On Libertarianism and Statecraft, Part XII: Greed
By Insula Qui
Author’s note: This is the final article in this series for now, not because there is nothing more to be said about libertarian statecraft, but because I have said everything that I can say with confidence. Expect more articles in the same vein, but this should serve as a good foundational document for libertarian statecraft. I post far more experimental ideas about the topic on the Libertarchy Blog. Furthermore, my book “Anarcho-Monarchism” has all the theory that preceded the view developed in these articles. I am grateful for the sustained interest and hope that I have started to fill a woefully empty niche in libertarian theory.
Introduction
Over the course of this series, we have provided the baseline content of libertarian statecraft, explained why it should be accepted, and have provided ways to prevent crime by reciprocity and high costs through nuclear armament. But one fundamental question has been left unanswered: the problem of greed, or how to prevent the libertarian government from turning into a den of special interests and totalitarianism. The libertarian government still retains the conceptual power to resell property if it can manage to manifest fundamental greed in the military apparatus.
Parts IX, X, and XI focused on what the libertarian government ought to do, but this article will solely focus on what we have to do to ensure that libertarian government can exist. Essentially, we must provide a theoretical model to ensure that defense forces are not abused to form the Nozickian minarchist state. We must also assure that we can retain heightened liberty while having the benefits of statecraft. To the dismay of Objectivists and some mainstream libertarians, the answer is to abandon the worship of greed.
Greed and the Military
Any government requires the support of the military. When the military interest is irreconcilable with the government interest, the military will overthrow the government. Furthermore, even when the military is responsible to the people rather than the government, as would be the case under libertarian statecraft, the problem of the military having its own interests still occurs. Thus, it is important that the military is not a self-serving institution and does not use its capacity for oppression.
This leads us to the Randian paradox of anarchism. Although it is a flawed argument against anarcho-capitalism, it can serve as an important critique of libertarian statecraft. Under the conventional model of anarcho-capitalism, the military is not a cohesive entity and thus constantly holds itself in check. This means that no military interest can actually form. The decentralization in the use of violence eliminates the monopoly on violence, bringing the military as a special class down with it.
But when there is only one nexus of violent power in a libertarian government, there can be a scenario in which aggressive violence is for sale. To state the paradox in other words, the market is founded on non-aggression, which means that the sale of aggression must be contradictory to the market. In anarcho-capitalist social orders, this is solved by only ever selling defense, but if private defense is supplanted by monarch-sanctioned defense, it could turn into an aggressive conflict between monarchs.
This can largely be solved by the fact that libertarian statecraft cannot operate on a scale close to the current size of nation-states, or even metropolises. Libertarian statecraft must be decentralized, which means that the cost of aggression for monarchs is too large. Monarchical statecraft also breaks down whenever even moderately sized cities are introduced, as rational governance becomes harder. The complexity of urban environments combined with the inherent difficulty in dividing a city between different providers of governance due to the high degree of integration between various industries and land owners might render libertarian statecraft in large cities untenable. One would find it nearly impossible to imagine any demand for monarchical rule without an entirely tribalistic basis even in a subsection of Queens. Additionally, military defense would likely be subcontracted by the people under a covenant and would not be a permanent fixture of one government, but the theoretical issue still remains.
The Sale of Violence
If a monarch is sufficiently greedy, then he might be drawn to use the military in such a manner as to make himself a dictator. If the generals of the military were sufficiently greedy, they would not fear sending their men to die for enough monetary gain. If the men in the military were afflicted by a similar amount of greed, they would not resist because they could earn enough to warrant possible loss of life. If there is an institutional lack of selflessness, the libertarian government would fail. This seems contradictory to the influential credo that selfishness is desirable, but the only thing preventing the misuse of violence is a certain degree of selflessness in how and where violence is used.
The acceptance of the non-aggression principle on the behalf of those with the largest proclivity towards the use of violence is a fundamentally selfless act. If one has more power than the defense providers, then one is functionally above the law. Thus, not aggressing against peaceful people becomes entirely an act of courtesy as the return outweighs the reduced deterrent. This is not to make a utilitarian argument, but to simply state that abstaining from violence is an act of altruism.
There is a certain role for altruism in society, even if it is not an ultimate philosophical good. There must be a certain level of morality that would allow people to reject violence for the sake of simply not causing harm. Excessive greed will ensure that libertarian statecraft will fail, and that there will be a libertine individualism in which civil war is imminent. Even if it is not profitable to engage in aggressive violence, human passions may ignite a cycle of revenge at any point.
The Selflessness of the Market
The common libertarian conception of the free market is that it combines selfish individual motives into a greater good. We can instead view the market as a community in which each person acts selflessly in mutual reciprocity. This simply requires that we adjust the causal view we take of the market; instead of putting the pursuit of profit as the base action with performing good for the society as the result, we can instead view performing good as the original action with profit derived from it. By making this slight change, we are better able to incorporate every model of action into our philosophy. This even allows us to answer the age-old question of why selfish people would do good without resorting to a vague notion of moral profit.
If we view the market as a place where people can facilitate their productive efforts with proportional rewards, we can no longer view the market as selfish people striving for profits. We do not need to cling to a sense of fundamental selfishness in market relations. This is not to say that selfishness is an absolute deontological evil; there is nothing inherently bad about being selfish, nor is there nothing inherently good about it. However, there is inherent dignity and virtue in productive efforts.
Thus, if we give up the notion that people profit from their selfish actions and instead adopt the view that productive efforts bring proportional rewards, we are able to adjust our entire worldview. This answers the question of how the military is prevented from conquering the libertarian social order and/or corrupting it from within. Since the military only benefits its customers if it is being productive, the military is incentivized to profit and is not simply driven to a vague non-aggression. If production itself creates profit, it becomes contradictory by definition to strive for profit using destructive means. If we view the marketplace as conducive to selflessness, which in turn creates profit, we must realize that the military must be more selfless on the marketplace than when operated by a state.
The ultimate facts of the matter are the same in both scenarios. By employing violence, the military loses out on profits. As profits are created by providing services, not doing so will necessarily reduce profit. Judging by the amount of debt states accumulate, forming a new state does not seem like a lucrative opportunity. However, by not seeing profits as the primary mode of operation on the free market, we can focus on why the private military would not employ violence in the first place without thinking of direct profit. Although the profit and loss system is the only system conducive to efficiency, we can rearrange the causal chains for a more complete analysis. Creating profits is good, but is not sufficient for all analysis. Therefore, we need to recontextualize our view of the economy so that we can view productivity as something that brings proportional profit. This is still an incomplete system, as it does not factor in losses as a separate concept, but models of understanding will always lack some degree of nuance.
Conclusion
No matter how greedy individuals on the free market could be, they can never match the inherent greed of states. The state demands payment with no choice to opt out and no guaranteed service. The state demands unconditional obedience and all rights. Nothing is sacred to the state except its own power, and there is nothing more in the state than raw, base selfishness. This is why we see only the state engaging in imperialism, an unapologetic demand to rule a country with no connection to it and the perpetual expansion of raw might. This is the act most antithetical to both altruism and liberty. As always, libertarianism might have some of the same problems that states do, but can never match the brutality of the state.
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