Franc's glossary of Market Anarchist theory

[Francois Tremblay]

Market: The process of freely trading for a certain commodity (as opposed to state control). The sum total of such trades.

Anarchy: The absence of a state. Any form of social organization which does not include a state.

Market Anarchy: A form of social organization where individuals are free to trade for any commodity, including those usually reserved to the state. In short, a form of social organization where individuals are politically free.

• Freedom: Capacity to fulfill one's values. To be free means to be able to fulfill one's values to the best of one's abilities, without interference. There are four areas of freedom: personal freedom, relational freedom, social freedom and political freedom.
• Trade: The free exchange or sharing of resources.

Society: The sum total of all voluntary interrelations between individuals.

State and ruling class: A parasitic organization monopolizing order on a given territory, using the process of legitimized coercion (mainly through the imposition of a singular value system). Provides some services coercively and in a monopolistic fashion (such as police, military, law, courts, roads, currencies, charity, and so on). Statists point to these services as proof of legitimacy, even though these services would be provided far more efficiently and morally without monopoly or coercion. The individuals populating the state are globally known as the ruling class. The state follows the Parasite Principle.

• Monopoly: Exclusive control over the production of a commodity by one organization. Monopolies lead to higher prices, lower service, and lowered incentives for progress. The state is the clearest and most widespread example of a monopoly, on many different and vital commodities.
• Order: The social result of an apparatus by which actions are evaluated and judged. Necessarily implies legitimacy on the part of the apparatus.
• Legitimized: General belief that someone's power or authority is justified. Such a belief can be manufactured by propaganda. Legitimacy explains why a serial killer is jailed, while a soldier who kills "the enemy" is rewarded.
• Coercion: Using force against, or threatening the use of force against, an individual to make him act against his will or agreement.
• Parasite: An organism that obtains nourishment from a host without benefiting or killing the host.
• The Parasite Principle: "In all state actions, there are winners- the ruling class and the exploitative class- and losers- us."

Statism: Utopian belief system having as fundamental principle that the state is the best (or only acceptable) form of social organization. As for most belief systems, it is mostly transmitted through constant propaganda by the ruling class and the exploitative class, as well as the reinforcement provided by peer pressure and ostracism. Its morality is uniformly of the type "might makes right".

• Utopian: A form of social organization which goes against basic facts of human nature. Statism is utopian because its imposition of a singular value system on the whole of society goes against the fact that most human beings have different value systems. This creates the endemic social warfare typical of most democracies.
• Propaganda: A coherent structure of psychological entrapment, having the aim of manipulating people's value systems into serving those who control the structure. In a democratic state, this is achieved by control over money (e.g. through subsidies), education, the media, science and art.
• "Might makes right": The belief that the need for moral justification can be mitigated or eliminated by the use of force. Statism is a "might makes right" belief system because it claims that the sheer power of the state overrides moral concerns regarding the use of force. The state, in this view, transcends morality in a way that private individuals cannot (e.g. a murderer vs a soldier).

Value system: Hierarchy of values that all moral agents possess, and is demonstrated by their choices. Most people's value systems differ, making the imposition of a singular value system by the state a source of constant social warfare. This is an individualistic concept. One's value system is molded by one's virtues or vices.

• Value: A class of things that one seeks to gain or keep. In a rational value system, a value is necessary for the expression of all others, forming a self-sustaining system. For example, the value of freedom- freedom is necessary for the expression of all other values.
• Individualism: The basic moral premise that only individuals can act, benefit and suffer. The opposite of collectivism, which holds that abstract groups or transcendent entities can act, benefit or suffer, necessitating an abstract structure (such as the state) to support these groups or entities.
• Virtue: A mental habit conductive to moral behaviour. The opposite of vice. Example: the virtue of non-coercion.

Accountability: A feedback system by which we can select the changes we desire and help eliminate the ones we don't. In the market, this is called profit. There is no statist analogue, although voting is sometimes invoked. Accountability is the product of a healthy incentive system.

Incentive and incentive system: An incentive is a path of preferred behaviour induced by a feature of a system. An incentive system is the sum total of all such paths for a given system. Incentives are an important feature of any form of social organization because they hold true regardless of who is in power or a specific culture, and as such they tell us how desirable this or that form is in general.
For example, statist systems have a strong incentive towards war because states can raise the resources needed by taxation and force people to become killers through draft, while market organizations cannot do the same. Therefore we should expect statist systems in general to be more warlike, and perhaps a correlation between state power and war, a tendancy which we observe in history.

Class: A social stratum whose members share certain political characteristics. In statism, we can differentiate between four general classes: the ruling class, the exploitative class, the working class, and the welfare class.

• The ruling class is the group of individuals who are part of the state.
• The exploitative class is the group of individuals who are exploiters but not part of the state.
• The working class is the group of individuals who receive neither the dubious benefit of welfare, nor the morally corrupt benefits of being an exploiter. This represents the largest segment of the population.
• The welfare class is the group of individuals who are entrapped by the state in a cycle of poverty, and unwittingly repay the state by giving it legitimacy.

Exploitation: The process of restricting people's value expression without their consent, of one's own power, through the use of the power of another, or indirectly through propaganda. I distinguish between three categories of exploiters : first-hand parasites, second-hand parasites, and free riders.

• First-hand parasites are the individuals who use force directly, those that have the guns, and the individuals who give orders to them (policemen, soldiers, private criminals, politicians, bureaucrats).
• Second-hand parasites are the individuals who exploit indirectly by benefitting from state power, and depend on state coercion for the maintenance of their status (activists, interest groups, political organizations and parties, unions, corporate trusts, corporations receiving subsidies, corporations benefitting from protectionism, mafias).
• Free riders are people who would still have a job in a market anarchy, but who use state power to further their aims, while suffering the perverse effects of said power (CEOs of multinationals, politico-scientists and politico-artists, activists, churches, lawyers, doctors, insurers, public school teachers, amateur and professional athletes, and so on).

Democracy: According to statist propaganda, a collectivist method of self-governance, "by the people, for the people". In practice, democracy is the means by which the state secures its legitimacy without needing to surrender any real power to "the people", representing a step down from monarchy, a form of social organization in which legitimacy is an arduous process. It gives the illusion of decision-making to its captive population through the process of voting, which is yet another form of "might makes right", although ultimately a futile one. The main product of democracy is social warfare. As a decision-making process, should be replaced by Informed Consensus.

• Voting: A democratic ritual in which individuals, called "voters", cast ballots in favour of a candidate or party. Morally, it represents a sanction of state coercion, as democracy is a mechanism of legitimacy.
• Social warfare: Process by which individuals affiliate themselves to various activist groups and demand laws, rights or privileges. Social warfare arises because of the Tragedy of the Commons: people must band together and get state power to act in their favour before other people do the same against them. When present in a relatively free society, the end result of this process is called the erosion of freedom.
• Informed Consensus: Process of decision-making where groups of informed individuals come together and take a decision by consensus, with a set of rules and values used to guide dialogue. This can be scaled to as few as two individuals (a couple) and as many as hundreds of thousands of people or more (Wikipedia).

Right: According to statist propaganda, a whole category of arbitrary laws and privileges united by a common concept (e.g. "the right to health care", "animal rights") that are owed to a group for no specific reason. In reality, a natural principle of social progress, derived from the value of freedom. A right is possessed by all individuals, and stops when the rights of another are infringed.

• Right of action: Principle that all individuals should be free to act in any way desired.
• Right of property: Principle that all individuals should be free to own things other than their own bodies.
• Progress: The expansion of our capacity to act (that which freedom acts upon).

Equality: A statist code-word used to imbue legitimacy to the democratic process, and push the doctrine of social justice. In reality, political equality means that all individuals should have the same rights. Statist systems are inherently unequal, as they are predicated on the existence of a ruling class which has the right to make an arbitrary code of laws, impose it by force, steal people's resources, and so on.


--continued in the next post--

[Francois Tremblay]

Social justice: According to statist propaganda, a vast forcible redistribution of resources by the state in order to enforce "equality". In reality, the market is true social justice.

State Capitalism: An economic system where the most economically powerful take advantage of the state's power in order to extract advantages over everyone else.

Communism: An economic system where both political and economic power are vested in the ruling class. Nothing more than State Capitalism taken to its logical extent.

War: Murder on a large scale committed in the name of the state or against it. The murderers who participate in it are called "soldiers".

Perpetual war: A (mostly metaphorical) war whose victory conditions are unattainable, usually because the goal is a nebulous concept or for whose opposite there will always be a demand (e.g. "poverty", "terrorism", "drugs").

Law: A monopolistic construct of the ruling class, designed to further its interests and enforced by its monopolistic courts. In order for the state to maintain its monopoly on coercion, anyone who breaks these rules is declared a criminal, and thus deligitimized in the eyes of the people.

Civil Disobedience: Refusing to obey the law, or a law in particular, for moral reasons. Civil disobedience, when done for sound moral reasons, is one of the most noble social acts one can perform.

Immigration: The action of crossing a border into a different country. There is no reason to think that people separated by an arbitrary line cannot be part of the same society, and in our modern world, such an idea is grossly outmoded and absurd.

• Border: Arbitrary line which delimitates the territories that each state can exploit.
• Country: Arbitrary territory delimitated by borders. The existence of countries and of parasitic exploitation within them gives rise to nationalism.
• Nationalism: Psychopathic belief of state-slaves that they alone have the best master. This behaviour is also observed in other forms of slavery and kidnapping.

"Agencies", "Protection Agencies": The terms I use to designate companies which offer a code (replacing the monopolistic law), and protection services following that code, to their customers.

DROs: Dispute Resolution Organizations. Term used by Stefan Molyneux to designate private courts, which also preside over arbitration.

Arbitration: In general, a form of justice where both parties designate a person whose ruling they will accept formally. More specifically in Market Anarchist theory, arbitration designates the process by which two agencies pre-negociate a set of common rules in anticipation of cases where a customer from each agency is involved in a dispute.


Arguments for Market Anarchy

Burden of proof: Logic dictates that the burden of proof be put on the positive claim. In this case, while common belief dictates that the anarchist has the burden of proof, it actually belongs to both parties. Both are making a positive claim about social organization. Furthermore, most statists make the same claim as the anarchist (i.e. that markets should exist) but adds an extra claim (i.e. that the state should exist), therefore the statist has an extra burden of proof. Statists are incapable of shedding this extra burden, which makes this a powerful argument, if you can get an honest statist to admit that he's making a positive claim.

Moral Argument: A moral principle or system, or a political principle or system, is invalid if it is asymmetrical in application (to locations, times or persons). Can also be called "universality." Argument made by Murray Rothbard in his book The Ethics of Liberty.
Examples: Gun control is invalid because it sets one principle for one group (state exploiters)- you can have guns- and another principle for the rest of us- you can't have guns. Taxation is invalid because theft remains criminal in all other instances. If it is just for some people to steal in the name of the "common good", then it should be good for everyone. And so on.

Geometric Argument: Consists of setting up a fictional scenario involving three people on a desert island, pointing out that statist behaviour in such a scenario is immoral (such as taxation- two people deciding to steal a third's resources because they think he has too much) without noting that it is statist behaviour, and expanding the situation in numbers until you reach the "millions of people" stage, at which point you reveal the statist analogy.

Argument from the State of Nature: Consists of examining every possible alternative about the nature of man and showing how the state is undesirable in all these alternatives. For example: if everyone is born good, then we don't need a state, if everyone is born evil, then the state would be evil as well, and if everyone is a mixture of good and evil, then a state only gives an opportunity for the most evil to wield power over the rest of us.

Semantic Argument: Consists of pointing out the conceptual absurdity of concepts such as "state", "country" and "citizenship", and showing that statism is literally meaningless. A favourite argument of Marc Stevens'.

Argument from Freedom: Consists of explaining the value of freedom, and demonstrating how Market Anarchy is the system most conductive to freedom.

Argument from Public Goods

1. A public good is defined as a good which cannot be efficiently provided because its provision benefits a wide population regardless of how many people paid for the good. Every single agents is faced with a high cost and a low proportion of the benefit, and thus will most likely not desire to shoulder any costs, making financing impossible. (Standard statist definition)

2a. In a democratic system, good governance is a public good because:

* Any individual voter would need to shoulder great costs in order to form informed opinions on all issues of public policy, and, if his vote means anything at all, would only reap a very small proportion of the benefits. Therefore each individual voter has a negative incentive in bringing about good governance.

* In trying to improve his situation, any individual lobbyist is faced with two alternatives: attempt to repeal the hundreds of laws passed by his opponents which make his life slightly worse (and which repeal could cumulatively make his life much easier), or pass one law for his interest group which makes life much easier for himself and slightly worse for everyone else. Since it is much easier to pass one law than repeal a hundred laws, he will necessarily choose the former.

2b. In a Market Anarchist system, good governance is a private good, because every individual directly reaps the reward of his good decisions, due to the one-to-one relationship between the customer and his agency. He faces the full costs, but reaps the full benefits as well.

2c. In a Market Anarchist system, bad governance is a public good because:

* Any individual customer would need to shoulder additional costs in order to endorse a bad rule or institution (such as the War on Drugs), and therefore every individual customer has an incentive to reduce bad governance.

* Any individual trying to bring about a State or other collectivist structure cannot do it alone. He would need the support of most people living on the same territory, as the State is a territorial monopoly. In doing so, he (and his eventual supporters) shoulders an enormous cost, with the anticipation of reaping only a small proportion of the (assumed) benefits of a State. Therefore States will tend to be very difficult to form within a Market Anarchy.

3. Therefore, Market Anarchy will more easily bring, maintain and cultivate good governance than democracy can, because democracy suffers from a fatal public goods problem, while Market Anarchy doesn't.

Freedom's Imperative
by Jim Davies

Proving that Market Anarchy is the only justifiable organizational system by demonstrating that self-ownership is axiomatically true and that Market Anarchy is the only organizational system built on that premise.

The Problem of Collectivist Obligation

(1) One or more of three possibilities must obtain:
a. Morality does not exist.
b. Morality is determined by the individual (realism, subjectivism, etc).
c. Morality is determined by the collective (autocracy, utilitarianism, etc).
(2) Morality necessarily exists, because:
(2a) Morality is axiomatic (cannot be denied without direct contradiction).
(2b) Morality is a necessary fact for all moral agents.
(3) Either morality is determined by the individual moral agent, or the collective, or both. (from 1 and 2)
(4) Collectivist obligation is inter-subjective relative to the collectivist belief system.
(5) Any moral obligation towards the collective would have to be demonstrated objectively (i.e. as a fact that exists independently from the group).
(6) It is impossible to go from inter-subjective propositions to objective propositions, as any given sum or network of inter-subjective propositions must still remain grounded to the belief system.
(7) It is impossible to justify the passage from collectivist obligation to moral obligation. (from 4, 5 and 6)
(8) Morality cannot be determined by the collective. (from 7)
(9) Morality can only be determined by the individual moral agent. (from 3 and 8)


Spooner's Dilemma

If there be such a natural principle as justice, it is necessarily the highest, and consequently the only and universal, law for all those matters to which it is naturally applicable. And, consequently, all human legislation is simply and always an assumption of authority and dominion, where no right of authority or dominion exists. It is, therefore, simply and always an intrusion, an absurdity, an usurpation, and a crime.

On the other hand, if there be no such natural principle as justice, there can be no such thing as injustice. If there be no such natural principle as honesty, there can be no such thing as dishonesty; and no possible act of either force or fraud, committed by one man against the person or property of another, can be said to be unjust or dishonest; or be complained of, or prohibited, or punished as such. In short, if there be no such principle as justice, there can be no such acts as crimes; and all the professions of governments, so called, that they exist, either in whole or in part, for the punishment or prevention of crimes, are professions that they exist for the punishment or prevention of what never existed, nor can ever exist. Such professions are therefore confessions that, so far as crimes are concerned, governments have no occasion to exist...

Lysander Spooner, "Natural Law," Section V

[Francois Tremblay]

Anything I missed?

[tnrr2]

Did you mean goods and services instead of commodity?

[Francois Tremblay]

What's wrong with commodity?

[tnrr2]

When I see the word commodity used in politics/economics I always think of it in the economic sense as specifically a homogeneous good (gold, lumber, cattle, etc). Just a little imprecise is all.

Btw, since you've define value and virtue, shouldn't you define morality and the other terms there as well?

[Francois Tremblay]

Well, I didn't think it was particularly relevant...

[tnrr2]

Might be helpful. There are so many moral reletavists around.

I really think you should change commodity to goods and services, though.

[Francois Tremblay]

What other terms do you want me to define apart from morality?

[tnrr2]

With regards to that, 'morality' and 'good/bad/moral/immoral'. Some reletavists I recently spoke with confused moral with virtue repeatedly.

[Francois Tremblay]

Well, I don't really see how it's relevant to Market Anarchist theory. Why not make a new glossary of moral terms?

[tnrr2]

True. Any way you wish. Would definetely be helpful when debating relativists.

[Francois Tremblay]

Added "border", "country" and "nationalism".

[turtle turtle]

Perhaps adding something about self-ownership to the argument from freedom. This seems to be a central issue with statists; they've been convinced that they somehow do not own themselves.

Great job putting this together. Thanks.

[Francois Tremblay]

How exactly would you formulate the argument?