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Why I Am a Panarchist

by Michael S. Rozeff
by Michael S.
Rozeff

A correspondent
recently informed me about the Global Poverty Act of 2007. This bill
did not pass Congress. It can be re-introduced in the current
Congress. Obama favors this bill.

I have a
negative opinion of this bill. I could explain why my opinion is
negative. I've done that before with other laws that have been
passed by the federal government. Instead, I will go to the root of
the political matter.

Dozens of these
bills are introduced into Congress and many get passed. Along the
way, there are hundreds of groups that favor and oppose these bills.
One can be fighting these fights 24 hours a day. This is not my idea
of living. In my remaining years, I'd like to do a few other things.
Still, I have to protect myself and my life from the impositions of
others. One course is to fight with the pen. This has certain
non-monetary benefits that I shall not go into. Either that or I
find a way to go underground, insulate myself from all this
nonsense, and become invisible. That too has benefits. At some
point, I may do that. I may become a dropout. Then I'll take up
painting. I'll have a machine shop and make myself a grease gun and
fire it off out of anyone's hearing. I'll raise a few chickens or
pheasants and ducks as my father once did as a pastime. I will not
raise geese, however. They seemed to like to attack at
will.

I find that I
have no need for the federal government or the other governments for
that matter. What do they do for me? They do negative for me. They
take from me. They impose on me. They impose on my neighbors and
prevent me from dealing with them as I might and they from dealing
with me. Who needs the grief that governments bring? Every so often
I must get my car inspected. I must kowtow to the state's insurance
regulations. I must get it registered every two years. God forbid I
should ever have to get involved with a case in court and have to
deal with the state's justice system. I've never used marijuana, but
maybe I'd like to try it sometime for medicinal purposes. I'm not
about to hit the mean streets looking for sources who supply me with
a product of unknown quality. I'd like to have my dad's old Mauser
pistol. In Maine, I could shoot it. In New York, I am a felon if I
have it in the house. Who needs this grief? I spurn countless
products in the supermarket because they contain high-fructose corn
syrup. I don't like it. I'd rather have sugar. If it were not for
the government, they might have sugar. I will have to pay extra at
some point for the privilege of having something with sugar in it. I
will bake my own cookies.

If you want
your government to ban marijuana, make you go through a lot of
rigamarole to carry a pistol, tax sugar, and subsidize corn or
ethanol, be my guest. But I get nothing out of it. I don't see why I
have to be made to do what you (I speak of the nameless others here,
not you, my sympathetic reader) want. What claim do these
governments have over me? Why am I their toady?

Why must I
persuade everyone else not to pass a law that harms me? Why is the
burden of stopping this placed on me? I am fighting off additional
chains. Obviously I am unable to do so. My success rate at this is
zero. Why am I a slave? Why are we all fish enclosed in the same
barrel? I didn't ask to be inside this barrel.

So, let others
pass the laws that they want for themselves and their own clique.
Count me out. I am not your slave. You go your way and I will go
mine. Tax yourselves all you want to. That is your right. My right
is to bow out of your impositions on me. Let me out of the barrel.
Let everyone out of the barrel. Let them find other barrels to be in
if they wish, or no barrel at all. Let those who want to stay in
this barrel stay. I won't stop them. Just let me out.

I believe that
others are deluding themselves to want a government such as we have
today that has the power to pass so many laws. They are making
themselves into slaves. It's their choice. I also know that others
have been making the case for liberty for decades without measurable
success. Some people want to be imposed on for whatever reasons at
certain times in history and at other times they do not. Some people
want to be in the barrel.

My problem is
not so much that they are self-chosen slaves but that they have made
me into their slave. They have no guilty conscience about this. They
seem to think it is perfectly all right to confine me to their
barrel. They regard this as the natural state of affairs. I am
expected (by them) to kowtow to various governments.

Why? Why am I
expected to bow down before others? Why should anyone bow down who
does not want to? Why should I be ruled by others? Why should anyone
be ruled by others who does not want to be so ruled?

If you ever
hear a good answer, let me know. I have not yet heard a good answer.
The force and power to make me bow down is not an answer.

The proposal
that we each go our own ways and choose our own methods of being
governed while living in America and other states of this world is
the novel proposal of panarchy. It is really the proposal that we
each have complete liberty. And if some of you wish to dispose of
that liberty and choose a group of others to govern you, that is
your business. It is your right. But it is not your right to include
me unwillingly into your group. I am fighting you now and forever on
that score. I am fighting you the best way I know how, which, at the
moment, is with the pen. This is not an antagonistic variety of
fighting, however, not at this time. I urge you to give up your urge
to dominate me and others. Let us be. Let us go. Wherever my message
is heard, if any government officials should happen to read it, I
urge you only to let us go. Stop imposing on us. Impose on those who
want to be imposed on, not on me. The end game if you do not accede
is something I cannot foresee or imagine. Perhaps there will be
multiple declarations of independence. Perhaps the number of
dropouts will rise. Perhaps you will bring about your own demise.
Perhaps we will band together and ignore you. We will stop paying
taxes. We will hunt for your weak spot. We will embarrass you
perhaps, jeer at you, and make fun of you. A political joke book may
bring you down. Maybe we will parade you around naked. Maybe we will
run you out of town or tar and feather you. I do not
know.

I have no idea
how to get from here to there. Such a social and political change is
beyond my ken. People ask me how to get to panarchy. I don't know.
Turn your creativity loose. You will devise the ways and means.
These things are works-in-progress. The loss of liberty under
monopoly governments has been a work-in-progress occupying decades.
Liberty might return in a flash, or it might be something that is
built up step by step over time as we learn and as attitudes change
and experience accumulates. I do not know. I have no game plan. I am
not that smart or wise. I don't know enough to say. I rely on many
others who will carry this forward in the future and have carried it
forward in the past before I ever heard of anarchy or
panarchy.

Why expect
someone to give you a plan anyway? Think for yourselves. Plan for
yourselves as best you can. All I know is that fighting the
government, bill by bill, is exhausting and does not get at the
heart of the matter. It is not a matter of individual bills in
Congress, bad as each one may be. It is a matter of there existing a
government that has the power to pass these bills in the first place
and to impose them on all of us, willy-nilly. That is why I am a
panarchist (and anarchist). I personally do not want to live under
such a power and such impositions, which is why I am anarchist. But
I also recognize that others of you might wish to do so, which is
one reason why I am panarchist. I do not want to abolish your
government that you may want for yourselves, but I want to have my
own means of governance for myself. This too is why I am
panarchist.

I have no
greater purpose than these expressions today. They are crude. They
are personalistic. That is how I feel today. I speak from my stomach
as much as from my brain.

Yet a
thoughtful person has asked me about how defense will work or can
work if there is panarchy; and I have an extended (but still
incomplete) response because defense is always a major issue
whenever the question of altering our political system comes up. His
e-mail read:

"If I
actually am able to opt out of government protection (thereby
paying no taxes) and yet can stay in my place described in your
‘thought experiment' below, am I myself not ‘looting'? What I mean
by this is simply that I will be enjoying the protection of the
army (provided by my taxed neighbors who opt-in for state
protection) which goes to battle (say a defensive war against a
foreign entity) and emerges victorious from this war. My liberty,
freedom, and property remain intact, yet I foot no part of the war
bill. Thus I still envision coercion for tax payments by my
neighbors regardless of any previous understandings we might have
had previously. Am I missing something
here?"

This is the
argument that defense is a public good, or that there is a positive
externality in the provision of defense that necessitates joint
action imposed by force on all.

Defense is not
a uniform good. It is not a pack of Camel cigarettes. Even to say
that defense is a public good is a meaningless statement. What
someone in Harlingen wants for defense may be vastly different than
what someone in Boise wants.

Nothing in the
idea of several governments on the same territory prevents people in
their own panarchies from associating and federating to produce
joint defense. That is what the colonies did in pre-Revolutionary
days. They did not have a national government but they constructed a
common defense. History provides other examples.

If your
neighbors defend themselves and you happen to benefit, does that
give them a right to force you to pay? If your neighbors benefit you
by any number of their actions, does that give them a right to force
you to pay them? If so, they control your agenda and you. How do
they justify that? If they cannot build a tank without your
contributions, does that justify their forcing you to contribute?
They will then have to know that they are helping you and by how
much. They will have to know that better than you do. Can they ever
know that? What if the shoe is on the other foot and you demand that
they pay for building your Maginot line? That preference reflects
your idea of knowledge of defense, and it differs from that of your
neighbors. When you and your neighbors disagree over the worth of
your respective defense products, they have no argument that can
persuade you and vice versa. Either you agree to buy your own
defenses, or else you will fight until one of you wins and enslaves
the other. That basic choice is the issue here. If we choose no
force in such matters, it creates a certain set of societal
incentives. If we choose force, it creates a very different set of
incentives.

The state
forces its method of defense on many of us and makes us pay for it.
We are the conquered. It makes our property less secure and
defenseless because it can force us to pay for its product that we
may not want. How can the state be defending us when it is attacking
us? Suppose I refuse the state's defense. Suppose I tell the state
that its evaluation of the defense benefit it claims to be providing
me is not worth the price I have to pay. The state does not listen
to me. It claims its judgment is superior to my own. That is
propaganda to keep the conquered docile.

Does the state
know better than I do what is good for me? If we allow that
conclusion for defense, then will we allow it for my education, my
health affairs, my management of my wealth, my entertainment, my
speech, my choice of mate, my guns, and my consumption of marijuana
and alcohol and tobacco? These controls are already here. The
slippery slope to a totalitarian society is already evident. The
state talks people into their own slavery.

I value liberty
for its own sake, because I am human and I conceive of being human
as making one's own decisions over one's life while conceding the
right of others to make theirs. Those who do not value liberty take
other stances on what to be human means. In one case, they view the
human being as a creature like a dog that they (in the state) train
and keep in its place, that can do a number of things on its own,
but that is actually contained and kept within the bounds that they,
the superior beings in the state, set for it. They are dividing
human beings into the superior rulers and those ruled. In another
case, there are those who view the human being as a creature that is
nothing without the state. Others view the state as inherently
superior to the human being. There are many philosophies that
support statism as against liberty.

Shall we
protect ourselves by forcing others to pay tribute for what we
conceive of as protecting them? Then we must logically accord others
the same right of action. This means that we decide to rule them,
and they decide to rule us by force of arms. We cannot make someone
pay without force. We cannot take their property without force. If
we choose that route, we will increase the costs of protection of
our property because we will have to defend against everyone else
who has a right of action against us for any reason that comes into
their heads. If they purify their air and we breathe some of it,
they will force us to pay. Which scenario do you prefer, uncertain
and perpetual war in which property is insecure because everyone can
trench on everyone else's property at their own evaluation of
external benefit and harm? Or a measure of peace in which we define
property boundaries and use a criterion of not using force to
extract resources from others?

The nations
achieve uneasy peace, often broken by warfare, in which on an
inter-national basis, there are defined territorial boundaries. The
gains from war on an inter-nation basis often give way to the
prospect of even greater losses, in which case peace occurs. Quite
often, for a variety of reasons, wars break out. One reason is that
states under-estimate war costs and rulers gain by wars even if the
people ruled do not. On an intra-nation basis, within each nation,
the predation and looting go on unabated within the nation's
political system. There is scarcely ever peace within a nation.
Among nations there is anarchy, and there are periods of peace.
Peace may even be the norm among nations. Within nations, where
there is no anarchy but centralized rule, there is not peace. There
is constant economic warfare and looting of property, one group by
another. Quite often civil war breaks out to end intra-nation
oppression. Anarchy and panarchy within the boundaries of existing
nations look to reduce the problem of civil war and reduce the
problem of internal economic looting, which gains the greater part
of its strength from the existence of that nation's monopoly
government.

Panarchy
envisions non-territorial governance. Society would discard
government as we know it today in its territorial form for many and
maybe all of its functions. Defense might be retained along the same
lines as today, if that is what people in different panarchies want.
It can be done through confederations. But defense as it looks today
in the U.S. is highly unlikely if Americans were free to choose
their own defenses.

The U.S. went
beyond federation to amalgamation under the Constitution. The idea
that was propagated was that a central government was needed to
defend against European powers. This political solution had a big
downside that was overlooked by the framers: The central power (the
U.S.A.) could make bigger and more expensive wars by taxing the
entire people under its territorial jurisdiction. All it needed was
a majority in Congress. The Union lowered the cost of one or two
regions combining to impose the costs of war on all the other
regions. The result was an expensive military and more wars. This
could never have happened under the Articles of Confederation. (The
same process happens for all our political programs. Defense is just
another program.)

With panarchy, if there happened to be
regions (who knows?), each region might have its own defense and
combine in a common defense only when it really paid to combine.
Defense would become much more competitively supplied as a good, so
it would become cheaper and more effective. The kinds of defenses
used would be far different than the armed forces we now have.
Offense would diminish because a given region would have to bear all
the costs.

In the year
2008, we are living with an arrangement (the Constitution) that may
have been a good idea for 1787 for defense, but has become very
costly and downright bad for our times. The proof is the constant
U.S. involvement in wars all over the world. Ever since U.S.
government got big, starting at the outset of the twentieth century
with roots going back to earlier days, the country has faced one
large difficulty after another. If it hasn't been wars, it has been
economic and financial problems. If it hasn't been those, it has
been social and family decay. The problems are getting worse. The
roots of them are political. We are not governing ourselves
properly, and this is why we keep having these problems. We badly
need to get out from under the monopoly federal government. This is
another powerful reason why I am a panarchist.

January 22,
2009

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired
Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New
York.

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