A Critique of Anarchism

published: 2010-11-09

Many people dismiss anarchism as a terrible idea without giving it a fair chance. I think this is because there is some misunderstanding about the meaning of "anarchy". Anarchy does not automatically entail chaos as the popular connotation suggests. It also does not mean that there is no law enforcement. An anarchy is a political system in which many smaller governing agencies take the place of a monolithic government. These government agencies compete for customers who pay them fees for the service of protection. The idea is that this competition will drive the agencies towards optimization just as competition in the marketplace promotes efficiency in business. In this article I will discuss why my analysis suggests that anarchy is nevertheless undesirable.

A good place to begin this discussion is with real world examples. Of course there are brief instances of anarchy after the abrupt overthrow of a regime, but we will ignore these because such transient states can be avoided with more careful implementation. There are also nations that look like anarchies because there governments are doing such a bad job, but these are not true anarchies because the government is suppressing the growth of new governing agencies. Perhaps the best long-term examples of anarchy in recent history are feudal systems. Feudal lords essentially ran local governments that protected the people in a region. Of course, feudal systems have a rather negative image because the citizens were usually oppressed to the point of serfdom. But modern anarchy would probably not closely resemble these feudal systems. Feudal lords were able to abuse their subjects because they held an effective monopoly on the service of government, despite the fact that an anarchy has many governing service providers by definition. The reason is that in the past, it was more difficult to move and protection depended on fixed resources like city walls. So citizens could not easily switch to a new service provider and competing providers could not easily get started. Thus, feudalism might better be thought of as a bunch of non-anarchic monolithic governments inside an anarchic territory.

In modern times, transportation is much easier and protection can be implemented with guns, which means that two or more agencies can easily service the same location. So feudalism is not necessarily a good example of what we might expect of a modern anarchy. Since we are out of real-world examples, we need to start thinking and developing arguments from thought experiments.

First, we need to be sure that the target is well-defined or there won't be a well-defined answer to the question of what system is best. Here is the scenario: you get to be dictator for 10 years and during this time you can mold government and society in any way that a dictator realistically could. For example, you can run a propaganda campaign, but you can't make everyone buy into it. At the end of the 10 years, your power will be permanently and totally removed. Given this situation, in what state should you leave the country in order to maximize the average expected subjective life quality of its citizens over the next 1000 years. We will define that state to be "the ideal government system", and our objective is to identify that system.

For the purposes of this article, we will limit ourselves to comparing anarchy with the current democratic republic of the United States. However, the comparison will be done in the context of seeking the above-defined ideal government system. Below is a list of arguments sorted by which side they favor and how strongly they favor it.

Strongly Pro-Anarchy

Cost Efficiency. Due to the fact that agencies compete in an anarchy, they will be more efficient at reducing costs and operating more efficiently. This would be particularly significant due to changes in military expenditure and social security.
Freedom. Enforcing laws costs money and when people have alternative law structures to choose from, they will have an incentive to choose less stringent ones in order to save money. For example, seat belt laws and some drug laws would likely disappear, among others.

Indecisive

__Coverage. In an anarchy, there will be certain regions and laws that are not profitable to be enforced, so they won't be. However, this is not a huge problem as people can choose whether they want to venture into un-governed territories and unprofitable laws can't be that important. It may in fact be better just to save the money in these cases.
Thoroughness. In an anarchy, individuals may be unable to pay for protection, or just choose not to. Not only are these individuals in trouble, but society will also feel some effects. If 10% of individuals are non-subscribers, then about 10% of crimes will go unprosecuted. This will leave more criminals on the loose. However, the citizens of an anarchy may pay for a community protection service to prevent these problems.
Corruption. Both anarchy and government suffer from corruption. In an anarchy, there will be some agencies, particularly smaller ones, that are in business for a quick profit and accept bribes to let crimes slide, or claim to provide a service and then deny responsibility for bogus reasons just like private insurance companies regularly do. Anarchy companies will also have an incentive to engage in racketeering in which they create crime in order to increase demand for service. On the other hand, competition will tend to keep such corruption in check, at least for larger companies, a benefit which a government doesn't have.

Moderately Anti-Anarchy

Voting. In an anarchy, money votes instead of people. This can cause negative effects on the average life quality. For example, suppose 99% of people favor a law to reduce pollution and 1%, who are running factories, don't. The people operating the factories are not only wealthier than average, but also have a more significant economic interest in the issue. If the factory owners are willing to pay 100x more on average than the rest of the population, the law won't pass. A small special-interest group benefits while the majority loses. Governments also suffer from special-interest group effects, but votes are more difficult to buy since polling is done in secret and there is no way to confirm which vote was cast.
Conflicts. The main criticism of anarchy that Ayn Rand presented was the problem of conflicts between agencies. What happens when the laws of two different agencies conflict? Somebody's protection has to fail. We can look to how governments deal with this issue: they leave it in the hands of the local regime. But in anarchy, regimes overlap, so there is no easy answer. Furthermore, anarchic agencies have more of an incentive to initiate battle because giving up will make their agency look weak and be bad for business. Gang-like turf wars seem likely.

Strongly Anti-Anarchy

Defense. It is hard to imagine how an anarchy could have an effective unified military for defense against internal rebellion or foreign invasion. Local agencies wouldn't waste their resources on a standing army if there wasn't an obvious threat. Some people suggest a donation-based standing army. This is a severe collective action problem, especially since threats probably won't be apparent or seem realistic until a war is already underway. Would you voluntarily give large sums of money for a standing army when there has been no war since before you were born and there is essentially no effect on the result whether you do or don't? As for on-demand military solutions, I can't imagine them beating a well-prepared tax-funded foreign military. A foreign nation looking to plunder, or a rebel militia looking for power could potentially overrun the whole system.
Stability. The strongest anti-anarchy argument is that anarchies are not stable even under ideal circumstances (no foreign invasions or internal rebellions). Just as in business, there will be a tendency towards consolidation and monopolization due to economies of scale. Eventually one company will become more powerful than all the rest and at that point you are back to a monolithic government. The only difference is that this government is a company, possibly owned by one person, probably without a strong constitution based on checks and balances. It's a toss of the dice and you may very well end up with a monolithic government that is much worse than the one you started with. Keep in mind that every nation in the world started as an anarchy and ended up the way it is today.

In conclusion, I have acknowledged certain benefits of anarchy, but the negatives are the overwhelmingly overriding factors. Therefore, I don't think anarchy can qualify as the ideal government system as defined above since it cannot beat the system currently implemented in the US.