New Logical Fallacy: Argument from the Brochure

All the bad things people predict will happen in an ancap world are happening NOW

One of the many tactics used in defense of the state (or out of fear of anarcho-libertarian ideas) is

1. Asserting that in the absence of the state’s authority, all sorts of bad things will happen, while simultaneously

2. Ignoring the fact that all those bad things happen with state authority.

There will be crime!
There is crime now. Lots of it.

There will be corruption.
There is corruption now. Some of it is small-scale and petty. Some of it is large-scale and entrenched. Some of it is happening on a scale we do not even perceive, in ways that impact our lives quite deeply, yet perpetrated by people far beyond our reach.

There will be war.
You mean more war than the wars waged by modern states, which killed more than 150 million people in the twentieth century alone?

There will be free-riders.
Oh please. Half the population of America pay no taxes at all. Many of them even get money back. You think people aren’t free-riding the benefits of that stop sign, police car, or Apache attack helicopter now? Think again.

There will be monopolies.
There is ample evidence that monopolies cannot exist without government help. Goodness knows corporate personhood cannot exist without government help. So government helps create monopolies, and then every once in a while comes along and uses antitrust laws to break a few of them up. Color me unimpressed.

Rich people will have special advantages!
Exsqueeze me? We don’t have to wait for anarchism—rich people can buy all the special advantages they want right now. Government doesn’t prevent that. (In fact, it probably makes it easier.) It’s hard to even take this objection seriously, and yet I hear it frequently enough.

People will die. Don’t you care?
Governments murdered and starved 262 million people in a single century IN THE NAME OF THE STATE. Their crime was opposing the state, or being inconvenient to statist aims and ideas. (Anarchist “warlords” will have to work really hard to match this number, or the 150 million war dead. Really really really hard.)

There will be two-tiered security and justice.
Maybe, maybe not. But right now, we have about seven tiers:

• Tier 1: Homeless people
  Police do not protect homeless people ex ante. Yes, they will investigate a homeless person’s murder, but not nearly as assiduously as they would a rich person’s. Often enough, all they really do is call someone to clear away the corpse.

• Tier 2: Poor people in terrible neighborhoods
  The LAPD don’t prevent crime in South Central, Compton, etc. They mostly just try to contain it.

• Tier 3: Poor people in poor neighborhoods
  Getting better than Tier 2, but it’s certainly no Tier 4

• Tier 4: Middle-class

  Police are still under no specific legal obligation to protect, but they will generally respond faster here.

• Tier 5: Rich
  Municipalities certainly respond to the security concerns of rich neighborhoods faster. After all, they pay the taxes. Rich people can also buy better security and better lawyers, giving them another advantage—right here, right now, with a government.

• Tier 6: Rich and famous or connected
  Don’t even begin to try to suggest that there isn’t a separate standard for politicians, actors, hedge fund CEOs, etc.

• Tier 7: The people we don’t even see
  I cannot prove their existence—indeed, that is the whole point of “people we can’t see”—but I contend that there are people so far above the law that we will never even know what they might have done.

We could go on all day talking about the objections I hear: People will be exploited. Companies will engage in fraud. Small polities will be vulnerable to larger ones. And on and on.

The objections are almost always things that are happening right now, in this world, which is all aswarm with massive modern nation states. Not just happening, but happening to egregious degrees. And yet very often, the disputant is SURE it would be worse in the absence of the state.

Sure because of what? It’s all guesswork, fueled by fear and 5,000 years of indoctrination by intellectuals making arguments on behalf of the state. Intellectuals who, for most of human history, would not have had a job unless they had devoted their intellects in service of the state…

Why of course there’s divine right of kings! Thank you, my liege, for this delicious turkey leg.

Why slave away in a farm field when you can sit in a nice warm room writing about how without the benign leadership of our betters, we’d all be living in chaos. (You don’t even have to believe it—more roast pig and a night with a toothsome courtesan should assuage any cognitive dissonance!)

There is no utopia. The question we have to ask is whether all the sorts of objections above will be worse or better in the absence of such states, and in the presence of their market alternatives.

I recognize that anarchists have to make the case that it will be better. We cannot respond with a tu quoque argument (i.e., “Oh yeah, well you do it too.”). We must have answers.

But that discussion cannot even take place if we are up against people who are pretending that the brochure version of government represents reality.

This logical fallacy needs a name. Something like, argument from the brochure…

Come to government land, where there is no war or crime or exploitation or fraud. Where justice is equal, no one is corrupt, and everyone pays his fair share. Stay away from Anarchy Island, where all those things are all happening all the time.

Please. Let’s at least start the discussion in an honest place.

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PS: Just a fun aside…

My prompt for this article’s image was this:

A man is having a fantasy dream. In his dream, he sees butterflies; friendly politicians shaking hands with happy citizens; a peaceful land; a rainbow-colored Capitol building; playing children; rich people in hot-air balloons dropping coins down to happy people; and Santa Claus riding a unicorn, delivering goodies to children side-by-side with the Easter Bunny.

I got a series of the most insane, surreal pictures. Here are a few of the others for your amusement.