It may come as a shock to some (or many… okay, most) of you to think of your lived experiences in the following way, but there can be no doubt that those of you living in the U.S. lead your lives as de facto anarcho-capitalists.
Here’s what I mean.
You wake up amongst possessions that you consider your private property, and it is your operative assumption that only you and those to whom you give permission may use or borrow those possessions. You wake up in a place where you expect that you have privacy and security, where you have the right to lock the door and do as you please. You can eat an entire bag of almond M&Ms. You can read Rand and Marx and the NYTimes. You can weep and laugh your way through a chick flick and nobody will ever know.
Throughout the day, you peacefully interact with people, from family and friends to coworkers and strangers. And by peacefully, I don’t mean there aren’t loud arguments or even that some of those relationships won’t end badly. By peacefully, I mean that you don’t force people to interact with you against their will (ie, at the point of a gun), and vice versa. Your operative assumption is that all of your interactions are based on voluntary, mutual consent. You assume that if anyone were to attempt to coerce or defraud you, you would be within your rights to resist those attempts and hold them accountable for bad behavior.
Your relationship to your employer or client or whomever you have business dealing is fundamentally voluntary. The operative assumption is that each of you is made wealthier by your engagement, and that either one of you may terminate the relationship, peacefully.
At the grocery market or pizza parlor or consumer electronics store, the operative assumption is that you will select what you want and pay for it, or browse through the store and leave without anything. The operative assumption, the basis for all of trade, is that neither you nor those with whom you are transacting can legitimately be forced to make a trade against your will, and that any trade that does take place will involve mutually agreed upon exchanges of value.
Generally, your days go smoothly because most other people share these operative assumptions. This set of anti-coercive rules are so widely accepted that we consider them social norms. Yes, there are also laws against behaviors that contradict these assumptions, most people behave well not because they fear the consequences of breaking a law but because they are simply not inclined to be aggressive or fraudulent. Most of them are also intuitively sensitive to the adverse impact on their lives, not legally but socially, of tarnishing their reputation by being jerks or bullies or deceivers.
These operative assumptions/social norms are instilled in most of us at an early age. Young children believe they are entitled to everything, but they learn that isn’t the case through repeated experiences to the contrary. They hear, “That doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to him/her. If you want something, you can’t simply take it. You need to ask permission to use things that don’t belong to you. And if you don’t get permission, even after trying to be persuasive, you simply have to move on.” Eventually, when more socially experienced children resist giving back something they’ve borrowed, all they need to hear is, “Does that belong to you?” and most immediately relinquish the item or, on their own initiative, ask for permission to continue using it. Children don’t have money, but they are taught about the the responsibility of reciprocation (ie, that values cannot simply be received without some form of compensation) every time they’re encouraged to say, “Thank you,” in response to a favor or gift or similar receipt. They are properly shamed and humiliated for taking or aggressing or lying: “You wouldn’t want somebody to do that to you, right? How would you feel if somebody did that to you?” Some reply by pointing out that another child their age did something wrong, or even (gulp) that you did something just like what they did. What do you say? “Two wrongs don’t make a right, honey. I was wrong when I did that, too. I won’t do it again and neither should you. Now say you’re sorry.”
Children clearly learn by imitation. Most adults say “please” and “thank you” during exchanges, and they pay for food and other things at the market in a ritualized way (ie, money visibly changing hands), and most don’t ever resort to threatening or initiating force. In popular entertainment, social norms are embedded in tales of adventure or dramas involving justice. Children are always watching and learning social norms.
I’ll say it again. Self-identifying Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Green Party people (Greenions? Greenites?), Independents, Libertarians, and Socialists are, especially long before and soon after elections, good anarchocapitalistic folks.
Consider the way you conduct your personal and professional lives. You’re generally not concerned with running anyone else’s life; on the other hand, you insist on running your own. You choose to rely upon and honor mutual consent, to resist coercion and interference with your peaceful pursuits, to respect the private property and privacy rights of others and expect the same in return, and to honor the capitalist code of voluntarily exchanging value for value.
You want four fully-stocked varieties of oranges and imported cheese around the block. You want the movie today and the book tomorrow and a trip to the beach next Summer and Bounty instead of the alternatives. You want entrepreneurial competition, the chance to get ahead in your career as your expertise grows. You want a vibrant marketplace, the chance to enhance or change your wealth-generating activities. Unfettered spontaneous, individual human action produces the dynamic setting for an opportunity-rich, highly individualized life. Especially if you were born in the U.S., one of your operative assumptions is that this will always be the case.
You’re all anarcho-capitalistic insofar as you prefer to lead a life on your own terms, peacefully and uninterfered with.
In light of that, there’s hope that you will find within yourselves reasons to halt your support for the coercive and fraudulent tactics that the vast majority of professional politicians undertake. There’s hope that you’ll grasp that your distance from the effects of your votes is never an excuse for endorsing the initiation of force (“How would you feel if somebody did that to you?”) to re-allocate wealth (“Does that belong to you?”).
When you search your heart for the reasons you do not personally take the time and initiative to coerce your family, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens, do you find any moral basis for voting to empower a surrogate to do that very thing? Behavior you would never accept in our personal life, you not only tolerate but even endorse among professional politicians. Why? The alchemy of yours and their good intentions?
Would you care about the intentions of somebody who bullied and stole from you? Do the intentions of a child or adult matter when they take what doesn’t belong to them and refuse to give it back?
Professional politicians butter their bread by breaking the backs of the social norms embedded in our peaceful approach to life. They cherish conflicts of interest, because such conflicts produce enthusiastic, highly motivated donors. Political careers are made by artfully choosing sides in manufactured conflicts where some parties have much to gain at the involuntary expense of others.
Politicians’ promises to you and me about hope and change you can believe in? Their claims that massive wealth transfers from you to corporations are critical for the salvation of the economy? Their assertions that transferring wealth from the private sector to the government and then back to the market is the first and best expression of compassion? These promises, claims, and assertions are the rationalizations of cult leaders who have placed their bets based on your apathy regarding the social norms they violate with impunity. Why do you comply with their devastating behavior when two wrongs cannot possibly make anything right?
Dear fellow anarcho-capitalistic citizens, you cannot for long love freedom in between your votes to empower those who despise it. How can you choose the side of professional politicians against your own daily libertyloving assumptions and expectations?
