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[Disclaimer: I do not believe in “natural law” or “natural rights.” I will, nevertheless, speak of “rights” for the sake of convenience. I do profess libertarian anarchism on other grounds.]
I was rifling through one of my back issues of The Journal of Libertarian Studies (“Symposium: Market Anarchism, Pro and Con,” Spring, 2007) when I found, in response to the libertarian anarchist challenge presented in that same issue by Walter Block, what I thought might be the definitive justification for minarchism by Tibor Machan. What I found disappointed me.
Block, in his essay, brings forth the standard definition of government with “If a ‘government’ collects no taxes and does not use coercion to preclude the competition of other ‘governments’ in ‘its’ area, then it is not a government at all, but rather a private defense-insurance agency, very much a part of the legitimate marketplace” (p. 73). Most of us would I agree, I think, that the second of the two criteria, the territorial monopoly, is the more critical one. Machan responds accordingly:
“Defense-insurance agencies are governments of a certain type. The only interesting question is whether competition among them can take place within the same geographical area, in what I have characterized the ‘crisscross’ fashion (the way pizza and newspaper delivery services can all operate with the same geographical area) or would have to service citizen-clients within a homogenous region (the way electrical, water-supply, or flood-control services are provided within such regions). If the former, then there can be competing governments (or defense-insurance firms) servicing people in the same region; if the latter then governments (or defense-insurance firms) would have to provide their services in separate regions. Whatever competition were to take place would follow the requirements of the services in question.” (p. 94).
Notice that neither of the two writers addresses one very important concern: does the defense-insurance provider in question own the entirety of the land that it excludes competition on? It seems to me that this is the place where a sane definition of government hinges. For if both Block and Machan agree that defense-insurance firm X may only justifiably preclude other defense-insurance firms from offering their competing services on X’s own property, then Block and Machan are in the same political boat, whatever we choose to call it. Machan seems to confirm this idea of ownership on page 95: “[With respect to secession,] ne could even remain in the same territory and reject citizenship [or “subscription to service”], so long as this does not involve blocking services to others with whom one has signed up for the services of government, that is, fellow citizens.”
A statement like this, from Machan’s natural rights perspective, only makes sense if the defense-insurance firm in question owns all of the land that it would be transporting its services on; because if I, the owner of the property right of the entirety of the Central Time Zone, decide to subscribe to your Eastern Time Zone-based defense-insurance firm, and then I later decide to cancel, then it seems to me that your firm cannot transport its services to Pacific Time Zone clients without my permission. If I do not give it, I certainly am “blocking services to others”—and I am doing this, moreover, in perfectly justifiable fashion so far as the imperatives of Machan’s “natural rights” go. In making such a statement as the above Machan forces himself to oblige—however implicitly—that the defense-insurance firm that he calls “government” must own the entirety of the territory that it excludes others from competing on, or else he must instead concede to the definition of Block that implies, by contrast, non-total-ownership.
Here we reach Machan’s semantic trouble. Why suppose that we should call this type of property-owning defense-insurance firm a “government”? Machan no doubt has in mind magisterial firms that come to naturally monopolize territories on a citywide, or perhaps even greater, level. But if Bob Slate, middle-class owner of defense-insurance firm Y, adjudicates by monopoly all the legal disputes that occur on his small, privately owned territory, then he does nothing qualitatively different from the citywide agency. That Bob represents a mere “scaling down” is better illustrated if we assume that he is self-employed, has no employees beneath him, and the land that he owns and monopolizes his defense-insurance services on is but a quarter square-acre in size. For kicks, we may assume that Bob Slate, unlike the citywide agency, does not advertise his services (he doesn’t have the time—he’s playing Wii Fit). The citywide firm and Bob both have their own land, both legislate within the boundaries of “natural law” on that land, and both reserve the right to settle the disputes of their land’s subscriber-tenants with said legislation. Are we really to be expected to call Bob, the scaled-down, one-man crank job, a “government of a certain type”? Given the implications of Machan’s analysis, it seems hard to understand why we shouldn’t.
I claim that the term “government” is most sensibly employed for an institution that exists by qualitative difference from the social constructs that surround it, and I openly appeal to common intuition in doing so. Otherwise we may just as well say, “Yeah, Rick Hopkins sells cars, but on the other hand we might call him a ‘government,’ as well—he, like Bob, just may not advertise his defense-insurance services. We’ll have to ask him to find out.” This is clearly very silly. We have virtually the entire weight of history to inform us that what we have always called “government” has monopolized territory that it did not justly acquire the entirety of. We have no need to transpose this term to private defense-insurance firms of all sizes and advertising proclivities.
Let those who called themselves non-rights-violating minarchists finally put this semantic quibble aside and join the rest of us libertarians at the anarchist table. Maybe Tibor Machan won’t be far behind.
"Melody is a form of remembrance. It must have a quality of inevitability in our ears." - Gian Carlo Menotti
The "ne" written above should read "[ o ]ne" as in the word, "one."
Keep in mind Machan is a Randian minarchist, and so believes in voluntary contributions to government &c., and not so much taxes. Many minarchists would probably not shy away from saying the government does have some kind of ownership over an entire region. If they allow for secession down to the individual level though, it's a matter for debate just how they're going to differentiate this arrangement from anarchism.
Freedom of markets is positively correlated with the degree of evolution in any society...