A different kind of rules
Without a belief in government, communities would almost certainly develop rules which, at first glance, might resemble what are now called laws. But there would be a fundamental difference. It is both legitimate and useful to write down and publish, for all to see, statements about the consequences of doing certain things.
People in one town may, for example, make it known that if you get caught stealing in their town, you will be subjected to forced labor until you pay back your victim threefold for what you stole, or the people of some neighborhood may make it known that if you are caught driving drunk there they will take your car and roll it into a lake.
But while such decrees would constitute threats they would be fundamentally different from what are now called laws for several reasons
The ones actually making the threats, the ones who decided what retribution they personally would feel justified in inflicting on those who harm or endanger their neighbors, would alone bear the responsibility for making and carrying out such threats.
The threats would not require any election or consensus. One person or a thousand people jointly could issue a warning in the form of: if I catch you doing this, I will do this to you. The threats would not be seen as the will of the people, but only as a statement of the intentions of those actually issuing the warning.
The legitimacy of such threats would be judged not by who made the threats, but by whether the threatened consequence is, in the eyes of the observer, appropriate for the crime committed. No one would feel any obligation to agree with, or abide by, such a threat if they deemed it to be unfair or unjustified.
Such warnings would not pretend to alter morality or make up any new crimes, nor would anyone imagine such warnings to be legitimate simply because they were issued, the way people now view authoritarian laws.
Instead, such warnings would simply constitute statements about what those making the threats believe to be justified. Therefore, instead of being in the authoritarian formula of we hereby make the following illegal, the warnings would fit into this template. I believe that if you do this, I have the right to respond in this way.
Many people, having been trained into authority worship, would be terrified of such a non-centralized, free-for-all method of human interaction. But what if, the statist will ask, someone writes a threat that says, if I don't like your religion or your hairstyle or your dietary choices, I'll kill you. Examining that question in the context of a society still suffering from the superstition of authority, and in the context of a society without such a belief, shows just how dangerous the authority superstition really is.
It is true that in the absence of the belief in government, an individual could threaten violence in unjustified situations. The point is not that everyone will automatically think and behave properly if there are no rulers, but that such malicious tendencies in human beings would be far less dangerous and destructive without the belief in authority to legitimize them.
For example, compare what happens when some individuals vehemently oppose alcohol consumption and when authority forbids it. It is possible, if unlikely, that an individual in a stateless society could on his own declare, I consider consuming alcohol to be a sin, and if I find out you've been drinking, I'm coming to your house with a gun to straighten you out. Any person who did so would almost certainly be persuaded, if not by polite reasoning, then by the threat of retaliatory violence that he should not carry through on his threat and should stop making such threats.
Obviously, one person could not, by himself, inflict oppression upon millions of beer drinkers. Even among others who also considered drinking alcohol to be a sin, even if it was a majority, few would feel justified in trying to forcibly impose their views on others.
Whether they recognized that such aggression is unjustified or whether they were simply scared of what might be done to them if they tried, either way, violent conflict would be avoided. In contrast, suppose a group of people wearing the label of government declared alcohol to be illegal and created a heavily armed gang of enforcers to hunt down and imprison any caught possessing alcohol.
Since that actually happened, there is no need to theorize about the results. With the promise of fixing most of society's ills and with public support, the U.S. ruling class enacted alcohol prohibition in 1920. Alcohol consumption continued, slightly reduced, and there immediately sprang up a black market in alcohol production and distribution.
A hugely profitable but illegal market led to violent conflicts, a jump in organized crime and other crime, and widespread corruption in government, as well as brutal attempts to crush the alcohol trade. Seeing the actual results of Prohibition, a majority of the people soon opposed it and demanded the repeal of the 18th Amendment, which authorized Prohibition at the federal level. And of course, after prohibition ended, all of the related violence, government violence and private violence, ended.
In this example and countless others, it can be seen that, left to their own devices, most people will not try to forcibly impose their preferences upon others, but will go out of their way to avoid violent conflicts. However, if there is a government that people can use to coercively inflict their values upon others, they will gladly beg it to do so and feel no shame or guilt for having done so.
If every person who made or attempted to enforce a threat or rule, as it might be called, had to take personal responsibility for having done so and had to assume the risk himself, very few people would be so eager to threaten their neighbors. But given the vehicle of authority, everyone who believes in government threatens all of his neighbors on a regular basis and accepts none of the responsibility and assumes none of the risk for having done so. In short, the belief in authority makes everyone who believes in it into a thug and a coward.
Organization Without Authority
Having mentioned the ways in which human society would change absent the authority myth, it is equally important to note the things which would not change. For some reason, some people seem to think that anarchy, a society without a ruling class, equates to every man for himself, with every person having to grow his own food, build his own house, and so on. The implication of such a belief is that human cooperation and trade occur only because someone is in charge.
Of course, this is not the case and never has been. People trade and cooperate for mutual benefit, as can be seen in the many millions of businesses and transactions which already occur without any government involvement.
Supermarkets are examples of highly organized, amazingly efficient means of distributing food, which involve many thousands of individuals, none of whom is coerced into participating, but each of whom does so for his own benefit. Everyone from the farmers to the truck drivers to the stock boys to the checkout clerks to the store managers to the owner of entire store chains does what he does because he receives personal gain for doing so.
No one is legally required to produce one bite of food for anyone else. And yet hundreds of millions of people are fed and fed well with a large variety of food products of high quality, but at a low price by what is essentially an anarchistic system of food production and distribution.
This is the result of human nature and simple economics. Where there is a need for some product or service, there is money to be made providing it. And where there is money to be made, there will be a number of people or groups of people competing for that money by trying to make products that are better and cheaper.
Such a system, which is really no system at all, automatically punishes those whose products are inferior or too costly and rewards those who find a way to provide people with what they want at a better price. And giving up the authority myth would not hamper that in the slightest.
In fact, the authority superstition is constantly interfering with people who attempt to organize for mutual benefit by throwing taxes, licensing requirements, regulations, inspectors, and other legal obstacles in the way.
Even laws supposedly intended to protect consumers usually do nothing but limit the options available to consumers. The end result is that many businessmen who otherwise would have to focus on making a better product at a better price instead focus on lobbying those in government to do things which handicap or destroy competing businesses.
Because the mechanism of government is always the use of force, it can never help with competition. It can only hinder it. In other words, rather than being essential to an organized society, the myth of authority is the biggest obstacle to human beings organizing for mutual benefit.
Defense Without Authority
Those who insist that government is necessary often raise the issue of defense and protection, claiming that society without government would mean that anyone could do anything, there would be no standards of behavior, no rules, no consequences for those who choose to commit theft or murder, and that society would therefore collapse into constant violence and mayhem.
Such concerns, however, are based on a profound misunderstanding of human nature and of what government is and what it is not. Defending against aggressors requires no special authority, no legislation, no law, and no law enforcers. Defensive force is inherently justified, regardless of who does it and regardless of what any law says. And having a formal, organized means of providing such defensive force for a community also does not require government or law.
Each individual has the right to defend himself or defend someone else. He may choose to hire someone else to provide defense services, either because he is physically unable to defend himself or just because he would rather pay someone else to do it. And if a number of people chose to pay to have an organization of trained fighters with the weapons, vehicles, buildings, and other resources they need to defend an entire town, the people have that right as well.
At this point, most believers in government will protest, saying, that's all government is. But that is not the case. And this is where the difference becomes apparent. What an individual does not have the right to do, what no group of people, no matter how large, has any right to do, is to hire someone else, individual or group, to do something which any average individual does not have the right to do.
They cannot rightfully hire someone to commit robbery even if they call it taxation because the average individual has no right to steal. They cannot rightfully hire someone to spy on and forcibly control the choices and behaviors of their neighbors, even if they call it regulation.
Those in a stateless society would feel justified in hiring someone to use force only in the very limited ways and in the very limited situations in which every individual has the right to use force to defend against aggressors.
In contrast, most of what the so-called protectors in government do is commit acts of aggression, not defend against them. Some of what is now classified as police work, in fact, all of what the police do that is actually legitimate, noble, righteous, and helpful to society, would exist without the authority myth.
Investigating wrongdoing and apprehending actual criminals, meaning people who harm others, not merely people who disobey politicians, would continue without the authority myth, as something that almost everyone would want and would be willing to pay for.
This is demonstrated by the fact that there are already private detectives and private security companies, in addition to the protection services of government that everyone is forced to fund. There would be only one difference, though it is a major difference.
Those doing the job of investigating and protecting, in the absence of authority superstition, would always be viewed as having exactly the same rights as everyone else. While presumably they would be better equipped and better qualified to do their jobs than the average citizen, their actions would be judged by the same standards that the actions of anyone else would be judged, which is not at all the case with so-called law enforcers.
Private protection providers would also judge their own actions, not by whether some authority had told them to do something or whether their actions were deemed legal by government, but by whether those actions, in their own personal view, were inherently justified.
Not only would an excuse of just following orders not convince the general public, but the agents themselves could not, even in their own minds, use such an excuse to evade responsibility for their actions, because no one would be claiming to be an authority over them.
Non-authoritarian police, if they would even be called that, would be viewed very differently than government agents are now. They would not be seen to have the right to do anything that any other person did not have the right to do. They could only go places, question people, use force, or do anything else in situations where anyone else would be justified in doing the same thing.
As a result, the average person would have no reason to feel any nervousness or self-consciousness in their presence, as most people now do when in the presence of law enforcers. People would feel no more obligation to submit to questioning or searches or anything else requested by private protectors than they would if some stranger on the street made such requests. And if a private protector became abusive or even violent, his victim would have the right to respond the same way he would if anyone else was behaving that way. More importantly, the individual who resisted aggression from a private protector would have the support of his neighbors if he did so, because his neighbors would not be imagining any obligation to bow to someone because of any badge or any law.
The best check against a defense organization becoming corrupt or out of control is the ability of customers to simply stop paying. Obviously, no one wants to pay for some gang to oppress him, but most people also do not want to pay a gang to oppress someone else either. As much as the average person wants to see thieves and murderers caught and stopped, he also wants to see to it that the innocent are not harmed.
If the customers of some private protection company discovered that their protectors were harassing and assaulting innocent people, the type of behavior they were hired to prevent, the customer base would instantly disappear, and the thugs would be out of business. And if, in the absence of any claimed authority, the thugs decided to try to force their former customers to keep paying, the backlash from the people would be swift and severe, as no one would feel any legal obligation to allow themselves to be oppressed.
A non-authoritarian protection system would also lack another particularly ludicrous aspect of nearly all government forms of defense. It is standard not only for governments to force people to fund defense schemes, but to refuse to even tell the people what they are funding.
The U.S. government, and in particular the CIA, though many other agencies also engage in secret operations, has spent decades and trillions of dollars, much of which still remains unaccounted for, on operations its customers, the American people, are prohibited from knowing about.
Indeed, anyone who tried to tell the American people what all they are funding would be imprisoned, or worse, for causing a breach of national security. With nearly unlimited power, nearly unlimited funds, and permission to do all of its deeds in secret, it is utterly absurd to imagine that the military and the CIA would only do useful, righteous things.
Indeed, more and more, the American people are learning that the CIA has for decades engaged in drug running and gun running, torture, assassination, buying influence with foreign governments, installing puppet dictators, and all sorts of other destructive and evil practices.
Even President Harry Truman, who created the CIA, later said that he never would have done so if he had known it would become the American Gestapo. Any private company that offered protection or defense services would get no customers at all if its sales pitch was, “If you give us huge sums of money, we will protect you. We just won't tell you what you're paying for, and we won't tell you what we do or how we do it.”
The only reason government gets funding based on such a ridiculous premise is because it gets its money through violent coercion, not voluntary trade. The people are not given a choice of whether to fund it or not.
There is another preposterous aspect of protection via government, which would never occur with private defense and protection providers. Under the guise of gun control and other weapons laws, authoritarian regimes often forcibly prevent the people from being able to defend themselves while making the ridiculous claim that it is being done for the safety of the very people being disarmed. Those in power know full well that a disarmed public is a helpless public, and that is precisely what tyrants want. The idea that a person who does not mind violating laws against theft or murder is going to mind violating weapons laws is absurd.
Crime statistics and common sense both demonstrate that passing a law against private weapon ownership will affect only the law-abiding, with the result being that the basically good people will end up less able to defend themselves against aggressors. And that is exactly what politicians want, because they have the biggest, most powerful gang of aggressors around.
Needless to say, if someone is looking for protection against aggressors, he will not voluntarily pay a company to forcibly take away his own means of self-defense. Furthermore, violent clashes between the police and civilians would obviously be reduced or non-existent if the people could simply stop funding any protectors that became aggressors.
For example, much of the racial tensions and violence in U.S. history were the result of white law enforcers oppressing and abusing black civilians. Rather than law acting as a civilizing influence, it was used as the excuse for violent aggression. Given a choice, the inhabitants of a black neighborhood obviously would not have voluntarily paid to have racist, sadistic white thugs intimidating and assaulting them on a regular basis.
Many other violent clashes in the U.S. and elsewhere have also been the result of people upset with what their ruling class was doing to them. This would include the massacre of thousands of protesters at Tiananmen Square by the Chinese army in 1989, the killings of several anti-war protesters by the National Guard at Kent State in Ohio in 1970, and so on. More and more often in the United States, public demonstrations and protests over government policies end in authoritarian attacks against protesters with tear gas, batons, tasers, rubber bullets, and so on.
Obviously, no group of people would willingly pay for a gang that forcibly stops those same people from speaking their minds. More importantly, the motivation behind such protests is almost always displeasure with what government officials are doing against the will of the people, at least some of the people.
If each person was allowed to spend his own money instead of being forced to fund a centralized authoritarian agenda, there would be no reason for most of this type of protest and the resulting clashes to occur at all.
A non-authoritarian protector would do only things that he and his customers viewed as justifiable, which would probably be spelled out in contract form, where the protector agrees to provide specific services for a specific fee. Compare this to the standard government version of protection. We will forcibly take as much of your money as we want, and we will decide what, if anything, we will do for you.
Most people want aggressors stopped and the innocent protected. In a free market, the way for a company to succeed is by giving customers what they want. Unlike government, if a private defense company had to rely on willing customers, it would have a huge incentive not to be careless, wasteful, abusive, or corrupt.
If people could take their business elsewhere, there would always be a competition to see who could provide actual justice most effectively. For a private protection company to succeed, it would have to demonstrate to its customers that
It is very good at figuring out who is guilty and who is not.
It is very good at making sure that the innocent are not harassed, assaulted, or slandered.
It is very good at making sure that the truly dangerous people are caught and prevented from doing further harm.
It is very good at making sure the victims of crimes receive whatever restitution is possible.
It is very good at making it so that those who have done something wrong but do not need to be completely removed from society are put into an environment where their attitude and behavior can actually improve.
In contrast, government prosecutors specialize in always demonizing the accused and always have an incentive to get convictions or the coerced confessions known as plea bargains, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the accused.
Government courts constantly release people who still pose an obvious danger to others while keeping millions of people locked up who have harmed no one. The government prison system, because of how prisoners are degraded, abused, and assaulted by guards as well as other inmates, makes frustrated, angry people into people who are even more frustrated and angry, making innocent people into criminals, and making criminals into worse criminals. And the American people are coerced into funding that destructive system, whether they want to or not.
Another important point is that in the case of a private protection company, if one protector becomes abusive, the reputation and career of every other protector depends upon exposing and routing out the thug.
In contrast, it is now universally understood that government police forces will first and foremost protect their own. When one cop is caught doing something corrupt, illegal, or violent, almost without exception, all of the other cops will help to cover it up or defend it.
They function based upon gang mentality because the people who are forced to pay their salaries are not the people they actually have to answer to. Like most government employees, they answer to the politicians and view the general public as cattle, not customers.
In contrast, the general public would view private defenders as their friends, their allies, and their employees, and more importantly, as their equals. They would not view them as an authority they must grovel before, nor as a constant potential threat to be feared.
Everyone, including the hired protector, would recognize that the protector has no more rights than anyone else. Everyone would know that if a hired protector ever committed theft, assault, or murder, he would be viewed and treated exactly as any other thug would be viewed and treated.
A genuine protector who defends liberty and property not only does not require a belief in authority, he requires an absence of that belief. One who imagines himself to have the right to forcibly control everyone else, even if only in a limited way, is going to treat people accordingly. The law enforcer who hands out tickets for obscure infractions, detains and interrogates people without just cause, and seems always looking for a reason to interfere with people's daily lives, is not a protector and deserves no respect or cooperation.
A non-authoritarian protector, on the other hand, would be nothing more than a normal human being with the same rights as everyone else, though perhaps more often armed and better trained in physical combat than most. He would be viewed as the neighbor to call if there is trouble rather than the agent of a gang of thugs which first and foremost serves the ruling class.
And the job of protector, absent any special authority, power, or status, would mainly attract those who truly want to protect the innocent, but would not attract those who merely want the chance to exercise power and control over others, a human shortcoming which the job of modern law enforcement feeds.
This is not to say that private protectors would never do anything wrong. They would still be human, capable of bad judgment, negligence, and even malicious intent, just like everyone else. However, they would not have legal permission to do wrong and would have no system, no law, and no authority which they could blame for their actions or which they could hide behind to avoid the wrath of their victims.
If they ever acted as aggressors, retribution against them would be certain and swift. In a population that has given up the superstition of authority, any group of protectors which decided to become a group of extortionists, thugs, and tyrants would not be voted against or sued or complained about to some authority. They would be shot.
The only thing that allows for the prolonged widespread oppression of any armed populace is the belief in authority among the victims of oppression. Without that it is impossible to subdue or dominate them for long.
Deterrence and Incentives
Some assume that, if not for government, crooks would be free to do as they please without any repercussions. Again, this shows a profound misunderstanding of human nature and of what government is.
In truth, the belief in authority adds nothing to the effectiveness of any system of defense and protection. People who use aggression against others, such as assault, theft, and murder, obviously are not restrained by their own morality or respect for the self-ownership of their victims.
However, they may choose not to commit a particular crime if they imagine a risk of harm to themselves. That is called deterrent. And deterrence, by definition, do not depend upon appealing to the conscience of the attacker, but instead make use of the attacker's instinct for self-preservation.
To put it bluntly, the message which works on true criminals is not, do not do that because it is wrong. The message is, do not do that or you will get hurt. The supposed moral righteousness or authority of the threat against a would-be aggressor is irrelevant to the effectiveness of the deterrent. Whether it is a police officer, a dog, an angry homeowner, or even another thief, the only question in the attacker's mind is whether he is likely to suffer pain or death if he attempts to rob or attack someone.
Deterrence to other types of bad behavior, which are not so severe or blatant as theft or assault, also do not require authority. Some assert that without government inspectors and regulators, every business would be putting out shoddy, dangerous products. But such a claim is again based upon a profound misunderstanding of human nature and economics.
No matter how greedy or selfish a businessman may be, he cannot be successful in the long run if he sells products which do not please his customers. Someone who knowingly sells a defective product or tainted food will have few, if any, customers. The many highly expensive recalls which many companies voluntarily carry out, even for relatively trivial defects or problems, attests to this fact.
Unlike in the current situation, in which the power of government is used to prop up and protect irresponsible and destructive corporations, in a truly free market with informed customers and open competition, corruption and crime would not pay and businesses would be unable to insulate themselves from the consequences of their irresponsibility.
Government inspectors and regulators are driven by the incentive to impose fines on people and to enforce laws and regulations, regardless of whether they make any sense. In contrast, a system of private inspectors, which answers only to the people who want to know what is safe and which has no enforcement power, has no incentive to interfere with business or to make up things to complain about.
Businesses could voluntarily invite private reviews of their products or facilities, such as is already done by Underwriters Laboratories, UL, Consumer Reports, and others, in order to be able to show the public an unbiased opinion of how safe and reliable their products are.
Many companies do this today, on top of having to jump through all of the bureaucratic hoops which government put in their way. Many other matters could be handled in similar non-authoritarian ways.
Private building inspectors already used by many realty companies would have the job of determining on behalf of potential buyers how safe and sound a building is.
In addition to private inspectors, restaurants could simply invite potential customers to examine their facilities themselves. All of these actions would be voluntary. A business could choose not to allow any inspections, and potential customers could choose whether or not to patronize that business.
The fact that so many things are assumed to be problems for authority to handle is a sign of intellectual laziness. Customers want quality products, and businessmen who want to be successful must provide quality products. It is in the interests of both, therefore, to be able to objectively demonstrate the quality of the products being offered.
Contrary to the stereotype of the evil, greedy, profiteering businessman, the way to become rich in a free society is by providing products and services which actually benefit the customer. Almost all of the dishonest schemes that are profitable in the long term are those that are forcibly created or endorsed by government, such as the fractional banking scam, the legal counterfeiting scam called monetary policy, the litigation racket, and so on.
Even without government, there would occasionally be serious conflicts. For example, suppose a factory was dumping toxic waste into a river, killing all the fish downstream on the property of others, which would constitute a form of trespass and property destruction. The absence of authority would not preclude the victims from doing anything about it.
In fact, it may make it easier for them to do something about it. Instead of suing in a government court where the judge can be bribed into supporting the billion-dollar business, the response might be something more effective, even if it appears less civilized.
The people who live on the river may do something as simple as telling the factory owner that if he keeps allowing his pollution to flow onto their properties, they will physically destroy his factory. Obviously, there may be more polite, peaceful ways the problem could be solved, such as boycotts or publicizing the wrongdoing. Either way, the people can create an effective deterrent to improper behavior, especially when there is no government involved that can be paid off and corrupted.
Many campaign contributions now amount to little more than bribes to have government regulators look the other way. Likewise, government courts can easily find reasons to dismiss almost any lawsuit, thereby allowing wealthy individuals, the kind with real victims, to prosper.
The cliche of the greedy evil businessman often omits the fact that large-scale crimes are usually done with the cooperation of government officials. Without protection from government, even the most greedy heartless businessman would have a huge incentive to not anger his customers to the point where they stop buying his products or to the point where they react violently against him. Most people, most of the time, would be reluctant to use force, knowing that they alone would bear both the responsibility and the risks of doing so.
There would be a huge incentive to settle disputes and disagreements peacefully and by mutual agreement. When the belief in government is prevalent, on the other hand, there is no incentive to settle things peacefully, because winning the political battle poses no risk to those who advocate violence via government.
Without a ruling class to whine to, to legislatively impose some central agenda on everyone, people would be forced to deal with each other as rational adults instead of as whiny, irresponsible children. People would be far better served by attempts at cooperation and peaceful compromise than they are by fighting over who can get a hold of the sword of government.
When bullying and aggression are no longer recognized as legitimate forms of human interaction, human beings will, out of necessity, learn to play nice.
Anarchy in Action
While many people dread the thought of anarchy, the truth is that almost everyone experiences anarchy on a regular basis. When people go food shopping or browse at the mall, they are seeing the results of non-authoritarian mutual cooperation. No one is forced to produce any of the products offered. No one is forced to sell anything. And no one is forced to buy anything. Each person acts in his own best interest, and everyone involved, producer, seller, and buyer, profits from the arrangement.
All of the individuals benefit, and society in general benefits, without any coercion or rulers involved. There are countless examples of mutually voluntary, cooperative, peaceful, efficient, and useful events and organizations that do not involve government.
Nonetheless, though there are a myriad of readily available examples of how efficient, organized, and productive anarchistic interaction is compared to nearly all government endeavors, people still imagine that human beings interacting with each other as equals all the time would lead to chaos and mayhem. When cars meet at a four-way stop, or when people pass on the sidewalk, that is anarchy in action. Billions of times every day people take turns, leave room for others, and so on, without any authority commanding them to.
Sometimes people are inconsiderate, but even then, only very rarely does a serious conflict occur, anything more serious than a rude gesture or an angry word. Potential conflicts from very minor things to more serious matters happen billions of times every day, and in the vast majority of cases they are resolved without violence and without the involvement of any authority.
Even regarding more significant problems, people often find ways to reach mutual agreements. While organized, non-governmental methods of dispute resolution, using arbiters, investigations, and negotiations, can peacefully solve even major disagreements, most conflicts of interest never get that far.
Most people most of the time go out of their way to avoid or quickly settle potential clashes with others. Though some people would point to such things as an indicator of the inherent goodness of mankind, there is often another factor at work. Most people simply do not want the hassles and the stress that comes with confrontation, and especially do not want the risks that come with violent confrontation.
Many people turn the other cheek quite often, not necessarily because they are patient and loving, but simply to avoid being bothered with time-wasting, futile bickering. Many, when they encounter someone doing something obnoxious, simply let it slide because they have more important things to worry about.
There is, in most people, a strong tendency to get along, even if just for one's own benefit. And if there were no authority to run to, no giant mommy or daddy state to cry to, people would handle matters like adults far more often than they do now.
This is not to say that every difference of opinion would end peacefully and fairly without authority, but the availability of the giant club of government is a constant temptation to anyone who holds a grudge or wants to hurt someone else or wants to obtain unearned wealth via litigation.
If it were not there, fewer people would drag out or escalate disagreements or disputes. Whether because of charity, cowardice, or just a desire to avoid the headaches of a prolonged conflict, many people, even those who have a legitimate complaint against someone else, will simply let bygones be bygones and get on with their lives.
Even without such examples, it is utterly irrational to claim that people could not get along without government when everything government does, using violence and the threat of violence to control people, is the precise opposite of getting along. The notion that peaceful coexistence requires aggression and coercion is logically ridiculous.
The only thing that bringing authority into a situation guarantees is that there will not be a nonviolent peaceful resolution to the matter. When someone describes the society he wants to see, he will almost always describe a state of nonviolence, of mutual cooperation and tolerance. In other words, what he will describe is the complete antithesis of the violence and coercion of authority.
Yet, having been raised to imagine authority to be a vital and positive part of society, people still constantly try to achieve peace by way of war, try to achieve cooperation by way of coercion, try to achieve tolerance by way of intolerance, and try to achieve humanity by way of brutality.
Such insanity is the direct result of the people being taught to respect and obey authority.
Anti-authoritarian Parenting
Parenting is so often based on authoritarianism that many cannot even imagine what non-authoritarian parenting would look like. It is important to distinguish what effect losing the authority superstition would have on parenting.
It would not mean that parents would put no restrictions on what their children could do, nor would it rule out parents controlling children against their will in many situations. But it would dramatically change the mindset of both parents and children. These days, teaching children right and wrong and teaching them to obey are seen by most people as the same thing.
However, a parent can command a child to do something wrong just as easily as he can command him to do something right. Contrary to what authoritarian parenting teaches, the fact that a parent issued a command does not make it automatically right and does not make the child obligated to obey.
If, for example, a parent commands his child to shoplift, the child has no moral obligation to do so, and disobedience would be perfectly justified, though probably hazardous. Of course, the child might not understand that stealing is wrong if his parents told him to steal.
On the other hand, a parent may impose a necessary justified restriction on his child which the child does not like and does not believe is justified. In either case, the child is only obligated to do whatever he deems right. The alternative would be that he has a moral obligation to do what he deems is wrong which is impossible. And this is where the difference lies.
The authoritarian parent teaches the child that obedience in and of itself is a moral imperative regardless of the command, e.g., because I am your father and I said so. The non-authoritarian parent may also impose restrictions upon the child, but he does not demand that the child like it, nor does he pretend that such restrictions are just simply because the parent imposed them.
In other words, the non-authoritarian parent may see the need, because the child does not yet have the knowledge or understanding to be competent enough to make all of his own choices, to force certain restrictions upon a child regarding bedtime, diet, etc. but he does not claim that the child has any moral obligation to obey without question. The sooner the child can be taught the reason for the rule, the sooner he can understand why doing what his parent says will benefit him. Of course, that is not always possible, especially when children are very young.
The parent who stops the child from eating a box of candy is benefiting the child, who does not yet have enough understanding or self-control to serve his own interests. But to teach the child that he should feel a moral obligation to abide by rules which seem to him to be unfair, unnecessary, pointless, stupid, or even hurtful, just because authority told him to, is to teach that child the most dangerous lesson there can be, that he is morally obligated to put up with unfair, unnecessary, pointless, stupid, hurtful things if they are done by authority.
To avoid passing on the authority superstition, parents should never cite because I said so as the reason a child should do something. The parent should express that there are rational reasons for the restrictions even if the child cannot yet comprehend those reasons.
In other words, the justification for the rules is not that the parents have the right to forcibly impose any rules they want on their children, but that the parents, hopefully, have so much more understanding and knowledge than the children that the parents must make many of a child's choices for him until he becomes competent to make his own choices.
Even more important is how a parent controls his child's behavior towards others. It is extremely important to teach a child that it is inherently wrong to intentionally harm another person, except when necessary to defend an innocent. But if, instead of that principle, the parent teaches, obey me, and then commands the child not to hit others, he has taught the child obedience, but not morality.
If the child refrains from hitting others, not because he understands that doing so is wrong, but only because he was told not to, then he is functioning in the same manner as an amoral robot. He has learned nothing about being a human being. The short-term, practical result may look the same, i.e., the child refrains from hitting others, but the lessons learned are very different. When the child who is merely taught to obey grows up and some other authority tells him that he should harm others, he almost certainly will because he was trained to do as he is told.
On the other hand, the child who is taught to respect the rights of others and was taught the principles of self-ownership and non-aggression will not lightly abandon those principles just because someone claiming to be authority tells him to. Children learn by example.
If a child sees his parents always acting as unquestioning subjects of a ruling class, the child will learn to be a slave. If instead the parents demonstrate in their daily lives how to use and follow one's own heart and mind, the child will learn to do likewise. The child must understand that it is his duty not merely to follow the rules of being a good person, but to figure out for himself what the rules of being a good person are.
The standards which a self-owner lives by may still be described as rules, but the worth of such rules does not come from the fact that an authority issued them, but because the individual believes that such rules describe inherently moral behavior. This is not to say that everyone agrees upon what is moral, though there is wide consensus on some basic principles. But even with each person's behavior guided by his own imperfect, incomplete understanding of right and wrong, the overall results would be drastically improved compared to the authoritarian alternative, in which basically good people do things they know to be wrong because they feel compelled to do whatever authority tells them to do, as demonstrated by the Milgram experiments.
Again, though many people falsely assume that a society without a centralized rule-making authority would mean every man for himself, group cooperation and agreements do not require authority. And those children who spend their formative years learning to interact with different people of all ages on a mutually voluntary basis, instead of learning to blindly do as they are told, are far better equipped to form relationships and enter into joint efforts based upon agreement, compromise, and cooperation.
Such voluntary interaction can take place between two people, or between two million. Even the limited freedom experienced by Americans has demonstrated that even extremely complex industries can be based entirely upon the willing participation and voluntary cooperation of everyone involved. And history has also demonstrated that the moment a method of organization based upon centralized coercive control is used, such as occurs in so-called planned economy, productivity crashes and poverty and enslavement appear.
Yet most children are still raised in authoritarian environments, with the claim that that will best prepare them for life in the real world. In truth, it prepares them only for a lifetime of enslavement.
Halfway There
In any group of people that has given up the authority myth, whether they are just a small group of friends or the inhabitants of a town or the population of an entire continent, the frequency and severity of violent conflicts and acts of aggression inside that group will be dramatically lower than it is elsewhere, where most people, by way of voting and other political actions, advocate and perpetrate aggression on a regular basis.
However, though the individuals in such a group would have little to fear from each other, they still would likely have to deal with acts of aggression from those outside of the group who still adhere to the belief in government.
An individual whose mind has been freed but who still lives in a society plagued by the delusion of authority will be at constant risk of being the target of authoritarian aggression. Being free in one's mind, understanding the concept of self-ownership, does not necessarily cause one to be physically free.
However, it can make an enormous positive difference by opening up countless new means through which people can try to cope with, avoid, or even resist authoritarian attempts to control them. The individual who takes pride in being a law-abiding citizen has only one way to even attempt to achieve freedom, which is almost never effective, begging his masters to change their laws.
On the other hand, one who understands that he owns himself, owes no allegiance to any supposed master, and needs no legislative permission to be free has many more options. And the more people who have escaped the superstition, the easier avoidance or resistance becomes.
For example, even a small number of self-owners can create channels of commerce which circumvent the usual controls and extortion schemes imposed by governments. Ironically, this entirely legitimate and moral form of voluntary interaction is often referred to as the black market, or as doing business under the table, whereas the usual system of aggression, coercion, and extortion is viewed as legitimate and righteous by the believers in government.
In reality, the legitimacy of any trade or any other human interaction does not depend upon whether some authority knows about it and controls it, as the concept of black market implies, but depends only upon whether what occurs is mutually consensual.
Those who understand this can find many ways in which to circumvent or defeat attempts by government to coercively control and exploit them. Many acts of aggression done in the name of the law can be avoided or defeated fairly easily by a relatively small number of people if they feel no automatic moral obligation to do as they are told.
Of course, this is not always the case. If the gang-called government does anything well, it is exerting brute force, whether in the form of military actions or domestic law enforcement.
However, in almost all cases, most of the power wielded by those in government is the result not of guns and tanks and bombs but of the perceptions of their victims. If 99% of a population obeys the ruling class out of a feeling of obligation or duty to do so, the remaining 1% can usually be controlled by brute force, with the approval of the 99%. But if a more substantial percentage of the population feels no duty to obey, the amount of brute force needed to control them becomes enormous.
To wit, many of the inhabitants of the United States now surrender about half of what they earn in taxes at various levels, and most feel obligated to do so. But if a foreign power somehow invaded and conquered the land, imposing a 50% tax would be utterly impossible because the people would feel no moral, legal, or patriotic duty to comply. 200 million workers would find 200 million ways to use evasion, deception, secrecy or even outright violence to avoid or defeat such attempts by foreign thieves to enslave the people.
Today, there is only one gang capable of oppressing the American people, and that is the American government. This is because it is the one gang imagined by most people to have the right to coerce and control, regulate, and rob and extort, tax the American people.
A common concern among statists is that without a strong government to protect them, some foreign power would just come in and take over. But such fears completely overlook how large a role perception plays in the ability to oppress. An area of land the size of the United States inhabited by a hundred million gun owners, in addition to 200 million other people who would likely become gun owners if an invasion occurred, would be impossible to occupy and control by brute force alone.
History gives many examples, e.g., the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II, the Vietnam War, and the aftermath of the war in Iraq, of how even an enormous, technologically advanced standing army can be indefinitely frustrated by a relatively small number of armed insurgents. And a land inhabited by self-owners has another huge advantage, in that it is literally impossible for them to collectively surrender.
If there is no government pretending to represent the population and no one who claims to speak on behalf of the people as a whole, there is literally no way for them to give up without each and every individual surrendering. A good way to grasp the reality of the situation is to consider the matter from the perspective of the leader of the invaders. How would one even begin to try to invade and permanently occupy an area in which many millions of the inhabitants, who could be hiding anywhere, can kill anything within at least a hundred yards, as any decent hunter can do?
An aspiring tyrant would have a far better chance of gaining power over the people by running for office, thereby obtaining the perceived right in the minds of his victims to rule and control them.
Large-scale oppression, especially since the advent of firearms, depends a lot more on mind control than it does on body control. Those who crave dominion gain much more power by convincing their victims that it is wrong to disobey their commands than by convincing their victims that it is merely dangerous but moral to disobey.
No matter how much the people complain and protest, as long as the people continue to obey the law, the commands of the politicians, the tyrants have little to fear. As long as their attempts to control and extort are seen as legal acts of authority, and as long as the people therefore feel an obligation to comply, unless and until the ruling class change such laws, the people will remain enslaved in body because they remain mentally enslaved.
Ironically, many people still believe that a strong government is the only thing that can protect the people as a whole, when the belief in government is actually the only thing which can oppress the people as a whole. Brute force alone cannot do it on any large scale or for any prolonged period of time.
Even a gang with tanks, planes, bombs, and other weapons has no power to control an armed populace for long unless it first dupes the people into believing that it has the right to control them. In other words, only a gang, imagined to be authority, can get away with long-term oppression and enslavement.
As a result, government or the belief in it, instead of being essential to the protection of individual rights, is essential only for the prolonged and widespread violation of individual rights.
Ironically, even most of those who recognize government as the biggest threat to liberty today still insist that government of some type is necessary for protection. The belief in authority is so strong that it can convince otherwise rational people that the very thing which routinely robs, coerces, and assaults them is needed to protect them from robbery, coercion, and assault.
The fact that government has always been an aggressor and has never been purely a protector anywhere in the world at any time in history does not shake them of their cult-like belief in the magical powers and virtues of the abstract mythical entity called authority.
The Road to Justice
Many large-scale injustices in history would have quickly collapsed or never would have started if not for authority condoning and enforcing such injustices. The evils of slavery, for example, are often blamed on racism and greed. But authority played a huge role in making slavery economically feasible. If there was not a huge, organized network of law enforcers to capture escaped slaves and any who helped them escape, how long would slavery have continued? If freeing slaves was not illegal and thus immoral in the eyes of authoritarians, how much larger and more effective would the Underground Railroad have been?
It probably would not have been known as an underground anything if it was not illegal. The abolitionist movement consisted of people who thought slavery was immoral and who wanted the laws changed to officially declare slavery to be immoral and illegal.
If, instead of petitioning for a change in laws, the abolitionists were actively freeing slaves, the slave trade most likely would have collapsed decades earlier if it ever happened at all. Shipping slaves halfway around the world would be a very risky business indeed if the moment you landed your cargo might be forcibly liberated.
The problem is that most people believe that even immoral unjust laws should be obeyed until the law is changed. Clearly, this means that such people's loyalty to the myth of authority is stronger than their loyalty to morality, and doing what the masters tell them is more important to them than doing what they know is right, and mankind has suffered greatly because of it.
The ability of people to resist tyranny depends largely upon whether they accept the myth of authority or not. Those who can see the injustice committed by government, but who continue to believe that they must follow the law and work within the system, will never achieve justice.
On the other hand, those who do not view the political megalomaniacs as rightful rulers— those who do not feel an obligation to obey an immoral law, those who do not feel the need to treat what is actually a parasite class, a gang of political thieves and thugs, as untouchable, respectable, and honorable, have a far better chance of defeating legal tyranny. And most tyranny and oppression which has occurred throughout history was done legally.
There are many methods available to those willing to illegally resist injustice and tyranny, including everything from passive resistance to nonviolent sabotage to things such as assassination and other forcible resistance.
Depending upon the severity of the oppression and the individual's own values, conscience, and beliefs about when, if ever, the use of violence is appropriate, one may choose any number of ways to defeat tyranny. Some will simply try to stay under the radar, living in such a way as to avoid the attention of authorities and enforcers.
Some may choose open civil disobedience, such as hundreds of individuals openly smoking marijuana in front of a police station. Some may choose a more active but non-violent method, such as slashing the tires of police cars or destroying other property used to commit acts of authoritarian aggression.
Others may choose the method of openly violent resistance, such as occurred in the American Revolution. By analogy, the intended victim of a robbery, the non-governmental kind, may try to evade the thief, or outsmart him, or even kill him if it comes down to that, whatever it takes to avoid being victimized.
Likewise, those who recognize that legal evil is still evil and resisting it is still justified would not waste time on elections and lobbying politicians for a change in legislation. They would simply do whatever they could to protect themselves and possibly others from being victimized by such legal aggression.
Beyond a certain point, the more people who resist, the less violence is necessary to do so. If a local police force has a dozen narcotics officers, people whose main job is to commit acts of aggression against others who have committed neither force nor fraud, and several hundred civilians let it be known that they believe that they have the right to use whatever it takes, including deadly force, to stop any attempted kidnappings, home invasions, or similar acts of aggression committed by narcotics officers, the aggressors, the police, if they did not have any bigger authoritarian gang to appeal to for help, would simply give up to avoid being exterminated.
The deterrent effect, that works against private criminals, can work just as well against government criminals. In India, Mahatma Gandhi and his followers used widespread passive disobedience to undermine British control of that country.
Alcohol prohibition in the United States is another example of an immoral law that was basically disobeyed out of existence. The high levels of disobedience, along with the refusal of most jurors to give their blessing to the legal aggression, along with some acts of violent resistance, e.g. tarring and feathering revenuers, made the immoral law unenforceable.
The legislatures eventually repealed it in an attempt to save face, because having an unenforceable law on the books goes a long way toward destroying the ruling class's legitimacy in the eyes of its victims. Anywhere the people feel no moral obligation to comply with authoritarian demands, any legal acts of aggression can be ignored out of existence.
When the number of self-owners is smaller, however, sometimes violence is necessary to defeat legal acts of aggression. If only a few people recognize the illegitimacy of legal oppression, forcible resistance often backfires. Where there is oppression, there is always violence. It is usually one-sided, with the agents of authority committing most or all of the violence.
The man who passively cooperates while claiming to be against violence is in fact rewarding the violence of the state. When an act of aggression is committed, whether by authority or anyone else, nonviolence by definition ceases to be an option. The only question is whether the aggressive violence will go unchallenged or whether defensive force will be used to counter it.
Either way, violence will occur. Of course, the thieves, thugs, and murderers who declare their crimes to be legal, which every tyrant in history has done, will always brand any who resist them as criminals and terrorists.
Only those who feel no shame at being labeled criminals because they have shed the myth of authority and recognize that the term law is often used to try to characterize something as evil as something good have any chance at all of achieving freedom.
Again, somewhat ironically, the more people there are who understand self-ownership and the mythical nature of authority, and who are willing to fight for what is right and fight against what is legal but wrong, the less violent the road to true civilization, peaceful coexistence will be.
Side Effects of the Myth
Looking back in history, there is no shortage of examples of man's inhumanity to man, examples of oppression and suffering, violence and hatred, and situations and events which do not reflect well on the human race in general. And though many of the most blatant injustices in history were the obvious product of the belief in government... Such as war and overt oppression, many other injustices which are not usually attributed to government action would also have been impossible without the involvement of authority.
In addition to the example of whether slavery would have existed had it not been legally enforced as mentioned above, similar questions could be asked about the treatment of the American Indians.
If not for the authoritarian government edicts and the state mercenaries to enforce them, would there have been such a large-scale, concerted effort to exterminate or forcibly evict the natives from the lands they had inhabited for generations? No doubt there would still have been many smaller conflicts due to the clash of cultures and demands for farming and hunting lands, but would it have been in anyone's personal interest to engage in large-scale violent combat?
After open slavery was ended in the United States, at about the same time that legal slavery, the income tax, first came into being, racial tensions and violent conflicts continued.
Many believe that government then came along and saved the day. In reality, violent conflict between the races was encouraged by authority. For many years, racial segregation was forcibly imposed via laws. Ironically, racial tensions were later exacerbated further by government mandated integration, which sought to coerce people of different races and cultures to mix whether they wanted to or not.
Again, the result was violence. During the entire fiasco, some businesses and schools, if left in freedom, would have chosen segregation and some would have chosen integration. If not for government trying to forcibly impose one official policy on everyone, parents could simply have chosen which schools to send their children to, segregated or not. And shoppers could simply have chosen which businesses to patronize, segregated or not.
Not only was much of the violence committed against blacks done directly by government enforcers, the police, but even much of the privately committed violence was the result of anger over people being forced by government to deal with people of another race and culture.
It is silly to think that forcing people apart, or forcing people together, will make people happier, nicer, or more open-minded and tolerant. In neither case was the peace or security of either race served by authoritarian intervention. While it is impossible to say exactly how widespread or prolonged segregation and racism would have been without government involvement, it is common sense that if people of all races and religions are allowed the freedom to choose who to associate with, it at least makes it possible for very different cultures to peacefully coexist.
But when government gets involved and the debate is between forcing races to remain separate or forcing races to mingle, obviously some people will be angered either way, and rightly so. This is not to say that every point of view is equally valid.
The point is that people of vastly different worldviews, however wise or stupid, open-minded or bigoted, informed or ignorant their views may be, can usually coexist peacefully, even in close proximity, unless government gets involved.
Different people may not like each other, may not approve of each other's beliefs and lifestyles, and in fact may harshly criticize or condemn other cultures. But that does not mean they cannot peacefully coexist, with both sides refraining from violent aggression. But whenever government gets involved, the coercion inherent in all law makes certain that people will not just get along.
Another example of the indirect deleterious effects of government action is the fact that the violence associated with the drug trade, the production and distribution of illegal substances, exists only because of narcotics laws.
By outlawing a substance or a behavior, even when all of the participants are willing adults, the politicians create a black market, which not only has a huge profit potential due to limiting the supply, but creates a situation which specifically deprives customers and suppliers of any legal protection.
For example, if a drug dealer is robbed or assaulted by the police or by anyone else, he is unlikely to call law enforcers to help him. Outlawing something consensual, whether it be prostitution, gambling, or drug use, almost guarantees that the market will be controlled by whichever gang is the most violent or has paid off the most cops or other officials.
Again, a perfect before-and-after example of this was alcohol prohibition in the United States. When alcohol became illegal, it was immediately taken over by organized crime, which was renowned not only for its violence, but also for its ability to bribe government agents and officials. When alcohol became legal again, all of the related violence stopped almost instantly.
Despite that crystal clear example of the horrible results of enacting laws to prohibit vices, most people still support laws against behaviors and habits they find distasteful. As a result, the related violence continues. Instead of being recognized as a problem which exists because of government and its laws, it is still imagined to be a problem which government must fight against.
The same could be said of the infamous violence of loan sharks who deal with illegal gambling and the violence of pimps in places where prostitution is illegal. In such cases, even better than a before and after comparison is a side-by-side comparison.
Does gambling lead to more violence in Atlantic City where it is legal or in places where it is illegal? Does prostitution pose a bigger threat to all involved in Amsterdam where it is legal, or in all of the places where it is illegal? This is not to say that prostitution, gambling, and drugs, including alcohol, are good things, but that good or bad, introducing the coercion of government into the situation does not do away with such vices, but only makes them more dangerous for everyone involved, and often for people who are not involved.
Lest anyone still imagine that such vice laws are the result of good intentions, the politicians are well aware that gambling, prostitution, and illegal drug use still occur in government prisons. The politicians know full well that if even constant captivity, surveillance, random searches, and harsh punishments cannot prevent such behaviors in people who are kept in closely monitored cages, laws obviously cannot eradicate such behaviors from an entire country.
But they can and do supply tyrants with a ready excuse for ever-expanding power. And that is exactly why governments enact vice laws to begin with, to create crime where there was none, in an attempt to justify the existence of authoritarian power and control.
In a world without the myth of authority, many people, including this author, would still strongly disapprove of drug use, prostitution, and other vices, but they would be unlikely to support efforts to have such behaviors violently suppressed. Not only would they usually feel unjustified in advocating violence if they did not have the excuse of authority to hide behind, but they would be unlikely to want to provide the billions of dollars necessary to wage a large-scale violent campaign against such widespread activities.
Even the most judgmental person would have both economic and moral incentives to leave others in peace, as well as the fear of retaliation from any he chose to commit acts of aggression against. Of course, open criticism of lifestyles and behaviors and attempts to persuade people to change their ways are a perfectly acceptable part of human society.
In fact, if people had to try to use reason and verbal persuasion to win people over, instead of using the brute force of government, perhaps the targets would be more open to listening.
At the very least, people would no longer turn an issue of bad habits into an issue of bloodshed and brutality, as happens now with all attempts to legislate morality. The flip side to the notion that if it's illegal, it must be bad is if it's legal, it must be okay.
Perhaps the biggest example of this is the fact that in 1913, the U.S. government not only legalized slavery via the income tax, directly and forcibly confiscating the fruits of people's labor, but also, by way of the Federal Reserve Act, legalized a level of counterfeiting and bank fraud which boggles the mind.
In short, the politicians gave bankers legal permission to make up money out of thin air and to loan such fake fabricated money out at interest to others, including governments. Though most people are unaware of the specifics of how such huge frauds and robberies occur via fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking, many people now have a gut instinct that the banks are doing something deceptive and corrupt. What they fail to realize is that it was government which gave the banks permission to defraud and swindle the public out of literally trillions of dollars.
Another particularly controversial example of how a debate of legality can trump a debate about facts and morality is the issue of abortion. One side lobbies for authority to make or keep abortion legal and then defends the practice based upon its legality. The other side pushes for abortion to be outlawed in the hopes of having the violence of authority used to prevent the practice.
In logical terms, the only relevant question, which is a religious, biological, philosophical question, not a legal question, is, at what point does a fetus count as a person? The answer to that question dictates whether abortion amounts to murder or is the equivalent of having a kidney removed.
However, instead of addressing the only question that actually matters, as complex and controversial as it may be, both sides usually focus instead on trying to get the violence of authority on their side.
As another example of legalized injustice, almost everyone is aware of how outrageous and irrational lawsuits have become, e.g. trespassing criminals successfully suing property owners after injuring themselves during a break-in. But they fail to realize that it is the decrees of government-appointed judges which allow it to happen at all.
In addition to government being able to legally steal from one person to give to another, government also creates via the current system of litigation, a mechanism whereby one person can directly and legally rob another.
Laws in the name of environmentalism are also used for immoral power grabs in both directions. With enough money, a company which is actually polluting, and thus infringing on the property rights of others, can trade campaign contributions for legal permission to pollute. At the same time, they can use environmental laws to crush competition by creating and enforcing a maze of environmental regulations, many of them unnecessary or counterproductive, sometimes idiotic, to keep smaller companies out of the market.
Additionally, politicians can use vague threats of environmental dangers as excuses to gain control of private industry, to control the behavior of millions, or to extort more money for their own purposes.
In many industries, success now depends less upon providing a valuable service at a reasonable price than it does upon obtaining special favors and preferential treatment from government. This can be in the form of direct handouts, e.g. grants or subsidies, political trading, e.g. no-bid government contracts, licensing schemes, such as in the medical industry, tariffs on international trade, regulatory control and favoritism, and many other means.
The results of all of these, higher prices, inferior products and services, fewer choices, and so on, is often assumed to be the result of the shortcomings of private industry instead of being recognized for what it is, the adverse consequences of authoritarian control over human interaction.
Major economic crashes are always the result of government tampering with commerce, credit, and currencies. Short of total physical destruction, the only way to destroy an entire economy is to meddle with the medium of exchange, the money, through legalized counterfeiting, via the issuance of fabricated credit and the issuance of fiat currency.
Most people, being ignorant of even basic economics, view inflation and other economic problems as natural, unfortunate, but unavoidable occurrences.
In truth, they are symptoms of large-scale legalized fraud and theft. Immigration laws give another example of indirect damage and secondary problems caused by government.
Aside from the obvious direct coercion involved, such laws cause other problems that would not exist otherwise, including:
The lucrative, often vicious racket of smuggling illegals into the country.
Illegals being easy targets for human trafficking and other forms of exploitation because they do not dare to speak out or to seek help, and
People being forced to live under tyrannical regimes because they cannot physically escape. And because illegals are already classified as criminals and often viewed as
undesirables simply for being in the country and receive neither respect nor protection from much of the citizenry, there is less of an incentive for them to otherwise behave in a law-abiding manner. Even many problems that seem to be non-governmental in nature exist because of some law.
Of course, there are and always will be instances of fraud and theft committed by unscrupulous individuals acting on their own. But most people are completely unaware of how many seemingly private swindles, schemes, and rackets are not only allowed by authority, but encouraged and rewarded by the laws of government, whether intentionally or accidentally.
Having no truly free market to compare it to, many continue to assume that state coercion is necessary when all it actually does is hinder and interfere with human productivity and progress. What might have been?
It is impossible to even begin to imagine in how many ways history would have been different if the superstition of authority had collapsed long ago. Obviously, the atrocities of Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and many more would never have happened.
Furthermore, while there could still be violent regional, cultural, or religious clashes, large-scale wars simply could not and would not happen without soldiers blindly obeying a perceived authority.
If the enormous amount of resources, effort, and ingenuity that have been poured into mass destruction, war, had been put into something productive, where would we be today? If, instead of spending such a huge amount of time and effort struggling over who would have the reins of power and what that power should be used for, people had spent all those years being inventive and productive, what might the world now look like? What if every person had been allowed to support what he wanted, instead of having government robbing everyone and then having a never-ending argument over how those public funds should be spent? What if, instead of arguing over which centralized authoritarian plan should be forcibly imposed on everyone, people lived their own lives and pursued their own dreams? Who can even imagine how far humanity as a whole would have progressed by now?
This is not to say that without the belief in authority, personal conflicts would never arise. They would, and they would sometimes end in violence. The difference is that with the belief in government, they always end in violence, because coercion is all that government ever does. Whereas people, even people of very different viewpoints and backgrounds, can usually find ways to peacefully coexist, any situation which authority becomes involved in is automatically solved by force.
With the issue of same-sex marriage, what if, instead of an ongoing argument over what views and choices should be forced upon everyone, every church minister, every employer, and every other individual could decide for himself how to live, what he wants to call marriage, and so on?
With the issue of prayer in school, what if instead of government creating a hostile conflict by forcibly confiscating money from all property owners to fund one big homogenous public school system, each person, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, etc., was allowed to choose which schools, if any, he wanted to support?
This does not mean that people of different views would like each other or end up believing the same things. It does mean that without believing the same things, they could still peacefully coexist, a situation which government does not allow.
What if, instead of government agencies deciding what drugs and medical treatments it would legally allow people to try, and which practitioners would be licensed to practice, people could make their own choices?
In such a scenario, the business of providing customers with unbiased information about various products and services would flourish. Government solutions are always about politicians deciding how to deal with different situations and then forcibly imposing their ideas on everyone else. But it is neither morally legitimate nor effective on a practical basis to have politicians making everyone else's choices for them. And that is true of all sorts of aspects of human society.
What would the world look like if, for the past hundred years, instead of arguing over how to forcibly limit people's options, which is what every law does...people had spent their time and effort trying new ideas and coming up with new approaches to problems, each person having been allowed to devote his own time, effort, and money to whatever he personally chose to support.
What if, instead of a centralized system of forced wealth redistribution, government welfare, people had been left in freedom to decide for themselves the best, most compassionate ways to help the needy? Instead of a system that rewards laziness and dishonesty and breeds dependency, we might have a system that actually helps people.
What if instead of government forcing businesses to do whatever the politicians and bureaucrats declared to be safe, people could come up with new ideas and inventions, set their own priorities, and make their own decisions about how to best protect themselves?
What if instead of having a centralized control machine trying to force people to be fair, people could choose for themselves who to associate with, what deals to make, and so on?
Everything government pays for creates a conflict. Every public project, from grants given out by the National Endowment for the Arts to grants for certain studies or businesses, to schools, to parks, to everything else public, amounts to robbing thousands or millions of people in order to give the money to a few people.
Why would anyone expect everyone in an entire country or even a hundred people to all exactly agree on how their money should be spent?
What if, instead of many trillions of dollars in spending power being diverted and hijacked every year to fund the agendas of politicians and their bureaucracies, that wealth had gone into whatever things the people who earned the money actually cared about and wanted to support?
What if, for the last several thousand years, each person had minded his own business and not tried to use government to force his ideas and priorities on everyone else?
What if instead of a giant centralized monster violently limiting everyone's choices, everyone's options, everyone's creativity and ingenuity, trying to force conformity and sameness while draining the producers of their ideas and their wealth, different people and different groups had been trying new ideas and figuring out the best ways to solve problems and create a better world, guided by their own beliefs and values?
Sadly, the idea still terrifies a lot of people who still imagine that a world forcibly controlled by politicians would be more safe and civilized than a world inhabited by free human beings exercising free will and individual judgment.
The fact is that those people who put their faith in government to make things work, though they are by far the majority, and though they may mean well, are the problem. As a result of their indoctrination into the cult of authority, they continue to believe and push the profoundly insane idea that the only road to peace, justice, and harmonious civilization comes from constant, widespread coercion and forcible government controls, perpetual oppression and enslavement done in the name of law, and the sacrificing of free will and morality at the altar of domination and blind obedience.
As harsh as that may sound, that is the basis of all belief in government.
Accepting Reality
Statists often say, show me an example of where society without government, anarchy, has worked. Of course, since they are speaking of societies consisting almost entirely of thoroughly indoctrinated authoritarians, human society without a ruling class is rarely even contemplated, much less attempted.
Yet the statists use the fact that they have never tried true freedom, because the concept is completely foreign to their way of thinking, as proof that a stateless society wouldn't work. This would be akin to a group of medieval doctors who all use leeches for every ailment arguing, show me one case where a doctor has cured a headache without the use of leeches.
Of course, if none of them had ever considered any treatment other than leeches, there would not be an example of alternative methods working. But this would be a testament to the ignorance of the doctors, not the ineffectiveness of treatments which have never been tried. But the more important point is that anarchy is what is.
To say that society cannot exist without government is exactly as reasonable as saying that Christmas cannot occur without Santa Claus.
Society already exists without government, and has from the beginning. It has been the people imagining an entity with the right to rule, hallucinating a thing called authority, which has made the story of mankind consist largely of oppression, violence, suffering, murder, and mayhem.
Ironically, statists often point to the death and suffering which occurs when two or more groups are fighting over who should be in charge, label that as anarchy, and cite it as evidence that without government there would be chaos and death. But such bloodshed and oppression is the direct, obvious result of the belief in authority, not the result of a lack of government.
It is true that, compared to life under a stable, entrenched authoritarian regime, life in a country where the people are fighting over who the new authority should be, via rebellions, civil wars, one nation conquering another, etc., can be a lot more dangerous and unpredictable. As a result, people living in war-torn areas often wish only for there to be an end to the conflict, for one side to win and become the new government. To such people, a stable government may represent relative peace and security, but the underlying cause of the oppression committed by stable regimes and the bloodshed which occurs during struggles for power is the belief in authority.
If no one believed in a legitimate ruling class, no one would fight over who should rule. If there was no throne, no one would fight over it.
All civil wars and nearly all revolutions rest on the assumption that someone should be in charge. Without the superstition of authority, there would be no reason for such things to happen at all. By its very nature, government adds nothing positive to society. It creates no wealth and generates no virtue. It adds only immoral violence and the illusion that such violence is legitimate.
Allowing some people to forcibly dominate all others, which is all that government ever does, does not contribute to society one speck of talent or ability or productivity or resourcefulness or ingenuity or creativity or knowledge or compassion or any other positive quality possessed by human beings.
Instead, it constantly stifles and limits all of those things through its coercive laws. It is destructive and insane to accept the notion that civilization requires the forcible limiting of possibilities and the violent restraint of the human mind and spirit, that civil society can exist only if the power and virtue of every individual is forcibly overcome and suppressed by a gang of masters and exploiters, that the average man cannot be trusted to govern himself, but that politicians can be trusted to govern everyone else, that the only way for the morality and virtue of mankind to shine through is to crush the free will and self-determination of billions of human beings, and to convert them all into unthinking, obedient puppets of a ruling class and a source of power for tyrants and megalomaniacs, that the path to civilization is the destruction of individual free will, judgment, and self-determination. That is the foundation, the heart and soul, of the superstition called authority.
When people are ready to recognize that heinous lie for what it is and begin to accept personal responsibility for their own actions and for the state of society, and not one moment before, then true humanity can begin.
People can desperately wish for peace on earth until they are blue in the face, but they will never see it, unless and until they are willing to pay the price by giving up one tired old superstition. The solution to most of society's ills is for you, dear reader, to recognize the myth of authority for what it is, give it up in yourself, and then begin efforts to deprogram and wake up all of the people you know who, as a result of their indoctrination into the cult of authority worship, and in spite of their virtues and noble intentions, continue to support and participate in the violent, anti-human, destructive and evil oppression and aggression machine known as government.
The Punchline Revisited
Contrary to what nearly everyone has been taught to believe, government is not necessary for civilization. It is not conducive to civilization. It is, in fact, the antithesis of civilization. It is not cooperation, or working together, or voluntary interaction. It is not peaceful coexistence. It is coercion. It is force. It is violence. It is animalistic aggression cloaked by pseudo-religious, cult-like rituals which are designed to make it appear legitimate and righteous. It is brute thuggery disguised as consent and organization. It is the enslavement of mankind, the subjugation of free will and the destruction of morality masquerading as civilization and society.
The problem is not just that authority can be used for evil. The problem is that at its most basic essence, it is evil. In everything it does, it defeats the free will of human beings, controlling them through coercion and fear. It supersedes and destroys moral consciences, replacing them with unthinking blind obedience. It cannot be used for good any more than a bomb can be used to heal a body. It is always aggression, always the enemy of peace, always the enemy of justice.
The moment it ceases to be an attacker, it ceases to fit the definition of government. It is, by its very nature, a murderer and a thief, the enemy of mankind, a poison to humanity. As dominator and controller, ruler and oppressor, it can be nothing else.
The alleged right to rule in any degree and in any form is the opposite of humanity. The initiation of violence is the opposite of harmonious coexistence. The desire for dominion is the opposite of love for mankind. Hiding the violence under layers of complex rituals and self-contradictory rationalizations and labeling brute thuggery as virtue and compassion does not change that fact.
Claiming noble goals, saying that the violence is the will of the people, or that it is being committed for the common good or for the children, cannot change evil into good. Legalizing wrong does not make it right. One man forcibly subjugating another, no matter how it is described or how it is carried out, is uncivilized and immoral. The destruction it causes, the injustice it creates, the damage it does to every soul that it touches, perpetrators, victims, and spectators alike, cannot be undone by calling it law or by claiming that it was necessary. Evil, by any name, is still evil.
The ultimate message here is very simple. All of recorded history screams it, yet very few have until now allowed themselves to hear it. That message is this: If you love death and destruction, oppression and suffering, injustice and violence, repression and torture, helplessness and despair, perpetual conflict and bloodshed, then teach your children to respect authority, and teach them that obedience is a virtue.
If, on the other hand, you value peaceful coexistence, compassion and cooperation, freedom and justice, then teach your children the principles of self-ownership. Teach them to respect the rights of every human being, and teach them to recognize and reject the belief in authority for what it is. The most irrational, self-contradictory, anti-human, evil, destructive, and dangerous superstition the world has ever known.
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