Leeson on Anarchy

 

This month’s exchange at “Cato Unbound” features Peter Leeson arguing for anarchism:

The unifying feature of my examples [of communities thriving without government] is the incentive individuals have to solve their problems. In this sense, the empirical evidence from anarchy only demonstrates that as long as there are unrealized gains to realize, people will find ways to realize them. Fortunately for anarchists, this ‘only’ is considerable.

 

The article is good. My thoughts, after the jump.

 

Nothing in terms of theory is new here—the legwork is really done by Leeson’s examples of 18^th century pirates and contemporary Somalia. He even concedes that theory isn’t the best way to justify anarchism, as theoretical explanations for it tend to border on “science fiction.” Also, to the credit of consequentialist anarchists, they all seem genuinely concerned with the upshot of their theories, and the possibility that anarchism could actually make the lives of people better in a concrete way. This is in sharp contrast to natural rights anarchists like Spooner and Rothbard, who were much more concerned with what we can charitably call “abstraction worship.”

 

Leeson is trying to prove a very limited point, and he does it very well: anarchism is the “least bad” option in certain situations of dramatic state failure, when compared to feasible state alternatives. In places like Somalia, where the most feasible state alternative is another dictatorship along the lines of Barre, this is probably true. Leeson is not claiming that anarchism is better under all (or even most) circumstances. I fear that over-excited anarchists will not grasp the difference. It is probably valuable to remember that his article is titled “why self-governance works better than you think,” not “why self-governance always works.”

 

He recognizes the reason that most people refuse to acknowledge the possibility of successful anarchism: the nirvana fallacy. As Robert Nozick would say, people are comparing the worst possible outcome of anarchism (chaotic bloodshed and widespread suffering) with the best possible outcome of statism (an orderly, peaceful, just, and affluent community). This logic leads them to the conclusion that a state is preferable, just as the reverse logic would certainly lead to the conclusion that anarchy is preferable. Like Nozick, Leeson takes the middle path of comparing the best likely outcome with a state to the best likely outcome with anarchism.

I wonder, though, if Leeson’s work really demands a radical rethinking of our approach to state failure. His conclusion is really nothing to get excited about: it turns out that there really are some governments so bad that the people under them are better off with no government at all. State failure is not so prevalent that these countries comprise more than a small minority of the total, and it doesn’t take a lot of thought to conclude that, say, Zimbabwe would be better off in anarchy than under the heel of Robert Mugabe.

And, of course, there will always be the issue of what we actually expect our states to do. For those of us not averse to the idea of some wealth redistribution, the real question is not how best to provide only the basic public goods, but also the institutions that achieve economic justice. While a redistributionist might endorse Leeson’s anarchy as a good step away from government that coerces arbitrarily (without reference to a principle of justice), it could only be as a remedial step. The next challenge is how best to build those stable institutions of government necessary for distributive justice.