Anarchy Unbound
For the August issue, Cato Unbound has Peter Leeson, Bruce Benson, Dani Rodrik, and Randall Holcombe answering the question of who needs government. I don’t want to get into all the details here (and don’t have to since the whole point of the discussion was to allow you to read the thoughts of four very smart people on the subject) so I’ll just point to two of the opening essays of interest.
Leeson’s opening salvo is a particularly good presentation of the case for at least considering anarchy as a viable option. Rather than offering a wildly Utopian vision he makes the more sensible claim that private arrangements tend to work better than we think, even in situations with a seemingly high potential for criminal activity. Recent research (a lot of it from Leeson himself) is finding more examples of social arrangements that are stable without government enforcement. As Leeson notes, the best arguments for anarchy are empirical, not philosophical. There are lots of theoretical reasons why Somalians should be worse off since the collapse of their government but the fact is they’ve experienced a rise in most of the objective measures of their standard of living. There are several reasons why criminal agreements should breakdown quickly and yet pirates were able to create stable, democratic institutions that enabled “expeditions” of several months.
I think Randall Holcombe’s response was the better of the two “anti-anarchy” pieces. Holcombe’s arguments boil down to two issues: can a state of anarchy be a stable social equilibrium (essentially Nozick’s objection) and how feasible is anarchy politically? I think the stability bit is a very good point but I think it’s a theoretical objection that some of the research mentioned above is starting to chip away at. As far as political feasibility in the US today, anarcho-capitalism is a dead duck. Bring it up and people start looking at you like some kind of commie hippie that accidentally wandered in from the 1960s. But I think that’s more because people haven’t heard of it than because they’ve considered it and rejected it.
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