Famous Last Words II
David Clark Scott, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, November 26, 2003:
US soldiers trying to create goodwill in Fallujah echo the bitterness. “We thought we were doing something good when we built a soccer field,” says Maj. Allen Vaught. “We brought in engineers, earthmovers, welded goal posts, and trucked in some smooth dirt.”
The next day looters took everything. “Goal posts, nets, and the good dirt. How can you help people who steal dirt?” he asks incredulously.
I am reliably assured that there are all kinds of libertarians with all kinds of views on the war in Iraq, the Global War on Terror and the global struggle against violent extremism. But it seems to me that any libertarian ought to have no trouble listing the conceptual errors in Major Vaught’s plaint. Just to get you started:
1. Collectivism: Lumping “people” who weren’t involved in removing things from the soccer field in with “people” who were is sloppy thinking.
2. Confusion of Ownership: If the “people” of Fallujah really could be considered collectively, then once completed and turned over the soccer field was theirs to do with as they would, not the US military’s. The word “steal” ceases to apply.
3. Dispersal of Information: A soccer field may not have been the most productive use of fertile topsoil for that town at that time. Fallujans may have been able to increase their utility by turning the piping and netting of the goals to other uses. The “people” of whom Vaught complains would be better poised than he to choose among the potential uses of the materials in question. (The article offers no evidence that troops first asked locals, “Hey, how about we build you guys a soccer field?”)
Item one is in tension with items two and three. From the libertarian perspective, our errors in Iraq are an embarrassment of riches. The soccer field anecdote handily presents them in microcosm.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
August 5, 2005 @ 8:23 am
Well, you could also hold up Major Vaught’s plaint as an example of the *problems* of libertarianism. After all, contemporary Iraq is almost an ideal David Friedmanesque anarcho-capitalism, complete with private justice enforcement. And the instant appropriation and vanishment of a public space into the market is just a speeded-up version of what even minarchist libertarians plan for all public spaces.
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Or maybe we could just say that there are any number of reasons for certain Fallujans to have sabotaged a public relations gesture by an occupying power, and that maybe there is no economic lesson to this at all.
Comment by Hesiod —
August 5, 2005 @ 10:01 am
On the “bright” side, the local Mullahs who eventually take over the town when we leave can use the field for public executions.
So, it does have some utility.
Comment by x-height —
August 5, 2005 @ 10:40 am
It kind of reminds me of:
BBC Monday, 23 February, 2004, 16:48 GMT
Thieves steal bridge in Ukraine
Thieves in western Ukraine have dismantled and stolen an 11m steel bridge over the river Svalyavka.
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so much for Radical Individualism?
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 5, 2005 @ 1:23 pm
What, after two and none of our ancap friends have defended the honor of market anarchy from Rich’s sally yet? I hate vacation season.
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Rich, like I said, an embarrassment of riches. I don’t think you can vanish the economic lesson, though, since in the larger sense economics is a study of how people pursue their ends. And my enduring quest remains to get as many libertarians as possible to understand that the implications of the work of Hayek are profoundly anticolonial and anti-interventionist. I’ll ride that hobbyhorse until I fall off.
Comment by Leonard —
August 5, 2005 @ 2:38 pm
Rich, contemporary Iraq is not anarchic. There’s the little matter of occupation by a state. But even if America left tomorrow, it would not be ancap, since the protection agencies on the ground there all want to be, and are acting like, states. They are territorially exclusive, or at least trying to be. Even now they are using force against customers who might take their business elsewhere, and in general oppressing their customers.
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It’s true, though, that valuable commons will always be appropriated if it is at all feasible. However that is true in general, not just in a libertarian system. I doubt that Major Vaught would be so shocked if he had placed out gold bars and they had been “looted”. Rather, he’s amazed that some people in Iraq are so poor that they’d actually take dirt. This simply shows his bias as a rich westerner.
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As for it being sabotage… I doubt it. Stealing dirt is a dirty business, not the sort of thing people would do just to make a point.
Comment by Hesiod —
August 5, 2005 @ 3:09 pm
The problem with libertarianism is not in it’s theory. It’s in the inability of flawed human societies to execute it properly.
Any market-driven economy will inevitably lead to one or more individuals or enterprises accruing disproportionate power. A power they will inevitably use to expooit their advantage.
Sure, it may be that eventually their currupt regime will collapse of it’s own weight, but there will still be chaotic periods of repression war and death punctuated by short and sweet enlightened periods.
In this sense, pure libertarianism suffers the same flaws as marxism. An overreliance on the better angels of our natures to make it work.
I know that objectivism claims that if each person is perfectly free to act selfishly, that the collective result of individual selfish acts will inure to the greater good.
But, as I said, that breaks down when someone has the power to deny you your freedom of action. In essence, then, libertraianism sows the seeds of it’s own destruction.
For my part, I am very buddhist about things. I seek balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility.
And, by necesity, the midpoint of that balancing act changes all the time.
Comment by Avram —
August 5, 2005 @ 3:21 pm
Leonard, there’s a very elegant criticism of the plausibility of anarcho-capitalism in your comment: It’s not true an-cap if the protection agencies are seeking to become states, and states are entities with a monopoly on the use of force, then an-cap is only possible if protection agencies (which are, of course, businesses) refrain from seeking to become monopolies, which does not seem to be common behavior for businesses from what I’ve seen.
Comment by Leonard —
August 5, 2005 @ 3:29 pm
Hesiod, I dunno where you get your ideas about libertarianism, but comparing it to Marxism as failing because of overreliance goodness is completely off base.
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Marxism is wrong in many ways. For example the idea of “exploitation” is a (correct) consequence of an incorrect theory of value. It’s just flat-out wrong – value is subjective, not objective. This failure of Marxism has nothing to do with human benevolence.
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Or take the prediction that the logic of capitalism would inevitably cause workers to be ground down to sustenance wages. Again, flat-out wrong, as a matter of documented history.
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I suppose you could say that the failure of the socialist revolutionary state to wither away is a failure of benevolence. However I think it is simply ludicrous to expect any group with absolute power to give it up voluntarily. World just doesn’t work like that.
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By contrast, the market works just fine in the real world. And contrary to your assertion, there has been no “disproportionate power” gained, not even by Bill Gates, by comparison to the power that even a very mild state has.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 5, 2005 @ 3:30 pm
Avram, by itself your dynamic doesn’t make ancap impossible, I don’t think. Businesses can try to become monopolies, but it seems passing hard to achieve that goal, either briefly or sustainably. Even theoretical monopolies still operate under market constraint, because if they set prices too high they attract new competitors into their field. It seems that the best way to really stabilize a monopoly position is to have a state ratify it for you.
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However, my concern in the case of protection agencies is that even the trying is problematic, because the product of a protection agency is targetted violence. As a minarchist wag on Usenet put it about a decade ago (no, it wasn’t me), a competition in goods or services is a market. A competition in force is war.
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I hold no brief for the state. None. I think just about every item in Hesiod’s bill of particulars against libertarianism applies in spades to statism. I think once again Hesiod is holding a libertarian society up to a standard of perfection that statist ones themselves can’t match. I have a lot of sympathy for anarcho-capitalist opposition to the state as an institution. But I still can’t see why protection agencies would stay “tame.”
Comment by ckrisz —
August 5, 2005 @ 3:34 pm
I wouldn’t say that’s true for businesses in general, certain fields tend to natural monopoly. I would argue that the field of security is one of these — if a controlling force providing basic conditions of security is absent, the more efficient and thus more powerful security forces will fill the void and become statelike.
Now they may not succeed — other actors could band together and stop them. But the tendency is there and will continue, and neverending violence is the end result.
Comment by Leonard —
August 5, 2005 @ 5:04 pm
Regarding the question of why protection agencies would stay “tame” – there’s no guarantees. If you set up an anarchy “wrong”, then it can happen.
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However, let us take some hope from the world of states. Consider all of the inventions man has created over time trying to rein in the state. I would argue that none have been fully effective, but some have had real effect. I am thinking here of these:
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human rights
civil rights – habeas corpus, trial by jury, etc.
constitutionalism
armed people/militia
federalism
separation of powers
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… that’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many others. Now, note that none of these technologies for state-limitation relies on the state being a state; that is, none of them require a monopoly on legitimized violence. Rather, they could be applied by any “government”, including agencies in ancap.
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Put another way, the agencies in ancap are weaker than states. Any institution which serves to rein in the state, must also serve to limit ancap agencies, unless somehow it relies on the monopoly of coercion. Furthermore, in ancap you add a brake that is far, far more powerful than any of those above: exit. Exit alone won’t do the trick, I don’t think. But exit, along with all of the sorts of nice-state tricks we’ve invented so far, will.
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In my opinion, ancap has not worked thus far for several reasons, not least of which is it is hard to get going. I analogize it to an arch: very stable once set up, but not likely to just happen. Rather it requires “scaffolding”, and states by their nature won’t allow the “scaffold” to be kicked away.
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However, there may be another reason why ancap hasn’t taken over yet: it requires a certain level of technology. I think, at minimum, it requires technologies only invented during the Enlightenment – those listed above. If you’ve studied Iceland much you’ll know what I am talking about.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
August 5, 2005 @ 6:30 pm
Leonard, most of the “inventions” that you mention — rights, constitutionalism, separation of powers, etc — have no meaning outside of a state context. And I fail to see how the “protection agencies” in Iraq are not really such because they are trying to gain power for themselves. Using force against customers and preventing exit of customers is what all armed groups try to do. Relying on some ill-defined ideology to prevent them from doing so, without any enforcement mechanism, is a wholly unstable situation.
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What is more interesting, to me anyway, is whether Iraq must be considered to not be an anarchy because there is “occupation by a state”. I think that the occupying powers have clearly failed to enforce a monopoly of violence — given the opinion of the populace, perhaps even a monopoly of legitimate violence. In this case they become simply the largest protection agency in the area.
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As for whether stealing dirt is sabotage, I think that it was highly effective as such. Look at the effect it had on Sassaman, and indirectly on us. People talk about “salting the fields” or a “scorched-earth policy”, but stealing the dirt goes one better.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
August 5, 2005 @ 6:49 pm
Oops, I got threads mixed up. Please substitute Vaught for Sassaman above.
Comment by Leonard —
August 5, 2005 @ 10:49 pm
most of the “inventions†that you mention — rights, constitutionalism, separation of powers, etc — have no meaning outside of a state context
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Rich, are you truly meaning to say that only when ruled by a state can men conceive of rights? I think not. In any case, to argue as such is to beg the question. Or are you meaning that rights only have meaning with respect to state actions? Do you honestly think that your right to life, say, is only relative to the state? That if the state declared otherwise, you have no such right, and that nobody would think you do?
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Or take constitutionalism. What does it mean? That an organization will write down how it intends to function, and individuals who constitute said organization will endeavor to act in accordance to their interpretation of the document. Do you think it means something else? If you want to limit the organizations to only states, then again you are begging the question: what is so different about states that only they can write down how they intend to function?
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Consider a protection agency, a group of men with guns trying to prevent crime and rectify it where it happens. How does “constitutionalism” apply to them? They can publish a written document that says what they will do, what “rights” they will act as if people have, etc.
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How is this not possible? Did you know that even as I write this, organizations large and small write down the way they function?
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I hold to my point.
Comment by Leonard —
August 5, 2005 @ 11:10 pm
As for your other comments, though, they are astute enough. Yes, clearly a lot of Iraqis don’t think US violence is legitimate. So in a sense there is no “monopoly” on legitimized violence there. However, I still am not willing to call it anarchy. The question really boils down to: is a civil war anarchy?
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Or to put it in clearer terms, the definition of statehood seems to talk about the number one: one legitimized agency. Which is the case in most places in most times, so, sensible to talk about. The definition I tend to use for anarchy does not talk about how the agencies act, only that there is not just one. What anarchists think of when they propound anarchy is a situation where there are zero protection agencies that view themselves as a state. But you appear to be trying to hold me to the definition, and there I will yield.
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I think that anarchy is not purely structural. What the people who live in it think about it matters. If all (or practically all) of them have the mental pattern of the state – single agency rule – and act accordingly, you’ll either have the state, or civil war. That is how I would analyze Iraq – we should recognize that there is no possibility that it will evolve in the direction of no-state. Rather it will evolve to one-state, and that after much blood shed. This gets back to my point about the protection agencies there wanting to be, and acting like, states.
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It seems to me that if you have a civil war involving many agencies all of which are acting like states, you don’t really have anarchy. However, again, you can certainly include this under a strict usage of the definition of anarchy. And in fact there (probably) are some results of anarchy going on there – perhaps lower taxes than there might otherwise be. But it still nothing I am eager to experience.
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Anarchists already know there are are at least two different kinds of anarchy: one where there is no order at all (bad), and one where there are plural governments and order (good). You want to include a third: plural protostates and some order (bad). Feel free. But that’s not really what I am getting at when I talk about what I envision.
Comment by J —
August 7, 2005 @ 4:23 pm
There’s an intersting argument in these comments: Hesiod says libertarianism fails because of human flaws, Avram says an-cap is only possible if protection agencies refrain from seeking to become monopolies, Jim Henley says that there can be market competition for violence provision (which results in war), and Leonard ends with “anarchy is a situation where there are zero protection agencies that view themselves as a state,” which clearly isn’t the situatio in Iraq.
To tie this all together, when would an entity with a comparative advantage in violence NOT seek to use that comparative advantage to expropriate a surplus? Let’s look at theories of the origins of states: economies of scale (in violence and/or provision of public goods), environmental circomscription (can’t run away), and a storable (agricultural surplus). Pacific Islands, for example, did not originate states because they lacked the first and the second. They had their own structures, but not anything like an-cap envisions — rule by chiefs; trade done through the prestige political and social systems. So when would protection agencies in the modern day not seek to become states? Only when something from the above three don’t apply, plus not being next to a neighboring state with a military technology supply curve that would favor enlargement.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
August 7, 2005 @ 5:36 pm
J,
Note that the Seasteading folks:
http://seasteading.org/
are trying, among other things, to get rid of #2 on your list.
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Leonard: I’d say that anarchy/non-anarchy is something of a false dichotomy, or rather a {0,1}-valued Boolean variable used where you should have a [0,1]-valued real variable. Clearly there have been many places that were partly anarchic: the late-19th-century American West, for example. And in a real sense every place is at least a little bit anarchic: no state has ever had a *perfect* monopoly on violence, certainly, nor even of legitimate violence– every society has at least a few people who reject the state’s legitimacy, and a few instances in which freelance violence is generally approved.
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Iraq is also partly-anarchic, I think. The occupation-backed government cannot establish secure rule over much of the country because a nontrivial percentage of the population rejects its legitimacy and has determination and arms enough to back up the rejection. Nevertheless, as you say, that government considers itself top dog, and with some justice: there is no other organization on Iraqi territory that can prevail against it in a pitched battle, which is not usually the case in situations typically regarded as close-to-complete anarchy.
Trackback by Brad DeLong's Website —
August 7, 2005 @ 10:35 pm
What Are We Doing in Iraq?
Unqualified Offerings parses the U.S. military’s attitude towards hearts-and-minds in Iraq: Famous Last Words: “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help the…
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 8, 2005 @ 9:00 pm
Leonard, theoretically, protection agencies could also evolve in the direction of benevolent associations, couldn’t they? Nothing would stop them from providing members more comprehensive services than defense. Couldn’t there be a protection agency called “The Democratic Party” that offers all members a defined-benefit pension plan and disability insurance along with substantially higher premiums, and another called “The Republican Party” that provides its members with a defined-contribution pension instead? The Republicans could make it illegal for homosexual Republicans to marry, but not for homosexual democrats to do so. Less anarchy than polyarchy IOW.
Comment by Leonard —
August 8, 2005 @ 9:55 pm
Jim: yes.
Comment by a —
April 17, 2006 @ 7:52 am
what are we doin in iraq? stealing dirt.