Last week I ordered a copy of "Instead of a Book: by a man too busy to write one" by Benjamin Tucker, late 19th Century American proponent of Individualist Anarchism, and from which tradition much Mutualist thinking is derived.  I was intending to give it the Audiobook treatment.  But when it arrived today I found that it was a facsimile edition and therefore not ideally suited to easy reading into a microphone (small text, difficult fonts, awkward spacing and so on).

I had previously found just the one complete online copy of the work, (there is an incomplete one too) which is split into many html pages, one per article, which again kind of makes it difficult to read (and especially if I decide to do it when I am not online of course!), so I was scouring the web to see if there was a PDF or a single HTML page version of it, but to no avail.

I did come across this discussion at Reason about it being available in different formats, but the two different formats linked to in the comments show up as dead links, so I went about the compiler's suggestion of grabbing the DocBook format file and seeing if I could convert it.  After trying unsuccessfully with a number of tools (they all rejected the XML input for some reason) I eventually downloaded an evaluation copy of something called Oxygen XML Editor, which seemed to process it well enough.  And so for anyone interested attached you will find three zip files - one of a PDF version, one of a single page HTML version and one of a single page XHTML version.

Or you could wait till I have read it out loud and just listen!

So, my latest audiobook recording, this time actually "commissioned" by Stephan via the Mises Institute, is Stephan Kinsella's monograph "Against Intellectual Property".  You can get the text at the Mises.org website, or buy a dead tree version, or read it online at Scribd or in HTML at the author's own site.  Attached to this blogpost though you'll find the audiobook version in several formats - a single MP3 that will work on more or less anything, a set of one-per-heading MP3s (and a zip file of those), and for iTunes/iPod users an m4b version that comes in one file but with chapter markers that show up in those Apple devices and you can skip back and forward to.

I find the whole area of Intellectual Property fascinating.  We are so conditioned that, for example, pharmaceutical companies would never develop any important drugs ever again if they were not able to secure a twenty year monopoly in the form of a patent on their discoveries, or that the music industry is on the brink of collapse because of copyright "theft", when actually what you have to consider is that by granting these state protected monopolies, as Kinsella explains, we are actually restricting our own rights to use our own property as we like.

Got a blank CD you want to burn the latest hits onto?  No can do - your right to use that blank CD, your property, as you wish, is restricted by someone you may very well have already paid a fair price for a creation from.  It's obviously a contentious one for me as a university employee - after all, academia usually worships intellectual property rights, but it's an important debate to be had.  The "monopoly of patents" is one of the four "great monopolies" identified by the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists with which the state conspires with select, favoured or powerful interest groups to skew markets, usually to the disadvantage of consumers and always to the disadvantage of owners of tangible property.

I may try and follow this up with an audio version of Boldrin and Levine's recent "Against Intellectual Monopoly" which greatly expands on the subject set out by Kinsella here with responses to many of the common objections to the eradication of Intellectual Property protections.  In the meantime, there's a great website/blog that covers many of the issues involved at "Against Monopoly".

Incidentally, yes, there is a wonderful irony currently in the recording.  Since I read it straight from the printed version you get the title, and then, yes, you guessed it, the "copyright" notice for the Mises Institute.  But we should make clear that actually, Mises has to declare its copyrights over it just in case someone else does and excludes them from distributing the work how they please.  But since Mises gives away all its material for free, and aims at the widest possible dissemination of its work in the spirit of evangelist, you should feel free to copy, share, pass on and generally do as you please with the audiobook version too.

Oh, and I should add, you can watch a video of Stephan giving a lecture on this subject at the Austrian Scholars' Conference last year on TheUKLibertarian blog.

I noticed in the "Golden Dozen" today a post by Paul Walter last week concerning the Tories making a lot of noise about how they would bolster the right to "self defence" when you or your property are under threat. Whilst difficult cases like that of Munir Hussain make bad law, such things are far from the mind of politicians in election time and "my right to defend myself" clearly makes a good election slogan amongst a certain section of the population who feel that the rights of criminals have been taken too far, as witness a couple of elections ago a similar outcry about the fate of Mr Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who killed a fleeing burglar with his shotgun, and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

Conservative concern might be laudable, if it weren't for the very inconvenient fact that they, just like Labour, have been compliantly complicit in the long term policy of steadily disarming law-abiding citizens and rendering them less and less able to defend themselves and their property, whilst at the same time ensuring that when you need them, in such circumstances, the police are like as not going to be as far away on the other side of the county as they could possibly be.

Yet for all the bravura about banning one weapon after another in recent decades from all our political masters of whatever hue, prohibition in this as in so many other areas of prohibition has made the problems worse.  Gun crime is higher than it was in 1996 when the public outcry for "something must be done" led to the banning of nearly all effective handguns.  We all know the stories of the rise of knife crime on our streets.  The fact is that with a disarmed citizenry, and a seemingly ever more remote possibility of a timely police response, it is now the criminal that is routinely armed and the victim that is routinely helpless.

By way of an aside and example, a few weeks ago we had some intruders on site trying to steal bikes.  One of our students caught them in the act and rescued three bikes which he took into his flat while he called out the warden.  Although they were just kids really, these would be thieves were no ordinary cut-it-and-run types though; while the warden was on the phone to the police, using 999 as instructed when the perpetrator is still on the premises, these kids were running round and round the block, banging on the windows of the flat into which the bikes had been taken, threatening the occupants and so on.  But no, the police switchboard was more interested in the colour of the bikes, and no, there would not be a 999 response, and lo! half an hour later, having managed to get our own private mobile security on site first who managed to shoo them away, along pops two PCSOs, yes, you guessed it, on bikes, to take down more details.  And all on a Sunday evening, when you would have thought that the doughnut shops were all closed and the pubs and clubs relatively quiet!

But anyway, back to the gripe.  You see it does not matter whether you call it "reasonable force" or whether you try to make some vacuous and vain change in the wording of the law to "not grossly disproportionate force" (whatever that may mean); it is the political classes of all parties in this country who have left the victims of crime defenceless and unaided.  They can make all the hullabaloo they like; they have brought us to this.  Political point scoring will not wash here.

And this is where anarchists, and the idea of "private law" we espouse, is head and shoulders above any of this silly legislative willy waving which will just result in more courtroom consternation and a bigger statute book for government to finance from our pockets.  "Justice" in a private law society is simple.  It is based on the "non-aggression principle" and the respect of society for property and contract.  You see, "non-aggression" does not entail pacifism.  If someone attacks or threatens you or your property you may defend yourself and your property.  But the "non-aggression" principle applies to you as defender as well.  If you go beyond the force needed to to make you and your property safe from immediate threat then you yourself are stepping over into the role of aggressor and the now victim, who was attacking you and yours, has every right to legal redress against you.

It doesn't need reams of legislation.  Just the "natural law" right to be able to resist aggression against you and yours.  And you may be armed in the process.  It's not up to the State to say who can and cannot hold a firearm or a sword stick or wave a knife at a threatening intruder under such a system.  But, since everyone would, in a market anarchist system, almost certainly need to be insured against claims made by others, your insurance company is the one who will authorise whether you are the sort of person they will insure with or without a weapon that might, in the hands of the responsible user, effectively deter an intruder for little cost or harm but in irresponsible hands cause them to bear the liability for you pumping the paper-boy full of lead and claiming he was an intruder!

As Aleksandr says, "Compare the meerkat; simples!"

Any of the political parties in the UK that decides to try to ape Obama's "Change we need", "Change we can believe in" mantra from last year in their campaigns deserves to suffer the apparent fate in terms of popular disappointment their would be mentor is currently suffering.

Because people don't like liars.  And claiming you represent "change", or at least anything I would consider "change we need", whilst continuing to pursue those positions of power least capable, on incontrovertible historical evidence, of delivering anything like "change" will be lying.

There can be no "change" whilst the wheels of State rumble on.  Changing how the State is run for a few years does not alter the fundamentally evil reasons for which "State" was invented and which it continues to pursue, inevitably.

There are two fundamental laws of human survival:

First, there are two, and only two, means by which humanity collectively and humans as individuals can meet their needs for the stuff to maintain their lives.  The one is through working and trading with others the surplus of your own work to buy the additional things you don't produce for yourself.  This is called the economic means.  The other is to exploit the proceeds of others' work.  This is called the political means.  There can be no other way - you make it (or are given it voluntarily), or you take it (by force).

Second, human beings will always seek to meet their needs by the means that involves the least work, or disutility, to themselves.

Oh, and I'll add one for myself: if two wrongs do not make a right, three redoubles the evil, rather than redresses it.

The State was created in order to enable the political means of fulfilling the needs of one group by exploiting another.  It has always done this.  It continues to do this to this day.  There is no evidence in human history that it can do any other.  Against thousands of years of evidence, it is utterly futile to expect it to change, any time soon, or indeed ever.

If the first wrong was that of autocratic rulers and small groups of nobles exploiting everyone else in serfdom, and the second was that of the mercantilists and new industrialists able to exploit the workers the third is that of the so called "majority" to decide to take from one group to keep another.  It doesn't matter, for it to work it must all boil down to a simple formula - that the State believes that it has the right to all your produce and to decide in differing proportions at different times how much of it you may keep.  Whether that State claims its power by arms and status, by wealth and oligarchy, or by "democracy", the formula must be the same.

Lord Acton (he of "Power tends to corrupt") wrote that "It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason."

Nobody is promising, even remotely, "change" of that formula.

...or how, if we are to change the world, we'll need to change Oxford first.

When I were a lad and doing my "O" Levels, about the same time it would appear as messrs Cameron, Johnson, Balls, Gove, Milliband snr. and a whole host of others now in the upper echelons of government or headed that way, the clever boys, like me, did proper subjects, like classical and modern languages, physical sciences, mathematics, history and the like, whilst the tier who were never quite sure whether they would get five O Levels did economics, politics, business studies, technical drawing, European studies and woodwork.

When it came to deciding on what to apply for at university then, it is hardly a surprise that, apart from the "Philosophy" bit "Politics, Philosophy and Economics" or "PPE" as it is known at Oxford was a bit of an enigma around which we tended to steer a wide berth.  And I have to admit that to this day, whilst I understand more now about the importance of having economically literate people (but that does not necessarily mean schooled by the mainstream British economics academic establishment), I do not really understand why we "teach" politics.

It can't be for the people who really run the country, for the technocrats of course do things like languages for the diplomatic service, town and country planning for the Scottish Executive and things like classics for the mainstream civil service!  Even the City took more "real world" subject graduates as analysts and consultants or Computing and Mathematics nerds as traders.  So it was with great interest that I read this analysis of the networks of Oxford educated power now at or coming to the fore in the Times.  Of those who list their degree subjects, it runs 10:6 in favour of PPE against all other subjects combined.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that I was brighter than them.  They got in, I didn't.  The fact that I was the arrogant petulant little boy who refused all his tutors' advice to choose Theology at Worcester which might have got me a place and still been a "respectable" subject, but rather chose to try for English at New College in the first year they took women and the last year the bigger boys could come back and try the entry exams after their A levels certainly didn't help my chances.  One can't help wondering, however, if choosing PPE might have been an "easier" (none are "easy" routes to Oxford but in relative terms perhaps) option, and then where might I have been now?

But what intrigues me, given, as I say, the penchant for relegating the O Level (and subsequently A Level) in things like Politics and Economics to the second tier boys, why did so many of these folk now reaching the zenith of power choose that course?  The article in the Times to which that graphic is linked makes the point that here wasn't a group of young men plotting their way to high office, but one does have to wonder what their school careers officers had predicted for them embarking on such a discipline.  I somehow doubt that they saw themselves as potential Nobel economists!

Moreover, the worrying question for me is why on earth we seem to acquiesce in electing people like this who appear, for all the world, to have decided at the earliest stages of their lives to aim for political power?  It seems to me that if we are to have political power at all, it ought to be vested only in those who have demonstrated the least desire for it.  As Milton Friedman once put it, "[democratic] government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And most worrying of all is how all these people seem to come out the same.  There may be nuances of difference between them, though it is interesting to see how some of them were what one might call political whores during their student days, chopping and changing political affiliation, or even being more than one thing at the same time.  Even today it seems quite difficult to find much to differentiate between politics and economics academe at Oxford, and elsewhere in Britain.  Have we, as Hoppe and others say, got to the point where the intellectuals in such disciplines are so captured by the prevailing statist, and even within that more or less social democratic version of statist, worldview that the cycle of political education to power and thence to a new generation of would be politicians is merely churning out the same vaguely left of centre, always collectivist mudpie that is modern political "choice"?

We certainly appear to have more Marxian influenced types in the newer universities, but we seem to have precious few, anywhere, really promoting proper, old fashioned, liberalism, classical, individualist anarchist or whatever.  Surely, if we are to break that cycle of mudpie middle of the road managerial ideology free politics we need to have people planting the seed of radicalism in our younger generation?  Or maybe that's the point - maybe, if someone has decided aged 18, that they want to know about politics and power and how to get it, they are precisely not the people who will be receptive to anything but that which gains them that power ten, twenty years down the line.  If so, it is the duty of the rest of us to deny them that power at any opportunity.

So for the latest of my forays into reading audiobooks I have decided to embark on a reading of Herbert Spencer's "The Man Versus The State" which is cited several times in the previous book, "Our Enemy The State" by Albert Jay Nock, who also provides an introduction in the Online Library of Liberty edition I have used for this recording.

Each of the essays probably deserve a post of their own, because they all have a tremendous resonance with some of today's pressing issues, especially as we go into a general election.  So for this post I will just link to the audio files.  Once again, there are individual MP3s for each section, an M4B file more suitable for iTunes and iPod/iPhone playing which are recognised as audiobook format and contain chapter information, and a Zip file of all the MP3s for downloading.

The Online Library of Liberty edition I have used contains much more than the four essays originally included in "The Man Versus The State" when first published.  But since I wanted to read his critique of the Liberal Party around the time of Gladstone before going to the Liberal History Group event next week, I've decided to release this section now, which is the original work, and record the other essays over the next few days/weeks and add them as and when.

NB - I have not gone through all of these chapters with the proverbial fine-toothed comb for errors and slips, but I think they're all pretty well intelligible and that any errors will be relatively trivial (and so more difficult for me to find and correct!).

So said Nick Clegg today, when visiting some college somewhere with housing "supremo" Sarah Teather and national "bread head" Vince Cable to announce something or other about housing policy.

Oh yes, they want to take a bunch of my money, who does have a job but not a house, mash it up a bit in some kind of Westminster alchemy pot, which gives out less than you put in, naturally, and give it - yes, give it free, at least nearly half of it, or lend it "cheaply" to the others, to some people who own a spare sodding house but are too lazy or miserly to do anything with it, even if it would make them money if they did. 

Then, if I am lucky, which I won't be because there aren't enough of those spare houses here to make one iota of difference to me, because, you see, a lot of them are in places nobody actually wants to live, I can start shelling out to those same people to whom I have already had money stolen from me, there is no other word for it, stolen from me - I'll say it again - to give to them, to put a roof over my head.

Now, Vince and Nick, well they're both Vice-Presidents of the party's land tax campaign group, so one might think that they would know better.  Sarah, well we can forgive her cos she just glazed over when several of us tried to explain it to her a while back when we took a day off work (without expenses) paid to go to London (without expenses) for a meeting which turned out after we had arrived to be a bit inconvient for the three MPs (with expenses) we had arranged to meet with a month before.

Which Lib Dem manifesto theme does this fit into?  "Fairness"?  Bollocks does it.  Not unless fairness suddenly means taking from the beleaguered tax-payer and giving to the lazy landowner who can't be buggered to make use of the assets he or she owns.  Even if you believe it is the state's right to try and tell those landowners what to do with their property, giving them my money to do it is not "fairness".

Five years ago nearly now, when we sat around a table in a Westminster Hall committee room to inaugurate the Housing Policy Working Party the first question I asked was "when are we going to talk about Land Value Tax" to which the housing policy team responded that "oh, that's a fiscal measure, we can't discuss that, the Treasury policy team will deal with that when they do a review" and so we spent months developing housing policy with our best hand tied behind our backs.  And when the Treasury policy team, better known as the Tax Commission, did get round to discussing policy, they welched on Land Value Tax too.

Steve Goddard is a lucky man, our PPC for Oxford East is one of the nicest politicians you could want to meet, if that's not an oxymoron, and if it weren't for the fact that I so badly want Andrew Smith out of this seat, with policy like this, it might very easily be "the 964 club" rather than "the 963 club" tonight.

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See, as I'm not interesting enough to do podcast thingies of my own opinions, and to try and get me out of the habit of dipping into a book rather than reading the whole work, I started reading to my computer whenever I picked up an interesting work on political-economy.  I don't know what the computer thinks of it all, but judging by the reaction from one author whose book I gave the treatment to recently, others seem to like it, and so I have today knocked off an audiobook version of Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy The State" (a .pdf file of the complete work).

Nock was a friend and follower of Henry George and quite a libertarian heavyweight in his day (he died in 1945); even Rothbard cited him as a big influence on him.  He and his friend Frank Chodorov were probably the last major libertarians who, in common with many libertarians and anarchists of the preceding nineteenth century (as well as the British Liberals till somewhat later), had viewed the special privileges attached to land ownership as one of the major nuts to crack in moving toward a fairer, freer society.

In "Our Enemy..." Nock distinguishes first "social power" from "State power", where "social power" is, as described by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the last sections of "What is Property?", all the (good, voluntary) associations and obligations that bind us to each other, and is constantly being predated upon by "State power".  The book is essentially a warning, somewhat in the same vein as Spencer's "The Man Versus the State" and Hayek's "Road to Serfdom", that this "State power" will take over so much of what had previously been the purview of "social power" to the extent that people will no longer have the will to do anything for themselves and will always look to the State to "do something" in any eventuality.

And he distinguishes also between "government" and "the State" after the fashion of Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, in which he sees "government" as something set up by mutual consent and only to secure the negative rights of "freedom and security" when the social power proves inadequate.  This leads him to an interesting "take" on the American Revolution.  The Declaration of Independence, upon which Paine's influence was clear and formalised by Thomas Jefferson, for whom Nock has a soft spot as more or less the one person in the revolutionary band who did understand the dangers of allowing "government" to become "State", was essentially ditched just as soon as it came into being. 

Whilst the ideals of "natural rights" and "individual sovereignty" were useful for galvanising everyone, of whatever class, against the British "common enemy", just as soon as the United States was founded, these groups naturally fractured and battled with each other for access to the exploitative power of the State.  The winners were those who had been top of the pile before the revolution, the land speculators and exploiters of others' labour who deliberately framed the Constitution to be as protectionist as possible as against Jefferson's idea of widely distributed individual sovereignty where the "highest" level of political organisation was to be the township level (not entirely dissimilar to the idea of "Cellular Democracy" about which I have blogged previously).

And it is this, he says, that has marked out the State as far back as history records: that the State is founded by conquest and confiscation; that it is always a vehicle of economic exploitation by one class over another.  Man will always seek to meet his needs with the least possible effort.  There are only two ways of meeting those needs: either by work and trade - the "Economic Means" and naturally involving the most effort; or by conquest and confiscation, and economic exploitation of others, in a word, robbery - the "Political Means" which, if you happen to have influence over the people who administer that State, is the easiest way, since it does not involve work for yourself, but feeding off the work of others through State granted privilege and protection.

The catalyst for the book is Franklin D. Roosevelt's accession to power in 1932 which accelerated the progress of the State power's predation over social power, in much the same way as Nock had observed had happened for forty years or more in Europe, and, by implication at least, had led to the great global threats of Fascism, "Hitlerism" as he called it, and state Communism, each of which had promised to be different from what had gone before in their respective countries, but which were just as centred on conquest of the access to the "Political Means" as any other State before them.

And, as we are in an election year here, it is worth noting Nock's view that essentially it doesn't matter who you vote for, at each stage in the State's advance over social power, the politicians tend to accept what has already been done (after all, it gives them, as actual or putative administrators of the State, all the more power) and will never truly roll back that State.  They are the State, or want to be; they are the very people who desire most to have access to the "Political Means"; how could they do otherwise?  That every appearance of the State's receding is actually in itself an exercise in State power - temporarily offering concessions in order to maintain a semblance of actually having the interests of the people at heart.

The book ends on a depressing note: Nock says he didn't write it in the hope of changing minds, or of fomenting any kind of change in direction; the State will only change when it collapses, having taken all power to itself and still found itself insatiable with no more to confiscate.

Feel free to download my Audiobook reading of "Our Enemy, The State" if you think you can bear my dulcet tones for the best part of four hours.

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Even many who are relatively sympathetic to free market minarchist and mutualist ideals where as much as possible is done through voluntary rather than coercive statist mechanisms often have a problem envisaging a system in which no state apparatus exists.  Two of the most common objections are that we at least need a state to administer "justice" and to ensure "national defense".  Even intellectual heavyweights such as Robert Nozick felt that a de facto "state", at least at a local level, would emerge from private law enforcement agencies.

So I'm often on the lookout for literature that explains how a private law based society would work, indeed would vastly improve upon the current predominant state run model, and so I am delighted to point my reader to "Chaos Theory", a pair of short essays, one on "justice" and the other on "national defense" by Robert P Murphy.  It is available as a freely downloadable PDF at the Mises.org site.  You can also buy a dead tree version (though I find delivery costs too high at Mises.org to justify having these sent to the UK).

It also provides further illustration of the point I was making in my previous piece on how respect for private property and contracts frees us from the need for a state.

I have also prepared an MP3 audiobook version, which is attached to this post.  It's mainly just for me to listen to again on the way to work, but if you'd prefer to listen than to read, and can face my dulcet tones, feel free to use it, Robert Murphy has given his permission.  It's only an hour and a half long, so you can judge how long it will take you to read this very accessible introduction to some of the ideas involved.

Particularly on the "justice" side, I can see ways in which the Mutualist ideal of creating such institutions and mechanisms within the current system could be successful.  Since the non-aggression principle would not rely on the same ability conferred on state agents (i.e. the police) to arrest someone, there is no reason why such mechanisms could not operate successfully on private property at present.

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Now lots of people baulk at a perceived notion that libertarianism is fixated on private property.  They feel that it is indicative of an incessant right wing-ish obsession with accumulation of wealth and devil take the hind-most (who will, obviously, they assume, have no such private property: wrongly of course - for we want everyone to be able to accumulate enough property to enable them to gain financial security and so on).

In fact of course the statement in the title, "property is freedom", comes from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with whom most people associate a. anarchism (which many seem to think of as somehow not "right wing-ish" - if libertarianism is "right wing-ish" - which it is not but never mind; I don't want to get into a left-right debate here), and b. the more famous dictum that "property is theft".

And it struck me the other day, while listening again to Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty" (of which you can listen to an excellent free audiobook version in individual chapters at the Mises Institute), that actually the really important thing about property and why it occupies such an important place in libertarian is little to do with material wealth accumulation.

Actually it's two big reasons, the first of which I don't really want to get into here - that private property, as opposed to communal property in particular, creates the right sort of economic incentives for individuals to want to work to support themselves and keep their property in good order - if they get to keep the product of their efforts, the property which results, they are incentivised to do well. 

But it is the second big reason that I want to highlight now in the context of "property is freedom":  respect for private property rights and the voluntary contracts that give rise to them is key to eradicating the state's (often contradictory) interference through legislation.

Take, for example, the right to free speech.  A right in theory at least at the very root of liberalism - for if you cannot be free with your thoughts, and with expressing them in speech or publication, is not the state constraining your very being?  But we've all heard, and many accept, the idea that there must be some kind of "limit" on free speech, such as not being allowed to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre because of the harm that may cause to panicking patrons.  Well, libertarians do not need such a contradictory limitation; because of our respect for property and contract.

To yell "Fire!" in that crowded theatre is a breach of contract of the basis and conditions on which you and the other patrons are permitted in that theatre by the owner - to watch a performance.  Any harm caused by your actions will either be breaches of their contracts, or damage to their property, and properly actionable through private actions on their behalf.

By the way, you can hear more about the "Person who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theatre" from Walter Block's book, "Defending the Undefendable", also at the Mises Institute.

Many think that anarchy means a complete lack of order, or a lawless world in which the vulnerable for whatever reason will be preyed upon by all those vicious racists, homophobes or whomever that we have created many dubious restrictions on free speech to curtail.  But let's say I own a particular street, I charge my customers for using the street, and they, in turn expect me to provide a safe environment for them to traverse.  So I get to set the rules; the protection agency contracted by my insurance firm makes sure everyone feels safe, ,is not intimidated by racist thugs or whatever.  After all, I may be liable to my customers if they are hurt while in my care, on my property.

Proudhon called all these associations developing civil society "spontaneous order", driven not by what a few people who solicit your votes every so often want, but by you and everyone else going about the myriad of transactions of your every day lives.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I'd probably want to make sure my street was gritted and safe for my customers in the snow too, maybe even get a few more customers if other street owners didn't bother so much.  I can't say my local authority is a "customer focused street owner" at the moment, can you?  It is because of respect for property and contract that all this can happen and, just as important when compared with the state's way of doing things, that the money flows to the services that people actually need, because, well, they're paying for it and can demand what they've paid for.

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