private law society

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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I am a "land taxer".

Some people seem to believe one cannot be both. On the one hand, we find people like Lib Dem Matthew Huntbach, who in the comments to this Lib Dem Voice piece on my opposition to the suggested "Mansion Tax" claims that as a self-described libertarian I am likely to drop the idea of land taxes, however much I may talk about them (much more than him I'd wager but there we are) as soon as the opportunity to enrich what he thinks of as my fellow wealthy libertarians allows. For the record, I don't think that I know any truly wealthy libertarians or anarchists, and indeed I know of not a few who, despite being not very well off at all, subsisting on benefits, campaign actively for the destruction of the welfare statist system that seems to sustain them at the moment. On the other hand, we find lots of other libertarians who resolutely refuse to accept even as libertarian those who would appear to want to "confiscate" the value of private property in land they hold as a near sacred element of libertarian thought.

Now I realize that one blog post by an insignificant in Oxford is not going to settle this argument once and for all. Far better economists and political theorists than I have tried. But it is a personal battle for me, because it was the ideas of Henry George that brought me to libertarianism - for his is a libertarian idea, in direct response to the "land question" raised by so many in the history of liberal and anarchist thought - from Locke, Paine, Proudhon, Spencer, Mill, and the individual anarchists Spooner and Tucker. And it is as I have heard, read and hopefully understood more by the likes of the Austrian school market anarchists that my views on George's "single tax" solution have been challenged. Yet I still hold them.

First, a bald statement: I do not believe there are many libertarians of whatever branch or flavour (and we are truly a Baskin-Robbins ideology on that score, whatever the misinformed Lib Dem detractors believe) who do not appreciate that there is an issue of equitable access to land - that which has historically been called the "land question" by many (including Murray Rothbard [pdf] even as he criticized Henry George's solution to it). Sure some place more emphasis on it than others - but I really believe that any who denies there is any issue has not thought terribly deeply about it. I'd go further - that before the early part of the twentieth century it was a touchstone of most or even all of the emerging theories of libertarianism and anarchism; that the four "great monopolies" - of land, of money, of intellectual property and of government - that the individualist anarchists and mutualists described were commonly held to lie at the root of the inequity caused by the statist systems of privilege which they wanted to smash.

It may be that it is merely a difference of emphasis. George, for example, like Proudhon believed that the land monopoly was the "mother of all monopoly" and that solving that, for Georgists as for Proudhon, will tend to render the other three insignificant. When we sat down to discuss the content of the Lib Dems ALTER's recent book "The Case for a New People's Budget" I wanted it to include pieces on the money system and intellectual property but one of the other editors, a better schooled Georgist than I felt that such was completely unnecessary, since solving the land question would solve these others.

On the other side, the Austrians today believe, perhaps, that the fiat state controlled and cartelized money system is at the root of monopolistic behaviour and that sorting that out will render the others nearly insignificant. To this extent, whilst we acknowledge there are other problems, if all we are saying is that sorting this one or that one out first will resolve those others, we are, by different means, aiming at the same ends, of equitable economic distribution of scarce goods.

Others still acknowledge that there is an historical problem - that most land title ultimately and historically descends from aggression or statist privilege - such as monarchs kicking off serfs to give rewards of land to favoured courtiers, or the state sanctioning enclosures without any recompense to those who required the land to maintain life and limb. And they might suggest, as in the excellent introduction to libertarianism by Morris and Linda Tannehill - "The Market for Liberty" (available here as a free audiobook) suggest that at the advent of a truly libertarian society such ancient titles would be revoked since they would be next to impossible to prove and that everyone would have to stake their claims anew. But to me this resolves the problem as a "one off" and not the ongoing problem that land distribution necessarily is given the propensity for populations to change and land requirements with them.

Since it is as a result of hearing Hans-Herman Hoppe on the "Idea of a Private Law Society" nearly a year ago now at last year's Libertarian Alliance Conference that I have become more interested in "full blown" non-state ideas, it is, perhaps naturally, to the Austrian School and in particular the Mises Institute that I have turned to learn more; devouring several years' worth of podcasts of the Mises University series, but also listening to various contributers to the FEE's Freedom University series. And whilst they do indeed talk very little about land, I can glean some of the following with which I find myself in agreement that relates to the "land question" in their thinking:

• If we did not have the corrupting influence of inherently inflationary and statist fiat money there would be much less speculative froth in the system to be ploughed into land values.

• If we did not have state controlled zoning and planning restrictions, more land would be made available as development was needed and land values elsewhere would tend to fall.

• If we did not have state enforceable land titles, we would have to find another mechanism for protecting our rights of ownership of land which would tend to release land that land owners felt was uneconomic to protect compared with the utility they got out of holding it.

• And, I really do appreciate the arguments in favour of the protection of private property (well, I'd rather, after Proudhon, say "possession" than "property") being the mainstay of a civil society, that without which original appropriation and therefore economic production would be all but impossible. And allied to this I feel a sense of unfairness that someone who has, in the Lockean term, "mixed his labour" with "land" and thus brought it into production in the first place, might find that simply because others have later agglomerated around his far-sighted piece of appropriation, he would be subject to paying rent on it that may price him off it.

But...and you knew there would be one...what I cannot get round is the idea that, whilst anarchists anathematize taxation as confiscation of the legitimate product of labour and therefore an attack on Lockean self-ownership, the rental value of land is really a tax on everyone else who cannot use a particular location, even though they may have a more productive capacity to use a particular piece. All of us pay for the monopolization of locations of better quality in terms of our needs, than what we are then forced to settle for. If we have to live further away from work, we pay in time and travel costs to get past those locations that would serve us better. These values feed into land values. It is not merely that land value increment is unearned by the land-owner, but it costs the rest of us in like measure. And it is a huge burden - in the UK it amounts perhaps to about a third of what is the salaries portion of GDP. This effect, whilst it may be smaller if all the other Austrian remedies above were implemented, would never, in my opinion, disappear.

Austrians, of course, reject the value theories on which this hypothesis of land values is based - the labour, or cost theories of Smith, Ricardo and other Classical Economists. They prefer their subjectivist or utilitarian theories based on the work of the likes of Carl Menger and Eugen von Böem-Bawerk. And, whilst I also do not agree with a wholly unmodified labour theory, I am becoming more and more convinced by the likes of Kevin Carson's critique of Menger's and Böem-Bawerk's criticism of the Classical cost theories in his "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy" - which is just as well since I describe myself as a "mutualist"!

On the other hand, I am with the anarchists in that I do not want a government or quasi-government institutional structure to value and collect such "rent". And so I am attracted to ideas such as those of geo-libertarian Dan Sullivan in the US, of how it could be handled by a voluntarist system of community management companies. And it is on his ideas that I think can be developed a system that fits with both the Georgist aims of collecting land rents and the anarchist aims of not having government structures impose taxes on us. In his essay "Are you a Real Libertarian or a Royal Libertarian" he says, toward the end:

Can't we do this without the state?

There are, in fact, proprietary communities operating on the single tax model. Arden, Delaware, with a population of 4900, has had no local taxes since 1900. The Arden Corporation collects a fair market rent on each land parcel, which is reappraised annually. (They actually collect only about a fourth of the rent to which they are entitled.) From that they not only pay for all the municipal services, but rebate all property taxes levied by the county and school district.

There are excellent reasons for libertarians to prefer the land trust route over the political route. Private communities can be built on explicit contracts (leases) with the citizens, can have internal democratic processes that are vastly superior to electoral democracy, can be far more flexible and free of state intervention, and can be downright profitable (even with trust investors pocketing a mere fraction of the rent). Most of all, dealing with investors is far more pleasant and self-affirming than dealing with politicians.

But what worries me about this approach, taken literally at least, is that we might end up with one agency acting as a local monopoly that becomes a de facto government, just like Nozick says that private protection would combine into one agency with a monopoly in an area (though I am yet to read "Anarchy, State and Utopia" - I bought it and promptly lost my copy! - and so haven't read his arguments, I instinctively disagree with this as an inevitable outcome) and be to all intents and purposes a coercive albeit limited government.

However, I think there is a resolution. Admittedly I have not gone into this too deeply as yet. I have not followed all the economic incentives through the processes. It is based on the idea that in a "private law society" (necessarily the case of course in a no-state anarchist system), defense of one's life and property would be handled by competing insurance, protection and arbitration agencies.

In the absence of a single, state-provided, system of land titles, one's ability to hold onto a piece of land (that is, not to fight for, but legally to defend one's right of occupancy against any other claims) would usually be handled by your insurance and protection agencies. Of course, you could opt out, but then you would have to pay for such physical protection and legal protection against claimants by yourself and on a simple division of labour basis it is likely to be more cost effective joining with others via an insurance and protection agency system. But your premiums would likely rise to be something similar to the market rent value of the location - because it is on that basis that other possible claimants would be likely to be basing their claims on. If your insurance agency were a mutual agency operating with profit policies, they would effectively disburse the equivalent of the statist "citizen's dividend" to the members with with-profit policies.

Here, there could be competition. My insurance agency would make a (probably class action on behalf of all their clients inconvenienced by your monopoly holding of land that costs us money to avoid) claim against yours, yours would pay up and that would go into the profits of my insurance firm for distribution to the with-profits members. And these firms could compete across whole areas of productive land. So, for example, you couldn't have only those in expensive locations in Mayfair joining together and insuring against each other and effectively doing so cheaply because you're hardly likely to lay claim to your neighbour's similar property if it's going to cost you money and you're both pretty happy with your lot and are not costing each other anything by your occupancy of neighbouring sites. My firm may be based in Sutton or Dagenham and have most of its clients there, but will still be likely to be making claims against yours.

Eventually it is likely that these individual claims would not be processed at all, but that reciprocal arrangements between these agencies would spread premiums around amongst them such that the dividends paid to each one's clients would tend to even out, but all the same, the claims mechanism would remain available where there were disputes, just as, for land taxers operating within a state system, there would be tribunals to adjudicate on land value disputes.

UPDATE:  I've thought of perhaps a simpler way of understanding this - it might be looked on as competing land registries paying each other premiums for recognizing and upholding each others' clients' titles.  Does that make sense?

As I say - I have not followed the economic incentives right through such a system. But I think it contains the germ of a possible solution that does not rely on confiscatory quasi-state bodies but does equitably distribute the values created by and paid for in other ways by all who need to use land within an agglomeration area.

Remember please, this is a genuine search for a reconciliation between two sets of ideas with which I generally agree but which in contemporary libertarian discourse seem to be all but irreconcilable. But if you've read this far, I'd love to hear your responses.

Following on from the "social contract debate" started on Charlotte Gore's blog Oranjepan has further developed some of Barry Stocker's critique in the comments on my last piece and on Charlotte's summary with an historical context. I hope I don't misrepresent them - Barry is far better versed in philosophy and philosophers than I and Oranjepan much better versed in historical detail. But both wanted to point out that the "Social Contract" also contains within it not just the "Labour" style definition of being bound to obey whatever the demos decides via the government or state but a set of rules as to what we can do when we don't like the government, when it oversteps the mark.

Now sure, I know full well that Locke, for example, sets out some reasons why and when we can reject the current government and set up new arrangements - when it oversteps its original remit and is no longer acting solely to protect our lives, liberties and property in the main. And I hear what Oranjepan is saying about this let out being a guard against tyranny. But I disagree with both.

Both make the "statist" (I don't mean that pejoratively either of you, but merely technically) assumption that the benefits we get out of being part of this "social contract" must necessarily be delivered by a monopolistic state type entity which needs to be subject to some kind of control (preferably democratically) other than that which the natural operation of truly free markets could provide. Indeed, Oranjepan states explicitly that "to deny the social contract is to pave the way for tyrants". I'd say quite the opposite - to create a territorial monopoly of arbitration and force, a state, paves the way for tyrants.

To turn to Hoppe again, this time from his essay "Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State":

Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. And implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agent's power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.

Based on this definition of a state, it is easy to understand why a desire to control a state might exist. For whoever is a monopolist of final arbitration within a given territory can make laws. And he who can legislate can also tax. Surely, this is an enviable position.

Given such a definition, however, it is quite difficult to understand why anyone would accept such an institution. But this entire paradigm, that there must be some form of over-arching monopolistic and usually beneficent state type entity is inculcated upon us from the earliest age. In most cases we simply believe that the state "does" education, health care, welfare, justice, policing, defense, rubbish collection and a host of other things and accept it without question.

We are told that those who buy private education do so in order to take advantage of the network benefits of their children hob-nobbing with the rich and well connected, but this ignores the fact that most private schools are not filled with the well-connected (though increasingly by the rich or those making tremendous sacrifices because fees have often risen - though there has been a flourishing of more modestly priced private schools more recently). We don't actually stop to think, terribly often, that what these parents are doing is deciding that the state system does not produce the best educational results and that they are paying for a better, or perhaps more personalized, education rather than for the network benefits.

We are told that those who pay for private health care just want to jump the queue or get access to more expensive drugs the local NHS service will not sanction, but don't really stop to think that those queues themselves indicate vast inefficiencies or that those inefficiencies are a function of the system itself rather than an inevitable consequence of the scarcity of health care resources.

But it is on the police and implementation of justice that I want to focus, since that forms the core definition of the state. Even those who think in terms of a "night-watchman" state seem to think these are functions that only a monopoly that can be enforced on everyone can deliver. But it's inconsistent to insist on some national monopoly when, at a level above states for example, we do not insist on a similar thing. There is no world government that has the monopoly of force and final arbitration in disputes between sovereign states. We have all sorts of treaties, voluntary memberships, in specialized areas of trade or resource disputes, of handing over alleged criminals to another jurisdiction and so on; we have bodies such as the UN whose main weapon is more a version of shunning or ostracism such as economic or political sanctions (and this often for people in charge of countries who are unashamedly mass murderers and psychopaths! At a level beneath the state we have arbitration systems enforceable by contracts that do not insist on the state provided justice system as the last line of appeal.

These polycentric arrangements indeed are often better - instead of Mr Justice Jack-of-all-trades, where arbitrators are chosen by, for example, a trade body, they are often chosen for their particular expertise in the type of dispute. Complicated, technical cases are likely to be quicker, less costly and the judgement respected more by both sides if they know there is a level of expertise on the equivalent of the bench.

Just as there are positive reasons for choosing a polycentric justice system, so there are powerful negatives for insisting on a monopolistic state run system. It is hugely wasteful for a start. It rarely actually solves cases, unless someone is caught red handed or there is some extreme public pressure, such as perhaps in a murder case. How many times do they respond to a burglary with the message to call your insurance company, we're unlikely to get anywhere investigating this and you may as well just make a claim. So not only are you not getting value from the system you are paying for through your taxes, but they are increasing your costs elsewhere - in the form of your insurance premium, because you can bet full well that this inability to provide restitution at the hands of the state system is factored into the costs of insurance.

Even if they do catch the perpetrator and put them on trial, the outcome is very unlikely to give you real restitution, and indeed will likely cost you, and the rest of us as tax payers, a small fortune in paying for the punishment, especially if they end up in jail. The fact that the same body that creates new laws and raises taxes also runs the official protection agency means that they can allocate these resources to their own causes and for political ends. So, despite the odd step here are there towards "Neighbourhood Action Groups", they don't really prioritize what the local people who have to rely on their protection services want, but what politicians decide is important that week - victimless drug use for example.

Incidentally, I notice just today a story about a community in Southampton deciding enough is enough of a lack of policing and are clubbing together to pay for their own visible security guards on their streets. And why not - just because thus far private security guards have tended to be associated with businesses doesn't mean they could not be just as effective in a residential neighbourhood. In fact, there are more "private police" of this kind employed than there are publicly financed police.

Given a system of openly competing private insurance firms insuring people against the effects of crime, together with competing arbiters whose salary rests on a reputation for handing down good judgements that people respect and private security firms acting primarily to prevent crime more efficiently than the current state police arrangement all the correct economic incentives are there to prevent crime happening in the first place, to solve crimes when they do happen and to exact restitution from the criminals when they are caught. So much more incentive than the system we have now.

So, if the very core of the state, the ability to legislate - which is the mechanism by which it can grow, arbitrarily, from a night-watchman or minimal state into an ever increasing burden on us all, both controlling us and taxing us is not necessary, why should we need any of these other things that are commonly, unthinkingly assigned to this inefficient and coercive monopoly system to be delivered that way? Why ought we surrender any of our personal sovereignty or basic right of self-ownership to a system that has been shown to be extremely difficult to hold in check even when in theory the mechanisms exist to permit us to do so?

As Hoppe puts it, in dismissing the idea that the state must do some particular function or another - "just because monkeys can ride bikes doesn't mean that only monkeys can ride bikes" - in fact, because of its inherent inefficiencies and its tendency to grow and encompass ever more aspects of life, the axiom ought to be unless you can show me that the state is the only body that could possibly do something, we should assume it ought not to do that thing, because letting it in creates this "social contract" that eats away at our basic freedoms until one day we will not have the means to fight it, whatever the principles in that contract.

There's been a couple of blogs having a little spat about whether libertarians can ethically support having some kind of military in order to intervene in unfree countries in order to assist the oppressed people of those countries gain freedom. We can be all happy in our stateless country, no coercion, no taxes and so on. But we might think ourselves callous, careless, if we didn't worry about how so many other people on the planet are doing under their oppressive regimes.

For some this turns into a justification for a state in order to intervene abroad. It was, ultimately, Tony Blair's final plea to the people of Britain in his speech to the Labour Party Spring Conference as millions of us were marching against the Iraq war on the morning on Feb 15th 2003. So how could we help those oppressed peoples of the world in a stateless non-militarized society? Do we merely rely on our shining example of liberty making all dictators and tyrants quake and fall? It seems unlikely doesn't it?

How about "mercenaries of liberty"? Or even "charity mercenaries"? We have, I am sure, many fine men and women in our current military who joined up thinking they were going to help people around the world. Especially today when so much is spoken of our military's role in peace-keeping and policing in areas of conflict. I'm sure the likes of Col Tim Collins (he of the "We come to liberate not to conquer" speech to his troops before going into Iraq) could be cast in such a mould.

How about armed and militarily trained squads going in, funded by private charity say, alongside the Oxfam delivery in Darfur? Perhaps even developing international "protection agencies" who might advertise their services in Saddam's Iraq offering to protect your Marsh Arab village against Saddam's security forces? Always of course working on the same basis as protection agencies in our stateless private law society - spreading out private law society into another society. No initiation of aggression, but just protection. That protection could even help break down the forces of the oppressor. How much of Saddam's military, who after all largely fled when confronted with well trained troops, acted all their military careers out of fear of the consequences of not obeying orders from a tyrannical bastard?

Perhaps in defending the Marsh Arabs, with as little aggression as possible, some of Saddam's forces might come to understand that if they came under your protection too they would be able to escape from Saddam's predations until the latter is actually left weak enough for people to act against on their own to grab their own liberty. I suppose ironically this is not dissimilar to how the neo-cons at the Project for the New American Century were suggesting getting rid of Saddam without actually going to war with him - by offering protection to the people in the south and the Kurdish north until they had the confidence to act on their own.

Would it work? Is it ethical for a libertarian? How would one ensure that such an armed protection agency capable and willing to take on others' statist oppressors did not become the "might is right" monopolistic wielder of force when back at home? I suppose the market-anarchist line would be that they can only build up those businesses in the public glare if they do as their customers pay them to - if they were charitably funded by people here wanting to help Iraqis, say, that would mean only being able to build up the weaponry to take that role on, and being answerable to arbiters if they breached their contracts of non-aggression here or even in theatre. That they would be inefficient if they spent time and money developing anything more than the best defensive power, skills and weaponry.

Those of us who quite like the idea of anarchism, or to use a word I've heard used more frequently recently and which rather neatly it seems to me gets round the inevitable comparison with bomb throwing revolutionaries, Spanish priest killers or G20 violent-left credentialed academics when unsympathetic folk hear the "hot button" word "anarchy", "voluntarism", are frequently goaded with taunts such as "look at Somalia, look at how great your ideal of anarchism is doing there (not)! Explain that if you think anarchism is such a great alternative.". Or even "why don't you go live in Mogadishu if you think anarchism is so good?"

Well in the past I have really tended to wave away such taunts with something along the lines of "that's not really a great example of the sort of thing we mean, because it only arose out of the complete and unplanned collapse of a previous totalitarian regime with no time, as we would want to have if we were deliberately introducing anarchism here in a developed country, to develop those alternative sorts of institutions that we would probably expect to replace state run public goods like security and rule of law."

Nonetheless it is an example of a country that has been essentially stateless for much of the past two decades, and which continues to be in the headlines now and again, whether over piracy, as recently, asylum seeking or the scene of a shambles of a US attempted invasion popularized by a Hollywood action adventure blockbuster. So I figured it deserves a closer inspection. Also, though, as I grow ever more impatient to sack all the politicians and bureaucrats that currently are making such a destructive hash of ruling us, I think it is actually an interesting experiment to consider how it might pan out here if we were to manage to achieve an unplanned revolutionary change.

The first thing to consider is what expectations we should have when looking at Somalia as such an example. Those who taunt supporters of voluntarism with Somalia seem to expect a miracle and are trying to suggest that voluntarism has obviously failed because people dont't live forever, all drive around in Bentleys, have rosy cheeked children dreaming of graduating from the world class University of Mogadishu into world leading management consultancy firms and have the highest standard of living on the planet. But this is to mistake the claims made for the superiority of voluntarist statelessness. We only claim that in a cost-benefit analysis statelessness would do better for any given group of people than a statist society. If somewhere was more or less a shithole with a government we would want it of course to be less of a shithole without and, one would hope, on a trajectory of development and improvement that would see it advance more quickly and to a higher level than with a government. We would, I think, agree that to expect somwhere to go from armpit of the planet to surpassing the standard of living of some Monaco style playground of the world's wealthiest would be unreasonable. Wouldn't we?

So, can such claims for the superiority of statelessness be demonstrated by the Somali example? Well, before considering that a little history of the place is called for. Let's face it, Somalia was not merely in the "bit of a shithole" category in the years preceeding the period of statelessness: it was one of the worst. Even in a period when there were rivals such as Congo's Mobutu vying for the title of the regime with the worst record on human rights, the era of Uganda's Amin and other such paragons of sound government sharing the continent, that of Siad Barre in Somalia was described by the United Nations as "one of the worst". Barre had run a totalitarian "scientific socialist" regime for his first ten years and then as the western aligned powers tried to butter him up to end his reliance on the Soviet bloc he had slowly introduced a few economic, in the main reforms.

He was still a complete bastard. In a country with a clan system that goes back millennia he was ruthless in persecuting those of clans other than his own. There was massive corruption and lotos of world aid ending up in the hands of his favourites. "Gossip" was a capital offense. Not that you would notice it since his internal militia just killed people they didn't like the look of anyway. He had complete control of the media - with just one state owned newspaper for example. There were hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people as he made frequent land grabs to give to his friends and more refugees over the border in Ethiopia. Of course we didn't hear so much about all this because those who would speak out were terminated before they could.

Apart from the short nine year period between independence from Italy and Britain in 1960, Barre's rule was pretty well the only time this "counry" had existed as a monocentric governed state. These two colonial powers had suppressed traditional clan based polycentric natural and property law based justice systems that had survived successfully operating for eleven hundred years regardless of which Caliph had claimed what bits of the territory.

So, has the ensuing statelessness made things better or worse? And if better, has it been better than what might have been expected had a more controlled, humane, government been in charge? Well, first of all, you probably wouldn't consider the immediate aftermath of Barre's overthrow an "anarchy". It was a state of civil war, in which those warlords who had collaborated in overthrowing Barre fought to get to form a new government. But when that fizzled out in stalemate, despite interventions from the "international community" on one side or another, real statelessness set in. Of course quite a number of the positive studies of the benefits of the statelessness are by people with something to prove about anarchism - libertarian authors who could be said to have a bias toward showing statelessness in its best light. But I'd encourage you to read this one by Austrian economist Peter Leeson - it's only 33 pages of double line spaced text and appears quite methodologically sound to me.

Nonetheless, the World Bank (in a report co-authored by Tim Harford), The Economist, the BBC and National Geographic are amongst the more unbiased positive studies of various aspects of the working of markets to provide many public goods not available under Barre's regime. Indeed the World Bank report states that "Somalia boasts lower rates of extreme poverty and, in some cases, better infrastructure than richer countries in Africa". In telecommunications, electricity generation (at least in the urban areas), air transport and financial services, sophisticated markets, unburdened by regulation (and sometimes "buying in" regulatory services such as with airlines all safety checks are contracted out to the destination countries' civil aviation regimes) have flourished and are amongst the cheapest on the continent. There is a thriving competitive media with a dozen radio and TV stations and many newspapers. Cross border cattle trade has more than doubled - and the insurance contracts required by Kenyan buyers to assure them that cattle are not stolen have lower premiums even than those paid by Kenyan sellers.

Literacy is high, even though schooling has fallen (though before 1991 all schooling was being funded by international aid money which has fallen off rapidly because the "international community" cannot cope with the idea of a stateless entity - there is no government, corrupt or otherwise, to do aid deals with. Nonetheless private primary education is taking off, and there are now three universities where there was only one. Life expectancy is higher than in its relatively "stable government" neighbours, as is access to medical care, even though it is private. Infant mortality and maternal mortality in childbirth are both lower compared with their regional neighbours.

The clan system of extended family support for the destitute has kicked back into life - so although access to safe water is lower than in its neighbours, the poorest do not pay because their clans arrange that for them. The Somali diaspora remits nearly a quarter of the entire GDP through a network of unofficial but quite sophisticated money transfer agencies operating internationally - a little like a Somali version of Western Union. Homicide is, if I understand the measure correctly, down to 4% as a cause of death, compared with 3.6% in parts of the USA.

In fact, the periods between 1992 and today which have seen most turmoil have been those in which the "international community" has taken it upon itself to say "enough is enough, you need a government and we're going to help impose one". When there is a chance of a government, the war-lords start fighting again hoping to get the upper hand. When the energy for the establishment of a government fizzles out they go back to looking after their clan based interests and leaving the others alone. The ancient polycentric "Xeer" system of clan justice, based, as mentioned above, on restitution for property loss and natural law has which was by all accounts a very humane legal system has been usurped for the moment by the allegedly more brutal Shari'a based Islamic Courts Union with its Shari'a emphasis on codified punishments and we do get to hear about summary and brutal justice being doled out on occasion. But when we consider where they have come from under Barre's brutal regime even that is an improvement.

In conclusion then, yes, Somalia is still in the "bit of a shithole" category. Yes, it confuses the hell out of governments and international organizations around the world to have a state without a government and they keep trying to interfere to impose one. It is probably not yet the sort of place you would tend to want to go for an Indian Ocean holiday, let alone to settle in some kind of a global "Free State Project". But on the basis that we claim market anarchy is not a miracle cure, but merely better than government based institutions operating under similar constraints of national natural and human capital, it certainly looks as though the period of statelessness has seen many improvements in Somalia, and improvements that have come more quickly than in comparable neighbouring countries with functioning governments.

They still face enormous challenges of course, not the least of which is the continual hand-wringing of the "international community" desperate to try and help impose some state apparatus from time to time. But maybe, just maybe, if that "international community" can refrain from attempted power-broking and limit themselves to things like trying to persuade the traditional courts system or the Islamic Courts Union to take responsibility for dealing with the likes of the pirate problem - since it would be in their interests to do so if it keeps the heavy hand of government imposed from without away from them - perhaps Somalia can continue to prove that statelessness can bring bigger faster improvement than governments can.