Imagine, if you will, a world without government. What does it look like? Is it a chaos where life is nasty, brutish, and short? Is it a paradise, without hatred or coercion? Perhaps it lies somewhere between the two, tending toward one or the other, or maybe you need more information before you can tell.
What I'm wondering about in particular is how did you make the transition from our world (which presumably has at least some government) to a world without it? What precisely did you remove? When we speak of government we often conflate two distinct meanings of the term. Government can be either a set of tasks or an organization that performs those tasks. Which do you have in mind when you use the word? Different ideas on this point lead to vastly different answers.
Probably the most popular interpretation is of government as the State--a territorial monopolist of judicial enforcement (or some other essentially identical definition). Precisely what the State does, or should do, is a major point of contention in modern political discourse. Some believe that it is rightly a simple guarantor of the natural rights of the citizenry; others that it ought to equal out disparities of economic or social power; still others that it exists to help society achieve its collective goals, usually (though not always) communicated by means of a roughly democratic process. Anarchists from Noam Chomsky to Hans-Hermann Hoppe see the State as an agency of oppression by those with effective control over it, typically a subset of the extraordinarily wealthy.
Of all these ideas, the anarchist view is most correct, since what ultimately typifies a State is the impunity with which its agents can commit acts which, when performed by anyone else, would be considered criminal. Devices like constitutions, separation of powers, and supreme courts might be used to restrain the activities of the State, but these safeguards are ultimately illusory, as they are enforced by the State itself. That it would eventually begin looting and tyrannizing the populace is about as foregone a conclusion as that a fox set to guarding a hen-house would one day start consuming its wards.
As you might guess from the preceding paragraph, I am not a fan of the State. Precisely why I object to it should become obvious over the course of this inquiry. For a long while I was also in the camp that identified government with the State. However, reading Plato, a number of articles on natural law, and a book by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn gave me a new idea that significantly changes my perspective, at least terminologically. The meaning of terms is fundamentally significant to any discourse seeking truth, and I think explaining my new views will help elucidate some subtleties our casual use of the word government obscures.
What would be an alternative to thinking of government as the State? Consider this paradox. According to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, conservatives during the 19th century thought of a society ruled by a democratic State as in actuality having no government at all. The solution to this conundrum is an alternative interpretation of government. Natural rights theorists have traditionally ascribed the tasks of protecting life, liberty, and property to government, almost always meaning the State. But what if, instead of government being an organization, it is instead a function. We could thus keep the notion of government protecting life, liberty, and property, but drop the necessity of a territorial monopolist.
According to Plato, the purpose of the ruling body, whether of a man or of a society, is to temper the passions that can lead it away from the Good. In the Gorgias, he carefully explains how a tyrant, who can satisfy his desires to the greatest extent, is worse off for doing so, and even in truth a slave to his own whims. He may be very clever, but lacking wisdom, he will invariably take action which is contrary in effect to his true wish. Such a man does not rule himself, and stands in need of restraint by those wiser, for his own good as well as that of those he might harm. By the same token, if all the people in a society are permitted to express and act on their desires to the utmost degree, nothing but harm can be expected to result. Thus, a society must be regulated for the common good of all its members.
I agree with Plato, at least as I have interpreted him. To put it more plainly, since some readers might be surprised by this, I am convinced that government is a necessary component of a society. To speak of one without the other would be nonsense. This may seem to break sharply with my anarchist ideas, but in fact they are quite compatible. Being as I am a property-based anarchist, suppose there were no private property at all and anyone would be permitted to use any physical object they wished. This would result in conflict as soon as one person wanted something that another person was using. We can easily imagine that in a few cases this is resolved peacefully, it strains credulity past the breaking point to say that this would be the norm, especially after some people with a great deal of strength and modicum of intelligence noticed that they could acquire whatever they wished by brute force. Remembering that in this scenario there would not even be property rights in individuals' bodies, we can see immediately that this would lead to an utterly intolerable state. However, if we have property rights in objects and bodies, and these rights are generally respected, we can easily imagine an essentially peaceful society, even with occasional criminals and outlaws.
Now, to avoid being misunderstood, I do not mean to say that any distribution of property rights is acceptable. Rather, I have a specific method for assigning them in mind derived from the tradition of natural law, specifically Locke, Rothbard, and Van Dun. While there is room for nuance, the basic principles are the presumption of self-ownership of individuals' bodies; that new property titles only arise when previously unowned resources are plainly altered, with the title belonging to the person who altered those resources; and property titles can be transferred only by means of voluntary exchange or gifts. The great beauty of this system is that it can ensure conflict-free interaction starting from the beginning of mankind onward and also is the legal regime most conducive to economic prosperity. However, another advantage is that it strains moral intuition almost not at all--to find fault with this system, critics usually have to resort to horribly contrived examples or extreme behavior, for example, consensual cannibalism. If you have to go to the extreme of eating people to find an objection--which I think can be answered--then you're really grasping at straws.
Something I've left out, however, is how these rules are to be enforced. Obviously the law will not support itself, so some group of men must organize to do so. Thus, a government is born. However, this government need not be a compulsory monopolist. In fact, there can be many organizations providing government in various ways in the same area; and this has been borne out historically. Of course, it would be to the advantage of each such organization to eliminate its competition, but so long as public opinion is against the violence necessary to establish such a monopoly, it will be all but impossible for them to do so. Thus, if such a system could be established, it could be remarkably stable for the freedom from injustice it would provide.
Now, it might be objected that this whole scheme hinges on public opinion. If the public decides it no longer wants justice, then a State and all the corresponding injustices arising therefrom can take over. This isn't as serious an objection as it seems. If a people believes that injustice is unobjectionable, there will be injustice. Nothing terribly remarkable about this. And in such a case, the solution is surely not to convince them that only certain people dressed in the proper regalia or brandishing the appropriate insignia may commit injustice, but rather than it is acceptable for no one to do so.
There you have it: my views on the nature and proper role of government. Constructive critiques welcome.
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