is a libertarian paradise I’m just going to reply by saying, “the government of Rwanda.”
Give the man a blue ribbon. It was the Belgians who instituted the caste system in Rwanda as well as in Burundi. They thought the tall slim Tutsi were sort of like the Nordic tribe– African Aryans, so to speak. And encouraged the Hutu to feel inferior. So they hired only Tutsi to enforce their colonial regime while telling the Hutu they were only fit to be toilers of the field. Way to instill some ethnic animosity!
So once the Belgians left, the Hutu began slaughtering Tutsi in order to gain their political independence… while in other areas the Tutsi began to slaughter the Hutu pre-emptively, to save their hides and privileges. This slaughter and counter-slaughter has gone back and force since independence.
Sadly, people today are still very often prisoners of the past, and held answerable to the sins of their fathers.
I think my point was that if you want an America with no rules and no government, how would that differ from Somalia? Without police, wouldn’t the gangs and warlords start to take over?
Or, how about giving us a better example of a country that runs like a top with no government.
Or, maybe you want to keep some parts of government while throwing other parts of it away. If so, which parts would you keep? And how would you fund them?
I wasn’t intending to be critical. In fact, I remember coming away from her talk thinking about how the subject matter of her story is a great (though somewhat implicit) example of the evils wrought by the existence of the state. I just wish there was some leeway in this forum for discussion of the connection between liberty and faith.
In case you didn’t notice, Somalia is populated entirely by tribal black muslims. America is mostly white, secular, and literate.
“I think my point was that if you want an America with no rules and no government, how would that differ from Somalia?”
You are assuming that no government = no rules.
Society obviously cannot function without rules, but the question is, are rules better when they are self imposed or when they are imposed top-down from a coercive state?
How silly humans are to think that they are the originators of the ethical rules that advance civilization. ‘Silly’ may be the wrong word. Ego-driven is more accurate. Ego-driven interventionism is the erroneous attempt to establish ethical rules. Ego-driven interpretation is the erroneous attempt to alter the meaning of ethical rules.
“if you want an America with no rules and no government, how would that differ from Somalia? Without police, wouldn’t the gangs and warlords start to take over?”
Somalia has been discussed here in the past – if you do a search you will find some interesting articles and comments.
The real question is whether Somalia became a better place in the absence of government than it was when it previously had a government. The answer is”yes”, because Somalis were freed from much of the large-scaling thieving and murder which are the stock in trade of any government, but especially of African governments.
Somalia may still have warlords – but this is not a problem arising from the absence of government, but because the warlords aspire to be the national government, and try to prove that they are a government-in-waiting by stealing and killing. The difference between having a single, monopoly government of murderous thieves, and a bunch of smaller, competing, would-be governments, is that in the latter situation people have more options in terms of being able to defend themselves and to vote with their feet and move to another petty, would-be tyrant’s turf if they are too badly abused by their local bigwig. In the absence of a central government to confiscate guns and prevent migration, the warlords undoubtedly find that in practice their power is severely limited.
And BTW the police in the USA are a gang, that should be fairly obvious from reading the headlines. In fact it has been reported that in police training programs, recruits are repeatedly told, “there are lot of gangs out there, so we have to be the biggest and meanest gang of all.” And many American leaders are like warlords, especially the leaders of certain regional-based political machines. But rather than truly competing with each other and having to survive based on whether they either build up or ruin their own turf, these gangsters and warlords are nearly completely shielded from the consequences of bad decisions by being part of an interlinking web of gangs whose reporting structure goes all the way to the top of Washington DC and Wall Street and beyond that to a handful of extremely large and powerful banking interests. This huge, monolithic gang provides the (fiat) money, the weapons, the army and the propaganda machine (the Mighty Wurlitzer) which locks the gangs into power and protects for their entire natural lives the criminal gangleaders who are big cheeses in the whitehouse, congress, Wall Street, etc.
You commit the mistake typically committed by people who have not investigated the topic of anarchism sufficiently. Before I read anarchocapitalist literature, I made the same mistake. I assumed that the absence of government equals absence of services that are currently provided by it.
michael, check out Ryan Faulk’s book, For an Emergent Governance at http://fringeelements.ning.com/page/for-an-emergent-governance.
Audio and [abridged] PDF available.
It talks about several staleless societies which have existed through out history:
1. Somalia (Present day)
2. The Western US (19th century)
3 Pennsylvania (1661 to 1692)
4. Rhode Island (1636-1655)
5. Ireland (650 to 1650)
6. Iceland (930 to 1262)
Of course there could be some who would be sell weapons to aggressors. Chances are it would be the same sellers selling to both groups.
A Libertopia is a matured libertarian society. There would be plenty of checks and balances in it to prevent warring factions from emerging. What you say won’t happen.
You rule.
Sorry not to add anything to the discussion, but you’ve once again said it all and said it best.
Selling weapons to both groups achieves peace.
Think of it like this: if only you had a magical green clarinet that makes people say embarassing truths, you could do anything you wanted but if other people possess, let’s say, a magical red tuba that makes you defecate, you wouldn’t be so inclined to abuse your clarinet.
We would want to note that in East Africa, the lines on a map are almost entirely meaningless. Rwanda proper may be under one-party control, but the conflict area encompasses about as much territory as the USA east of the Rockies. And in it there are few if any places where there’s any form of organized government. At the high point in the conflict no fewer than seven nations had expeditionary forces there. Plus numbers of independent outlaw militias. It’s a free for all with no solution, a war without an ending.
The body count? At least five million to date, and climbing. Most of the women in the conflict area have been raped by one or more of these militias, or just by bands of marauding youths. There is no such thing as property, with no government to protect it.
A strong government in this context would be a real blessing. But no one player is strong enough to make that happen. So the slaughter continues, into the indefinite future. Those of us who advocate the erasure of all government would do well to heed this object lesson.
Excellent exposition of racist thought. We are white, and as such are innately superior to the savage blackamoors, eh?
So it follows that if America were to be reduced to a state of anarchy, we would respect our neighbors in all our dealings, and respect the rule of law, even though there would be no rulers and no laws? Right? Because we’re white?
Quite a theory.
I merely ask the obvious question. How is that committing a mistake?
For you it would seem sufficient just to read some ‘anarchocapitalist literature’, whatever that might mean, and the literature would explain to one carefully how there’s not the slightest possibility anything might go wrong. But I think I’ll need more than that before I make any strong commitment to the destruction of our current way of life.
So, again, “how about giving us a better example of a country that runs like a top with no government.” I’d like to see where this odd notion has been tried and found to be superior to other forms of social organization.
Daniel– Thanks. This is exactly what I was asking for.
I’m only on page one and your fellow is telling us how we can have police protection without making it a government service. And it reminds me that we do have an example of exactly how that arrangement worked, in the New York City of the mid-19th century.
They had no fewer than two private police forces– the Municipal Police and the Metropolitan Police. They were both run on a subscription basis, so shopkeepers got used to having policemen from one or both forces come around to get protection money. That was the origin of the protection racket in NYC.
The trade became so lucrative that Manhattan was divided into turfs– exactly the way the whole country would be if it were, say, the Bloods and the Crips who decided to run our protection industry. In fact, bloody street battles were fought by the two police forces over the right to protect certain profitable neighborhoods.
Finally after the Civil War, Boss Tweed consolidated political power and only one police force was allowed to remain. To this day they have the Metropolitan Police.
I like it. Maybe your writer is really onto something. I’ll read more.
“You are assuming that no government = no rules.”
Not exactly. I’m assuming that no government = no enforcement. And I’m noting that something bad always pops up in a political vacuum, so we would not lack for enforcement for long. We just wouldn’t like the kind we got.
“..the question is, are rules better when they are self imposed or when they are imposed top-down from a coercive state?”
No, that question is, are rules any more effective when they are imposed by some force, or when they are not imposed but optional.
I’m surprised you’ve never thought about what kind of world we’d have if all behavior were optional. Do you think we’d all be noble savages? Or Platonic free men, ruled by reason? I don’t.
I think the strongest would take what they wanted while the weak hid. And I think that would be a permanent state of affairs until a group of concerned citizens banded together and decided to impose a strong government on their community. That’s something history tells us, and there’s no reason we should assume it might be different next time around.
My guess is you’re saying that ethical rules all come from God. But that doesn’t help those of us who note that God’s telling the Muslims one thing, the Catholics another and the Buddhists yet a third thing. In fact even if you just look at all the evangelists, God seems to be telling us all sorts of different things. Some say He’s telling us all to get rich. Others say His big idea is that we all repent our sins. And yet others say the only thing we have to do is accept Jesus Christ as our savior. Then, that done, we can do whatever we want.
It seems apparent to me that all this God business is just various egos performing acts of self-justification by invoking the name of some superior authority. And at least around here it’s Mises and Rothbard whose names are invoked, not God.
“The real question is whether Somalia became a better place in the absence of government than it was when it previously had a government. The answer is”yes”, because Somalis were freed from much of the large-scaling thieving and murder which are the stock in trade of any government, but especially of African governments.”
Nope. The real question is whether WE would be in a better place. And if we decided to bring down the government here, I doubt we would usher in a reign of peace and harmony. All of history tells us we’d see the rise of competing warlords, battling one another for the right to seize our wealth.
When the discussion gets into this area, I get the strong feeling I’m trying to reason with crazy people. You don’t understand this? Power does not tolerate a vacuum. The thieves rush to enter in.
That’s why we so complacently accept the current gangs of thieves who control our wealth: the major financial interests, the corporate interests, the military industrialists and the government they control and mandate for us. It’s cheaper and safer that way.
If you still want to try bringing down the state apparatus, fine. But I’ve lived in areas outside the law, and it’s neither safer nor less expensive there. For one thing, the first thing to collapse would be the dollar. Then where would you be?
Last time an article initiated a long and ‘interesting’ thread long the lines of racial polylogism. Jeffery Tucker, said that the reasonably written article was attracting more than its fair share of crazies, threatened to ban everyone from the blog and then deleted the entire thread. So now you still read the article, but there is no corresponding blog, no comments.
http://mises.org/daily/3545
You are conflating two things: the definition of anarchy and an example of anarchy. Unless we can agree on a definition, there is no point debating examples.
If you take it from a very abstract point of view, anarchy is a system where social interactions do not require violation of private property or freedom to contract perpetrated by a third party (“ruler”) against the wishes of the parties involved. It does not mean that:
- a third party can’t intervene without violating private private property or freedom to contract, for example by ostracism, boycott, reduction of rating or any other non-violent method of pressure
- a third party cannot intervene violently with agreement of one party in order to protect private property or freedom to contract of said party
A slightly related is the implicit assumption of statists that in order for two parties to deal together, they need to have one ruler. Maybe if I begin from here, it will be easier to understand. The existence of international trade refutes this claim. Each party has their own ruler. And it works fine. International trade works much smoother than national one, even as individual governments try to prevent it via tariffs and protectionism. The individual partners to trade are in an anarchic relationship vis-a-vis each other, they do not have a common ruler.
Many other aspects of social interaction are anarchic, even if you can’t see the full anarchic spectrum at the same time in the same place. You are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking to see an example of a country without government, you should be asking provision of what service requries government. As for the historical evidence, all services which are nowadays provided typically by governments were first provided by non-governments. Governments just monopolised them, banned or regulated competition.
You misunderstand the principles of anarchy, despite our attempts to clarify it. You use vague terms and do not see that they can be interpreted both ways.
The absence of rulers does not mean the absence of enforcement. The reason why this confuses you is that government makes all competitors in violent enforcement illegal. So of course only criminals use violence to enforce rules!
Switzerland. Every male of age has an assault rifle.
Arm the world and let them defend themselves.
“An armed society is a polite society.”
“I think the strongest would take what they wanted while the weak hid.”
All you have done in that sentence is ironically describe monopoly Government. Please revert to Peter’s prior response, in which he eloquently identified the logical root of contention between you and him — what services, all of which were at one time provided “privately” or through voluntary associations like the Church or through the law merchant, MUST the monopoly government provide?
I think you will find it difficult to answer that question. The very warlords you are concerned about are nothing but proto-monopoly government. The greatest, bloodiest worst warlord who wins, becomes the State.
The State necessarily derives its power from implicit “consent” of those who rule or benefit from rule, and the acquiescence of the rest. Take that away with a cultural shift, and people will interact with one another through voluntary associations that are given coercive power by consent (Hans Hermann Hoppe argues that these are the precusors to the State, being traditional elites that were looked to because of their high intelligence and wisdom). You would absolutely still have lawyers, police, property confiscation rights to settle debts, etc, but these would happen much as modern arbitration happens. If a person elects not to be part of the network of voluntary dispute resolution / “governmental” organizations, then that person is not dealt with by the commercial or social society.
What comes from all this is competition in government. Ultimately, all government on this planet is de facto; God anointed none of it. Legitimate authority is morally binding, but without express consent, or a natural relationship like parent-child, what is the State’s authority? The fact that it won a war and killed a lot of people? That would be the very problem you recite.
I would hope the webmaster might decide to keep all entries, so we could see the varieties of opinion being entertained. And if the comments became too numerous he could do what many do, close the thread to further postings.
I would also hope that he moderated immoderate speech. But I think both my comment and Paul’s fall within the spectrum of moderate opinion, sensibly put. Just my opinion, of course.
There are many definitions of ‘anarchy’. In an anarchic condition, no one is forced to accept another’s definition. However I thank you for expounding upon your own.
Within that system, if there’s someone whose behaviors you don’t like, what do you do about it? Just let him go on doing it?
Suppose it’s not a ‘he’, but rather a well armed gang of criminal predators, an outlaw militia, who wants your home, your wife and daughter, and the rest of your stuff– but doesn’t want YOU?
In such an event (or, hopefully, well prior to that event) isn’t it incumbent on you and your neighbors to set up a self defense force, with a few guidelines as to how it will operate?
And if so, how does that differ from your instituting a government? That, as I recall, was the method our Founding Fathers used to get us to this point.
“The absence of rulers does not mean the absence of enforcement.”
Describe how this enforcement works. Let’s take the following scenario:
The USG falls, through some unknown series of events, and the dollar becomes worthless. Despite that, the former citizens of the US have accumulated many more items of value than the residents of most other nations. This fact attracts some attention.
So, in the name of ‘restoring order’, the Russian Army shows up to take charge. You, as a former American, do what?
Perry– You may be making a more profound statement than you’re aware of: “The very warlords you are concerned about are nothing but proto-monopoly government. The greatest, bloodiest worst warlord who wins, becomes the State.”
That’s the history of civilization in a nutshell. When we first climbed out of caves we arrayed ourselves into clans, and the clans into alliances, and the alliances into tribes led by some able chieftain, to both defend from the next tribe over and to pillage that next tribe for items of value. And once life was on a militaristic basis, the ruler of each tribe was an absolute dictator.
He extended his rule over others, exercising pre-emptive force to bring them under his rule before the next tribe over attached them to their rule. And he took a tithe from each, to run the army with. Naturally he took an extra tote for himself, so in time grew rich. And had a crown made (nice touch).
So let’s scroll through the centuries. In time his rule matured, and he was forced under agreements like the Magna Carta to accord some degree of autonomy to the princes. And they. after a time, accorded some freedom to their serfs. The process continued to the present day, when we actually have a remarkable degree of protection from the Lords we owe fealty to.
My feeling is that I’m getting more than I’m losing. So I vote in favor of having some form of government, even though it’s crummier by far than it’s been in the history of the Republic. Because if we went back to Zero we’d have to endure the pain of more centuries of warlords clawing their way to the top. Civilization would fall as surely as Rome did, leaving to us the pleasure of enjoying several long centuries of Dark Ages.
I get the feeling that you and many others here are arguing from the POV of abstract principle. I’m arguing like a guy who doesn’t want thieves to murder me and steal all my stuff, once there’s no one around to protect my interests.
I’ll tell you a story. I don’t remember exactly where I read it, I think it was by one of the people working with the Mises Institute. An guy (maybe it was the article author himself) worked as an economist in the Soviet Union. Some high ranking government officials were thinking about loosening the labour market and asked him how it worked. So he explained that if the labour wasn’t managed by the government, the workers would travel themselves towards potential job offers, maybe even migrating and settling down in different areas, and the price system would make sure the the allocation is efficient. They looked dumbfounded and retorted that they can’t imagine how that might work.
You see, your problem is that the current state of affairs has influenced your thinking patters. You can’t imagine an alternative because the present state is all you know. You mistake historical data for economic rules.
It is unrealistic to assume that everyone would be staring at a government falling apart without taking any action. Retreat from a market increases demand for the services that are being neglected and a potential for profit appears. We don’t know what exactly it would look like, we are not prophets. But we know how market forces work.
“I get the feeling that you and many others here are arguing from the POV of abstract principle. I’m arguing like a guy who doesn’t want thieves to murder me and steal all my stuff, once there’s no one around to protect my interests.”
So then you will commit aggression on others before they commit aggression on you. Got it.
And although I recognize the long existing class warfare between ruler and ruled, your narrative on man’s history is fictional and charactized to lead to one conclusion, yours.
Instead of bickering back and forth over what would happen in this or that scenario, I would still like to see you directly address Peter’s question posted at 10:04am. Much of your reasoning has been consequentialist to this point, but surely you recognize that ethics is not entirely decided by the consequences.
Reminds me of Rothbard’s example that if the government provided everybody with shoes(or so heavely regulated the shoe-making industry that they may as well have). People would be shocked, SHOCKED at the idea that we should allow a free-market in shoe making. How would the market ensure that all the appropriate sizes are made? What about people who need specialized footware(ex. Steel-toed boots)? Wont private shoe-makers charge too much for poor families to afford? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But obviously our private shoe making works just fine. The market provides a more-than adequate supply of shoes, in all the right sizes, Special footware is no problem to get, and you can buy shoes for as little as $10 at Wall Mart or Payless(among other places).
My point is that theres no way to know for sure what the market will develop until you give it a chance. I’m sure in the 1980′s people would have thought you were crazy if you suggested setting up a computerized auction where people can buy and sell just about anything. But E-bay is huge business, one of the largest and most popular websites and a great place to find just about anything you want(and a whole bunch of stuff you dont).
But to give a more specific response to your question. A number of writers have written on the possibility of private defense. I know off the top of my head that Robert Murphy has written a few articles on the subject. And if you looked around I’m sure you could find more.
I would suggest that most of the conflict is enabled by outside forces, i.e. governments, in the form of monetary aid and other indirect meddling as well as military intervention. Any foreign aid for example is famously diverted into military activity which could not otherwise take place.
Uh huh. No war was ever called off when one side realised the other side had weapons too.
If now you don’t like what others are doing and would like to exercise violence against them, you have these options:
- look if there are existing laws that this behaviour violates. In some cases you need to foot the bill for putting this into action yourself, in some cases the prosecution is paid for by the taxes
- exercise violence yourself and in case this is not in accordance with the laws, prepare to face the force sector of the state (e.g. police)
- lobby for the lawmakers to make the type of behaviour illegal
Of course, you also have a lot of non-violent methods of dealing with it, such as mediation, criticism, ostracism, boycott, trickery and so on.
Your options in anarchy, surprise, are roughly the same, the main difference being the absence of a territorial monopoly and of compulsory financing. This answers your question “how does that differ from instituting a government”. Because there is competition in the production of law and financing it is based on contracts, it is more difficult to skew the legal rules in your favour. Likely, victimless crimes will unbecome crimes. Also, for the same reasons, exercising force by the professionals (the analogy of police) would likely be more in line with the wishes of the people that deal with them.
There is literature dealing with this, written by professional economists and historians. I can only offer you a very rough glimpse of the whole spectrum. For example, “Anarchy and the Law” by Edward Stringham (ed.), Myth of National Defence by Hoppe (ed.) and there is also a very good podcast series by Stefan Molyneaux ( http://www.freedomainradio.com )
“I would suggest that most of the conflict is enabled by outside forces, i.e. governments, in the form of monetary aid and other indirect meddling as well as military intervention.”
To lay all, or even most of the blame on government forces would be to twist an argument pretty badly, IMO, to fit your theory. Conflicts, by definition, involve opposing forces. Governments have at their command large forces. So you can always find places where they fit together.
The causes for Rwanda 1994 and the progress of the resulting instabilities are many. But it began with a nongovernmental movement to overthrow a government and slaughter a hated ethnic group. Then the killers became the losers when the next liberation forces showed up, driving them into areas of what was then eastern Zaire that really had no effective government.
This destabilized the ethnic status quo there, leading to the formation of militias of all sorts. Some were out there killing baNyamulenge– Zairian Tutsis. Other were organizing self defense forces. Where was the Zairian military, the ostensible statist force in the area? Off fighting a couple of civil wars in other parts of the country.
From that point it became like an Irish bar fight. Everybody jumped in– Zambia, Uganda, Angola… half of central Africa had troops rushing to duke it out in what had become a free fire zone.
After a while the OAU became alarmed and stopped much of the monkey business. Many national forces went home, but the homegrown militias stayed– along with the groups funded by Paul Kagame’s new Rwandan government.
So who are the winners? Mining consortia, first and foremost. They get to establish mines in the conflict zone, provide their own security forces and take national wealth out of places where there are no national forces keeping order. An excellent case can be made for the view that this conflict is being perpetuated precisely due to the ABSENCE of statist powers. No one’s able to lay effective claim to the area and put a stop to the slaughter.
Peter– With all respects, this discussion is starting to descend into craziness.
“If now you don’t like what others are doing and would like to exercise violence against them, you have these options:
- look if there are existing laws that this behaviour violates…” etc.
In your own definition, we’re talking about a state of anarchy. WHAT LAWS?? There’s no more state. No more force. No more laws. Only private security forces (gangs of thugs) that provide protection on a for-profit basis.
So, again, “how about giving us a better example of a country that runs like a top with no government.” I’d like to see where this odd notion has been tried and found to be superior to other forms of social organization. Third iteration.
Here’s a place where it has been tried and found lacking: most of the cities of Africa and many of those in Latin America, where statist forces are sadly inadequate to the job. The privileged classes (anyone possessing things of value) have to hire desperate members of the underclass (nearly everyone else), train then, arm them and support them, to guard the perimeter 24-7 against aggression from gangs of well armed thieves. Usually they hire guard services, which do not come cheap.
It doesn’t always work out. Some times these guards are the very people who leave the back door unlocked one night. Standard procedure then is to kill every living thing in the house and back trucks up to take out what used to be your stuff.
That’s a good story, but an evasion of my question. What happens when a government falls and there’s no one there to catch it?
A: Everyone scrambles to quickly build up enough military power to become the next government. In ten thousand years of history, it’s never happened any other way.
Now here’s the followup: Which is the more pleasant state to live through? The one where an oppressive government has grown complacent and has figured out that the peasants are easier to control when they’re happy and given a measure of employment and prosperity? Or one where warring bands shoot their way back and forth across a lawless and devastated city, and civilians have no place to hide.
I think you have an unrealistically rosy view of what real anarchy actually looks like. It is a state, by definition, where no one is in control. An unstable state, which will remain volatile and dangerous until a new stable state has been achieved.
“It is unrealistic to assume that everyone would be staring at a government falling apart without taking any action. Retreat from a market increases demand for the services that are being neglected and a potential for profit appears. We don’t know what exactly it would look like, we are not prophets. But we know how market forces work.”
Peter– Yes, we do know what exactly it would look like. History has given us many hundreds of examples, and it always works the same way. Apparently history was not a required subject at your place of education.
Power abhors a vacuum. Compensating powers rush in at once and vie with one another for control. The process is known as civil war, after which consolidation of power under a newly victorious sovereign takes place. That is, a new government is formed.
“My point is that theres no way to know for sure what the market will develop until you give it a chance.”
SirThink– Your shoe story was amusing but does not apply. We are discussing what market forces act on reality once the state falls and anarchy ensues. See my reply above, to Peter.
But I suppose we really need to deal with those shoes. Back in the USSR, the classic command economy, the state shoe factory made plenty of shoes, in every size. The only problem was, they made the shoes the factory wanted to make. Not necessarily the ones people wanted to buy. Still, if you were barefoot, you could buy poorly made ugly shoes.
A classic clumsy solution to the issue of consumer production. And a brilliant devastation of an argument no one is making.
Again, same problem as before. You assume absence of state = absence of services provided by it. Why do rules have to be produced by the state? That is not even how they evolved nor is it currently the prevailing source of rules.
I start to believe the discussion is futile. No matter how many times I repeat it, you keep coming back to your original errors. Reminds me of an old joke. During World War II, an American submarine mistakenly torpedoes a Soviet ship. Then they rescue the sailors from it and the ship’s captain angrily confronts the submarine ship:
R: Почему вы утонули наш корабль?
A: ????
R: Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
A: ????
R: Parlez-vous français?
A: ????
R: Se habla español?
A: ????
R: Do you speak english?
A: Yes of course!
R: Почему вы утонули наш корабль?
“..your narrative on man’s history is fictional and charactized to lead to one conclusion, yours.”
Find another narrative that fits the observed facts of history. Or create one. Identify a single instance of an established state that died and was replaced by the absence of any new controlling force acting on all lesser forces. That is, a new state taking over.
When the kingdom falls, warring factions invariably engage in conflict until it is resolved by the victory of one force and the defeat of the others. Even in the case that two victors emerge, as in post-1945 Korea, one takes over one territory and the other takes over the other half. They don’t peacefully co-exist and invite all the other freedom-loving libertarians in the land to invent and to enforce their own version of what the law ought to be. What they do is crush all opposition. I guarantee it.
Let’s imagine a third scenario, where the kingdom grows so old and decadent that it deteriorates to the point where it collapses, and no single force remains that’s strong enough to consolidate power.
In that event it is invaded and occupied by outside forces. You really should read a little history. It varies only in the details.
There is no evasion on my side. I answered the question earlier, you just don’t get it. But you evade answers: which service cannot be provided without a government? It’s kind of getting tiresome.
“Instead of bickering back and forth over what would happen in this or that scenario, I would still like to see you directly address Peter’s question posted at 10:04am.”
Perry– I’ve scrolled back to that comment, and there’s really no question there. Unless you mean this:
“Instead of asking to see an example of a country without government, you should be asking provision of what service requries government. As for the historical evidence, all services which are nowadays provided typically by governments were first provided by non-governments. Governments just monopolised them, banned or regulated competition.”
I suppose that statement has an implied question. An effective government provides a stable and secure framework in which one can work, raise a family, prosper and not have one’s wealth taken away by thieves, etc. And it costs money to run. So there’s a fee involved– taxes.
And how did government monopolize this service? It didn’t. We have lots of different places around the world to choose from. Some even have no government, or only a very weak one.
So how come you’re still here? Because you find this to be the best place on earth to do business. And that’s because our government performs a superior service. That is (and you should listen very carefully) because it is more competitive than the others. It offers a better package. And for what you get, I think the expense is nominal.
But I suppose we really need to deal with those shoes. Back in the USSR, the classic command economy, the state shoe factory made plenty of shoes, in every size. The only problem was, they made the shoes the factory wanted to make. Not necessarily the ones people wanted to buy. Still, if you were barefoot, you could buy poorly made ugly shoes.
*ahem* you apparently completely missed the point of my example(actually, not mine, Rothbard’s, but whatever). I wasnt trying to argue the government couldnt make and provide citizens with shoes(although it would seem we agree that the government couldnt provide consumers with the kids of shoes they really want). My point is how would people living in the USSR react to the idea of de-regulating the shoe making industry? No doubt they would be shocked at the idea: The market cant provide shoes, footwear is too important to leave to the ‘animal spirits’ of the market. It would be utter chaos if they tried.
We know thats bunk because we dont live in the USSR and instead in a place where shoes are provided by the(mostly) free market. You cant blame the citizens of Soviet Russia for not understanding otherwise. They’d never seen shoes not provided by the government and cant understand how things could be run any other way.
We(by which I mean pretty much everybody living today) are in the same situation as Soviet citizens when it comes to law and order, National Defense, and to a lesser extent money. These things have always(as far as we’re concerned anyway) been provided by the government, we dont know any other way, and so we instinctivly recoil in horror at the idea of something different. I suppose its mostly simple fear of the unknown.
My spouse and i genuinely prefer what we publish in this article. Particularly new along with wise. A single situation however. I’m operating Safari using Debian along with components of your respective existing theme bits can be a minor wonky. My spouse and i know it’s not only a popular build. Nevertheless it’s a little something for you to have in view. My spouse and i trust who’s might support along with always keep in the prime good quality producing.