What’s in it for me? An argument for a stateless society.
What would life look like without a central government?
Many assume that it would result in chaos – a lawless country full of crime and cruelty.
But this terrifying vision isn’t at all accurate.
In many societies of the past, like ancient Ireland, people lived in relative peace for many years without a central State ruling over them.
In the modern world, though, a truly stateless society has never existed – so, understandably, it can be hard to imagine.
However, things are slowly changing.
Many people are beginning to turn to libertarianism, an ideology that strongly favors individual rights and advocates for abolishing much of the central government.
These blinks will give you a broad introduction to libertarian thought.
You’ll find out why libertarians are so opposed to central government, and you’ll discover how a libertarian society might function.
By the end, you might just find yourself looking at the State with a more critical eye.
Along the way, you’ll learn how all rights can be interpreted as property rights; why libertarians think inciting a riot isn’t a crime; and how free markets could reverse pollution.
Libertarianism evolved over the course of American history.
Today, libertarianism lies somewhere on the fringes of contemporary politics.
But there was a time when libertarianism was mainstream.
In fact, the United States was founded on it.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, governments generally consisted of an all-powerful State headed by a king.
The political order was one of absolute control, high taxes, and monopolies.
Classical liberals – the people who eventually became known as libertarians – aimed to disrupt this order.
Classical liberals wanted to free the markets and eliminate central control to improve the lives of the masses.
They wanted an end to constant war and political oppression.
And they wanted to stop kings from using religion to justify tyranny.
These principles were deeply important in America’s founding years – but they didn’t necessarily remain so.
The key message here is: Libertarianism evolved over the course of American history.
English philosopher John Locke was a classical liberal who laid the foundations for modern libertarianism in his treatises defining natural rights.
One of his arguments was that if a government became tyrannical, citizens had a right to revolt.
In the early 1720s, writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon took Locke’s ideas a step further.
In their publication Cato’s Letters, Trenchard and Gordon argued that the State is always an agent of tyranny and coercion.
Avid readers of Locke’s treatises and Cato’s Letters, the American revolutionaries were inspired to embed the libertarian principles of limited government into America’s founding documents.
But as time passed, these libertarian values began to erode, and the central government’s power expanded.
In the early eighteenth century, the Democratic Party was created specifically to recapture the spirit of liberty.
But in the 1840s, the issue of slavery began tearing the party apart.
Meanwhile, the abolitionist – yet overtly statist – Republican Party rose to power.
Despite ending slavery, the Republican Party also granted subsidies to big businesses, established federal control of the banks, and instituted other big-government policies during and after the Civil War.
At the same time, other ideologies started co-opting libertarian terminology.
The biggest offender was socialism.
Prior to socialism’s rise in the nineteenth century, libertarians were considered the radical, progressive party on the “extreme Left.
” But before long, socialists had designated themselves the new progressives, pushing libertarianism to the fringes.
Despite these roadblocks, the Libertarian Party has now become the third-largest political party in the United States.
The nonaggression axiom underpins the libertarian belief system.
Libertarianism is often considered an anti-State philosophy.
Really, though, all libertarian beliefs stem from one overarching principle: the nonaggression axiom.
The nonaggression axiom is simple: no person or group of people should initiate or threaten violence against anyone else.
We can see how this principle dictates libertarian beliefs.
Take prostitution, for example.
Libertarians don’t consider prostitution a crime since it doesn’t involve aggression by one person against another.
But the libertarian credo doesn’t just forbid physical aggression and threats – it also forbids aggression against other people’s property.
The key message here is: The nonaggression axiom underpins the libertarian belief system.
Libertarians define private property as anything produced when someone takes raw material and mixes it with her labor – say, by taking some trees and turning them into a house, or by hiring someone to do it for her.
Of course, she can exchange her property for other goods or services, which transfers ownership to a new person.
To a libertarian, private property is an extension of its owner’s body – which means that all rights are property rights.
Let’s take freedom of speech, for example.
Libertarians consider freedom of speech the right to say what you want while on your private property – whether your home or a rented-out assembly hall.
A classic example of an exception to freedom of speech is the right to falsely yell “Fire!
” in a movie theater.
Does a person have this right or not?
Like many others, a libertarian would say no.
But that’s because the fire-yeller would be aggressing against the theater owner and the other theatergoers’ property rights.
He violated his contractual agreement by disturbing the movie – a contract he entered into upon purchasing his ticket.
The biggest aggressor in society, however, isn’t people who yell “Fire!
” at movie theaters.
It’s the State, the central entity that governs a group of individuals.
Despite the State also being made up of individuals, it regularly engages in actions that would never be acceptable for private citizens.
For instance, a citizen setting off bombs is considered a mass murderer.
But when the State does this, it’s simply called “war.
” The State has developed a sophisticated vocabulary to convince everyone that what it does is for the common good or public welfare.
But these terms just hide the fact that the State has a monopoly on aggression.
The State regularly compels forced labor.
It goes without saying that libertarians are vehemently opposed to slavery.
There’s hardly a greater violation of the nonaggression axiom.
But since slavery is now illegal everywhere in the world, is it still worthwhile to debate the issue?
A libertarian would answer yes.
And that’s because libertarians believe that slavery is still alive and well in the modern world, albeit in hidden forms.
Consider the military.
At the time the author was writing, all young American men were obligated to register for the armed forces.
If the government said the word, these men had no choice but to kill, capture, and put their own lives in danger in service of the State.
And this is just one example of the forced servitude – or slavery – that’s been a part of modern American history.
The key message here is: The State regularly compels forced labor.
Another major perpetrator of involuntary servitude is the tax system.
Take the income tax.
The very existence of income tax means that all of us work some amount of time per year entirely for free, making us part-time slaves to the State.
After all, what’s forced labor if not working for little or no pay?
Taxation is also unjust when it comes to the court system.
Our current system focuses on punishing criminals by jailing them.
However, who ultimately pays for that punishment?
Taxpayers, including the very victims criminals have aggressed against.
Worse, criminal suspects are often jailed before they’re even proven guilty.
In a libertarian system, a suspect wouldn’t be jailed until the court has made its verdict.
In our society, we don’t only unjustly jail criminal suspects – we do the same to people who have a mental illness.
Mentally ill people can still be involuntarily hospitalized because they’re supposedly a “danger to themselves and others.
” To a libertarian, this is plain wrong.
A person with a mental illness shouldn’t be involuntarily committed to a hospital any more than another person should be jailed under the premise that he might one day commit a crime.
Statistically, teenage males are more likely to commit crimes than any other demographic.
Does that mean all teenage males should be systematically rounded up and locked in prison?
Of course not.
Naturally, not all of our problems stem from the issue of forced labor.
The State also regularly intrudes upon our personal liberties.
The State should not legislate a particular moral code.
From the libertarian perspective, commonly accepted rights like freedom of speech and freedom of the press fall under the blanket of property rights.
Importantly, though, libertarians also believe in freedom of the will.
To illustrate freedom of the will, take this example.
Say Citizen A wants to start a riot.
She goes out into the town square, shouting and whipping people into a frenzy.
If Citizens B and C hear Citizen A’s speech and then decide to riot, who’s at fault – Citizen A, or Citizens B and C?
Libertarians believe that only Citizens B and C are at fault, since they’ve acted of their own free will in choosing to commit a crime.
But wait!
Isn’t it immoral to incite a riot?
A libertarian would certainly think so.
But for libertarians, morality and legality are two separate spheres.
Through the legal code, the State should not impose any particular moral views on anyone else.
The key message here is: The State should not legislate a particular moral code.
Conservatives and liberals have very different views on morality.
However, both advocate for a society that encodes their particular morals into law.
Consider the example of pornography.
Many conservatives believe that pornography is immoral and should therefore be illegal.
Liberals, on the other hand, tend to believe sex is healthy and empowering; in their eyes, pornography should be legal.
For both liberals and conservatives, moral beliefs dictate legality.
To libertarians, these moral questions are irrelevant.
Instead, violations of the nonaggression axiom are the only crimes.
If the State outlaws pornography, it becomes the aggressor by invading the property rights of anyone who wishes to produce, share, or watch pornography.
Of course, libertarians believe each person has the right to own her body and her property.
That means she also has the right to defend herself against aggressors with whatever weapons she chooses – including guns.
In the name of protecting the vulnerable, liberals would like to ban people from owning guns.
But it’s these vulnerable people who most need the ability to protect themselves!
In fact, a 1975 national survey of handgun owners found that the groups most likely to own a gun only for self-defense purposes are African-Americans, people with low income, and elderly people.
When the State legislates morality, someone’s freedoms are always impinged upon.
What happens when it gets involved in education?
State-run services like education and welfare harm the people they’re supposed to help.
Nowadays, we consider education an integral part of a child’s life.
But public education, specifically, is a relatively new phenomenon.
In the 1920s, the state of Oregon passed a law banning private schools.
Children were to be forced into public schools and taught the state-approved curriculum.
And who was the group so ardently pushing for this new law?
Not liberals or progressives, but the Ku Klux Klan, who wanted to force immigrants and Catholics into a homogenous “Americanized” school system.
In the name of progress and democracy, public schools actually stamp out diversity and thereby harm children.
Meanwhile, other State programs like welfare do similar injustices to poor people.
The key message here is: State-run services like education and welfare harm the people they’re supposed to help.
One major issue with government-funded education is that it doesn’t allow for specialization.
We all recognize that adults have different personalities and talents that are better suited to some careers than others.
But our current education system forces children into an ill-fitting, one-size-fits-all curriculum.
If education were privatized instead, parents could fund the schools that best suit their children’s unique temperaments and skills.
Religious parents could send their children to religious schools, for instance.
Some schools would have strict grading systems, while others would use gradeless education.
Because State-sponsored education is so harmful, it should be privatized.
Similarly, social welfare programs harm poor people; this entire system should be abolished.
During the 1970s, fewer people were living below the poverty line than ever.
Despite that, welfare spending had massively ballooned.
In 1937, the State spent $13.
7 billion on social welfare and $5.
9 billion on direct welfare.
In 1976, total social welfare spending was $247.
7 billion, and direct welfare spending was $36.
5 billion.
Over time, welfare benefits have been increasing much faster than average wages.
If you can make almost as much money through welfare as you can by working, what’s the incentive to work at all?
Moreover, the popular belief is that money gets redistributed from the rich to the poor.
But this isn’t true.
At the time the author was writing, the Tax Foundation estimated that federal, state, and local taxes extracted 30 percent of the income from people making less than $3,000 per year.
However, the taxpaying poor aren’t the ones receiving welfare.
Instead, their taxes fund welfare for other poor people who don’t pay taxes.
The Federal Reserve causes inflation and economic recession.
One day, a government official visits the Jones family and hands them a money printer.
The official tells the Joneses that they’re now in charge of printing the entire nation’s money supply.
The family is elated, and they start using the printer to slowly pay off their debts and loans.
But soon, that isn’t enough, so they begin printing money for luxury goods.
Over time, the country’s total money supply goes up substantially.
This creates the illusion that citizens in general have gotten richer, which causes the price of consumer goods to go up.
So, who are the real-life Joneses?
In the US, it’s a governmental organization known as the Federal Reserve, or the Fed.
However, the Fed doesn’t just go printing money whenever it likes.
Instead, the Fed causes inflation – not to mention economic recession – in a much sneakier way, one that’s designed to be difficult to understand.
The key message here is: The Federal Reserve causes inflation and economic recession.
The Federal Reserve is in complete control of the total dollar supply.
And it can write checks, or bank demand deposits, at a rate of 6:1 to its physical money reserves.
These checks are promises that the Fed will pay out a deposit-holder’s demand deposit in cash whenever it desires.
But banks are the only ones with checking accounts at the Fed.
In practice, this means that banks lend six times as much money as they actually physically have.
If every person suddenly demanded to have all the cash that was stored in their bank accounts, the Fed would have no chance of paying out that much money all at once – unless, of course, it simply printed as much money as it needed, causing major inflation.
Inflation plays a vital role in the economic boom and bust cycle, which the Fed is largely responsible for perpetuating.
Banks profit when they’re lending money.
During the boom cycle, the Fed increases the money supply and banks hand out lots of loans at artificially low interest rates.
Businessmen, then, are incentivized to invest in capital goods – for example, factories.
The extra money they’re spending goes to workers – the consumers – in the form of higher wages.
The larger money supply then causes the prices of consumer goods to rise.
At some point, banks must start asking people for debt repayments to replenish their reserves.
An economic depression ensues.
Next, the Fed steps in and bails out the banks, inflating the currency further.
This expands the government’s revenue – remember the Joneses?
– but it hurts everyone else.
The money supply never shrinks, which means prices never fall, and so the cycle continues.
Public sector services like streets, police, and courts should be privatized.
Imagine living in a society in which, for as long as you can remember, the government has provided shoes to everyone in the population in exchange for a percentage of their taxes.
One day, a libertarian comes along and says that the government should stop providing shoes and that the whole shoemaking business should be privatized.
Undoubtedly, many people would object.
Who would possibly supply shoes without the government?
How would we afford them?
This hypothetical seems ridiculous, but it’s the argument people often make when they stand behind State involvement in public services like roads.
Libertarians believe that, on the contrary, the free market could provide these services at much cheaper prices and higher quality.
The key message here is: Public sector services like streets, police, and courts should be privatized.
If the public sector were abolished, all pieces of land would become privately owned – including streets and roads.
In a residential neighborhood, landlords might band together to purchase, and become joint owners of, a particular block.
Wanting to increase the market value of their block, the landlords would automatically be incentivized to ensure that their streets remained efficient and safe.
So, who’d be ensuring street safety?
Well, private police, of course.
In addition to owning the street, perhaps the landlords would also pay for the services of a private police department.
After all, these landlords wouldn’t be able to attract many tenants if their streets were constantly plagued with crime.
But what if, one day, a crime – say, a robbery – were to happen in a home on one of these privately owned streets?
Well, the accuser – let’s call him Smith – would take the crime to a privatized court.
Let’s say the court finds the accused – we’ll call him Jones – guilty.
Now, to defend himself, Jones might employ the services of a different private court, which finds him not guilty.
Both courts could then take the case to a third court – a court of appeals – for a final decision.
In this society, there would be no State enforcing the courts’ judgment.
Instead, a criminal would be incentivized to comply with his sentence because of the consequences of not doing so.
If a merchant was found to be a scammer, for example, and then didn’t pay his court-ordered fine, the news would spread and he’d quickly find himself out of business.
A fully free market could correct the environmental ills the government has created.
Environmental conservation has become one of the most pressing issues of our time.
Are capitalism and excessive industrialization to blame, as some believe?
Let’s look at the big picture.
Thanks to capitalism and the technological innovations it’s brought with it, the continent of North America now supports several hundred million people at a very high standard of living.
Prior to capitalism, however, the continent only supported about a million Native Americans living at the subsistence level.
Undoubtedly, capitalism and industrialization have helped create unprecedented prosperity.
But capitalism and the power of free markets can also solve the growing issues of resource scarcity and pollution.
The key message here is: A fully free market could correct the environmental ills the government has created.
When it comes to many resources, the free market has done an excellent job of conservation.
Take copper.
Like all companies, mining companies operate according to the principles of supply and demand.
If they tripled their copper extraction one year, they’d also triple their profits.
But then, they’d have much less copper to profit from the following year.
In contrast to copper, the government is largely in control of the timber industry, which is experiencing scarcity issues.
The State owns most of the forests in the western United States and Canada, and it leases parts of the forests out to private timber companies.
These companies are allowed to use the forests but never own them.
That means there’s no economic incentive for companies to conserve and maintain the forests – their goal is simply to generate as much profit as possible, then leave.
Privatizing the forests would create an economic incentive for companies to carefully maintain them.
This same principle could help solve the problem of pollution.
Say General Motors owned the Mississippi River.
Since a river is such a valuable resource, GM would have a huge incentive to keep it clean and pollution-free.
As soon as some other company or individual began using the Mississippi as their personal dumping ground, GM would immediately file a lawsuit.
Moreover, rivers and lakes are heavily polluted by sewage companies, which the State employs to dispose of everyone’s waste for free.
If this service didn’t exist, everyone would invest in eco-friendly toilets that can burn off sewage on their own.
These toilets are already on the market, but there’s currently little incentive to buy them.
States should interfere as little as possible in other States’ affairs.
Due to their anti-war stance, libertarians are often smeared as isolationists or peace-loving hippies.
But like all other libertarian beliefs, opposition to war comes down to the fact that it’s a gross violation of the nonaggression axiom.
In an ideal world, every country would follow libertarian principles, so war would rarely – if ever – break out.
On top of that, there’d also be no foreign policy, since no nations or governments would exist.
But, of course, this isn’t the world we live in – nor is it likely to be.
Currently, our world is divided into States with monopolies over the violence in their particular societies.
The libertarian goal is to pressure States to avoid war at all costs and confine their aggression to their own populations.
The key message here is: States should interfere as little as possible in other States’ affairs.
Modern warfare is uniquely violent and destructive.
During the Middle Ages, war almost never involved citizens – instead, it was two armies fighting each other.
Nation-states didn’t presume to speak for the opinions of civilian populations, and weaponry was much less deadly than it is today.
But thanks to advanced weaponry and nationalism, war nowadays necessitates the mass murder of civilians.
But what about a scenario in which one country initiates an unjust attack on another, and a third country jumps in to defend it?
Is this ever justified?
Many pro-interventionists liken this scenario to a street mugging.
If you see Smith robbing Jones at gunpoint, the obvious moral action is to rush to Jones’s aid.
But this analogy is false, because State aggression is not analogous to aggression between individuals.
When one State rushes to defend another, it’s not only aggressing against another State’s civilians – it’s also opening its own population up to attack.
So, a more apt analogy would be this: Smith holds Jones up at gunpoint.
To remedy the situation, the police bomb an entire city block, murdering thousands of innocent people.
Only one type of warfare has the potential to be acceptable to libertarians: guerilla warfare, which almost always involves civilians banding together to fight the offenses of their State.
Libertarians believe that individuals always have the right to defend themselves against violence and coercion.
But they never have the right to force others to do their bidding – either through conscription, taxation, or any other form of aggression.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: To many people, government seems like a necessary and inevitable entity.
But from the libertarian perspective, the State is nothing more than a highwayman that forcibly robs its citizens at gunpoint, impinges upon people’s liberties, and impedes free enterprise.
All of the services the State currently provides could perform just as well – or even better – if they were privatized and the market was allowed to operate freely.
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What to read next: Free to Choose, by Milton Friedman You’ve just heard Murray Rothbard’s argument in favor of libertarianism.
Next, dive even deeper into this political philosophy with another classic, Free to Choose, by Nobel prizewinner Milton Friedman.
In our blinks to Free to Choose, you’ll take a closer look at the government’s role in the economy – and how it can impact your personal freedom.
Find out how government intervention distorts the value of goods and services, what happens when economies free up their markets, and why the welfare state can be so problematic.