 I'm going to be discussing with you this morning the anarchist-minarchist debate. This is a debate between two groups of libertarians, so we've already confined the debate to a fairly small number of people. And both the people in both of these groups accept individual rights, including property rights. Both anarchists and minarchists want a free market. So the question between them is, should all services be provided by the free market, or is a state necessary to provide protection, justice, and defense? I should say term anarchist is one that's familiar in political science, but minarchist was a word that was coined by Sam Konkin, who was a libertarian, he was an agorist, to say, someone who believed that production should take place in small businesses. He was very good at coming up with terms that caught on, and minarchist was one of his coinages. Another one that he coined was in reference to the large number of organizations controlled by Charles Koch and his brother. He coined the phrase, the Coke to Puss, which some of you may have heard. I knew him back in the 1970s and 80s. He lived in the Los Angeles area. He was not a minarchist. Now, the prima facie, there seems a difficulty in the minarchist position, which is if the free market is the best means of supplying goods and services, why should there be an exception for protection, including defense and justice? If a free market is so good, why is this type of service an exception? In fact, it was just that line of thought that led Murray Rothbard to anarchism in the very late 1940s that he had been convinced of the general desirability of the free market in debate with his friends at Columbia University who were much more socialist inclined. They said to him as if it were a reductive argument. Well, if the free market is so good, why don't we have a free market in defense as if that were an obviously absurd idea? Murray Rothbard thought it's actually a good argument. We should have a free market in these areas and consistency requires this, and that led him to his study of 19th century individualist anarchists such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. So prima facie, there is this difficulty for the minarchist position. Now, one argument in favor of the state that's very often given, we're fortunate we can set aside in this standard economics literature, which I'm sure you encountered this argument in classes that you've taken or lectures given here, an argument for government provision of protection, defense and justice is that these are public goods. You'll remember a public good is one that has to be non-excludable. It's supplied to everybody. The argument would be for defense that if there's a defense over the whole country, individual people can't opt out of the defense services provided to everybody. It's jointly supplied and non-excludable. So the argument is the free market can't supply such public goods or can't supply them efficiently. Now, there's a great deal to be said about what's wrong with the public goods argument, but fortunately we don't have to get into that in this lecture. And question, can you see why not? Well, remember the debate is between anarchists and minarchists. And minarchists are people who think that the free market can supply everything except defense, protection, justice. But there are many more public goods than that, so they don't favor the non-market provision of the other public goods. So they can't appeal to the public goods argument as a reason for the provision of these services. They could say there's something different about defense and the related goods from other public goods that require supply of that good by government rather than market, but they can't in general appeal to the public goods argument, so fortunately we don't have to consider that one in its various complexities. I should say a couple other points is when we're talking about anarchism versus minarchism, the question would come up over what territory we're talking about. This I won't go into detail, but in general one has in mind something like a similar territory to that of a modern nation state. One could also possibly when talked about individual rights, one could allow for anarchists and minarchists who favor legal rights, but their moral theory doesn't have rights in it at a fundamental level. That's to say one could imagine or there actually are people such as David Friedman, who has a somewhat utilitarian theory justifying anarchism, although his view on moral theory is a bit hard to pin down. There's a apparent problem for minarchists who are natural rights libertarian. The state claims to have the sole legitimate authority authorizing the use of force. Now within states there are very often other people or agencies who use force, for example individuals who are acting in self-defense or private security firms or sometimes states have allowed labor unions to use violence to prevent people from breaking strikes. Very often in states there are other groups other than the state that are using violence, but the state claims to be the final authority in determining what rules they operate under. If say you had a legal dispute with someone now and you went to a private arbitration agency to settle the dispute, then let's say the party, one of the parties refused to obey the decision of the private arbiter, then what measures you could take to enforce the judgment would be dependent on the state. The state claims the final authority to set the rules for the use of violence. So why is this a problem for minarchists? Well supposing we have a minimal state, that's to say a state that's confined to production of protection and defense justice, and someone sets up a competing agency. The agency says well we're supplying defense protection justice, but we can do it in better terms than the existing agency. Would the existing state be able to suppress the competing agency? The difficulty is whose libertarian rights is this competing agency interfering with? According to the, it would seem like if the state says to the competing agency well we're going to shut you down, you just don't have the right to exist. We're the final authority in setting the rules here. It seems to be violating the non-aggression principle because how has the competing agency aggressed against the state if you say well the state has the right to be the sole supplier of protection, justice and defense in the territory. How did it acquire this right? It doesn't appear to be one of the standard libertarian rights. So that is a big difficulty for the minarchist position. That's a problem that they have to get around. Another problem is that the state takes resources from people by taxation. Again this would be true of a minimal state. It says you have to pay for the protective services, but what if you don't want to pay? What if you refuse? It appears that the state is guilty of theft. So we have here two apparent problems for the state. One is it appears to be violating rights if it suppresses competing agencies and it's committing theft if it takes resources from people by taxation. Now in posing these problems I don't argue that that settles the debate. At once we have to consider the minarchist responses to those arguments, but I'm just for now just suggesting that this is a challenge that the minarchists have to face. It's worth noting that some supporters of minarchism don't favor taxation. For example, Ein Rand has a system in which there's no taxation, but people pay user fees, say for going to court or for bringing in the police. So you don't have to pay these user fees. You can say, look, nobody, it's my property. I don't want to pay for this, but it would be, at least in most cases, very much against your interest, not to pay because then you wouldn't be able to get any protection or go to court and sue anybody. I remember in Rand's system there's a monopoly agency supplying these things, so it's either pay the user fees or you don't get justice or protection. You can't go to your own police force and pay for it. Similarly, in the minimal state of Robert Nozick, I'll be discussing him in more detail later, doesn't involve taxation either, but in his system, people who don't want to be clients of what he calls the dominant protective agency are offered to cut raid policies for protection and if they don't want to pay for those, those are free to do so. But again, if they don't, they'll be severely limited in what they can do to protect themselves and secure justice. So how does the how do the minarchists respond to the problems I've raised? Remember, the problems are that the state, even a minimal state appears to violate right since if it claims a monopoly on the who exercises force on permissible use of force, it seems to be violating the non-aggression principle and then for at least some minarchists taking resources by through taxation. So again, it appears to be violating right. So how do minarchists respond? Well, there are two sorts of responses. One is to say that I'll be discussing in the most detail is to say that the minimal state doesn't, in fact, violate rights. It appears to, but in fact, this is a false appearance, the minarchists claim by various ways, which most elaborate is the one who is followed by Robert Nozick, that one could show that the minimal state doesn't violate rights. The other way is to say, yes, the minimal state does violate rights, but unless we're willing to allow these rights violations society couldn't exist at all. So in this view, we're in a less than ideal situation. It would be nice if we could have a system that fully respected libertarian rights, but we can't have that because the conditions would be so chaotic that society wouldn't function. So we have to make an exception in our usual adherence to rights. Now, I want to go into and hear for those of you who are unfortunate enough to listen to my lecture on Robert Nozick. This will involve some repetition. I want to go into Nozick's views on how the state, the minimal state arises in a way that doesn't violate people's rights. He imagines a situation in which we start off from a libertarian anarchist situation, which people have individual right, libertarian rights, individual property rights, and we have a people joining protection agencies to defend these rights. Now, he thinks it's likely that what he calls a dominant agency will arise. There'll be a single agency that will be the one that's setting the rules. In part, he gets to this conclusion through a rather tricky procedure in that supposing the protection agencies form some sort of agreement among themselves on what to do if there's a conflict. Say they come up with some sort of appeals procedure and they'll say this is what we'll do in case their disputes will go to an appeals court. He counts that as making those agencies a single agency that seems doubtful, whether that's a good way of looking at that, but not much turns on this semantic point. But he's defined an agreement among agencies as being a single agency. What happens, let's say, you're a client of a dominant agency and you get into a dispute with someone who isn't a client. Let's say the other person is a client of some other agency or somebody who is independent. He's not a client of any agency. He just enforces his rights by himself. So what would happen then supposing the other person wants to try you in the courts of his protection agency? Then the question would arise, what procedure would be used to try you? What do we mean by procedure? Just what are the rules that would be used to determine your guilt? We could imagine different sets of rules. Some rules would make it very likely that anyone who's guilty would be found guilty, but they would risk finding innocent people guilty as well. We could imagine other rules that would be extremely unlikely to find innocent people guilty, but they would free a lot of guilty people as well. So each agency would come up with some balance of these considerations. They would come up with some procedures that would give what they considered a way of balancing innocent people being wrongly found guilty against guilty people being wrongly found innocent. Now, what if the agency that's proposing to try you has what you consider a risky decision procedure? That's to say one that say if you're innocent will have some chance of finding you guilty. Then Nozick thinks, he says, well, this might arouse fear. You might think depending on what they propose to do to you if they find you guilty, this might make you afraid because you think, oh, I imagine say you're accused of theft and they say that if you're found guilty, you might, if you can't come up with the money, you might be forced to labor until you can pay it off. So the prospect might make you afraid and this fear will be present even if they don't in fact apply the procedure to you. That's to say, suppose you know that there are all these agencies or independent people around who might apply risky decision procedures to you. You'll feel fearful even if in fact you don't get into trouble with them and they don't apply the procedures to you. So according to Nozick, there was kind of general state of fear of people suffering from risky decision procedures. So then Nozick says, well, the dominant agency can prohibit these other group agencies or independents from applying such procedures. You can say we don't want to, our clients don't want to be subject to such fear so we can stop you from doing so. Now I won't go into the reasons Nozick thinks that they can do that. They are very complicated and I created enough trouble in my Tuesday lecture in trying to explain that. So I'm not going to get into the same trap again. So you might say though, oh, but isn't there a problem? Why should the dominant agency have the right to prohibit risky decision procedures? Why should it have more rights than other people or other agencies? And Nozick's response is no, it doesn't have such rights. It's other people have the right to prohibit risky decision procedures also. But if there's a conflict, they'll lose because the dominant agency is the strongest agency so it will win conflicts and then its procedures will be the one, its decisions will be the one that are established. So to repeat a point I mentioned earlier, if the let's suppose that the dominant agency prohibits other people from applying risky decision procedures, the people who are prohibited from applying such procedures haven't really done anything wrong. It's just they have a different view of what are the proper procedures from the dominant agency. So in Nozick's view, it owes them compensation for prohibiting them from using these procedures. It can't just say, well, we're prohibiting you, that's it. And the compensation consists of offering them cut rate policies, protecting them and offering them justice and defense. So they're free to reject these, but again, they'll be generally ill advised to do so since they won't be protected. Now, again, I won't go into the details here. I tend to think that argument doesn't work. It's tremendous fun going through all the complicated variations that Nozick gives on the art. And to think that it's ultimately an unsuccessful one, but that is the most elaborate argument that the minimal state doesn't violate rights. I should say, I knew Nozick quite well for 20 years. He was amazingly ingenious in coming up with counter examples to arguments. It would be very difficult, almost impossible to give him an argument he hadn't already thought of, but it sometimes can be done. Now, so that, as I say, was the most elaborate attempt to argue that we a minimal state doesn't violate rights, even though it prohibits competitors. And in my view, it doesn't really succeed. Now, I want to go to arguments that have been advanced in favor of a state. And these are ones very often advanced by people who say, all right, maybe a minimal state does violate rights, but we need it anyway. We just couldn't function without it. But people who think we can have a minimal state consistent with rights can advance these arguments also. Probably the most popular argument for the state would be something like this. Well, in order to have a free market, we have to have a system of property rights, law and property rights. Supposing, for example, in a free market, I want to exchange my apples for your oranges. Well, we have to have some system that says, what are my rights over the apples? What are your rights over the oranges? And what are the requirements for an exchange? We have to have rules in place. So the argument is, well, we can't have a free market for a legal system and for property rights because we can't have a free market until we have such a system in place. So that can't be supplied by the free market. It's a presupposition of the market. Murray Rothbard has a very interesting response to this argument. He said, first, the basic problem with this argument is that it's confusing the need for a system of property rights and a system of legal rules with a state. But what would be required for a free market is an agreement among people in a society on what the appropriate property rules and legal system should be. So if, say, we want to exchange apples for oranges, and we agree who has the rights to the apples and oranges and how the rights should be specified, why do we need a state? All that we need is the system of rules. Now, we could say, well, will people in fact agree on a code, a common code, does this, are we presupposing that there's a single common libertarian code that settles everything? Well, Rothbard didn't think that there was such a code that settled everything, but he thought that there was a large measure. We could establish what the objective procedures and rights should be, and he thought that people could come to accept such a system. And if they did, then no state would be necessary. In Rothbard's view, a libertarian society would depend on a large measure of agreement among people on what the appropriate legal rule should be. And there are many historical examples we could point to where people have come to agree on a common legal code, for example. The law merchant, which governs what happens in, say, in international trade and disputes between merchants of different countries. These were very often settled by private courts not bringing in the state. There are many cases. Ed Stringham, who gave a lecture earlier this week, has a book discussing many claims of private law settlements of dispute. Bruce Benson is another author who's written on this. So in the response to the Minerchist argument, we need a state for a legal system, is that in fact we don't all that we need is some sort of agreement on a system of rights and laws. And in fact, in many areas, we've actually had such an agreement. Now, another argument that's very often given is this. If there were private defense agencies, wouldn't they fight with each other? Say, exposing a client of certain agency, you're a client of a different agency, and I claim that you've stolen my wallet. Of course, that wouldn't get you very much if you did that. I don't know why anybody would do that, but I suppose that happened. And then I got my agency to arrest you and try you in its courts, and then the other person just appealed to his agency to come to his defense. Wouldn't this lead to a fight among the agencies? So Rothbard says, no, that would be very unlikely. It wouldn't be in the interests of the agencies to fight with each other. They would come to an agreement on an appeals procedure. And you remember I mentioned this before. Nozick said, well, if they did that, they'd be part of a single agency, but this seems like an arbitrary stipulation. Why should we say just because there's an appeals procedure that they're part of a single agency? Now, one odd thing, I didn't mention this in my Nozick lecture, but I found it a bit odd. There's one footnote where Nozick mentions Rothbard's suggestion of an appeals procedure by which competing defense agencies would settle disputes. And he said, well, this could happen, but Rothbard doesn't give any argument that this would have to happen. It just seems like something he's just come up with to settle the problem. But he doesn't show this would have to happen. And what I found odd about this is that Nozick himself earlier in the book said that that was what would happen if they were competing agencies. So he was giving the same solution as the one he said that was arbitrary when Rothbard was giving it. Just as a side point, when you read Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it's really quite surprising how much of the book is a response to Rothbard. It really is taking Rothbard's ideas and just modifying them in very slight direction. Let's say the whole property theory of acquisition then passing on to different generations, principle of justice and acquisition and transfer is completely Rothbardian. So it's really a very Rothbardian book that's not acknowledging what it really is. So if you read the book, you'd be surprised at the number of citations of Rothbard in the book or maybe after I've said that you won't be surprised by it. Now, another argument that's sometimes given for a state is this. Supposing there's a dispute, say a dispute among agencies such as the one that we have saying we have an appeals court. There has to be some final court of appeal. Say there's a dispute, we can have an appeals procedure, then we can different appeals court if people still aren't satisfied. But there has to be some final court of appeal. So there has to be one agency that's kind of the final one in society that's settling all disputes. We can have disputes at a certain limited level, but there has to be one agency that's really settling everything. Now, this argument, many times in political philosophy, we have arguments that just rest on competing premises that certain people find plausible and others don't. And it's rare that we can come up with a straightforward logical fallacy. But here, in this argument, we can, we have an actual logical fallacy because we're moving from the premise for every dispute. There's a final decision maker to the premise. There's a final decision maker for every dispute to bring out the difference. If it isn't immediately obvious, let's consider a parallel case. Very often, if we're trying to look at whether an argument is right, it helps to just substitute premises where we, the same form, where we're able to see the structure argument better. So suppose we have the premise every person has a father, which is like the premise for every dispute. There has to be some decision maker to settle it. So we couldn't conclude from every person has a father to someone, meaning some particular person is everyone's father. The first premise is, is true, but the second is rather more doubtful. The conclusion is rather more doubtful, namely that there's one person who's everybody's father. So similarly, it doesn't follow from for every dispute. There are some decision maker to there's some decision maker and the same one for every dispute. That's what's called in the trade a quantifier shift fallacy that that probably won't be on the written exam though. Now, another problem with the argument is that it's starting off by saying every for every dispute, we have to have some way of settling it. But why is that true? Maybe there are some disputes we should just put up with it's not worth the cost of settling it. It isn't at any rate immediately obvious why every dispute does have to have a decision maker. Another problem that sometimes advanced against anarchism is what's called the problem of the rogue agency. The suggestion here is that if we had an anarchist system, there would be possibility that rogue agencies, agencies that didn't respect libertarian rights could arise and start aggressing against other people somewhat like the mafia. And that if we had an anarchist system, it would lead to control by these rogue agencies. But as Rothbard pointed out, other agencies would be able to combat the rogue agency if presumably most people in the society wouldn't want the rogue agency. So the other agencies could combine against it and suppress it for violating rights. And in any case, the issue would come up. Why is that worse than the state? Why is this possibility more dangerous than having the state? Because if we had say a minimal state, wouldn't there be possibility that that could be taken over by rogue elements that would suppress people's rights? And then in that situation there wouldn't be by hypothesis any other agencies to combat it. Another monarchist argument, which is I think a very interesting one, it's interesting because it tries to apply the free market against anarchism. Anarchist view is the, we would say the extreme free market position, but this argument says, well, there's a tension between the certain aspect of the free market and anarchism. The argument is that if anarchism is such a great idea, why doesn't it already exist? In the free market, general argument is that the market will supply what consumers demand because it's in the interest of business people to supply them. If the market isn't supplying something, that's a good indication it isn't profitable to do so. If it were some business person would have thought of the idea and come up with it, the claim is, well, we don't have anarchist societies, at least ones that cover large territories. There are various historical claims that there have been such societies such as Iceland or sometimes other claims Ireland at various times. There are all sorts of historical claims, but we don't have such anarchist societies now. The argument is, doesn't anarchism fail the market test if consumers wanted anarchism, we would have it already. The problem here is with the market argument is one where we have a certain structure of rights in place and it says if under those conditions it will be in the interest of business people to supply consumers with what they want. But once we introduce violence into the picture, that changes matters. It isn't an argument that once we introduce the argument isn't that once we have violence, then the market will still produce what people want. Once we have violations of rights taking place, all bets are off, we can't say that because a service isn't provided under such conditions, then this shows that people really don't want it. That argument applies in situations where we have a free market without violence, so it isn't really relevant here. It doesn't apply if the market would be forcibly suppressed. Now, I would say also this, to the extent this argument has any weight, it would have more weight if there were cases of anarchist societies that had been established that just broke down and didn't work. Then we would have some reason to think that that wasn't such a good idea, but we don't have such a society so we can't say that the anarchism has been tried and has been shown to fail. Now, yet another problem is, this is not a problem with the argument itself, but it's a problem for a monarchist who used the argument is that it hasn't been, we don't have cases of monarchist societies either. So if the monarchist says, oh, well, the anarchist is really in very bad strikes because anarchism fails the market test, then it doesn't appear that monarchism does any better. So then why shouldn't we use the argument to show we need substantially more of a state than the monarchist allows. So I think we've reached the end of, if not the anarchist-minarchist debate, at least the end of this lecture on the anarchist-minarchist debate. Thank you.