Oh Vilken Härlig Dag: I Am Now an Anarcho-Capitalist

For the past while, I have considered myself a minarchist, a limited-government libertarian, as opposed to an anarcho-capitalist. I have been sympathetic to the anarcho-capitalist viewpoint, because according to minarchism, government is merely a necessary evil, and so all one has to do is prove it unnecessary, and show that private markets can perform the same tasks as the government, and voila, the government ceases to be a necessary evil, and it becomes simply evil. Most of my reading has been about 16th-18th-century Reformed Christian political thought (including Colonial and Revolutionary America), so most of my reading has been minarchist, not anarchist. But the moral philosophies of the two are the same; both regard government as evil, only one sees government as a necessary evil, and the other as not. So the moral philosophy of the two is the same, so even reading minarchist writings is a fine gateway drug to anarchism. So while I have considered myself a minarchist, I have been open to the anarchist perspective, and I thought, as soon as someone proves to me that anarchism will "work", then I'll have no reason to avoid becoming an anarchist. So I was completely and totally receptive to that viewpoint. It is just that I have not yet had the time to read anything from Murray Rothbard or the like; having read only Reformed Christian minarchism and not any anarchism, I have not yet had any reason to become anarchist.

But for the past few weeks, I have been pondering something, a certain thought experiment, which today has finally convinced me to officially consider myself an anarcho-capitalist. My thoughts of the past few weeks were finally crystalized by a passage in an article my friend Cam Nedland showed me, here, quoting David Friedman, Law as a Private Good:

Imagine a society with no government. Individuals purchase law enforcement from private firms. Each such firm faces possible conflicts with other firms. Private policemen working for the enforcement agency that I employ may track down the burglar who stole my property only to discover, when they try to arrest him, that he too employs an enforcement agency.

There are three ways in which such conflicts might be dealt with. The most obvious and least likely is direct violence-a mini-war between my agency, attempting to arrest the burglar, and his agency attempting to defend him from arrest. A somewhat more plausible scenario is negotiation. Since warfare is expensive, agencies might include in the contracts they offer their customers a provision under which they are not obliged to defend customers against legitimate punishment for their actual crimes. When a conflict occurred, it would then be up to the two agencies to determine whether the accused customer of one would or would not be deemed guilty and turned over to the other.

A still more attractive and more likely solution is advance contracting between the agencies. Under this scenario, any two agencies that faced a significant probability of such clashes would agree on an arbitration agency to settle them-a private court. Implicit or explicit in their agreement would be the legal rules under which such disputes were to be settled.

Under these circumstances, both law enforcement and law are private goods produced on a private market. Law enforcement is produced by enforcement agencies and sold directly to their customers. Law is produced by arbitration agencies and sold to the enforcement agencies, who resell it to their customers as one characteristic of the bundle of services they provide.

This passage finally crystalized two thoughts I had been having for the past few weeks, about private security agencies replacing government:

1. First, it seemed to me, violent war among competing private security agencies seemed unlikely. Market forces would dictate that out of parochial self-interest, each agency would form implicit (unwritten) mutual understandings and explicit (written) treaties, among each other, to prevent violence as much as possible, just as Friedman says.
   
   
2. Second, it seemed to me the only real, substantive difference between anarchism, and minarchism/statism (i.e. some sort of government), is the ability to opt-out of paying taxes to the police and military. You'll still be jailed, but you won't have to pay your own jailer, proverbially speaking. (I say "proverbially" because jails are not the only possible form of punishment for criminals.) I repeat: the only real core, substantive difference between statism (including minarchism) and anarchism is this: the ability to opt-out of paying dues to the police, not one's liability to punishment at the hands of the police. After all, today, a country is liable to "punishment" at the hands of a foreign, invading army, even though the invaded country never paid money to the invading army. It would be likewise with an anarchist society: the thief would be punished by the police all the same, but he wouldn't have to pay money to the police.
   
   We might have all sorts of moral philosophical notions of which laws are good laws, and what the laws ought to be, but these disputes are besides the point. A coercive government can have either good or bad laws, as can a private security agency. A coercive government might punish only murderers and thieves, while a private security agency might go out killing people who worship the wrong god. So the quality of the laws themselves, is not relevant here. I am not saying there is no avoiding bad laws under an anarchist society. I am saying there is no guarantee of avoiding bad laws and instead having good laws under an anarchist society, just as there is no guarantee of avoiding good laws and instead having only bad laws under a statist regime. One can envision a coercive government that obeys morality and a private security agency that violates morality. Market forces will affect which one is more likely to do which (more on which below), but that is only a likelihood. A coercive government of saints will be moral, while a private security agency of devils will be immoral, with their private moral inclinations overpowering those market forces. After all, charity (tzedaqa) itself is nothing other than morality overpowering markets. Economically, I have no reason whatsoever to help a poor man on the street. So why do I help him? Because my conscience overpowers market forces and parochial self-interest. (Actually, it would be more correct and precise to say, as my friend Rocco Stanzione pointed out, that really, giving charity and helping the poor is merely one more selfish desire. If I am a charitable person, then for me, helping the poor gives me the same sort of satisfaction as another person might get from buying a car. In that sense, my desire to give to charity is subject to market forces just as much as the purchase of any other good. The same way, one could classify anti-Jewish pogroms or black lynchings as a selfish, market-driven desire, with the deaths of Jews and blacks being a market-driven commodity no different than anything else.)
   
   And either way, whether with anarchism or statism, you are going to be coerced against your will. Even if we limit ourselves to good laws against murder and theft, even then, whether a murderer or thief is punished by the government or by someone else's private security agency, it makes no difference to the murderer or thief. Like I said, the jail will still exist and you'll still be jailed (proverbially).
   
   The only difference is, who pays for the government or private security agency - everyone, or only the subscribers. Does the murderer or thief also have to pay dues, or only the murdered('s family) and the stolen-from who hires the agency to exact his revenge?
   
   Now, this will have important consequences, according to market forces. If you specifically have to pay for every action of your hired agency, then you'll be unlikely to expend precious money hiring an agency to prosecute people smoking marijuana or worshiping the wrong god, i.e. things that do you no harm; whereas, if everyone must pay equally, then the diffusion of costs versus the concentration of benefits implicit in government, means that a few people will hire the government to outlaw marijuana at the expense of everyone else. With coercive government, everyone must pay the costs of your decisions, so you will make decisions that benefit only you yourself, knowing everyone else will pay. But with anarchism, you yourself must individually pay for everything you do, meaning you will be more likely, according to market forces, to hire a private security agency only to exact revenge on those who actually hurt you, and not for "sins" that do you no harm (like smoking marijuana). But putting aside these market consequences, the fact remains that in essence, the only real, substantive, core difference between anarchism and statism is whether you can opt-out of paying the government/security agency, not whether you'll be liable for prosecution at the government's/agency's hands. As I indicated, private moral inclination can overpower market forces and self-interest; we can envision, for example, a private security agency of rabidly fervent religious folk prosecuting their neighbors who are peacefully worshiping false gods, and we can envision a coercive government that punishes only murderers and thieves. Market forces incline statism and anarchism in different directions, but only in terms of likelihoods and probabilities.
   
   Also, if justice is defined as a marketable commodity, then the same market forces that make capitalism superior to socialism or central planning for producing televisions or cars, ought to make capitalism superior in producing justice as well. And if the majority of people are evil or unjust, making their selfish and evil desires a marketable commodity for them, well, then the same evil people would use the government for evil too. Human nature will not change. The hope is simply that all things being equal, capitalism will make goods and services (including justice) more plentiful, higher in quality, and less expensive.
   
   In short, human nature will remain the same, regardless. The same people who staff the government today, will staff the private security agencies. There are consequences related to market forces, but in essence, the only real, core, substantive difference between statism and anarchism, is who pays the dues, which results in market-related consequences. In other words: the only real difference between anarchism and statism is: who pays the dues. That's it. The ability to opt-out of paying money to the police and army, is the only difference. You will still be liable for punishment at the army's and police's hands regardless.
   
   When you put it this way, the difference seems mighty small, doesn't it? It is so small, that I can now comfortably consider myself an anarcho-capitalist. Until now, I have not wanted to consider myself an anarcho-capitalist, because while I was very strongly sympathetic to that viewpoint, I had not done enough reading or thinking about it to be entirely confident. I didn't want to be a hypocrite and claim to be something I was not. I did not want to announce myself to be something unless I was really, truly indeed so, and unless I really, truly understood what I was saying. I didn't want to utter empty, vain, hypocritical words. But now, thanks to this thought experiment, I feel confident enough in the concept of anarchism, that I feel my declaration is not empty and vain. When a gentile asked Hillel to describe Judaism on one foot, Hillel said, "Love your neighbor as yourself; the rest is commentary." So too now: I have my one-sentence-long summary of anarcho-capitalism (viz.: the ability to opt-out of paying for the police and army), and now I merely need to go read through everything Murray Rothbard has ever written.

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Other than that, I spent the day today, not only deciding that I am now anarcho-capitalist, but also gleefully listening to a song by one of my favorite artists, Swedish country singer Jill Johnson. This song, which I discovered today and cannot get enough of, is "Oh Vilken Härlig Dag":

According to a Google Translate translation of the song, it is apparently about a person seeing a naked person at the lake and proclaiming, "Oh what a lovely day!" (the English translation of the Swedish title of the song). It occurred to me that this would be excellent material for a Ladino romance, the often sexually-risque ballads traditionally sung by Judeo-Spanish Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire. My friend Evan Gadol (who is himself (unlike me) a Judeo-Spanish Sephardi and who, like me, considers Judeo-Spanish Sephardi rabbi, Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel, to be his rabbi) opined that while this song is a bit more risque than the usual Ladino romance, it is not by much. This song is therefore, it seems to me, on the outer boundaries of what could pass for a traditional Ladino romance (if it weren't in Swedish, of course).

As an example of such a traditional romance, Vítor André Ferreira Monteiro provided this (here):

If you're wondering how on earth a traditional Sephardi Jew could sing risque ballads, Rabbi Angel explains that for a traditional Sephardi, there was no contradiction between being a Torah-observant Jew, and being an ordinary human being. The risque romances, he says, merely represented ordinary human emotions and feelings about sexuality, which a Jew, no differently than a gentile, also felt need to express. The Sephardim, he says, had a joie de vivre which permitted such an attitude. On page 125 of his book, Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality: The Inner Life of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, (quoted in my article, "A New Hearing on Kol Ishah", commissioned and published by none other than Rabbi Angel himself) he adds,

Although there were religious pietists who objected to singing love songs, the romances were very popular throughout all strata of Sephardic society. Men and women often sang these songs together. It was not unusual for women to sing solo parts in the presence of men. People participated in the singing and enjoyed the songs in a natural, easygoing way.

So here we go, the original Swedish lyrics and a draft Ladino translation:

Original lyrics to Jill Johnson, "Oh Vilken Härlig Dag" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDAd5Ub7Kkk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv391EE_1q4

Draft Ladino lyrics by Vítor André Ferreira Monteiro at https://www.facebook.com/home.php? sk=group_164893083528659 &view=permalink &id=202374523113848

Steg upp på morgonen Innan min dag var riktigt vaken Oh vilken härlig dag Smög mig på knä till sjön För att få se dig bada naken Oh vilken härlig dag Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Såg du mig? Såg du vem det var? Jag hade satt mig ner När du tog av dig dina kläder Oh vilken härlig dag Fick syn på svalorna Dom kunde lova vackert väder Oh vilken härlig dag Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Såg du mig? Såg du att det var jag? Du låg på rygg o sög ut saften från ett strå Och du hade ingen annan Än dig själv att tänka på Men trodde du att Du var ensam i det blå Jag satt bakom och såg på Aahh.. Jag vet att jag blev smått generad mmmm Men jag tror även att även du var intresserad Såg du mig? Såg du att det var jag? Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Såg du mig? Såg du att det var jag? Jag tror du hörde mig när du Försvann in under kjolen Oh vilken härlig dag Så jag fick fly iväg och Jag sprang naken bort mot solen Oh vilken härlig dag Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala

LLevantome en la mañana Antes de mi diya estar realmente akordado Oh kue diya adoravle Se arrastró ella de rodillas hasta el lago Para te ver nadar desnudado Oh kue diya adoravle Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Me haz visto? Tu haz visto kuién fué? Yó me habia sentado Kuando kuitaste tus ropas Oh kue diya adoravle Dé mirada de las golondrinas Podrian prometer bueno tiempo Oh kue diya adoravle Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Me haz visto? Tu haz visto que fué ió? Te dektas sobre sus espaldas scgando fuera el suco por una E no tenia ninguno otro Sinó tu mismo en kue pensar Pero pensaste Kue vosotros estaban solos en el azul Me sentaba atraz i miraba Aahh .. Sé que torno algo envergonzada mmmm Pero también kreo kue estabas interesado en mi. Me haz visto? Tu haz visto que fué ió? Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Me haz visto? Tu haz visto que fué ió? Kreo que me hoyisté kuando tu Sumiste sobre su skirt Oh que diya adoravle Así tube que voar lejos i Estaba korriendo desnuda lejos del sól Oh kue diya adoravle Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala Lalalala lalalalalalala