Letters (October 1971)

Proposed Solution to the Anarchist/Limited Government Controversy

To the Editor:

Allow me to modestly submit what I think might be the solution to the limited government/anarchist conflict.

Today, an organization such as Pinkerton is obliged by the State to justify its arrests of individuals. And the obligation of justification is a valid one. For if Pinkerton arrested someone and refused to justify the action, the State could rightfully assume that there was no justification and that as a consequence the arrested person's rights had been abridged. Now, the State, as long as it itself was not an outlaw institution, could rightfully intervene in Pinkerton's arrest of the individual without abridging anyone's rights. In fact it would be upholding one of the most important rights of all — the right of any defense agency (“constitutionally” sanctioned or “privately” organized) to know that a citizen's rights are in fact being defended in his dealings with another defense agency! (Such a citizen represents a potential customer. And also if a defense agency is to maintain its credibility, a “charitable” — to the extent possible — concern with defense per se is required. That is, a defense agency ought to be concerned with the defense of all citizens, since to allow one injustice is to encourage more and makes the task of overall defense more difficult for all.)

Once it is established that our defense agency or government has a right to know another's justification for an arrest, the conflict between limited government and competing government is no conflict at all.

Two scenarios can be projected:

(1) Limited constitutional government existing hand in hand with various private agencies, each obliged to justify its arrest and incarcerations to the other. As long as the limited government solely uses force to secure justification from recalcitrant or whimsical defense agencies, such agencies' rights are not abridged, since they derive only from their being in fact defense agencies that can justify that defense.

(Those who didn't subscribe to private agencies would fall under the domain of the constitutional government.)

(2) If the constitutional government fell from favour there would be just competing agencies as postulated by the “pure” anarchists.

(In either case mooching must be allowed if the course of justice as such is to be preserved. Perhaps a penniless man subjected to false arrest would agree to turn his compensation over to the defense agency that came to his aid.)

So: once the right to justification of arrest, trial, etc., among any competing agencies (constitutional or otherwise) is established, the question is not what we ought to have, but what we will have as history moves on.

I hope this exposition is helpful. If the prose is murky and the organization shabby, please bear with me. Urgency compels me to submit this now. This limited government/anarchy argument is ripping up a movement in desperate need of unity if only because of its small numbers compared to others.

The initial concept of an agency's being obliged to justify its actions to the constitutional government was taken from Nathaniel Branden's Seminar #8. The justification of the “obligation to justify” is strictly my own.

Bill Bragg, Randallstown, Md.

The Editor Replies

There are several problems with Mr. Bragg's solution to the anarchist/limited government controversy. First, a central reason that anarcho-capitalists reject Randian “limited government” is because, we maintain, government can logically have no rights, no authority, no special powers which individual men and women and their voluntary associations (e.g., private defense agencies) do not have. Therefore, if in fact a “constitutional government” has the moral right to require private defense agencies to justify their arrests, incarcerations, etc., then so do those defense agencies have the right to require the “constitutional government” to justify its arrest, incarcerations, etc.

Actually what justifies the arrests, incarcerations, etc. of either a constitutional government or a private defense agency is not its willingness to justify itself. Rather what justifies the use of force in any case whatsoever, by any individual or group whatsoever, is the fact that it was retaliatory force; i.e., that metaphysically, in reality, defense rather than aggression occurred. If a man acts justly, the nature of his action justifies him whether or not anyone else knows the truth about what he did or agrees with his morality. Morality, after all, is objective. It may indeed be to a man's interest to have others agree with the morality of his action, but there is no primary moral obligation to justify moral actions to anyone. Moral actions are their own moral justification.

Mr. Bragg's solution has in fact evaded the precise question at issue in the limited government/anarchist controversy: Does government have any special authority of action, such as a “right to arrest”, not possessed by individual men in isolation, or does it not have such a special authority. If it does have such a special authority, a right of action not residing in individual men and their voluntary associations, where then does it come from? If it does not have such a special authority, then clearly it cannot place itself in a superior socio-political position to defense agencies.

It is obvious that Mr. Bragg believes that a constitutional government does have some special authority of action not possessed by private defense agencies. This is evident from such statements as: “Those who don't subscribe to private agencies would fall under the domain of the constitutional government.” An anarchist believes in no such thing as political “domain”. The only domains that an anarchist recognizes as morally valid are those which men create by their voluntary associations. Thus one can no more presume to place a person who does not subscribe to a private defense agency under the domain of a constitutional government than one could morally place a person who did not have life insurance under the “domain” of the Perpetual Life Insurance Company. In both cases, men are free to contract with the agency of their choice or not to contract with anyone whomsoever if they so choose.

The reason that Mr. Bragg's proposal is invalid is that it violates the basic principle of the libertarian social ethic: force is only to be used against those who have initiated its use. When Mr. Bragg sanctions the use of force by a constitutional government against a defense agency which refuses to justify its actions to the government, he is sanctioning the initiation of force. Thus his proposal is morally unacceptable.

If the rights of all men are equal and the same, then there is no way to a priori establish one instrumentality of justice (e.g., a constitutional government) ethically above another. Since government rests on precisely this distinction it remains morally unjustified. It is indeed possible that private defense agencies of a future anarchist society may from time to time query each other about the rationale behind this or that arrest. But such queries would be simply that — requests which a defense agency would have the right to turn down.

I share Mr. Bragg's concern about the negative effects the anarchist/limited government debate may sometimes have on the coherence of the libertarian movement. However I am afraid that he has simply rephrased the issue rather than provided a solution acceptable to all parties. Fortunately it is not necessary that libertarians agree about everything in order to work together. The greatest unwillingness to cooperate, to engage in activism of any sort whatsoever seems to be among limited governmentalists, particularly those who remain willfully ignorant of the growing body of anarcho-capitalist literature. Thus the barrier to cooperation in the final analysis seems to be ignorance and intolerance, and it is to these psychological problems which more open-minded libertarians must direct themselves if they are to forge an alliance between the dissenting factions.

Jarret B. Wollstein, Editor