[This article is a selection from Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto, 2014.]
Despite all the problems of the State, many of you are probably skeptical about anarchism. How would it work? We can’t give an answer that gives all the details of the institutions of anarcho-capitalism, but we can sketch out some of its main features. Those who want a more detailed account should read Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty.
Before we do so, we need to avoid a common mistake. Anarcho-capitalism means relying on the free market in everything; and we can’t specify in advance exactly how the free market will work.
Leonard Read pointed out in a classic account that when something has been socialized, people jump to the conclusion that the market can’t provide it:
Imagine that our Federal government, at its very inception, had issued an edict that all boys and girls, from birth to adulthood, were to receive shoes and stockings from the federal government “for free.” Next, imagine that this practice of “for free” shoes and stockings had been going on for lo, these 181 years! Lastly, imagine one of our contemporaries ... saying, “I do not believe that shoes and stockings for kids should be a government responsibility. ... This activity should never have been socialized. It is appropriately a free market activity. What, under these circumstances, would be the response to such a stated belief? Based on what we hear on every hand, once an activity has been socialized for a short time, the common chant would go like this, “Ah, but you would let the poor children go unshod.”
Just for this reason, when you first mention anarchism to people, they will think it is impossible to put into practice. The basic idea, though, is very simple. People in an anarcho-capitalist society have rights. Each person owns himself and has the right to acquire and hold property. People accept a common law code that spells out these rights.
Now for the key point. People have the right of self-defense, but most of us can’t do the job entirely by ourselves. We also need to settle disputes that involve the law code. In an anarcho-capitalist society, these functions would not be assigned to a monopoly agency that forced us to give money to it. Instead, people would purchase protection and judicial services on the market, just like other goods.
Rothbard spells out some of the details:
Most likely, such services would be sold on an advance subscription basis, with premiums paid regularly and services to be supplied on call. Many competitors would undoubtedly arise, each attempting, by earning a reputation for efficiency and probity, to win a consumer market for its services. Of course, it is possible that in some areas a single agency would outcompete all others, but this does not seem likely when we realize that there is no territorial monopoly and that efficient firms would be able to open branches in other geographical areas. It seems likely, also, that supplies of police and judicial service would be provided by insurance companies, because it would be to their direct advantage to reduce the amount of crime as much as possible.
We know that the free market supplies goods and services far better than any alternative system. Why are protection and defense any different? Rothbard asked this question in 1949, and thinking about it made him an anarchist.
Why here do we face a unique situation in which provision by a coercive monopoly outperforms the market? The arguments for market provision of goods and services applied across the board. If so, should not even protection and defense be offered on the market rather than supplied by a coercive monopoly? Rothbard realized that he would either have to reject laissez-faire or embrace individualist anarchism. The decision, arrived at in the winter of 1949, was not difficult. Once the issue was raised, Rothbard realized that, however surprising it might seem, the free market need not be abandoned even here.
In arriving at his iconoclastic response, Rothbard was much influenced by several nineteenth-century individualist anarchists. He called Lysander Spooner’s No Treason “the greatest case for anarchist political philosophy ever written,” listing it under “Books That Formed Me.” He termed Benjamin Tucker a “brilliant political philosopher” despite his “abysmal ignorance of economics.” The detailed attempt by the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari to spell out how a system of private protection would work impressed him:
In short, he reasoned: [if] free competition [can] supply consumers with the most efficient service, and monopoly was always bad in all other goods and services, why should this not apply to the service of defense. He maintained that single entrepreneurs would be able to supply protection in the rural districts, while large insurance type companies could supply the urban consumers.
What are the advantages of this system? For one thing, we no longer have a predatory body that seizes money from the rest of us. There is no longer a division between producers — taxpayers — and predators — tax consumers. The protection agencies make their money in the same way any other business on the free market does: by selling its product to consumers.
Because of this, we eliminate the main problem that plagued “limited government.” This problem was that no matter how carefully the limits were put in place in a constitution, we are relying on the government — a monopoly agency — to police itself. Here we don’t face this difficulty. Protection agencies are in competition with each other. If an agency tried to grab power in the way a government does, its clients would shift to a competing agency that offered better terms.
As always, Rothbard explains the issue with unmatched clarity:
Another common objection to the workability of free-market defense wonders: May not one or more of the defense agencies turn its coercive power to criminal uses? In short, may not a private police agency use its force to aggress against others, or may not a private court collude to make fraudulent decisions and thus aggress against its subscribers and victims? It is very generally assumed that those who postulate a stateless society are also naïve enough to believe that, in such a society, all men would be “good,” and no one would wish to aggress against his neighbor. There is no need to assume any such magical or miraculous change in human nature. Of course, some of the private defense agencies will become criminal, just as some people become criminal now. But the point is that in a stateless society there would be no regular, legalized channel for crime and aggression, no government apparatus the control of which provides a secure monopoly for invasion of person and property. When a State exists, there does exist such a built-in channel, namely, the coercive taxation power, and the compulsory monopoly of forcible protection. In the purely free-market society, a would-be criminal police or judiciary would find it very difficult to take power, since there would be no organized State apparatus to seize and use as the instrumentality of command. To create such an instrumentality de novo is very difficult, and, indeed, almost impossible; historically, it took State rulers centuries to establish a functioning State apparatus. Furthermore, the purely free-market, stateless society would contain within itself a system of built-in “checks and balances” that would make it almost impossible for such organized crime to succeed. There has been much talk about “checks and balances” in the American system, but these can scarcely be considered checks at all, since every one of these institutions is an agency of the central government and eventually of the ruling party of that government. The checks and balances in the stateless society consist precisely in the free market, i.e., the existence of freely competitive police and judicial agencies that could quickly be mobilized to put down any outlaw agency.
It is true that there can be no absolute guarantee that a purely market society would not fall prey to organized criminality. But this concept is far more workable than the truly Utopian idea of a strictly limited government, an idea that has never worked historically. And understandably so, for the State’s built-in monopoly of aggression and inherent absence of free-market checks has enabled it to burst easily any bonds that well-meaning people have tried to place upon it. Finally, the worst that could possibly happen would be for the State to be reestablished. And since the State is what we have now, any experimentation with a stateless society would have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
You might wonder, though, wouldn’t there be big problems if people in a dispute belonged to competing agencies? In America today, we live under a single legal system — although it’s one the government often abuses, as we’ve seen. Isn’t this a big advantage that would be lost in an anarchist society?
No, it isn’t. Competing agencies would find in very much in their interest to reach an agreement about what to do in such cases. If you sued someone in your agency’s courts and he got a different verdict from his agency, an appeals court would decide the matter. Each agency would use the common libertarian law code, so coming up with an acceptable decision wouldn’t be hard.
Once more, Rothbard is our guide:
The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it. ... No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
What about the libertarian code? This is the other key tool that, together with the competing protection agencies, eliminates all the problems caused by the Leviathan State which we havediscussed earlier in the book. How does it do this? It radically restricts the scope of laws. There are, e.g., no drug laws, gun control laws, or laws regulating “capitalist acts between consenting adults.” There is no danger of an aggressive or imperialist foreign policy, because there is no foreign policy. Each protection agency is confined to protecting its clients. Agencies, or allied groups of agencies, would defend against an organized invasion; but, once more, there is no foreign policy as we know it.
Why is the law code limited in this drastic way? The basic idea is simple. We start with two commonsense ideas that are difficult to dispute. First, every person is a self-owner. This means that you make all decisions about your own body. No state, for example, can draft you into the army because you, and no one else, have jurisdiction over your body. No one can override your right over your own body by saying that some other people, or “society,” need your body or your labor more than you do.
Rothbard spells this out:
the society of absolute self-ownership for all rests on the primordial fact of natural self-ownership by every man, and on the fact that each man may only live and prosper as he exercises his natural freedom of choice, adopts values, learns how to achieve them, etc. By virtue of being a man, he must use his mind to adopt ends and means; if someone aggresses against him to change his freely-selected course, this violates his nature; it violates the way he must function. In short, an aggressor interposes violence to thwart the natural course of a man’s freely adopted ideas and values, and to thwart his actions based upon such values.
We need only one other assumption to derive the basic parts of the libertarian law code. This is that all resources start out without ownership claims. People have to do something to acquire property. People aren’t entitled to a share of the world’s resources just by being born.
How then can people acquire property? Once they get it, it’s easy to see how they can pass it on to other people. They can do this by trading with others or by gifts to them. But if you ask someone, “How did you get your property?,” and he answers by telling you he got it from someone else, the same question would come up for that person. Eventually, you would come to someone who didn’t get the property from someone else. Where did he get it from?
We already have what we need to answer this question. If you own yourself, and the earth starts off free of ownership claims, then you are free to fence off a certain area and claim it as your own. How much can you claim? What exactly do have to do to the unowned land to make it your permanent property? The answers to these questions can’t be entirely fixed in advance. They depend in part on what people in particular communities find acceptable. But the general principle is clear. You get property initially by homesteading it.
Once again, Rothbard explains the issue clearly:
Crusoe finds virgin, unused land on the island; land, in short, unused and uncontrolled by anyone, and hence unowned. By finding land resources, by learning how to use them, and, in particular, by actually transforming them into a more useful shape, Crusoe has, in the memorable phrase of John Locke, “mixed his labor with the soil.” In doing so, in stamping the imprint of his personality and his energy on the land, he has naturally converted the land and its fruits into his property. Hence, the isolated man owns what he uses and transforms; therefore, in his case there is no problem of what should be A’s property as against B’s. Any man’s property is ipso facto what he produces, i.e., what he transforms into use by his own effort. His property in land and capital goods continues down the various stages of production, until Crusoe comes to own the consumer goods which he has produced, until they finally disappear through his consumption of them.
As long as an individual remains isolated, then, there is no problem whatever about how far his property — his ownership — extends; as a rational being with free will, it extends over his own body, and it extends further over the material goods which he transforms with his labor. Suppose that Crusoe had landed not on a small island, but on a new and virgin continent, and that, standing on the shore, he had claimed “ownership” of the entire new continent by virtue of his prior discovery. This assertion would be sheer empty vainglory, so long as no one else came upon the continent. For the natural fact is that his true property — his actual control over material goods — would extend only so far as his actual labor brought them into production. His true ownership could not extend beyond the power of his own reach. Similarly, it would be empty and meaningless for Crusoe to trumpet that he does not “really” own some or all of what he has produced (perhaps this Crusoe happens to be a romantic opponent of the property concept), for in fact the use and therefore the ownership has already been his. Crusoe, in natural fact, owns his own self and the extension of his self into the material world, neither more nor less.
Individuals in isolation, then, can acquire property; and things don’t change when more people enter the scene. As we said before, all we need to add is an agreement among the people in a community on the principle of acquisition.
We could go on at greater length about the libertarian law code, but for our purposes, there is no need to do so. Once we have self-ownership and property rights, that’s all we need. Individuals are then free to make whatever exchanges they wish. This is the basis on which the free market can get started.
Before we leave the libertarian law code, one issue requires mention. What about IP? (Intellectual property, i.e., patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc.)? For some people, this has become a central topic in libertarianism. Rothbard didn’t regard it that way: it’s an issue worthy of attention, no doubt, but not a crux of his whole position.
His views on the topic have stood the test of time: despite talk to the contrary, there has been no “revolution” in libertarian thinking on IP. In essence, Rothbard relied on contract. Inventors and creators are entitled to whatever protection for their creations they can get by contract, no less and no more.
We have seen ... that the acid test by which we judge whether or not a certain practice or law is or is not consonant with the free market is this: Is the outlawed practice implicit or explicit theft? If it is, then the free market would outlaw it; if not, then its outlawry is itself government interference in the free market. Let us consider copyright. A man writes a book or composes music. When he publishes the book or sheet of music, he imprints on the first page the word “copyright.” This indicates that any man who agrees to purchase this product also agrees as part of the exchange not to recopy or reproduce this work for sale. In other words, the author does not sell his property outright to the buyer; he sells it on condition that the buyer not reproduce it for sale. Since the buyer does not buy the property outright, but only on this condition, any infringement of the contract by him or a subsequent buyer is implicit theft and would be treated accordingly on the free market. The copyright is therefore a logical device of property right on the free market.
Part of the patent protection now obtained by an inventor could be achieved on the free market by a type of “copyright” protection. Thus, inventors must now mark their machines as being patented. The mark puts the buyers on notice that the invention is patented and that they cannot sell that article. But the same could be done to extend the copyright system, and without patent. In the purely free market, the inventor could mark his machine copyright, and then anyone who buys the machine buys it on the condition that he will not reproduce and sell such a machine for profit. Any violation of this contract would constitute implicit theft and be prosecuted accordingly on the free market.
The patent is incompatible with the free market precisely to the extent that it goes beyond the copyright. The man who has not bought a machine and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasive of property rights on the market.
The crucial distinction between patents and copyrights, then, is not that one is mechanical and the other literary. The fact that they have been applied that way is an historical accident and does not reveal the critical difference between them. The crucial difference is that copyright is a logical attribute of property right on the free market, while patent is a monopoly invasion of that right.
We now know enough to see how anarchism would get rid of the terrible problems, discussed in earlier chapters of this book, which the State has created. We wouldn’t have an aggressive foreign policy, because there wouldn’t be a foreign policy at all. There is no scope for one: the nearest equivalent would be the agreements on appeals procedures among the protection agencies. There would be no government to regulate drugs, keep us under surveillance, suppress our liberty or impose foolish and anti-human environmental regulations on us. The Fed would not exist. Money would be entirely supplied by the free market.
Because of the crucial importance of money, let’s examine in more detail what a free market money supply would look like. Money would not consist of pieces of paper, which the State forces us to accept as legal tender. Rather, money would be a commodity, in all probability gold.
As Murray Rothbard emphasized, the essence of the gold standard is that it puts power in the hands of the people. They are no longer dependent on the whims of central bankers, treasury officials, and high rollers in money centers. Money becomes not merely an accounting device but a real form of property like any other. It is secure, portable, universally valued, and rather than falling in value, it maintains or rises in value over time. Under a real gold standard, there is no need for a central bank, and banks themselves become like any other business, not some gigantic socialistic operation sustained by trillions in public money.
Imagine holding money and watching it grow rather than shrink in its purchasing power in terms of goods and services. That’s what life is like under gold. Savers are rewarded rather than punished. No one uses the monetary system to rob anyone else. The government can only spend what it has and no more. Trade across borders is not thrown into constant upheaval because of a change in currency valuations.
Readers should now have a good understanding of the basics of anarchism, and it should be apparent why this system is better than the State. Sometimes, issues just are black and white: Free market anarchism is good and the State is evil.
But even if we are right that there is a strong moral case for anarchism, we need to confront an important objection. But defense is supposed to be different. We all want it. But something in the nature of things is said to prevent us from organizing it ourselves. We need government to do it because defense is a “public good,” something the market can’t provide for a variety of convoluted reasons (free rider problems, non-excludability, high cost, etc.). It is believed that we would rather be taxed to have bureaucrats defend us. This belief is held acrossthe political spectrum. The arguments about defense and security and military budgets never go to the core.
What if the conventional theory is wrong? What if it turns out that the private sector can provide national defense, not in the sense of contracting with private companies to build bombs at taxpayer expense, but really provide it to paying customers at a profit? The argument of an explosive book edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and published by the Mises Institute, is precisely that it can. If you have never before considered the idea, or considered it but wondered if you were crazy, you need to read The Myth of National Defense.
In the entire history of economic and political ideas, you can find only a handful of writings that argue along these lines, and nothing that makes the argument in this level of detail or with this level of theoretical and practical rigor. This volume is the best proof I’ve seen in years that intellectuals can perform essential services to society: shattering myths, causing a complete rethinking of widely held fallacies, assembling historical evidence in patterns that reveal certain theoretical truths, and making obvious the previously unthinkable.
The bias in favor of government provision of defense, and the taboo about other alternatives, has been, of course, entrenched, for hundreds, even thousands, of years. And certainly since Hobbes, just about every political philosopher has conjured up nightmare scenarios about the consequences of life without government defense, while ignoring the reality of the actual nightmare of government provision. As Hoppe writes, “the first person to provide a systematic explanation for the apparent failure of governments as security producers” was nineteenth century thinker Gustave de Molinari. In our own time, the only people doing serious work on this subject, perhaps the most important of our time, are the Austro-libertarians.”
Government failure, yes, but private defense? Before you say this is an outlandish idea, remember that just about everything else done in the private sector sounds, at some level, implausible. What if I told you that oil needs to be extracted from the ground, on demand and at the price of bottled water?
It seems impossible. The first impulse might be to say that we need a government program to manage such a thing, but the non-intuitive reality is that government could never do such a thing on its own. Only the private sector can manage to coordinate the thousands of processes essential to such an undertaking.
Hoppe begins his argument with a quotation from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The British government had failed to protect the lives and liberties of the citizens of the colonies, and so it was the natural, God-given right (the Declaration argued) of the people to throw off that government and “provide new guards for their future security.”
Not much has changed in the intervening years, Hoppe says, because today the US is not protecting the lives and liberties of Americans and thus it is our right to provide new guards. The remainder of the book explores how such guards can come about.
Hoppe draws attention to the core problem of orthodox defense theory. The presumption on the part of nearly everyone is that monopoly is a bad thing. It is inefficient. It robs society of the benefits of competition. It limits choice. It places too much power in the hands of producers and not enough in the hands of consumers. The second presumption is that defense must be provided by a monopoly. Philosophers and economists have long presumed that the first argument about monopoly is false when applied to defense, and so it must be thrown out. This book takes the reverse view: the first argument is true and the second one is false.
He goes further. He says that there is no way to make a government monopoly of any kind work well. Government cannot be limited once it is conceded that it must be the sole provider of defense. It will continue to raise the price of the “service” as it provides less and less. Democracy doesn’t help, says Hoppe. Democracy is as likely to be as war-like and crushing of internal dissent as the total state (see, e.g., the American Civil War).
Readers might still hesitate. Anarchism may sound good in theory, but what realistic chance do we have to establish it? Isn’t it a Utopian pipe-dream?
To view matters this way would be to give up before we started. What we need to realize is that the State system is dead. It cannot sustain itself, and we must be ready when it falls with something better.
The State as we’ve known it — and that includes its political parties and its redistributionary, military, regulatory, and money-creating bureaucracies — just can’t get it together. It’s as true now as it has been for some 20 years: the Nation-State is in precipitous decline. Once imbued with grandeur and majesty, personified by its Superman powers to accomplish amazing global feats, it is now a wreck and out of ideas.
It doesn’t seem that way because the State is more in-your-face than it has been in all of American history. We see the State at the airport with the incompetent bullying ways of the TSA. We see it in the ridiculous dinosaur of the post office, forever begging for more money so it can continue to do things the way it did them in 1950. We see it in the federalized cops in our towns, once seen as public servants but now revealed as what they have always been: armed tax collectors, censors, spies, thugs.
These are themselves marks of decline. The mask of the State is off. And it has been off for such a long time that we can hardly remember what it looked like when it was on.
So let’s take a quick tour. If you live in a big metropolitan city, drive to the downtown post office (if it is still standing). There you will find a remarkable piece of architecture, tall and majestic and filled with grandeur. There is a liberal use of Roman-style columns. The ceilings indoors are extremely high and thrilling. It might even be the biggest and most impressive building around.
This is a building of an institution that believed in itself. After all, this was the institution that carried the mail, which was the only way that people had to communicate with each other when most of these places were first erected. The state took great pride in offering this service, which it held up as being superior to anything the market could ever provide (even if market provisions like the Pony Express had to be outlawed). Postmen were legendary (or so we were told) for their willingness to brave the elements of competition. It limits choice. It places too much power in the hands of producers and not enough in the hands of consumers. The second presumption is that defense must be provided by a monopoly. Philosophers and economists have long presumed that the first argument about monopoly is false when applied to defense, and so it must be thrown out. This book takes the reverse view: the first argument is true and the second one is false.
He goes further. He says that there is no way to make a government monopoly of any kind work well. Government cannot be limited once it is conceded that it must be the sole provider of defense. It will continue to raise the price of the “service” as it provides less and less. Democracy doesn’t help, says Hoppe. Democracy is as likely to be as war-like and crushing of internal dissent as the total state (see, e.g., the American Civil War).
Readers might still hesitate. Anarchism may sound good in theory, but what realistic chance do we have to establish it? Isn’t it a Utopian pipe-dream?
To view matters this way would be to give up before we started. What we need to realize is that the State system is dead. It cannot sustain itself, and we must be ready when it falls with something better.
The State as we’ve known it — and that includes its political parties and its redistributionary, military, regulatory, and money-creating bureaucracies — just can’t get it together. It’s as true now as it has been for some 20 years: the Nation-State is in precipitous decline. Once imbued with grandeur and majesty, personified by its Superman powers to accomplish amazing global feats, it is now a wreck and out of ideas.
It doesn’t seem that way because the State is more in-your-face than it has been in all of American history. We see the State at the airport with the incompetent bullying ways of the TSA. We see it in the ridiculous dinosaur of the post office, forever begging for more money so it can continue to do things the way it did them in 1950. We see it in the federalized cops in our towns, once seen as public servants but now revealed as what they have always been: armed tax collectors, censors, spies, thugs.
These are themselves marks of decline. The mask of the State is off. And it has been off for such a long time that we can hardly remember what it looked like when it was on.
So let’s take a quick tour. If you live in a big metropolitan city, drive to the downtown post office (if it is still standing). There you will find a remarkable piece of architecture, tall and majestic and filled with grandeur. There is a liberal use of Roman-style columns. The ceilings indoors are extremely high and thrilling. It might even be the biggest and most impressive building around.
This is a building of an institution that believed in itself. After all, this was the institution that carried the mail, which was the only way that people had to communicate with each other when most of these places were first erected. The state took great pride in offering this service, which it held up as being superior to anything the market could ever provide (even if market provisions like the Pony Express had to be outlawed). Postmen were legendary (or so we were told) for their willingness to brave the elements to bring us the essential thing we needed in life apart from food, clothing, and shelter.
And today? Look at the thing that we call the post office. It is a complete wreck, a national joke, a hanger-on from a day long gone. They deliver physical spam to our mail boxes, and a few worthwhile things every once in a while, but the only time they are in the news is when we hear another report of their bankruptcy and need for a bailout.
It’s the same with all the grand monuments of yesteryear’s statism. Think of the Hoover Dam, Mount Rushmore, the endless infrastructure projects of the New Deal, the Eisenhower interstate highway system, the moon shot, the sprawling monuments to itself that the State has erected from sea to shining sea. These all came about in an age when the only real alternative to socialism was considered to be fascism. This was an age when freedom — as in the old-fashioned sense — was just out of the question.
The State in all times and all places operates by force — and force alone. But the style of rule changes. The fascist style emphasized inspiration, magnificence, industrial progress, grandeur, all headed by a valiant leader making smart decisions about all things. This style of American rule lasted from the New Deal through the end of the Cold War.
But this whole system of inspiration has nearly died out. In the communist tradition of naming the stages of history, we can call this late fascism. The fascist system in the end cannot work because, despite the claims, the State does not have the means to achieve what it promises. It does not possess the capability to outrun private markets in technology, of serving the population in the way markets can, of making things more plentiful or cheaper, or even of providing basic services in a manner that is economically efficient.
Fascism, like socialism, cannot achieve its aims. So there is a way in which it makes sense to speak of a stage of history: We are in the stage of late fascism. The grandeur is gone, and all we are left with is a gun pointed at our heads. The system was created to be great, but it is reduced in our time to being crude. Valor is now violence. Majesty is now malice.
Consider whether there is any national political leader in power today the death of whom would call forth anywhere near the same level of mourning as the death of Steve Jobs. People know in their hearts who serves them, and it is not the guy with jack boots, tasers on his belt, and a federal badge. The time when we looked to this man as a public servant is long gone. And this reality only speeds the inevitable death of the State as the twentieth century re-invented it.
Free market anarchists of all countries, unite: We have a world to win!
