Just a quickie, for me at least...

On Friday night, in the ten minutes to nine slot on Radio 4 after Any Questions, thee was someone talking about British Somaliland and its place at the start of the main batch of decolonisation of the British Empire.  And it got me thinking; change, and change on a big scale at that, can be achieved much more quickly than people generally perceive of.  

In the fifty years following the end of World War Two the greatest empire the world has ever seen was rapidly dismantled.  Seventy-odd countries were carved out of the remains of that empire and given independence.  Momentous change, at a breakneck speed.  Post war Britain was broke, and the empire had transformed from being a supplier of exploitable resources to a drain on the British taxpayers.

With the state welfare Ponzi schemes now also pretty well broke, how about such an emancipation of the British people here at home with a similar rapidity?

Next week here at Oxford Brookes University, they're hosting a conference entitled "Sharia and Legal Globalisation".  I should stress that from what I can gather from the program this is not a conference about how to implement Sharia alongside say English Common Law within Britain but about how Sharia as a legal system in use in many countries in the world can co-exist with other legal systems in a globalised world.  My interest, however, is how different ideas of justice and the legal systems used to implement them can co-exist at any scale.  

At an international scale law is, by nature, polycentric - there is, thankfully, not one global law code, despite no doubt more or less serious attempts to impose one.  Citizens of one state when in dispute with citizens of another state have to agree to settle their difference in a mutually agreeable jurisdiction, often one of the ones from which one of the parties to the dispute comes, but it could instead be international arbiters mutually agreed upon either by their respective countries or their professional or trade bodies or such like.

And of course, even in this context at an international level, there is a debate to be had about how any two or more different viewpoints on law and justice can co-exist, and such is, I expect, the main point of the conference.

But suggest anything along the lines of that Sharia ought to be allowed to be practiced alongside English Law, say, here in Britain and there is usually much outrage and gnashing of teeth.  Here, however, quite unlike the international, anarchic, polycentric system outlined above, we are of course subject to a monopoly of law - one state, one legislature, one system of courts and one system of punishment.  We are not used to choosing which jurisdiction to go to to settle our disputes.  Or at least not on the face of it.

But in practice, we choose different sets of rules all the time.  I know, because one of my jobs is enforcing one set - the university's "Student Conduct Regulations" in which ultimately the penalty for certain misdemeanours might be far more than the police and courts could inflict on you and may be life changing - such as being booted off your course for bringing the university into disrepute by your non-criminal behaviour offsite.

And of course, in my preferred anarchist system of market produced law, we would get to choose which "system" of law we wanted to deal with our disputes with different counterparties.  If we were both Mulsims we might both be members of a Sharia based insurance agency which would patronise Sharia based adjudicators for such cases.  But it might be prohibitively expensive to get a non-Sharia insurance company to agree to using such adjudicators when their clients did not wish to be judged by Sharia standards.

And this market would also, of course, allow for a "cross pollination" of jurisprudence to take place - so particularly with Sharia's economic and financial rules, we might find that non-Sharia people and their insurance agencies might actually want to incorporate some of that into the adjudication system they preferred.

People will often counter "what about people being forced to be members of Sharia insurance companies against their will because of family custom and coercion?"  Well, just as today we have public spirited people trying to ensure that people do not get trapped in situations not of their making or choosing, so we would likely have in an anarchist system (we do believe that such people are actually behaving that way out of the good of their hearts rather than because there is some state created reward for them don't we?).  Such people would offer services to, for example, a Muslim woman who did not want to live under Sharia but could find no easy way out, which would protect her and help extricate her, and even prosecute the Sharia insurance company of her family or community for coercing her.

Overall, as in the anarchic system of international law that exists even today in cross border disputes, the jurisdiction in which both parties will agree to co-operate will be the one that can make the most persuasive case for producing a most likely just outcome for both parties at a reasonable cost.  It's just that you don't need to be in different countries to live under different sets of rules.  In fact it seems likely to me that the market process would end up picking the best from each type and ending up in a mutually agreed hybrid system, but always based on the most fundamental underpinning that the "natural law" that would emerge would be based on the "non-aggression principle" as the only universal ethic.

This is an important issue.  When we spread around the world in imperial colonisation, we imposed our legal systems on other parts of the world.  Our legal systems had already by this time largely separated from our religious law in many important respects, although still based upon it.  Now in a globalised world we have communities and peoples in all parts of the world whose faith rather than country gives them a code by which to live, and such an anarchist polycentric legal system offers a way of incorporating that, whilst still allowing for people within that system some defence from the worst of such a system where it breaches the universal ethic.

In practice, because in a market anarchist system things such as one's ability to migrate will be largely controlled by the wishes of the property owners at your proposed destination - in the absence of state provided housing, welfare and income support you are going to need to find someone to employ and accommodate you before it's feasible to move there and those people would be likely, if they wanted to be able to continue to do business with their own existing neighbours, be willing to impose conditions designed to maintain some kind of cultural hegemony - the spectre of big cultural change being foisted upon indigenous communities who don't want it, is much more unlikely in a society where there is no central state to impose the will of a few on the many, whilst at the same time allowing those inward migrants a way of keeping some of their own cultural norms insofar as they relate to each other and don't impose on anyone else.

In my view that's what you call the "best of both worlds".

Okay, I said I would stay off David Laws and get back to the business of attacking politicians and governments and so I am, in a way.  One of the things that the Laws fall from grace has done is raise the ugly spectre of people calling for curbs, one way or another, on the influence of "big media".  Let me say from the outset, "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing".  But the whole episode lets me have a go at politics, the state and their sometime chums in "big media", so allow me to use it as a platform to launch from!

It's not that I am comfortable with what the Telegraph have done; indeed I have unsubscribed from some paid content of theirs I had subscribed to and deleted their RSS feeds from my Google Reader and NetNewsWire; I doubt I will miss them, except perhaps Edmund Conway's bearish pieces on the economy, and I know they won't miss me, unless I am joined by hundreds of thousands of others.  I find their motives, as far as I can fathom them, to be deeply cynical and perhaps sinister; and I am worried about the enormous influence and power that control of such media giants gives to a few, usually immensely wealthy, individuals - whether that it the Murdochs, the Barclays, as in this case, or Lebedev, or even the BBC, however much it is supposed to be "ours" in some way.  

Many people still hold to what I find to be a quaint notion now that somehow the "Fourth Estate" works selflessly for "us" in holding our rulers to account.  In fact of course, this has rarely ever been the case and they have always sought for their proprietors quite unaccountable power, my forming opinion and, as was shown in the recent election, more or less telling us what to think and how to vote.  I agree with many that such influence is bad for "democracy" and pluralism, but then I find "democracy" one of the worst things invented anyway, so I'm not too fussed about that argument.  But it is not for nothing that media moguls have so often been the villains in their own productions.

But there remain two reasons why I would not wish to see any attempt to "control" any of the media: the free speech argument, and the idea that the market will, or rather perhaps could be made to, eventually destroy this oligopoly.

The free speech one should be obvious to all liberals, though I accept that there are problems with applying it to a Fourth Estate that has become so big and powerful an oligopoly.  It may well currently be able to drown out most other peoples' free speech for example - the lone blogger versus the Telegraph is like trying to speak unamplified at Speaker's Corner while a juggernaut full of loud-speakers is circling Marble Arch broadcasting your rival's message.  And it has a lot of financial muscle when it comes to things like libel cases, though as an anarchist I don't believe someone has a right to their "mere" reputation, and that it ought only to be when someone acts in a way to harm you that that person may be actionable for a tort rather than anyone writing stuff about you.

Both these problems though, and no doubt you can think of others, can be solved by the application of "rigorous liberalism" (about which I was pondering writing to David Laws about because I thought he was likely the best person in the party or government to understand it - I may still, because I hope he will retain influence at least) and the creation of more truly freed markets.  And there is no better a time to do that than now, when all sorts of technologies are enabling more and more of us to participate in myriads of real "big conversations" independent, in many ways, of the big media giants' interferences.

I remember in any case last year when the Telegraph started on its MPs' Expenses crusade, discussing, though I can't find a blogpost about it so presumably not on here, whether the whole thing was part of a "final fling" of the mainstream media - scared stupid by the actions of a few new media personalities (such as, yes, Guido) who seemed to be getting more and more scoops, they decided to fling financial resources at buying the biggest scoop of all - one that could, if they played it right, bring down if not entire governments then certainly key people and discrediting many others.  And I still think that that could be the case, though the "final fling" is likely to take quite a long time.  But there are things that we can do to hasten the process if that's what we want.

The Fourth Estate has enjoyed, indeed was created by, massive state protected privilege - in times when the media was censored and monitored only a few players were approved, and for the most part, these provided the seed-kernels for the media giants of today.  They therefore gained from artificial scarcity.  Even today, when their output may not be censored as such, often the incestuous relationship between media and politics creates exclusivity of access to the "movers and shakers" in the corridors of power - witness the difficulties Guido experienced in getting a Westminster lobby pass.  Copyright laws massively favour big media over the jobbing content creators and artists who all too often sell their rights to be exploited by big media merely to get access to heavily controlled markets operated by the media oligopoly.

Rigorous liberalism says that all these privileges, protections and barriers to real competition need to be swept aside - this is not curbing the media, it is making the market in information more free.  Of course, governments may find this a difficult thing to do.  After all, when the Fourth Estate are not attacking governments they are acting as their mouthpieces, convincing us of everything from the need to regulate local residential parking spaces to the justifications for going into illegal wars.  But if this government really wants a new sort of politics, and a "Big Society" then it needs to act on this so that more opinions are heard than just those controlled by a few very wealthy individuals, and to free up the market for small scale creatives in that "Big Society" to be heard and make acceptable livings - for that creativity is part of the very "culture" that the "Big Society" encompasses.

So this episode presents an opportunity to do something on this - at the very least it provides an impetus to re-examing the egregious Digital Economy Act, to ensure, for example, net-neutrality (though I disagree in principle with such controls on the market, whilst the relationship between privileged content providers and privileged infrastructure providers remains, then I think it is acceptable to take some action to limit their powers to segment that market in ways that only suit them), and that things like ACTA do not transfer yet more power over our own property and freedom of expression to privileged capital.  We need also to re-examine copyright law (I of course would abolish it and force the market to find ways of monetising fairly creators' work) to try to ensure that it is not simply a mechanism for transferring massive (and artificial) scarcity profits from creators to media giants.  And we need to look at libel law and process so that those with the most money cannot "buy justice" by throwing resource at legal inconveniences.  And of course we need to look carefully at the future of the BBC who have the ultimate privilege and protection in this - the captive customer of the television tax.

I'm sure there are others, but the point is that we do not need "positive laws" designed to restrict or prevent big media doing things we don't like, we need "negative laws" to free up the market so that real competition brings them down, just as surely and probably far more permanently.  How you achieve that when they can be the more powerful voice against your plans is, of course, more difficult!

Of course, all this would be so much easier in an anarchist society.  With no government, no state, enabling and maintaining barriers to entry, or super-centres of power around which people vie for such massive influence, such media giants would not have this ability to be both critic and mouthpiece of powerful people!  But perhaps let's not let this best option be the enemy of what good changes we could make in the statist situation we find ourselves in.

Never before has humanity been in this position where potentially billions of us can communicate our ideas so relatively free of middle-men to so many other people.  Part of attaining this potentially huge vehicle for trade, co-operation and peace, is to break the stranglehold of those old middle-men.  Doing so is imperative to this brave new world and society the government wants us to believe in (whether they do, truly, or not, the jury is still out on).

After the discussion involving Bella Gerens, Obnoxio, John Demetriou and myself about so called "left-libertarianism" and thinking back to the earlier discussion between IanB and myself about whether or not one required a state, albeit, as if such were possible (which I contend it is not), the teeniest "minarchist" state, to decide what laws need to be obeyed and how to enforce them, I wanted to return to the idea of "private law", sometimes also called "market produced law" or "emergent law".  Because as some of you already know, for me, understanding the possibilities of a "private law society" was probably the point at which I started to think in terms of a real "anarchy" being possible.  And indeed the more I think and read and hear about it, not just possible, but preferable, to any other arrangement.

All the resources on the subject I cited in that earlier discussion with IanB remain a good source of learning more about all this from people better able to explain it than I:

My moment of "epiphany" if you recall was at the Libertarian Alliance Conference in 2008 hearing Hans-Hermann Hoppe talking about a "Private Law Society" (the whole talk is available on video too).  And I mentioned also reading and listening to more and more about the idea by Hoppe himself, by Bob Murphy, the Tannehills (the subject is extensively covered over chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 - NB these chapter links point directly to MP3 audio files), and by Murray Rothbard. And these prompted me to look into the history of the idea of private production of law, at resources such as the Molinari Institute's excellent online library as well as the excellent collection in dead tree version only called "Anarchy and the Law" edited by Ed Stringham.  And since then I would add that there's a chapter of David Friedman's book "The Machinery of Freedom" available online which covers the mechanics of market produced law, and, most especially, this rather excellent video of Roderick Long explaining it in his series of Mises Institute seminars entitled "Foundations of Libertarian Ethics":

Why do I think that this issue is so important?  Well, in the context of the discussion on "left-libertarianism" mentioned above there seems to be a pretty basic problem in that some folk don't understand that believing that something is wrong does not necessarily mean believing that the only mechanism to correct that wrong would be a coercive statist one.  Yes, it's a terribly easy trap to fall into, after all, that is what the so-called "left" have promoted for at least a century - that the state is the organ through which social and economic inequity is redressed.

But not only that, market produced law, and the institutions that are likely to operate in such a system, now seems to me to be pretty fundamental to the functioning of an anarchist society.  And once you have understood the concept, you can, if you will, run every "social problem" through that mechanism as a thought experiment to see how market incentives could arise to achieve all sorts of ends.  If you read the chapter mentioned from "Machinery of Freedom" above, you'll see that I caught onto the idea reading Friedman's description of how two differing opinions - pro- an anti- capital punishment might work out in the market.  I'll quote it here to save you the bother of clicking if you don't want to:

Consider, as a particular example, the issue of capital punishment. Some people might feel that the risk to themselves of being convicted, correctly or incorrectly, and executed for a capital crime outweighed any possible advantages of capital punishment. They would prefer, where possible, to patronize protection agencies that patronized courts that did not give capital punishment. Other citizens might feel that they would be safer from potential murderers if it was known that anyone who murdered them would end up in the electric chair. They might consider that safety more important than the risk of ending up in the electric chair themselves or of being responsible for the death of an innocent accused of murder. They would, if possible, patronize agencies that patronized courts that did give capital punishment.

If one position or the other is almost universal, it may pay all protection agencies to use courts of the one sort or the other. If some people feel one way and some the other, and if their feelings are strong enough to affect their choice of protection agencies, it pays some agencies to adopt a policy of guaranteeing, whenever possible, to use courts that do not recognize capital punishment. They can then attract anti-capital-punishment customers. Other agencies do the opposite.

Disputes between two anti-capital-punishment agencies will, of course, go to an anti-capital-punishment court; disputes between two pro-capital-punishment agencies will go to a pro-capital-punishment court. What would happen in a dispute between an anti-capital-punishment agency and a pro-capital-punishment agency? Obviously there is no way that if I kill you the case goes to one court, but if you are killed by me it goes to another. We cannot each get exactly the law we want.

We can each have our preferences reflected in the bargaining demands of our respective agencies. If the opponents of capital punishment feel more strongly than the proponents, the agencies will agree to no capital punishment; in exchange, the agencies that want capital punishment will get something else. Perhaps it will be agreed that they will not pay court costs or that some other disputed policy will go their way.

One can imagine an idealized bargaining process, for this or any other dispute, as follows: Two agencies are negotiating whether to recognize a pro- or anti-capital-punishment court. The pro agency calculates that getting a pro-capital-punishment court will be worth $20,000 a year to its customers; that is the additional amount it can get for its services if they include a guarantee of capital punishment in case of disputes with the other agency. The anti-capital-punishment agency calculates a corresponding figure of $40,000. It offers the pro agency $30,000 a year in exchange for accepting an anti-capital-punishment court. The pro agency accepts. Now the anti-capital-punishment agency can raise its rates enough to bring in an extra $35,000. Its customers are happy, since the guarantee of no capital punishment is worth more than that. The agency is happy; it is getting an extra $5,000 a year profit. The pro agency cuts its rates by an amount that costs it $25,000 a year. This lets it keep its customers and even get more, since the savings is more than enough to make up to them for not getting the court of their choice. It, too, is making a $5,000 a year profit on the transaction. As in any good trade, everyone gains. _{[Friedman, David D., "Machinery of Freedom", Ch 29 "Police, Courts, and Laws -- On the Market"]}

Now, I don't know whether Friedman believes in capital punishment or not.  I know I don't, and I find it difficult to see how a society built upon the "Non-Aggression Principle" could ultimately sanction capital punishment - perhaps there would always be appeal to other arbitration firms who would have a more purist interpretation of "non-aggression" as demanding that some other form of punishment that does not involve "aggression" should always take precedence, even against those who have not shown such consideration for their victims.  I do know, however, that like the issue of a "just distribution" of goods it is one of those areas in which anarchists, just like those debating other more statist forms of social order, disagree, and it seems instructive to see how market produced law could reconcile these two seemingly diametrically opposed positions, peacefully and without coercion.

A similar process can be gone through for all sorts of issues that are often raised against anarchism and amongst anarchists:

• would individuals be permitted to own lethal weapons, and if so, what controls might be applied - permitted, of course, but you might find your insurance company charging you exorbitant premiums if you are unable to prove to them that you know how and when to use them responsibly;

• could drug use be legal, but socially discouraged - sure, your health premiums might rise for all sorts of "risky" activity and, on the other hand, your neighbour may want to pay higher insurance premiums for themselves so they can try and prosecute you more if you use them (they'll likely lose of course if no harm can be proven, but it's their prerogative to waste their money on fruitless pursuits);

• is landlordism acceptable or ought the idea of "occupancy and use" trump "first-appropriation" - maybe premiums for protecting property that you lay claim to but are physically not present on would rise until it becomes economical simply to write it off and let the tenant become the "new" homesteader;

• or perhaps, another frequent flier I have seen in libertarian arguments, should "limited liability" be allowed for businesses - if yes, the premiums of those the limited liability organisation deals with might rise to reflect a different type of risk and if no the premiums of the limited liability organisation may rise until it is no longer worth the premium to claim that "privilege"...and so on.

We can't, of course, predict exactly the outcome the free market would produce in every situation, and certainly can't impose one or the other outcome, but we can postulate how such hypothetical market mechanisms might produce a particular incentive if there is a sufficient groundswell of opinion desirous of a particular outcome.  

And that, let's face it, is what "democracy" attempts to do, except that it is likely to be slow (adding to ever growing and already vast piles of legislation), unresponsive (it takes five years to change a government for one with a policy you may prefer), and coercive (once it has decided something is illegal it can enforce it with all the power at its disposal regardless of how much an individual values their contrary opinion).  Oh, and of course, via "democracy" we contrive to give maximum power to a few people with which they can trample on the freedoms and choices of everyone else.

So, let us anarchists worry more about getting rid of government, before we get hung up on the sort of decisions alternative institutions would make in a freed market.  In government, only one side ever wins; in the market, only what is mutually acceptable to both opinions can succeed.  

The fact that there are differences of opinion amongst anarchists about what ought to happen in a freed market is A Good Thing, since it enables us to take our anti-state message to statists of different opinions and persuade them that their concerns can be met without the state.  But we should at least be agreed that all these issues can be dealt with by the market and that it's not a very good use of our time in the here and now to try and predict them all.  Let's not bugger that up by erecting unnecessary barriers between us.

IanB has a post over at Counting Cats (see what I've done there?) responding at length to a discussion he, I and some others have been having at the UK Libertarian Forums about whether a true market-anarchy could actually exist. His post though, moves on a little bit, to argue that even if it could, it would not be a terribly libertarian society.

Now, this is an important issue for me, because it was by understanding (or believing I understood) how a market anarchy could deliver justice, without a state holding a monopoly on the final judgement or the enforcement of it that enabled me to become what I think of as a purist anarchist. My moment of epiphany if you are interested was at the Libertarian Alliance Conference in 2008 hearing Hans-Hermann Hoppe talking about a "Private Law Society."

And from then on, I've read and listened to more and more about it by Hoppe himself, by Bob Murphy, the Tannehills (the subject is extensively covered over chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 - NB these chapter links point directly to MP3 audio files), Murray Rothbard. And these prompted me to look into the history of the idea of private productio of law, at resources such as the Molinari Institute's excellent online library as well as the excellent collection in dead tree version only called "Anarchy and the Law" edited by Ed Stringham to try and understand the way it might work and how likely and secure it would be. Secure in the sense of not being overthrown by some "war lord" very quickly or a monopoly quickly arising that would become a de facto state, as was Robert Nozick's assertion and the reason why he could not accept a no-state option and used the phrase "nightwatchman state" for his vision.

And, whilst I am ready to admit that the idea that we do not need a state even to ensure contracts and law and order is probably the biggest leap of the imagination you can make in libertarian theory - and is usually the one people simply dismiss as incomprehesible and inconceivable or just plain unworkable, personally I think that once you understand it it is a beautiful sounding system. Law and order with no coercion? That does sound pretty difficult doesn't it. But it's not really, and especially not in a sophisticated and technologically assisted economy and society.

But as IanB says, he has some form on this subject, having just apparently debated it passionately at Samizdata, which I missed or I would surely have joined in, and now again in the UK Libertarian forums. And he does appear fairly certain and fairly passionate that not only is it so highly unlikely that a genuine, zero-state, market-anarchy could either happen, or survive, but as in this piece, that even if it did its non-coercive, polycentric legal system would end up being far less liberal than what could be organised via a minimal state. So I figure that in the interests of my own education if nothing else, I would respond to his post here where I can.

So first, as Ian summarizes the two positions:

For anyone reading this who isn’t entirely au fait with the glorious philosophical differences within libertarian “thought”, minarchy and anarcho-capitalism are the two basic ideological approaches; a minarchist wants a state, but a small, tightly restricted one with very few responsibilities. Anarcho-capitalists think that’s ideologically cowardly, and the only logical position is to abolish the state altogether.

I don't think that it is "ideologically cowardly", particularly. The revelation that made me feel that a completely non-state situation was preferable was Hoppe's explanation that a "limited government", in "classical liberal" terms, whose only task, at least by intent and design ("constitutionally limited" as its proponents claim), is to enforce law and order, is impossible:

...government is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself. Consequently, instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will also provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to government for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of government, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding. Indeed, these are government constitutions and courts, and whatever limitations on government action they may find is invariably decided by agents of the very same institution under consideration. Predictably, the definition of property and protection will be altered continually and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the government's advantage. The idea of eternal and immutable law that must be discovered will disappear and be replaced by the idea of law as legislation – as flexible state-made law.

Even worse, the state is a monopolist of taxation, and while those who receive the taxes – the government employees – regard taxes as something good, those who must pay the taxes regard the payment as something bad, as an act of expropriation. As a tax-funded life-and-property protection agency, then, the very institution of government is nothing less than a contradiction in terms. It is an expropriating property protector, "producing" ever more taxes and ever less protection. Even if a government limited its activities exclusively to the protection of the property of its citizens, as classical liberals have proposed, the further question of how much security to produce would arise. Motivated, as everyone is, by self-interest and the disutility of labor but equipped with the unique power to tax, a government agent's goal will invariably be to maximize expenditures on protection, and almost all of a nation's wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection, and at the same time to minimize the production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work to produce, the better off one will be.

In sum, the incentive structure inherent in the institution of government is not a recipe for the protection of life and property, but instead a recipe for maltreatment, oppression, and exploitation. This is what the history of states illustrates. It is first and foremost the history of countless millions of ruined human lives.

So, in creating some kind of government, however you attempt to limit its competency via a constitution or other means, you are creating a monopoly whose inbuilt incentives are to grow, and, since it is the ultimate arbiter in respect of conflicts between the citizen and itself no checks on its power are ultimately unbreakable. Not only that, but the very institution breaks the first and most basic of what Hoppe above calls the "eternal and immutable law that must be discovered", that of "self-ownership", by putting one class of people, the rulers or bureaucrats, into an "ownership" position over everyone else and their property.

Now, you may say, we can solve this problem by creating some system that makes it a "government of the people, by the people, for the people" or some such nice sounding phrase: that renders it only able to change itself, for better or worse, for bigger or smaller, if it has the consent of those to which its governance applies. Some kind of, what's the word for it, oh yes, "democracy". History is littered with such attempts, and one only need look at what was probably the most noble-intentioned, cleverly constructed attempt to rein in government by constitutional checks and balances and the involvement of the governed to see how well those good intentions have fared. The United States of America. The biggest government on the planet. With not only its monopoly of force at home, but with the biggest, virtually unchallenged, mechanisms of projecting that force abroad as well. That literally hoovers up as many of its citizens' resources as it can get away with.

Well, is there an alternative? Yes, say the anarchists: the alternative to a monopoly is free competition. If you cannot keep the monopoly of ultimate arbitration in check by clever constitutional arrangements, surely you can keep any one group of potential law givers, enforcers, in check by the economic incentives inherent in free competition - the profit motive. Market incentives tend toward efficiency, monopoly creates incentives toward inefficiency and bloat. And you have an inbuilt "democratic" accountability: people will choose a provider of these arbitration services based on the quality of the service or product and its price in a free market. And if some budding legal entrepreneur thinks he can do it better or cheaper and gain a share of that market, well a new alternative proivder will be established. We agree, I think, that such a mechanism produces the best results for other goods, so why not conflict resolution too?

Notice, as well, that in each dispute or conflict situation that requires arbitration or punishment there will be two sides, two "customers" whose perception of quality will differ, largely depending on whether they are the victim, or the victim's agents, heirs or such like, or the accused, the plaintiff or the respondent. So the successful, profitable, arbitration or enforcement organisations will be the ones who balances, to the satisfaction of both sides, efficiency (including in matters such as evidence gathering, ability to get both parties into "court" in the first place in a non-coercive system and so on) and the justness of its decisions and methods of operation, proportionality of its penalties etc.

I realise at this point, having written much about why we anarchists believe our market-produced arbitration and justice system is superior to creating some "limited" monopoly state, I haven't even begun to address IanB's central, new substantive argument, that the anarchist system would be inherently illiberal. But since this is the first time I have written on here about the whole idea of "private law", I think I must plough on with the explanations of the mechanisms that might arise in a non-state society to address the conflicts for which IanB and minarchists believe only a state can provide a solution before I can answer that. Obviously I do believe the non-state society would be more liberal, or I would not be promoting it. But I feel I need to explain many of the whys and wherefores before we can discover why I believe that to be the case.

So, onward: IanB describes the free-market justice system as "a voluntary system of law enforcement" in which "courts etc either will arise or should arise (these are two quite different things but it’s not often clear which is being suggested) in the anarchy". Well, let's address this issue next. Is it that such structures would, or should, arise? Can we be certain?

I suppose the most honest answer is that no, we cannot be certain. But we do have the entirety of human history to show us that yes, societies do appear always to have tried to find themselves acceptable, appropriate mechanisms for resolving disputes and for giving victims some sense of justice and punishing wrong-doers. And actually this point is pretty crucial to understanding what we mean by the word "anarchy" itself (gosh, we're getting in deep now!). The word means, from the Greek, "without rulers", no more, no less. Popular culture has imbued it with a meaning of "without order", conjuring up the spectre of the Hobbsean "war of all against all". But actually all we mean by "anarchy" is entirely positive. We believe that social order can emerge, spontaneously, and be maintained, and maintained better indeed, in a society which does not set one class of person over another, as rulers and ruled, but through voluntary, mutual co-operation.

Consequently we cannot, nor would we want to, say what the best mechanisms for creating and maintaining that social order would be, absent the inherently unequal structures that exist currently in coercive societies. We can speculate, postulate, theorise and philosophise about them. We can even suggest that, given what we know now, some things may appear to be apodictic certainties. But we cannot know, in advance of such a society, exactly what form the institutions we would build in that society would be. The benefit of the free market is that it is open to innovation. And who knows what innovations, once it is freed from the state's mechanism of imposing one class of people's ideas on everyone else, what other possibilities may emerge.

But we do not start in a vacuum. We do know the sort of institutions that are imposed upon us now, in the state based society which we wish to dismantle. And from those, and the intentions behind them, we can play the part of entrepreneurs, and try and show mechanisms we think will work sufficiently better to make the anarchist society sufficiently attractive, non-threatening, that might persuade people to give it a go.

But that, I think, since I've been up at this all night and have to get to work, is going to have to wait for the next post!

These days I have so many individual bloggers in my feed reader who write so many varied and interesting, learned and informative pieces, that I'm afraid most things that are listed as being from the mainstream media I tend to skip over. Occasionally an interesting looking headline grabs my eye as I'm scanning a page load of their ramblings though and I take a peek. One such was Saturday ofternoon, "Blank votes would reform democracy" by Balaji Ravichandran on Comment is Free at the Guardian. He wonders how people who feel so disillusioned with British politics and democracy that they don't feel they can vote for anyone on offer can express that disillusionment in a way that might be noticed, and that shows they are not simply indifferent or apathetic.

With the general elections coming up, and political and ideological differences between parties becoming indiscernible, we struggle to find someone who comes close to representing our individual philosophies. More often than not, every party embodies two or more principles we feel are fundamentally incompatible. Quietism is not exactly welcome, and may even be counterproductive. Those of us who still want to engage with the democratic process, are, of course, not allowed to say: we don't like any of the parties, and short of a political rebirth, none of the parties are welcome. A poll by Mori in 2001 showed that more than 30% of voters would turn out to vote if the ballot had "none of the above" as an option, which has prompted Steve of Stevenage to form a party called No Candidate Deserves My Vote. Which in turn begs the question of whether it is sensible to attribute low turnouts merely to voter apathy. Disillusionment, after all, is not the same as indifference.

Ravichandran offers a suggestion that I have been thinking about recently too - to spoil our ballots, en masse, so that whereas spoilt ballots are usually not mentioned once the count is over, having as many as, say, the winning candidate polled, or even, in local elections, as many as all candidates polled, would be so remarkable as to be reported much more widely. I'll return to that later, as it does have problems and I have an alternative suggestion... But for now, what I found drew me into the article in the first place was Ravichandran's assessment of why we might be feeling disillusioned in the first place:

Democracy, we learn at school, is government by, of, and for the people. It's an attractive aphorism, and it sounds convincing. We accept it without much doubt, and through our adulthoods, believe that collectively, we hold the keys to the government. Indeed, the illusion of power is so complete that even when we are utterly powerless, it never occurs to us to question whether the prevalent forms of representative democracy are truly the least harmful ways to self-governance.

We might be inclined to say yes, but ask a woman, a gay man or someone of Jewish faith who lived through the early 20th century, when a decisive majority was against their rights, and soon one might feel different. Even today, imagine one of those daily encounters with a government official – from the managero of an NHS trust to the immigration officials at Heathrow – and then ask yourself the Coetzeean question: "Who serves whom? Who is the servant, who the master?" Do you still feel powerful? Do you still think it is your government?

There is something wrong about democracy as we practise it – the self same democracy that our governments seem intent on exporting elsewhere. Better than oppressive autocracies and theocracies, you might say. Sure, but without being a moral relativist, is that enough? For, by presupposing to be the most legitimate means for the transfer of power, and never questioning the source of that legitimacy, even democracy stifles dissent within and debates outside its own realms.

So many questions! So many reasons to believe our system might not be the best one we could conceive of. But for some reason, Balaji cannot quite make the logical leap that screams itself out to me from these questions: that the problem is not merely with the type of democracy we have, but with the entire notion that we need an all powerful monopoly body to rule over us, or that it could somehow be altered to make it more equitable, just, or accountable. Neither is government nbecessary, nor can it be made just and equitable.  Of course, the main cause of Balaji's I am sure involuntary myopia he puts in his own words: "democracy stifles dissent within and debates outside its own realms."

Albert Jay Nock, in "Our Enemy The State" predicted this inability to think "outside the state" and compared it with the European Christian Reformation: so disaffected were people with the hegemonic Roman Church that they went as far as rebelling and seceding from its rule, yet they did not liberate themselves, but rather set up another church with similarly repressive rules and hierarchies. And for an analysis of how even the most popularly elected "democracy" does not have the power it always seems to think it has, have a read of Herbert Spencer's essay "The Great Political Superstition" from his collection "The Man Versus The State" (or listen to me reading it!)

Democracy may be fine for small scale voluntary institutions and organisations where the final sanction of the disaffected member is to withdraw completely from that institution and go to a competitor or establish a competitor. But we cannot do that with a state. Whoever wins gets to rule over us all; whether we like it or not; whether we supported them or not; whether we agreed with their policies or not; whether we benefit from their actions or lose; whether the outcomes are just or Not. And that means that it must have the ability to force people to conform to its decisions. And as Ravichandran intimates, its operatives do not need to treat you like a customer, someone to be please and servfed by a producer in a competitive market for their custom. After all, the NHS manager or airport immigration officer are, in fact, agents of your rulers: resistance is futile! And possibly fatal too.

Indeed, in the first comment on CiF, by one "pwahlberg", he makes explicit the violent nature of democracy, saying that:

But this is precisely why it's valuable. Politics - and elections - are about forcing a very big diffuse group of people of many generations, creeds, whatever to nail down a lot of very hazy ideas into a coherent program of action. Not an ideology, and not a philosophy: action. It is about, to borrow from Sartre, the construction of a fused unity of people with common interests, goals and desires where only a collection of atomized individuals existed before. It's about reconciliation and hard choices and even that dirty word, compromise. It's about all of us dipping our hands in the blood.

The "valuable" thing about politics and democracy is that it is the way of "forcing" disparate groups of people to agree to a single way of arranging things? The a[pologists for this system sometimes astonish me! And if this is the vision and purpose, it can never work. It is doomed to failure. There is no system, no bureaucracy, no technology ton the planet hat can possibly even collect, let alone collate and interpret the wishes, intentions and needs of those sixty million "diffuse people". So something organised along those lines will never do justice to everyone's needs and priorities. It is doomed to failure. Or at least doomed only to deliver the lowest common denominator.

All we need to make a just, equitable, efficient, prosperous and peaceful anarchy possible is for opinion moulders like Balaji Ravichandran to make that intellectual leap and then start spreading the word. I hope he will. For there is another way.

Now finally, back to tactics. I personally agree with Ravichandran that it would be good if those who are motivated but disillusioned, who want to make the point by doing their "civic duty" but who will have nobody they wish to vote for, do exercise that vote in some way. And I tend to agree, and this is what I have been thinking about myself, that if the numbers of spoiled ballots are really significant - and if his figure is right, that up to 30% of eligible voters who would not otherwise vote had a way of expressing their dissatisfaction, they would participate to send that message, that would be really significant probably approaching or even exceeding the number of votes many winning candidates would poll, then it will be remarked upon long after the huddle between the returning officer and candidates and agents breaks up and the result of the valid votes is declared.

But I don't think that a blank ballot would be suitable personally for me.  My objection is not merely that there is nobody I want to vote for. To be fair, in my own case, I shall actually vote in the General Election for my friend and liberal Steve Goddard because accepting that democracy is not going to disappear in the next three weeks the worst outcome I could imagine is that the current Labour incumbent and his government are allowed to continue their nation-wrecking for another five ytears, but I may do this in the local elections. But I realise there are many fellow libertarians out there who are not fortunate enough to have either a libertarian or genuinely liberal candidate representing any party so they may wish to signal their non-consent in some way.

I want to signal that I do not even consent to the system: after all, the sole, still tenuoous, justification for government is that it governs "with consent" of the governed. And I do not so consent. And so, what I would quite like to do, and suggest any others who want to register their non-consent consider, is to write something on the ballot paper such as "I am a sovereign individual, and I do not consent" and then add your full name, legibly.

That way, when the huddle of candidates, agents and the returning officer has to go through the thousands of spoiled ballot papers to agree to rule them out of the count, everyone will be able to see the names of those who have withdrawn their consent in this way.

Because there is an alternative. And don't waste the opportunity to tell them so!

Over at the Bad Conscience blog, Paul Sagar has an interesting essay asking libertarians to agree with him that the recent banking bailouts were, in fact, necessary (to preserve society as we know it) and that we should also agree that there ought to be "better and greater" regulation of the financial world from now on.  Now, I don't appear to fall into any of the categories of people he's "tagged" as especially wanting to hear from, what he calls "sensible (and later "intelligent") libertarians, liberals and leftists of all stripes" (though I suppose as a Mutualist/Individualist Anarchist I could well fall into the last grouping).  I rather suspect, however, from what I am going to write here, he might consign me to his fourth, rather unflattering and condescending category of "unthinking libertarians" (anyone who does not agree with his argument, it would seem).

You see I fear Paul is falling into a very common trap of using a narrow definition of "libertarian" with just one, "minarchist" or "classical liberal", strain in mind.  And also assuming that they are somehow "of the right".  He makes frequent reference to that father of the Labour Theory of Value, Adam Smith, as a "libertarian" and that because Smith judged something (emergency intervention that overrode private property rights in this case) acceptable, then so should all "sensible libertarians."

But there is a great big elephant in the room here being thoroughly ignored, indeed so old and hoary is this elephant that some may even think it a museum stuffed woolly mammoth instead.  And that is that there is a great proportion of the "libertarian family tree", as I have taken to describing it, who would utterly reject the banking system as it is currently constituted and who would argue that if people had listened to us over the past getting on for two centuries now there would be little scope for these crises to arise in the first place.

Not only that, but the little menagerie crowding around Paul's argument includes another, perhaps not quite so lumbering beastie, let's call it the hippopotamus in the room: his criticism of the state's complicity in creating the circumstances in which the crisis could breed is restricted to whether or not their regulation was strong enough, or competent enough.  There is of course a much more direct way in which governments contributed to this crisis, through their monetary policy precipitating the classic asset bubble.  Even in the comments, though Tim Worstall mentions the asset bubble, he does not venture to place the blame for that at anyone's feet.

And if we are first going to sort out the current mess and second try to ensure that it cannot happen again, both of these issues that overshadow Paul's arguments need to be dealt with properly.  Why should be trust the state to provide industry regulation on the one hand, when it wishes also to tinker with the underlying economics through monetary, political and fiscal policy with the other?  And why do we believe that any amount of regulation of a system so fundamentally flawed as the fractional reserve fiat central bank money system will ever be able to prevent such a thing happening again.

It's also worth mentioning perhaps, lest someone pops up and dismisses these arguments about the money system as some "Austrian School nutter's ravings" that there have long been many statist political economists have recognised and called for the fractional reserve debt-money system to be replaced (and I was one of them - I was calling this recession to my friends in about 2003/4 on grounds that, as a budding housing developer, I thought were blindingly obvious, and which turn out with hindsight to have been simply a not terribly well articulated or understood perhaps exposition of the Austrian Business Cycle theory.  I believe Chris Huhne even may still have a copy of a book I managed to thrust into his hands when I first met him in Oxford for an elections photo-op in 2001 or 2002 that explained it all.

Further, Paul seems to be saying that the sort of "deregulation" seen in the financial services sector in the eighties and nineties created some kind of a "free market" that has been proven to be a busted flush.  However much or little regulation may be imposed from time to time, because of the very basic workings of the corrupt and fraudulent money system we currently have, and have had in effect for most of the twentieth century, there can be no sector looks less like a "free market" as radical libertarians would understand it than the banking sector.

It is, in fact, in each nation at least that operates a currency of its own or shares responsibility for a joint one like the Euro, effectively a monopoly.  A monopoly of state authorised and state manipulated money supply which is delivered to us plebs through a carefully selected and nurtured group of highly privileged "sub-contractors" - the private (and now not to private) commercial banks.  You only have to understand that the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in the US was the "price" Woodrow Wilson had to pay for the financial campaign support of the country's two wealthiest men (then, or ever, in real terms equivalence - something like four times Bill Gates' fortune!) - John D Rockerfeller and James Pierpoint Morgan - to make you wonder whether that system was never intended to be of great benefit to the people at large, or deliberately designed to yield the greatest benefit to the wealthy banking oligarchy.

This arrangement also enables the government of such a currency owning territory to inflate its money supply at will.  Not often as obviously as the recent "quantitative easing" policy of course, but over the last decade the broadest measure of money supply, M4 Lending, which is all the lending into existence of new deposits arising from loans, mortgages etc., has been growing in double figures per year.  Over the ninety or so years since the founding of the Federal Reserve system in the US the dollar has been devalued by 98% and a similar figure obtains for Britain too over a similar period.  

This amounts to an additional tax on anyone who possesses stores of money (savings), and, whilst it is commonplace to hear the supposed comfort that "it makes people's borrowings cheaper to finance" (the biggest debtor inevitably being...the government of course!) this hides the fact that for the ordinary folk who have such debts that may be marginally benefitted from inflation it will be accompanied with price rises.  Inflation is often a way in which governments pay for something they think it will be difficult to persuade voters of the need for higher taxes to do.  It is frequently used to diminish the cost of the debt arising from wars for example.  

And price inflation does not simply appear evenly right across the economy all at once - the people who have created the new purchasing power and spend it first (the government and the bankers) take prices by surprise and get their goods, with essentially counterfeit new money, at the old lower prices, whereas when it filters through to the ordinary man or woman on the street  in their pay rise or whatever prices will likely already have adjusted, so for them, the inflation has been of no benefit at all.

Now, quite apart from the fact that the way our money is created is an outright fraud, one that empowers politicians and their banker sub-contractor cronies above everyone else, the further truth that these bankers are conducting their business denominated in a unit that we the citizens believe and expect to be somehow "guaranteed by the nation" will always create so-called "moral hazard".  Forget all this talk of allowing banks to fail - it is the credibility of the state's currency that is at risk, so it is highly likely that they will try to protect it by massive intervention to prevent a collapse.  This, if you like, is where regulation most likely is needed - state treasuries need to have some feeling of control over "their" money - and so this is where things like reserve limits, monitoring quality of loans, even setting limits, perhaps, on the "velocity" of their money in the markets by limiting the vast sums involved in things like Foreign Exchange trading (in which in London dealers alone nearly as much is traded daily as would account for our entire annual GDP) come in, and insisting on the transparency of innovative trading instruments, so that monetary and wholesale market authorities have an idea of the potential calls on "their" (i.e. "our") currency that may arise.

If these banks were dealing in currencies for which they were the responsible issuer and guarantor of its stability and long term value, the buck would, literally, have to stop at the Chief Executive's desk.  Some banks might guarantee their currency by assuring its conversion on demand into precious metals, say, others might already have established strong credibility for the quality of their loan book against which they back their currency, others still might rely on a mutuial or co-operative business model whose members trust the bank they own between them.  Couple that with an active private deposit insurance market evaluating the creditworthiness of each issuing bank, and you have a market only solution, with no need for external regulation, and with no single point of failure that would threaten whole nations' economies.

But even if one were to agree that some kind of external regulation was necessary, how could one possibly believe a state agency is the right choice for the job?  The history of this recession will reveal why...

A recession, crunch, whatever you want to call it is not a random event occurring out of the blue.  It is in fact the end of a business cycle that starts with a boom.  For all Gordon Brown's bluster about having "abolished boom and bust" he must have known he was lying through his teeth,  In a boom, which is caused usually by excessively easy access to money, borrowed money mostly since that's how most money actually comes into existence anyway, and so somewhat less circumspection as to what that money is being invested in, produces many bad investments amongst the no doubt many good ones.  At some point the credibility, if you like, of the bad investment choices in the eyes of the consumer, disappears, and those businesses go to the wall or people start selling off that type of asset.  The downturn is a perfectly natural and necessary part of a boom - since it clears out these bad investments and allows the money previously tied up in them to be invested in new, hopefully better opportunities.  So what causes the boom?

Well, in our case, none other than Gordon Brown did.  In 1997 Labour's first election victory for 18 years had been largely made possible by them managing to persuade the City of London that they could now be trusted with the economy.  Imagine then the prospect of coming up to your first attempt at re-election as the previous asset bubble, the "dot com boom", was bursting.  There was a very real prospect, dragged down by the USA, the epicentre of the "dot com" phenomenon, that Britain could go into a recession just in time for the election.  So the monetary authorities on both sides of the Atlantic deliberately kept their interest rates artificially low.  This has always been a signal to the banking "sub-contractors" that they should be lending more to get more money into the economy to try to ensure demand kept growth positive.  However savings were already at an historically low level and borrowing at an historically high level.  Most people who would have been "good risk" borrowers were already mortgaged.  So the bankers had to find a new market for their new counterfeit debt money, and that meant finding new ways of managing the higher risk.  And so they started to make heavy use of the various now infamous packaging mechanisms and derivatives to spread the risk.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

With China pumping out consumer goods on demand, there was no upward pressure on retail prices from this extra credit swilling around, so where did it go to?  Into speculative bidding up of land values in house prices.  A boom that was sustained continuously for seven years or so.  In the process pricing many ordinary working households out of the housing market.

So this crisis was caused, as others have been before it, by a government wanting to save its electoral skin, causing an artificial monetary inflation raising the one asset price that could not be produced in unlimited quantities, leaving many families struggling to afford accommodation and that was as sure as night follows day to lead to an almighty correction sooner or later.  But you don't have to take my word for it - Eddie George explained the whole process its origins in political pressure and its implications to the Treasury Select Committee in February 2007, who promptly either ignored or forgot about it.

And you, Paul, want these people to be responsible for regulating the very industry they so calculatingly manipulate year in year out for their mutually beneficial ends?

And finally, on the rights or wrongs of the bail-outs and financial support for bad and doubtful debts being handed out by the state to the great cost of future taxpayers.  The big mistake was not allowing the recession to happen in 2000-2002.  Stifling it by encouraging demand through lower interested rates meant that the "clear out" of the bad investments made in the preceding boom did not occur properly.  So when we got to this time round there were already two booms' worth of those bad investments to be cleared out this time.  

So what have we done this time?  Yes, we have propped up hundreds of billions of pounds' worth of new bad investments - like people paying more than they can reasonably sustain for their houses - from the most recent boom.  If these are not cleared out, their effects will still likely be felt at the end of the next cycle, because until we get sound inflation proof, political interference free money we will have other cycles, and next time it could be even worse still.  And you have to add to that the fact that they have created so much new money in the process that that could easily kick start a new boom faster than would be desirable.

There were more sophisticated mechanisms available for "rescuing" banks without pumping in so much, if any, public money - like mandating private debt-for equity swaps...after all, shareholders of the banks had also made a very large "bad investment" in the very institutions that were financing everyone else's bad investments and these needed to be cleared out too.  Heck, even I had a clever scheme that I calculated could have taken all the doubtful mortgages then being underwritten by the taxpayer and converting them to capital partnerships in which the banks as mortgagors would receive new, performing, index linked paper whilst the mortgagees would be able to lower their costs for a period.

So, Paul, whether you now want to describe me as an "unthinking libertarian", an "intelligent libertarian" or merely a "mad mutualist", this "libertarian" does not accept your two proposals, and goes further - that if we do not take this once in a century opportunity to reform the money and banking system entirely, rather than tinker around with some new regulation here and there but essentially operating the same corrupt fraud, we will be doomed to repeat this again and again.  And the likelihood is that, as a result of our unwillingness to allow the malinvestments of the last two booms to be cleared out properly each time that they will come more quickly in future and be even more severe.  And in the process we can at last create a proper free market in banking in which the participants' own self-interests will play the regulator since they will have no-one standing by to protect their national currency's reputation, rather than whatever it is commentators have called a "free market" up till now.

But neither the banking oligarchy nor the politicians whose power is immensely increased by their ability to tinker with the money system want us to know this, and certainly don't want to do anything to change it.

 Last week there was a long discussion following the Lib Dem Voice "Saturday debate" slot about "equality of opportunity" versus "equality of outcome".  I don't want to rehash that all here.  I was thoroughly frustrated in trying to get a fellow in the debate, apparently from the remnant Liberal Party, who was promoting some kind of "universal inheritance" policy funded by confiscating more of the inheritance of the wealthy, to understand that real liberalism needs to look at the causes of the disparity they seek to redress, and where it is already created or protected by the state, the preference should be to repudiate whatever interference causes such inequity before compounding one injustice, the accumulation of vast wealth at the expense of others, with another, the confiscation of that and further interference in peoples' economic lives.

Anyway, that's not what this is about.  He kept nagging me about what, as an "anarchist" would I "construct" instead of the state!  Well what a silly question.  I would not "construct" anything, if by that he implies that I might have some utopian blueprint that I would impose on everyone else.  That would not be liberty.  That would be a state.  But what I did say to him was that I was confident that humanity was sufficiently advanced for institutions to "arise" naturally to meet common needs and provide solutions to social problems.

His rejoinder was that the "state has arisen" in the past.  And, by implication, "why on earth do you think it would not arise again? " And I have to admit that that stumped me for a while.

And so thanks to The UK Libertarian blog I found this video by Stefan Molyneux about the origins and ends of states:

And the answer to my soi-dissant "Liberal" correspondent became obvious.  The state only originated in an act of aggression for which there were no structures to prevent or punish.  Why is it that people who oppose the idea of not having to kow-tow to governments feel that we have not developed one iota beyond the end of subsistence farming that prompted the first expropriation by a bigger neighbour?  The entire point of a market-anarchist no state society would be built on institutions arising to uphold two particular, natural and founding laws - of self-ownership and non-aggression.  A state, in such a system, could not commit that original act of aggression, conquest and confiscation with impunity.

So, tonight was the big day of my talk to the "Speak Easy" event of the combined Oxford Libertarian Society, the Oxford University Liberal Democrats and Compass Oxford in which I was supposed to introduce "Mutualism".  A number of people managed to miss my opening pre-emptive self-abasement for not being a "lecturer" up to the usual standard of their invited speakers like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Eric Mack or the many other illustrious names they have hosted.

The ability to take a lecture you have delivered hundreds of times, probably written many papers around and, more importantly, understand your subject in great detail having spent half a lifetime studying it is one to be admired!  By contrast my only real period of doing any "public" speaking was when I was on the city council, or occasionally at party conferences, and I manage to ramble on in just three minutes, let alone a nearly half hour talk.  Still, it was being recorded, so you will soon be able to see for yourselves how awful I must have been, and apologies in advance to anyone I upset with throwaway remarks (such as in particular, that I recall specifically, suggesting that Kevin Carson's books were too long - what I really meant to say was that they were "over my head" and one chapter was enough to keep me trying to "grok" what he is on about for several months - sorry Kevin, if you read this!).

But hopefully having set the ground rules that I was not intending to convey that I was the world's expert on Mutualism or indeed anything I was going to say, and that discussion would be more welcome than searching academic questions that I could not answer, we did have quite a good, and at time vigourous discussion afterwards, even if, as it seemed to me, not much of what either I said or the discussion itself was terribly specific to Mutualism.

Anyway, the reason for writing, and the title of this blog, is to highlight one issue that came up in the discussion.  Whether I had actually made it clear in my talk, I actually doubt, though I had had it in my largely ignored notes, we got onto the subject of monetary reform.  Most of the libertarians in the room including myself excoriate the current system of central banking and fiat debt based money.  For the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists the state protected monopoly of credit creation is one of or probably the single biggest system of privilege which enables the owners of capital to exploit labour and creates enormous barriers to entry.

Yet twice now in two months (the other was on New Year's Eve) I have got into heated arguments with Lib Dems about the need, or as I see it lack of a need, for a state system of currency.  They seem to see it as an absolutely essential function of the state, the only thing that guarantees honesty in trade, in banking (sic!), in knowing what values we assign to things and so on.  Of course one problem with challenging such an accepted social custom as state backed money, is presenting an alternative defenders of the status quo understand, and one of our problems as libertarians is that we don't, naturally, present a single one.  

Many of course prefer some kind of precious metal backed currency - that poses problems in that people often do not understand how as economies grow they can be "valued" if there's only a fixed amount of the glittery stuff against which to value them.  The answer seem to be roughly that rather than prices always rising because of inflation of the money supply, the same amount of precious metal money buys more.  Money, remember, is not wealth.  The goods you buy with it are wealth, and just because you pay less in tokens for something does not mean you are any the less acquiring wealth.

I probably make life even more difficult for myself, because I do not favour an explicitly "specie" based currency system - I prefer a completely open market in currencies.  What today we call banks, but probably other sorts of organisations as well, issue their own currencies which compete in the market for customers to use them and businesses to accept them.  They are, ostensibly, kept "honest" because they have sole responsibility for the value of their issue and the market will react quite quickly in devaluing that of an issuer who, for example, has made irresponsible loans and has therefore less certainty of the value of the assets underpinning its currency.  In such a free market it may well be that specie backed private currencies will become the most favoured.  I suspect personally that this will only be the case for certain types of trade, and that people will soon learn to accept lots of different kinds of money depending on the level of guarantee of its value over the period they anticipate holding it they feel they need.

So, for example, in very local trades, a local currency backed mostly by your own assessment of the trustworthiness of the people within whose network it circulates may be sufficient.  In this era of rapid global communications where we may also form non-geographic communities, perhaps but not necessarily linked together by some other interest (such as is happening in some online gaming systems now), this level of trust may be sufficient.  But for more valuable trades, perhaps ones with distant counterparties of whose providence and trustworthiness you may be uncertain, you may want to use a currency that carries a better intrinsic guarantee, such as a specie backed one from a major issuer.

But the point is that money, the notion of money, is a really flexible thing and the idea of having some commonly agreed upon medium in which transactions are carried out is probably one of the most obvious examples of human society inventing things as the need arose, and definitely not waiting for states to come along to introduce it.  And the current system, that puts in the hands of a very few people the ability to determine if you like who gets how much of it and at what cost, how much of it exists at all, and issues it as debt, instead of as credit, must surely be one of the worst imaginable.

If you think the central banking system is an essential function of the state to protect the weakest against economic predation by the unscrupulous, you just need to look at the sort of people who demanded this system be created in the first place.  Do you really think that the Federal Reserve system in the US was the brainchild of the two richest men then, or proportionately, since with the intention that it benefit us?  Or that anyone other than William Paterson and his business associates were intended to benefit from the founding of the Bank of England?

At this time of financial turmoil, too few people understand the origins and nature of banking.  Or the amount of control that governments actually do have, in spite of all the claims of "deregulation" of the financial sector, in manipulating the money supply, usually, admittedly, covertly through their friends in the private banking system.  Whilst I am not a "gold bug" I do at least believe that the current system of money perpetrates the biggest imaginable fraud against ordinary people and businesses at the hands of the people we allow to be elected to "serve" us.

Those who have inherited the British Liberal tradition should understand this better than most.  Many connected directly or indirectly with that movement over the past hundred or so years in particular have been prominent skeptics about the debt-based fiat money system.  Why do they now seem to cling so tightly to the myth that our money system is something that keeps either the state or the bankers honest and favours us little people?

Those of us who do see through it may offer wildly different alternatives, but surely the mere fact that so many people do seek alternatives suggests that there might, just, be something questionable about it?

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!).