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kramlabs · 11 months ago

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Hans-Hermann Hoppe vs Walter Block* on Hamas

*def sad to see Walter Block take the position he did

Hoppe:

Breaking up with a person you have known for more than thirty years, with whom you have participated in countless conferences and co-authored a couple of articles, even if only in the somewhat distant past, is nothing done lightly. It is even harder, if one shares with this person a common standing as a public intellectual and both our names are mentioned frequently in one breath as prominent students of the same teacher, Murray N. Rothbard, and as leading intellectual lights of the modern libertarian movement founded by Rothbard.

But then: in this position, it becomes near-imperative to always stay on guard and take notice if a person closely associated with your own name goes astray and falls into serious error, and you may be compelled to publicly distance and dis-associate yourself from this person in order to protect your own personal and intellectual reputation (along with Rothbard’s and that of the entire libertarian intellectual edifice). Such is the case with Walter Block.

Block, to his credit, has published countless articles that pass muster by libertarian standards and there are likely many more to come, he has effusively praised Rothbard over and over again and he likes to refer to himself as the “sweet and kind Walter.” However, he has also published materials that clearly disqualify him as a libertarian and Rothbardian and that reveal him instead as an unhinged collectivist taken in by genocidal impulses, very much like Rand and the Randians recently taken to task by Fernando Chiocca, rather than a sweet and kind person.

I will offer three exhibits to substantiate this claim.

Exhibit one: Block’s writings (together with Alan Futerman and Rafi Faber) on the classical liberal respectively libertarian case for Israel, endorsed (surprise, surprise!) by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The cornerstone of the libertarian doctrine is the idea and institution of private property. Property, whether in land or anything else, is lawfully (and justly) acquired either by means of original appropriation of previously unowned resources (homesteading) or else by means of voluntary property transfer from a prior to some later owner. All property is always and invariably the property of some specific, identifiable individual(s), and all property transfers and exchanges take place between specified individuals and concern specified, identifiable objects. In reverse: all claims to property by a person who had neither homesteaded or previously produced such property, nor acquired it through voluntary transfer from some previous owner are unlawful (unjust).

For the potential problem of restitution or compensation this implies: In every case of conflicting property claims brought to trial for judgment, the presumption is always in favor of the current possessor of the resource under consideration, and the burden of a proof-to-the-contrary is always on the opponent of the current state of affairs and current possessions. The opponent must demonstrate that he, contrary to prima facie appearance, has a better claim because he has an older title to some specified piece of property than its current owner and whose ownership is hence unlawful. If and only if an opponent can successfully demonstrate this must the questionable possession be restored as property to him. On the other hand, if the opponent fails to make this case matters stay the way they are.

It is not in question that a considerable number of cases exists, where lawful compensation or restitution is owed: where person A can demonstrate that he is the lawful owner of some specified piece of property currently in possession and wrongfully claimed as his own by another person B. It is also not in question that there exist some cases, in which a current property owner can trace back the title to some of his present holdings for many generations. But it should also be obvious that for most people and most present holdings any such back-tracing from present to past ends up lost in history very quickly and, in any case, gets increasingly more difficult and murky with time, leaving little if any room for any present-day reparation-demands for “ancient” crimes.

How about 2000 year old crimes? Is there any one living person to be found today, who can claim lawful ownership of some specific piece of property (land, jewelry) that is and has been for a couple of thousand years in the possession of others, by demonstrating his own prior claim to these possessions through proof of an uninterrupted chain of property title transfers going from him and today back all the way to some specific ancestor living at Biblical times and unlawfully victimized at that time? This is not inconceivable, of course, but I very much doubt that any such case can be found. I would want to see it, before I believe it.

And yet, Block et. al., in their attempt of presenting the liberal respectively libertarian case for Israel, maintain that they can justify the claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine based on their status as “heirs” of Jews having lived two millennia ago in the region then called Judea. Not surprisingly, however, except for the single and in itself highly questionable case of the Kohanim (Jews of priestly descent) and their specific connection to the Temple Mount, they do not provide a shred of evidence how in the world any one specific present-day Jew, through a time-span of more than two thousand years, can be connected to any one specific ancient Jew and be established as legitimate heir of some specific piece of property stolen or otherwise taken from him two thousand years ago.

The claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine, then, can only be made if you abandon the methodological individualism underlying and characteristic of all libertarian thought: the notion of individual personhood, of private property, private product and accomplishment, private crime and private guilt. Instead, you must adopt some form of collectivism that allows for such notions as group or tribal property and property rights, collective responsibility and collective guilt.

This turn from an individualistic to a collectivistic perspective is on clear display in Block’s et. al. summary conclusion (p.537):

“Rothbard supports homesteading as the legitimate means of ownership (the first homesteader gets the land, not any subsequent one)….Libertarians deduce from this fact that stolen property must be returned to its original owners, or their heirs. This is the case for reparations. Well, the Romans stole the land from the Jews around two millennia ago; the Jews never gave this land to the Arabs or anyone else. Thus according to libertarian theory it should be returned to the Jews.”

Bingo. But homesteading is done by some specific Ben or Nate, not by “the Jews,” and likewise reparations for crimes committed against Ben or Nate are owed to some specific David or Moshe as their heir, not to “the Jews,” and they concern specific pieces of property, not all of “Israel.” Unable to find any present David or Moshe that can be identified as ancient Ben’s or Nate’s heir to some specified piece of property, however, all reparation claims directed against any current owner are without any base.

Another property theory is needed to still make the case for a Jewish homeland. And Block and his coauthors offer such a theory: property rights and reparation claims can allegedly also be justified by genetic and cultural similarity. Ancient Jews and present-day Jews are genetically and culturally related and hence present-day Jews are entitled to the property stolen from ancient Jews; and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs immediately before and in the aftermath of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, then, is not a crime but simply the re-possession of what legitimately belongs and has belonged for two millennia to the Jews.

Yet this theory is not only obviously incompatible with libertarianism. It is also plain absurd.

Just consider: Jews lived for hundreds of years in Egypt and when they finally reached their “promised land” this was by no means empty. According to Deuteronomy and Joshua quite a bit of killing, pillaging and raping had to be done before taking over the land. Ancient Jews were not just homesteaders, they were also perpetrators, and there had been already plenty of ethnic mixing with other people of other tribes, with Egyptians, Greeks and all sorts of other people around the Mediterranean, long before the Romans arrived and took over, and this genetic admixture, later also with Arabs, continued up to the present day. Any genetic linking of present-day Jews to ancient Jews, then, becomes an impossible task. There are contemporary Jews that show no genetic traces to ancient Jews, and there are plenty of Gentiles who do show such traces; and in any case, the genetic similarities to be found between the ancient and the present Jews will be one of countless variations and degrees. How to decide then who of the contemporaries is entitled to what part or portion of the holy land? (Interestingly, it appears that the closest genetic similarity to ancient Jews could be found among indigenous Christian Palestinians.)

Moreover: what if this fanciful new theory of property acquisition and inheritance via genetic similarity were generalized to all tribes and ethnicities? There are countless cases of expropriations and expulsions of one group or tribe by another in human history, of victims and of perpetrators, involving non-Jews as well as latter day Jews. How about every group of present descendants of some historical victim group demanding the restitution of assets currently held by the members of another group or tribe on account of the fact that such assets had been stolen from one’s ethnic forebears some time way back in history (whether by the group of present owners or any other group)? The result would be legal chaos, interminable strife, conflict and war.

If this collectivistic nonsense is not enough to disqualify Block as a libertarian, the following exhibit, demonstrating its monstrous consequences, should remove even the slightest remaining doubt that he is anything but a libertarian, a Rothbardian or a sweet and nice person.

Exhibit two: This is a recent editorial by Block (again co-authored with Futerman), originally most prominently published (although behind a paywall) by one of the most establishment papers, the WSJ, (what a surprise!) and subsequently easily accessibly reprinted on Block’s own newsletter on October 12, 2023. It is titled “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas. Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil, depraved culture that resides next to it,” and as the title already indicates, it is this screed of his, then, that reveals Block as an unhinged, bloodthirsty monster, rather than a libertarian committed to the non-aggression-principle as the second, complementary foundational pillar of the libertarian doctrine.

Subject here are the events of October 7th, 2023, its aftermath and consequences. On that day, members of the so-called Hamas, running the Gaza strip, attacked, maimed, killed and kidnapped a large number of Israeli soldiers and civilians. (As is to be expected in any type of war, both warring parties are presenting widely different stories concerning the actual events and numbers. What has become clear so far is only that the number of casualties runs in the several hundreds to low one thousands, and that a considerable portion of such casualties were actually the result of “friendly fire,” per helicopter, by the Israeli Defense Forces.)

What is a libertarian supposed to make of this event? First, he must recognize that both, Hamas and the State of Israel, are gangs financed and funded not by voluntary membership contributions but by extortion, taxation, confiscation and expropriation. Hamas does so in Gaza, with the people living in Gaza, and the State of Israel does it with the people living in Israel as well as the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Gaza is a tiny, poor and densely populated territory, and Hamas is accordingly a small, low-budget gang, with only some rag-tag army and little and mostly low-grade weaponry. Israel is a much larger, significantly more prosperous and less densely populated territory, and the State of Israel, subsidized long-lastingly and heavily by the world’s mightiest and wealthiest of all gangs, the USA, is a big and high-budget gang, with some large, well-trained professional army, equipped with the most sophisticated and destructive weaponry available, including atomic bombs.

The older one of these two fighting gangs is the State of Israel, itself established only recently, in 1948, by mostly European Jews of Zionist persuasion, and by means of intimidation, terrorism, war and conquest directed against the then-present, and for many centuries before, mostly Arab residents of the region of Palestine. And it was also by means of intimidation, terrorism, war and conquest, then, that the explicitly Jewish State of Israel was successively expanded to its present size. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were uprooted, expropriated and expelled from their homes and turned into refugees as a result; and large numbers of these victims or their direct heirs are still in possession of valid title to land or other properties now in possession of the State of Israel (the Israeli Land Authority) and its Jewish citizens. (At best, only a meager 7 percent of the present Israeli territory was regularly acquired or purchased by Jews before 1948, and could thus be claimed as legitimate Jewish property.)

Hamas, on the other hand, is one of several Arab resistance movements, parties and gangs formed in reaction to the Israeli-Jewish take-over and occupation of Palestine. Founded originally in 1987, and since 2006 in control of the Gaza Strip, which was and still is subject to a rigorous land, air and sea blockade by Israel and hence frequently referred to by knowledgeable observers as an open-air concentration camp, Hamas is committed to the reconquest of the lost territories, including by means of violence and acts of terror such as on October 7th. Explicitly directed not against Jews qua Jews but specifically against Zionists, it actually received funding also from Israel in its beginnings, in order to build it up as a counterweight to the growing influence of the larger, more moderate and better funded secular underground resistance group Fatah, and its PLO leadership in exile in Tunisia. As Fatah and the PLO were put in charge of some parts of the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Peace Process that started in 1993, the more militant and islamic fundamentalist Hamas’ relative intransigence became a useful tool for the increasingly influential extremist Israeli factions which sought to derail the peace process, and succeeded in doing so by increasing their building of Jewish settlements that split up the West Bank into non-contiguous open-air prisons controlled by Israel, rendering a Palestinian state essentially impossible. (There has been speculation as to the motive for this seemingly strange Israeli decision of lending support to Hamas. Quite plausibly: because events such as those of October 7th, can and are indeed currently being used by Israel as a dramatic proof and public demonstration of its long-held contention that there can never be any two-State solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and Israel, for the sake of regional peace, must be still further expanded and restored as one single State to its alleged original, biblical size.)

In any case, then, before this background, how is a libertarian to react and evaluate the 10/7 events? First off, he would want to wish the pox on the leadership of both gangs and on all gang-leaders of foreign states that have lent and continue to lend support to either one of the two warring gangs with funds stolen from their own subject population. As well, he would acknowledge that the Hamas attack on Israel was no more “totally unprovoked” than the Russian attack a little while ago on the Ukraine. The attack on Israel was definitely provoked by the conduct of its own political leadership, much like the Russian attack on the Ukraine had been provoked by the leadership of the Ukraine. And he would not fail to note also that in both cases, that of Israel as well as that of the Ukraine, their provocations had been encouraged, backed up and supported big time by the predominantly Jewish neo-con gang-leadership in charge of the US government.

Apart from this, there is little a libertarian can do except raise his voice in favor of peace, talks, negotiations and diplomacy. The Hamas leadership should be accused for having brought about through its terrorist actions the danger of some massive retaliation by a militarily far superior and more powerful enemy gang, the State of Israel. And the Israeli leadership should be blamed for having failed blatantly in protecting its own population owing to its apparently severely deficient surveillance agencies. The leadership of both gangs should be encouraged – and indeed pressured through public opinion – to agree to an immediate truce, and at once negotiations concerning the return of the hostages held by Hamas should be started. And as for the identification, capture and punishment of the various individual perpetrators and their superior commanders (including incidentally also those responsible for the Israeli victims of “friendly fire”), this should be left to regular police-work, to detectives, headhunters and possibly also assassins.

What must be avoided, however, in any case and at all costs, is an escalation of the armed conflict through a massive retaliatory strike by the Israeli military against the Hamas housing and hiding out in Gaza. This even more so, because Israel, with some 10 million inhabitants, incuding a minority of some 2 million Arabs, is surrounded exclusively by some less-than-friendly or even openly hostile neighboring states with a total population counting in the hundreds of millions, and any escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hamas may well expand and degenerate into an all-out war, engulfing the entire region of the Near- and Middle-East.

But this is precisely what Block et.al. are demanding. Based on their collectivistic theory of inheritance presented in exhibit one and the alleged “historical right” of “the Jews” to a homeland in Palestine derived from this theory, Block, in response to the events of October 7th, advocates an all-out attack by Israel on the Hamas hiding out in Gaza (and while we do not know if Netanyahu has read Block’s piece in the WSJ, Israel, under his leadership, has exactly done what Block has been asking for).

Leaving Block’s sketchy, characteristically one-sided remarks on the history of modern Israel and the region aside, which could have come directly from the Israeli ministry of propaganda, and that show himself completely oblivious to the genocidal impulses openly expressed by several leading members of the mighty Israeli military and government, all the while making much hey out of the reciprocal sentiments on the side of the (comparatively speaking) almost powerless Hamas leadership, this, in this own words, are Block’s demands (with my italicized comments interspersed in parentheses):

“The West needs to understand that to defend human life and dignity, it isn’t enough to claim to side with Israel. It needs to understand what this means: total, unrestricted support. (Does such support also include taxes forcibly taken by the various gangleaders in charge of Western States from their own population?) That is nothing less than allowing this beleaguered country to defend itself fully. To recognize that Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were. (Does ‘Nazis’ refer to all Germans living in Germany at the time, including all non-Nazis, Nazi-opponents, and all German babies and children; and does the method of their destruction include also the carpet bombing of entire cities such as Dresden, filled with mostly innocent civilians?) Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil residing next to it. (How about Israeli Jews opposed to war? Silence them, too, whatever it takes?) And, more important, that once it begins to proceed in that direction, it won’t be demonized for defending that which is the core of Western civilization (does this core also include the sort of apartheid practiced in Israel?) and which its enemies hate the most: the love of everyone’s right to human life, dignity and happiness.”

“In other words, it needs to support a complete, total and decisive Israeli victory. If this implies an overwhelming, unprecedented use of military force, so be it. Hamas is and will be responsible for any civilian casualties. Cause and effect. They created their own destruction, and its consequences.” (So, there is no need whatsoever to distinguish between members of Hamas and inhabitants of Gaza generally? They all, including all babies and children, are indiscriminately guilty, part of a depraved culture and a collective evil that must be rooted out once and for all? How about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza, then, as the US did about eighty years ago on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as collective punishment for the crimes committed by the Japanese government-gang?)

“Mere victory isn’t enough. Israel has won every war it ever fought. This time, the triumph must be so thorough and conclusive that there will never be any other war for this country. (Haven’t we heard this before: the war to end all wars?!) Israel has a moral right to finish the job, and the West has a moral duty to support it. Let Israel do whatever it must to finish this war in the fastest way possible, with the minimum civilian and military casualties on its side. (How considerate, and totally meaningless, even shameful, after everything said to the contrary before about the irrelevance of civilian casualties!) The consequences of this lie on the group that initiated the causal sequence – the one that must be completely destroyed, Hamas.”

Whatever these outpourings of Block’s are, they have nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism. In fact, to advocate the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents is the total and complete negation of libertarianism and the non-aggression principle. The Murray Rothbard I knew would have immediately called them out as unhinged, monstrous, unconscionable and sickening and publicly ridiculed, denounced, “unfriended” and excommunicated Block as a Rothbardian.

Indeed, unforgivably, with his WSJ piece Block has made a contribution to the horrors actually following the events of October 7th and still unfolding: the near complete destruction of Gaza and its reduction to little more than some huge pile of rubble and a vast field of ruins, the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians by the Israeli military, and the continuous widening of the armed conflict, including by now also the Lebanon and Yemen, and of the Israeli leadership itching (egged on in this endeavor by its neo-con compatriots in the US) to further include as a target for destruction also the Iran, as Israel’s alleged deadly arch-enemy.

Incidentally, Block’s supplementary reason given for his categorical “We Must All Stand with Israel” position (Israeli government leadership and all), is also faulty and implies a betrayal of the non-aggression principle. Essentially, it boils down to this: The Jews in Israel have made more and better use of the territory under their control than the Arabs made or are currently making with the territories controlled by them; and hence, the Jews have a better claim to some territory-in-dispute than the Arabs do. This reasoning is actually quite popular. However, even if the first part of this statement is accepted as true, the second part does not follow from it. Otherwise, every man-of-proven-success would be permitted to take the property of any long-proven-loser, which can hardly be reconciled with the libertarian non-aggression principle. Even “losers” have a right to life, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

If that is not already more than enough to forever disqualify and discredit Block as a libertarian, he manages to top it off in some short final exhibit that reveals him as a man without sense of measure and proportion.

Exhibit three: This concerns Block’s reply to a short piece by Kevin Duffy, contrasting a passage taken from Rothbard’s For A New Liberty: A Libertarian Manifesto with a passage from the just quoted screed of Block’s in the WSJ, and concluding that both are obviously incompatible and impossible to reconcile. Block’s response can be found here. Remarkably, in his reply, he does not even try to provide further reason for his advocacy of total, unrestricted war (not surprisingly, as that would mean trying to defend what is absolutely, truly and genuinely indefensible!). Instead, he evades the direct challenge and then quickly digresses into some entirely different and unrelated subject matter.

Libertarians are not pacifists, and indeed, Rothbard, as Block excusingly notes, was not opposed to all war. But conspicuously, Block then fails to say that the wars Rothbard considered possibly or potentially justified had nothing whatsoever in common with the sort of war actually proposed by him. What Rothbard had in mind was defensive violence used by secessionist movements against some central occupying powers trying to prevent them by means of war from leaving, i.e., something obviously a world apart from the total war advocated by Block.

Yet in stating that Rothbard “does not at all oppose war, period,” Block tries to create the deceptive impression that his deviation from Rothbard, then, is merely a minor one, only a matter of degree. Various deviations from Rothbard, he then continues, have been suggested or proposed before by other authors. And he cites (and links) to this effect several contributions of his own, of Joseph Salerno, of Peter Klein and also of myself, and notes that none of these has led to the exclusion of anyone of them as Austro-libertarians, nor would Rothbard himself have excluded them as such on account of these writings. Indeed, Rothbard embraced some of these deviations (such as mine, for instance), and he may well have seriously considered the others. Such then, Block claims, should also be the appropriate reaction to his deviationist position on the ”war question,” and such also, he believes, would have been Rothbard’s personal reaction upon reading his WSJ piece.

Grotesque. If anything, this assessment of Block’s only indicates that he has lost any sense of measure and proportion. None of the other “deviationist” writings mentioned by him in comparison to and as an excuse and justification for his own deviationist position on the war question is, or can be interpreted by any stretch of the imagination as a break with or renunciation of the fundamental principles of the Austro-libertarian intellectual edifice. But his call for total and unrestricted war and the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians is actually the complete and uninhibited rejection and renunciation of the non-aggression principle that constitutes one of the very cornerstones of the Rothbardian system. To believe that Rothbard would have given serious consideration to his WSJ piece is simply ridiculous and only indicates that Block’s understanding of Rothbard is not nearly as good as he himself fancies it to be. The Rothbard I knew would have denounced the piece in no uncertain terms as monstrous and considered it an unforgivable aberration and disgrace.

Author:

Contact Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher. He is the founder and president of The Property and Freedom Society.

#Walter Block #murray rothbard #Hans-Hermann Hoppe #gaza

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dailyanarchistposts · 7 months ago

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F.7.2 Is government compatible with anarchism?

Of course not, but ironically this is the conclusion arrived at by Hart’s analyst of the British “voluntaryists,” particularly Auberon Herbert. Voluntaryism was a fringe part of the right-wing individualist movement inspired by Herbert Spencer, a leading spokesman for free market capitalism in the later half of the nineteenth century. Like Hart, leading “anarcho”-capitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe believes that Herbert “develop[ed] the Spencerian idea of equal freedom to its logically consistent anarcho-capitalist end.” [Anarcho-Capitalism: An Annotated Bibliography]

Yet, as with Molinari, there is a problem with presenting this ideology as anarchist, namely that its leading light, Herbert, explicitly rejected the label “anarchist” and called for both a government and a democratic state. Thus, apparently, both state and government are “logically consistent” with “anarcho”-capitalism and vice versa!

Herbert was clearly aware of individualist anarchism and distanced himself from it. He argued that such a system would be “pandemonium.” He thought that we should “not direct our attacks — as the anarchists do — against all government , against government in itself” but “only against the overgrown, the exaggerated, the insolent, unreasonable and indefensible forms of government, which are found everywhere today.” Government should be “strictly limited to its legitimate duties in defence of self-ownership and individual rights.” He stressed that “we are governmentalists … formally constituted by the nation, employing in this matter of force the majority method.” Moreover, Herbert knew of, and rejected, individualist anarchism, considering it to be “founded on a fatal mistake.” [Essay X: The Principles Of Voluntaryism And Free Life] He repeated this argument in other words, stating that anarchy was a “contradiction,” and that the Voluntaryists “reject the anarchist creed.” He was clear that they “believe in a national government, voluntary supported … and only entrusted with force for protection of person and property.” He called his system of a national government funded by non-coerced contributions “the Voluntary State.” [“A Voluntaryist Appeal”, Herbert Spencer and the Limits of the State, Michael W. Taylor (ed.), p. 239 and p. 228] As such, claims that Herbert was an anarchist cannot be justified.

Hart is aware of this slight problem, quoting Herbert’s claim that he aimed for “regularly constituted government, generally accepted by all citizens for the protection of the individual.” [quoted by Hart, Op. Cit., p. 86] Like Molinari, Herbert was aware that anarchism was a form of socialism and that the political aims could not be artificially separated from its economic and social aims. As such, he was right not to call his ideas anarchism as it would result in confusion (particularly as anarchism was a much larger movement than his). As Hart acknowledges, “Herbert faced the same problems that Molinari had with labelling his philosophy. Like Molinari, he rejected the term ‘anarchism,’ which he associated with the socialism of Proudhon and .. . terrorism.” While “quite tolerant” of individualist anarchism, he thought they “were mistaken in their rejections of ‘government.’” However, Hart knows better than Herbert about his own ideas, arguing that his ideology “is in fact a new form of anarchism, since the most important aspect of the modern state, the monopoly of the use of force in a given area, is rejected in no uncertain terms by both men.” [Op. Cit., p. 86] He does mention that Benjamin Tucker called Herbert a “true anarchist in everything but name,” but Tucker denied that Kropotkin was an anarchist suggesting that he was hardly a reliable guide. [quoted by Hart, Op. Cit., p. 87] As it stands, it seems that Tucker (unlike other anarchists) was mistaken in his evaluation of Herbert’s politics.

While there were similarities between Herbert’s position and individualist anarchism, “the gulf” between them “in other respects was unbridgeable” notes historian Matthew Thomas. “The primary concern of the individualists was with the preservation of existing property relations and the maintenance of some form of organisation to protect these relations… Such a vestigial government was obviously incompatible with the individualist anarchist desire to abolish the state. The anarchists also demanded sweeping changes in the structure of property relations through the destruction of the land and currency monopolies. This they argued, would create equal opportunities for all. The individualists however rejected this and sought to defend the vested interests of the property-owning classes. The implications of such differences prevented any real alliance.” [Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in Britain, 1880–1914, p. 20] Anarchist William R. McKercher, in his analysis of the libertarian (socialist) movement of late 19th century Britain, concludes (rightly) that Herbert “was often mistakenly taken as an anarchist” but “a reading of Herbert’s work will show that he was not an anarchist.” [Freedom and Authority, p. 199fn and p. 73fn] The leading British social anarchist journal of the time noted that the “Auberon Herbertites in England are sometimes called Anarchists by outsiders, but they are willing to compromise with the inequity of government to maintain private property.” [Freedom, Vol. II, No. 17, 1888]

Some non-anarchists did call Herbert an anarchist. For example, J. A. Hobson, a left-wing liberal, wrote a critique of Herbert’s politics called “A Rich Man’s Anarchism.” Hobson argued that Herbert’s support for exclusive private property would result in the poor being enslaved to the rich. Herbert, “by allowing first comers to monopolise without restriction the best natural supplies” would allow them “to thwart and restrict the similar freedom of those who come after.” Hobson gave the “extreme instance” of an island “the whole of which is annexed by a few individuals, who use the rights of exclusive property and transmission … to establish primogeniture.” In such a situation, the bulk of the population would be denied the right to exercise their faculties or to enjoy the fruits of their labour, which Herbert claimed to be the inalienable rights of all. Hobson concluded: “It is thus that the ‘freedom’ of a few (in Herbert’s sense) involves the ‘slavery’ of the many.” [quoted by M. W. Taylor, Men Versus the State, pp. 248–9] M. W. Taylor notes that “of all the points Hobson raised … this argument was his most effective, and Herbert was unable to provide a satisfactory response.” [Op. Cit., p. 249]

The ironic thing is that Hobson’s critique simply echoed the anarchist one and, moreover, simply repeated Proudhon’s arguments in What is Property?. As such, from an anarchist perspective, Herbert’s inability to give a reply was unsurprising given the power of Proudhon’s libertarian critique of private property. In fact, Proudhon used a similar argument to Hobson’s, presenting “a colony … in a wild district” rather than an island. His argument and conclusions are the same, though, with a small minority becoming “proprietors of the whole district” and the rest “dispossessed” and “compelled to sell their birthright.” He concluded by saying ”[i]n this century of bourgeois morality … the moral sense is so debased that I should not be at all surprised if I were asked, by many a worthy proprietor, what I see in this that is unjust and illegitimate? Debased creature! galvanised corpse! how can I expect to convince you, if you cannot tell robbery when I show it to you?” [What is Property?, pp. 125–7] Which shows how far Herbert’s position was from genuine anarchism — and how far “anarcho”-capitalism is.

So, economically, Herbert was not an anarchist, arguing that the state should protect Lockean property rights. Of course, Hart may argue that these economic differences are not relevant to the issue of Herbert’s anarchism but that is simply to repeat the claim that anarchism is solely concerned with government, a claim which is hard to support. This position cannot be maintained, particularly given that both Herbert and Molinari defended the right of capitalists and landlords to force their employees and tenants to follow their orders. Their “governments” existed to defend the capitalist from rebellious workers, to break unions, strikes and occupations. In other words, they were a monopoly of the use of force in a given area to enforce the monopoly of power in a given area (namely, the wishes of the property owner). While they may have argued that this was “defence of liberty,” in reality it is defence of power and authority.

What about if we just look at the political aspects of his ideas? Did Herbert actually advocate anarchism? No, far from it. He clearly demanded a minimal state based on voluntary taxation. The state would not use force of any kind, “except for purposes of restraining force.” He argued that in his system, while “the state should compel no services and exact no payments by force,” it “should be free to conduct many useful undertakings … in competition with all voluntary agencies … in dependence on voluntary payments.” [Herbert, Essay X: The Principles Of Voluntaryism And Free Life] As such, “the state” would remain and unless he is using the term “state” in some highly unusual way, it is clear that he means a system where individuals live under a single elected government as their common law maker, judge and defender within a given territory.

This becomes clearer once we look at how the state would be organised. In his essay “A Politician in Sight of Haven,” Herbert does discuss the franchise, stating it would be limited to those who paid a voluntary “income tax” and anyone “paying it would have the right to vote; those who did not pay it would be — as is just — without the franchise. There would be no other tax.” The law would be strictly limited, of course, and the “government … must confine itself simply to the defence of life and property, whether as regards internal or external defence.” In other words, Herbert was a minimal statist, with his government elected by a majority of those who choose to pay their income tax and funded by that (and by any other voluntary taxes they decided to pay). Whether individuals and companies could hire their own private police in such a regime is irrelevant in determining whether it is an anarchy.

This can be best seen by comparing Herbert with Ayn Rand. No one would ever claim Rand was an anarchist, yet her ideas were extremely similar to Herbert’s. Like Herbert, Rand supported laissez-faire capitalism and was against the “initiation of force.” Like Herbert, she extended this principle to favour a government funded by voluntary means [“Government Financing in a Free Society,” The Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 116–20] Moreover, like Herbert, she explicitly denied being an anarchist and, again like Herbert, thought the idea of competing defence agencies (“governments”) would result in chaos. The similarities with Herbert are clear, yet no “anarcho”-capitalist would claim that Rand was an anarchist, yet some do claim that Herbert was.

This position is, of course, deeply illogical and flows from the non-anarchist nature of “anarcho”-capitalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Rothbard discusses the ideas of the “voluntaryists” he fails to address the key issue of who determines the laws being enforced in society. For Rothbard, the key issue was who is enforcing the law, not where that law comes from (as long, of course, as it is a law code he approved of). The implications of this is significant, as it implies that “anarchism” need not be opposed to either the state nor government! This can be clearly seen from Rothbard’s analysis of Herbert’s voluntary taxation position.

Rothbard, correctly, notes that Herbert advocated voluntary taxation as the means of funding a state whose basic role was to enforce Lockean property rights. The key point of his critique was not who determines the law but who enforces it. For Rothbard, it should be privatised police and courts and he suggests that the “voluntary taxationists have never attempted to answer this problem; they have rather stubbornly assumed that no one would set up a competing defence agency within a State’s territorial limits.” If the state did bar such firms, then that system is not a genuine free market. However, “if the government did permit free competition in defence service, there would soon no longer be a central government over the territory. Defence agencies, police and judicial, would compete with one another in the same uncoerced manner as the producers of any other service on the market.” [Power and Market, p. 122 and p. 123]

Obviously this misses the point totally. What Rothbard ignores is who determines the laws which these private “defence” agencies would enforce. If the laws are made by a central government then the fact that citizen’s can hire private police and attend private courts does not stop the regime being statist. We can safely assume Rand, for example, would have had no problem with companies providing private security guards or the hiring of private detectives within the context of her minimal state. Ironically, Rothbard stresses the need for such a monopoly legal system:

“While ‘the government’ would cease to exist, the same cannot be said for a constitution or a rule of law, which, in fact, would take on in the free society a far more important function than at present. For the freely competing judicial agencies would have to be guided by a body of absolute law to enable them to distinguish objectively between defence and invasion. This law, embodying elaborations upon the basic injunction to defend person and property from acts of invasion, would be codified in the basic legal code. Failure to establish such a code of law would tend to break down the free market, for then defence against invasion could not be adequately achieved.” [Op. Cit., p. 123–4]

So if you violate the “absolute law” defending (absolute) property rights then you would be in trouble. The problem now lies in determining who sets that law. For Rothbard, as we noted in section F.6.1, his system of monopoly laws would be determined by judges, Libertarian lawyers and jurists. The “voluntaryists” proposed a different solution, namely a central government elected by the majority of those who voluntarily decided to pay an income tax. In the words of Herbert:

“We agree that there must be a central agency to deal with crime — an agency that defends the liberty of all men, and employs force against the uses of force; but my central agency rests upon voluntary support, whilst Mr. Levy’s central agency rests on compulsory support.” [quoted by Carl Watner, “The English Individualists As They Appear In Liberty,” pp. 191–211, Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty, p. 194]

And all Rothbard is concerned over private cops would exist or not! This lack of concern over the existence of the state and government flows from the strange fact that “anarcho”-capitalists commonly use the term “anarchism” to refer to any philosophy that opposes all forms of initiatory coercion. Notice that government does not play a part in this definition, thus Rothbard can analyse Herbert’s politics without commenting on who determines the law his private “defence” agencies enforce. For Rothbard, “an anarchist society” is defined “as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person and property of any individual.” He then moved onto the state, defining that as an “institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as ‘taxation’; and (2) it acquires and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defence service (police and courts) over a given territorial area.” [Society without a State, p. 192]

This is highly unusual definition of “anarchism,” given that it utterly fails to mention or define government. This, perhaps, is understandable as any attempt to define it in terms of “monopoly of decision-making power” results in showing that capitalism is statist (see section F.1 for a summary). The key issue here is the term “legal possibility.” That suggestions a system of laws which determine what is “coercive aggression” and what constitutes what is and what is not legitimate “property.” Herbert is considered by some “anarcho”-capitalists as one of them. Which brings us to a strange conclusion that, for “anarcho”-capitalists you can have a system of “anarchism” in which there is a government and state — as long as the state does not impose taxation nor stop private police forces from operating!

As Rothbard argues “if a government based on voluntary taxation permits free competition, the result will be the purely free-market system … The previous government would now simply be one competing defence agency among many on the market.” [Power and Market, p. 124] That the government is specifying what is and is not legal does not seem to bother him or even cross his mind. Why should it, when the existence of government is irrelevant to his definition of anarchism and the state? That private police are enforcing a monopoly law determined by the government seems hardly a step in the right direction nor can it be considered as anarchism. Perhaps this is unsurprising, for under his system there would be “a basic, common Law Code” which “all would have to abide by” as well as “some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society … whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.” [“Society without a State,”, p. 205]

That this is simply a state under a different name can be seen from looking at other right-wing liberals. Milton Friedman, for example, noted (correctly) that the “consistent liberal is not an anarchist.” He stated that government “is essential” for providing a “legal framework” and provide “the definition of property rights.” In other words, to “determine, arbitrate and enforce the rules of the game.” [Capitalism and Freedom, p. 34, p. 15, p. 25, p. 26 and p. 27] For Ludwig von Mises “liberalism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism.” Liberalism “restricts the activity of the state in the economic sphere exclusively to the protection of property.” [Liberalism, p. 37 and p. 38] The key difference between these liberals and Rothbard’s brand of liberalism is that rather than an elected parliament making laws, “anarcho”-capitalism would have a general law code produced by “libertarian” lawyers, jurists and judges. Both would have laws interpreted by judges. Rothbard’s system is also based on a legal framework which would both provide a definition of property rights and determine the rules of the game. However, the means of enforcing and arbitrating those laws would be totally private. Yet even this is hardly a difference, as it is doubtful if Friedman or von Mises (like Rand or Herbert) would have barred private security firms or voluntary arbitration services as long as they followed the law of the land. The only major difference is that Rothbard’s system explicitly excludes the general public from specifying or amending the laws they are subject to and allows (prosperous) judges to interpret and add to the (capitalist) law. Perhaps this dispossession of the general public is the only means by which the minimal state will remain minimal (as Rothbard claimed) and capitalist property, authority and property rights remain secure and sacrosanct, yet the situation where the general public has no say in the regime and the laws they are subjected to is usually called dictatorship, not “anarchy.”

At least Herbert is clear that his politics was a governmental system, unlike Rothbard who assumes a monopoly law but seems to think that this is not a government or a state. As David Wieck argued, this is illogical for according to Rothbard “all ‘would have to’ conform to the same legal code” and this can only be achieved by means of “the forceful action of adherents to the code against those who flout it” and so “in his system there would stand over against every individual the legal authority of all the others. An individual who did not recognise private property as legitimate would surely perceive this as a tyranny of law, a tyranny of the majority or of the most powerful — in short, a hydra-headed state. If the law code is itself unitary, then this multiple state might be said to have properly a single head — the law . .. But it looks as though one might still call this ‘a state,’ under Rothbard’s definition, by satisfying de facto one of his pair of sufficient conditions: ‘It asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of provision of defence service (police and courts) over a given territorial area’ … Hobbes’s individual sovereign would seem to have become many sovereigns — with but one law, however, and in truth, therefore, a single sovereign in Hobbes’s more important sense of the latter term. One might better, and less confusingly, call this a libertarian state than an anarchy.” [Anarchist Justice, pp. 216–7]

The obvious recipients of the coercion of the new state would be those who rejected the authority of their bosses and landlords, those who reject the Lockean property rights Rothbard and Herbert hold dear. In such cases, the rebels and any “defence agency” (like, say, a union) which defended them would be driven out of business as it violated the law of the land. How this is different from a state banning competing agencies is hard to determine. This is a “difficulty” argues Wieck, which “results from the attachment of a principle of private property, and of unrestricted accumulation of wealth, to the principle of individual liberty. This increases sharply the possibility that many reasonable people who respect their fellow men and women will find themselves outside the law because of dissent from a property interpretation of liberty.” Similarly, there are the economic results of capitalism. “One can imagine,” Wieck continues, “that those who lose out badly in the free competition of Rothbard’s economic system, perhaps a considerable number, might regard the legal authority as an alien power, a state for them, based on violence, and might be quite unmoved by the fact that, just as under nineteenth century capitalism, a principle of liberty was the justification for it all.” [Op. Cit., p. 217 and pp. 217–8]

13 notes · View notes