I stubled on to this while doing a search.
---------
September 4th 2005, 12:14 am
A Minarchist Confronts Disaster
by Jason Kuznicki
When the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in December, I posted a series of essays looking at natural disasters from an atheist’s perspective: If providence never enters into the calculus of disaster–then what? How do we face indifferent nature alone?
On the spiritual front, I have nothing new to add. Perhaps for want of anything better, my thoughts have turned to politics.
From the left: Although I agree with Brent Rasmussen on a great many (largely non-political) issues, he has been hyping Katrina as an epochal turning point in American history, a “watershed” event, to use his uncharacteristically inapt phrase. I have to disagree, in part because we’ve seen this all before: Rasmussen and company would seemingly make Katrina the left’s version of 9/11, complete with all the trappings that the neocons once attached to their own watershed (fireshed?) moment. We all know the story, and it runs something like this:
Everything changed that day. Maybe we could get by with limited government before, but in the new world we live in, the government needs broad new powers. The previous administration was asleep at the switch, but our party could have handled the gathering disaster far better. Give us control, and we’ll get the job done right. Oh, and if you don’t agree with us, then you must hate Americans and Christians (or the poor and the black). See, you haven’t listened to us about Islamism/global warming/American immorality/wetlands/whatever. Now, to atone for your mistakes, you must vote for us–and give us more power, please. More power to the state!
It’s disaster-as-opportunism, and, whatever respect I have for Rasmussen (which at times is still considerable), I have to part with him here, and in the strongest possible terms. It still strikes me as odd, and suspicious, that the political consequences should be so similar in such different disasters, and that the rhetoric should follow in lockstep from one event to the next.
Meanwhile, the anarchist contingent, notably at Liberty & Power, has been protesting that what we have seen in New Orleans is not real anarchy, and that the anarcho-capitalist utopia would look nothing at all like the awful state of affairs down there.
My difficulties with anarcho-capitalist libertarians are many, but first among them is that an anarchy, a real anarchy with no form of private defense agencies, would have no way at all of dealing with the looters we have seen in New Orleans. (And by the way, I accept Robert Nozick’s argument that a monopoly state could and almost certainly would arise naturally out of a system of competing defense agencies. I would even go a step further, and suggest that any so-called “private” defense agency would end up being nothing of the sort the moment it attempted to extract justice from someone who did not subscribe to the agency. Government is in almost every case a name we give to the organized use of force, and it needlessly confuses the issue to term some governments “private,” while others are “public.”)
As far as I am concerned, anarchists are entirely free to defend their increasingly hypothetical utopia. They should be happy, though, that someone makes it possible for them to do so in safety and comfort. So long as they can continue to blank-out just what set of institutions is allowing them this safety and comfort, they will have their anarchism, and I will have no part of it.
So libertarian anarchists find themselves severely embarrassed. Meanwhile, big-government liberals are nearly gloating at the incompetence of the Bush administration. (Someone should tell them that it’s bad form to gloat about disasters, an enduring bad habit of theirs…) The big-government conservatives, who now hold all the political power, are in an awkward game of catch-up, trying to prove that they are also big spenders on environmentalism, urban planning, and social welfare, in addition to all their other pet projects.
What about the rest of us? As usual, John Tierney rises to the occasion, pointing out that government-subsidized flood insurance deserves much of the blame for recent events. Unduly cheap flood insurance makes low-lying property (temporarily!) inhabitable where it would otherwise be far too risky for profitable use. Such subsidies also offer a disincentive toward more responsible planning on the part of individuals and communities. In other words, the real tragedy is not that two thirds of New Orleans residents lacked flood insurance–It’s that the other one third had flood insurance, and that they, with their tax-subsidized risk-taking, unthinkingly drew the others in. The entire article is well worth reading.
Less government? In What Dimension? There’s also a lot of confusion, I think, in the left’s attacks on smaller government coming out of the disaster. And I’d like, if I could, to divide the question of smaller government, which really contains two different issues that ought not to be confounded. A disaster like this exposes “smaller government” as something of a package deal, and it’s best to be clear on what we mean.
A government’s size may be measured either by the extent of retaliatory force that it is capable of wielding or by the extent and nature of the laws that it enforces on the citizens. It is in the latter capacity that government must be limited; in the former, a government may (and should!) do whatever is necessary to overwhelm those who initiate force. Proper minarchists therefore do not want to dismantle the army, the national guard, or the police force, nor do we even to cut their budgets, because we already know that in times of disaster, looting and carnage is the result.
We do, however, want to pare down the regulations and the redistributions much as we can, leaving law enforcement personnel to do what they’re supposed to be doing, rather than, say, redistributing private property or arresting people for consuming a certain herb. In paring down the ruleset, we hope to eliminate the perverse incentives that Tierney discusses–and to give free play to creative disaster aversion strategies that need not be centrally planned.
Anarchists and socialists aside, the rest of us have instituted governments precisely to preserve individual rights, which are–like it or not–anterior to the questions of food, clothing, and shelter: The way a modern society obtains food, clothing, and shelter is not through appropriation, nor through hunting and gathering, but through production and trade. And for these activities to happen, individuals must be accorded their rights.
In other words, to make production and trade possible, there must be a sufficient guarantee that looters and moochers cannot profit, not even under extraordinary circumstances: As Don Watkins rightly points out, people may take things that do not belong to them only in cases of true emergency–and then only if they pledge to compensate the owners once the crisis is over.
All We Need: Lastly, I also have to note how bureaucratic bumbling has undercut a great deal of the rescue effort, and I wouldn’t be a minarchist if I didn’t question whether private systems might have done a better job. Indeed, even the leftists have had to acknowledge the utter failure of central planning in response to the disaster. We have to do better, and there are even hints that it might not be so hard as we imagine.
A frustrated refugee was quoted saying yesterday on NPR as saying in effect, “All we need here are busses and gas. Busses and gas to get us out.” Yet none of the federal, state, or local agencies were at all able to deliver. They couldn’t even do it with several days’ notice before the storm, and several days after, the demand remains unfulfilled.
Now any reasonably entrepreneurial local bus service would sit up and take notice for the next time around–that is, if any reasonably entrepreneurial bus services existed in place of the state-run monopolies we now have. It would be a simple matter to offer monthly pass holders the option of buying evacuation insurance with their bus fares, perhaps for only a few pennies more a month. In the event of a flood, this insurance would transform their ordinary bus pass into a ticket to another city, a benefit that would certainly be appreciated by the urban poor, who may lack other means of transportation. If the bus company’s resources were insufficient, several firms, possibly from several cities, could pool their evacuation insurance systems, transforming all of their busses into emergency relief convoys as they were needed.
Perhaps there is some great hole in the plan that I’m just not seeing, but even so, we still have to be thinking far more creatively the next time around. Coming up with new and better ideas is the only thing that’s ever saved us–from anything–in the past.
positiveliberty.com |
