Good Times With Peter Leeson
Posted: August 20th, 2007 | Author: Sam | Filed under: Anarchy, Blog Posts, Development, Frustration, Libertarians, Politics, Scary Stuff |
To read Peter Leeson’s defense of anarchy, you’d come away from it thinking that anarchy was actually a good idea. And although I have numerous objections to his work, my friend Josh does a far better job of dissecting Leeson’s work. But I wanted to object to one particular argument that Leeson, and his other anarcho-capitalists, frequently make: that negative behaviors are no big deal in the long run.
To illustrate this, Leeson makes the following argument -
Imagine you go to a restaurant and order a $30 filet mignon. When your food arrives you take a bite and realize the restaurant has served you a $10 flank steak instead. The restaurant has defrauded you. You could take the owner to court; but then you realize that the simple time cost this will entail is not worth what you will recover even if you win. Although in principle government exists to adjudicate this matter, in practice it does not.
Your dining experience is a little slice of anarchy. Knowing this, restaurant owners should perpetually serve $10 flank steaks to customers who order filet mignon. Of course restaurants don’t do this. And the reason they don’t is because they realize that if they do, you’ll stop eating there and tell everyone you know to boycott the restaurant as well. Even without government, Smith’s “invisible hand” leads the restaurant to do the right thing.
This is a common argument made by anarcho-capitalists like Leeson. In it, we see that the negative behavior - serving the incorrect food in an attempt to steal profit from the customer - will eventually end as the restaurant’s reputation is so badly damaged that it loses its customers. Sure, a few people have been defrauded out of their money, but over the long run, so what?
There are two very serious problems with this sort of argument. The first is that comparing steaks to the very serious suffering of Somalis is slightly offensive. “Oh, see how I got defrauded out of my $20 bucks for a steak? That’s like 300,000 Somalis dying in an anarchist state. Sure, it sucks in the immediate, but over the long term, so what?” Reading through Leeson’s work - and the work of some other anarcho-capitalists - you see very real human suffering compared to all sorts of pain-in-the-ass experiences, as if there is anything there worth comparing.
The second, and more objectionable, part of Leeson’s argument is that he affords himself and his beliefs an infinite amount of time to work themselves out. In other words, while he gives any form of government approximately no time whatsoever to work itself out, he maintains that places like Somalia will eventually be in tip-top shape. How convenient for his beliefs. It makes it remarkably easy to gloss over 300,000 dead Somalis if, in however long it takes for anarchy to actually work, things eventually get better.
But that’s just it; short term suffering, especially on the scale of the Somali experience, does matter. Glossing it over because, some day, things will be better? That seems cruel at best and downright ignorant at worst. And although Leeson, and other anarcho-capitalists can try, attrocities cannot be ignored simply because they undermine their own beliefs. What’s strange is that the Leesons of the world insist that those of us who believe in some sort of government owe everybody else the same honesty, that we must admit that governments have failed to lived up to expectations. I’ll be the first in line to do so. But ignoring the serious concerns that some of us have over human suffering in an anarchist state, or by simply comparing it to a flank staek, one wonders how seriously Leeson is actually taking things.
(For the record, I have met Peter Leeson, and he seems like a very decent man. He also looks an awful lot like the kid from Rushmore.)
Calling Somalia an anarchist experiment is actually pretty tenuous. The situation in what used to be the nation-state of Somalia, as I understand it (and I’ll admit to being no expert on Somalia, so if someone else is, please correct me), is that there are a number of little governments, each of which control small areas of land.
Some of them, like Somaliland, are quite good and well-run, holding elections that are reasonably democratic, setting up infrastructure that allows commerce to function, enforcing law and order, and generally doing the things that nearly all of us agree governments should do. The main problem these “governments” have is that other nations and international bodies like the UN don’t recognize them as governments and thus refuse to do business with them as such, so they can’t do things like make treaties and trade the way that other governments do. Somaliland is what Leeson and others point to when they say that anarchism is succeeding in Somalia.
Others of these little governments, however, are warlords who control their areas of land with sheer brute force, stealing from the people under their control and doing whatever is necessary to maintain power. They’re able to do so because the historical accident that gave them power and money in the first place and others little or none gives the people over whom they rule little chance to gain enough power or money to overthrow them and form new coalitions or choose new leaders or even move someplace else where they like the reigning warlords better. I’m sure Leeson has an explanation for why these warlords don’t count as failures of anarchism, but my suspicion is that under anarchism, these sorts of warlords will always exist.
My question for anarcho-capitalists is this: if Somalia counts as an example of anarchism in action, why doesn’t our current system of “international law” also count as anarchism? We have a variety of different regions, each ruled by different systems that evolved over time and were chosen by the people who lived there, most of whom are free to leave and go somewhere else and choose a different system under which to live if they don’t like it. There is no overarching body that tells each nation whether or not it is allowed to exist and whether or not its rules are up to snuff, and if enough people dislike the laws of the system under which they live, they overthrow it and choose a new one. A lot of people suffer because there is no one person or body charged with preventing all suffering and arbitrating all disputes, but in the long run, nearly all of the most egregious offenders are overthrown or killed or phased out and suffering decreases because people refuse to stand for it. That sounds to me a lot like what anarcho-capitalists are describing.
sound good, respect!
i like ur blog, write more..