Anarchists, among our many other ideological divisions, espouse two
opposing philosophies on the subject of Rights. The two issues to be
decided include what are "real" Rights, and who gets them. I will broadly
label the opposing sides as the Natural Rights camp, and the Jungle Law camp.
The former state that all human beings have as inherent in their being a
certain set of rights, similar to what TJ and company had in mind when they
scribbled up their spin on the social contract, a.k.a. Life, Liberty and
the Pursuit of Happiness. Whether these rights are endowed in men by their
Creator, or come from our Randian power of reason or what have you, they
are innate in human beings, and the pivotal reason for the anarchist cause
is that states so enthusiastically trample these natural rights. The
anarchist society would conversely hold paramount the protection of said
Rights. The latter side, which I will defend in this essay, posits that the
concept of Natural Rights is only relevant insofar as believing in it
shapes one's behavior. There are no true objective human Rights. The
central point trying to be expressed by us Jungle Law people is that Rights
enforcement is not fundamentally different from any other market product,
like taxis or peanut butter.
Unless there is a strong conscious demand for Rights (whatever they may be)
to be enforced, it will not happen. That is why we have statism; there is
essentially no demand for libertarian style Rights to be enforced. What
little there is, cannot be supplied because the per unit cost of doing so
is currently overwhelming. In order for some producer to provide the
service of Rights enforcement to our niche market, they would need to
overcome the resistance of the single most financially potent entity on the
planet: the United States Government.
That is the only relevant concept in the whole debate. Rights are just a
specific set of services we want provided but are presently cost
ineffective to do so. Our mission as anarchists is to alter our environment
such that it can be profitable to provide that service, whether by
converting people and increasing the demand, or reducing the cost via
weakening the state, or increasing supply with various Ancap-themed firms.
Thus Rights in economic terms are indistinguishable from any other service
that can't be provided in the current climate � like space travel or
necrophiliac brothels � due to lack of technology or cultural disgust or
whatever.
Once we do make it possible to buy and sell Rights services, the debate
becomes more meaningful, but no less pragmatic. Without the state, only
those Rights which are both in high demand and cost effective will be
provided. For example, the Right to have one's death avenged, a la ancient
Iceland, will likely be demanded and, with efficient detective agencies,
would be a viable industry. Therefore that Right will exist. Contrarily, a
large segment of the population may demand the Right to income
redistribution. Without a state, however, the expense of collecting would
quickly surpass the funds themselves. Thus that Right will not exist.
Lastly there may be for some reason a Right that is easily enforced, say
against trespassing on one's property, but for whatever reason it is in low
demand. Hypothetically it might be the case that no one cares if vagrants
wander on their land. Thus due to lack of demand that Right would not
exist, despite its inclusion in libertarian dogma.
So the point is: there are no objective Rights. The Right to life is not
fundamentally different than the Right to be free of second hand smoke, the
only thing that determines which Rights exist and which do not is market
forces. You may have an epiphany and craft the ultimate moral theory, but
unless it is both practical and attractive to follow that theory, you might
as well not have bothered: your theory is irrelevant, except for how it
affects your own behavior.
The second issue under discussion is to establish who or what shall be
granted these rights. My theory automatically handles all the myriad cases
that always pop up in our favorite hypothetical game. E.g., what do you do
about:
Small children
The impoverished
Fetuses
The comatose
The physically/mentally handicapped
The extremely aged
Non-technological aborigines
A genetically engineered slave class
Normal animals
Hyper-intelligent chimpanzees
Self-aware machines
Magically animated objects
Extra-terrestrials
Middle-class Libertarians
etc.
Who on this list has Rights? Answer: no one has any Rights other than what
the market will bear. If robots become independent to the point that they
can produce wealth of their own, nothing stops them from spending their
earnings to hire a Rights enforcement agency. Voila, they have Rights. On
the other hand, infants obviously are unable to perform any useful task and
thus can't provide for their own defense either directly or through hired
surrogates. Unless someone (their parents) is willing to donate Rights
enforcement services to them, they do not have Rights. It is irrelevant
whether the entity in question has "potential" or is "rational" or
satisfies any other arbitrary criteria the Natural Rights crowd will toss
out to sort the list into Rights-haves and Rights-have-nots.
Bottom line, Rights are nothing more than one commodity in the whole wide
market. If you don't want or can't afford a car, you don't have a car. If
you don't want Rights (most people) or cant afford them (poor us), you do
not have them. Conclusion: do we have Rights, at this moment, in the face
of the state? NO!
A valid criticism could be that the theory is rather relativistic. Saying
the Right to Property is equivalent to the Right Against Sexual Harassment
seems very leftist. All I'm saying though, is that they are economically
equal, in that their existence depends solely on how successful they are in
the market. The whole point of the exercise is to prove that the market
always functions and it really doesn't care about the moral value of items
within. Morality is conceivably relevant in the decisions you make about
which Rights you choose to spend your enforcement dollars on, but in an
objective social sense, I'll say it straight out, Rights are definitely
relativistic and totally interchangeable. The difference is that each
consumer assigns a different value to each Right when they decide what
enforcement options to consume (theoretically, since the choice is made for
them by the monopolist at the moment). I am not asking you to treat all
Rights equally, in fact I have strong opinions on what Rights should be
prized and which discarded, and I fully expect everyone has their own
tastes, which ideally need to be realigned closer to my own for any
progress to be made in this market.
Another criticism of this theory is that it is somewhat tautological. If
the anarchist goal is to have a market for Rights enforcement, well we
already do, which unfortunately has long been monopolized by an economic
player called "the State". Under this theory the only real difference in an
anarchist society would be of degree. In the Ancapland I imagine, the
sweeping changes can be summarized simply as a radical diversification in
this particular industry. I think anarchists delude themselves when they
think that property owners and defense agencies are some diametrical
opposite of statehood. The only necessary shift is a meaningful power
balance at the local level, and an increased demand for the Rights we
value. Tautological, perhaps, but its still an important point to make
because it seems many philosophers are loath to accept the reality of their
situation and are analyzing the problem incorrectly.
The battle should not be perceived as anarchism vs statism, with us
romanticized rebels on one side and anthropomorphised Leviathan on the
other. Politics do not exist, they are merely the management decisions of
the dominant firm, which, as of 225 years ago, adopted the marketing tactic
of superficially seeking its customers' opinions. The only relevant social
force is economic. Our true role is that of unsatisfied consumers, and
boxed out suppliers, of a specific black-listed good, and the state is the
obnoxiously successful peddler of junk goods we are trying to grab market
share from. That is the paradigm we must adopt if we want to stop playing
by the competition's rules and supporting their "political" marketing.
Analogy: we want action movies, yet there is only one studio and it insists
on spinning out endless dramas for countless adulating fans. We can't
afford to make our own action flicks, no one else wants to buy tickets to
action movies, and no one else of means wants to supply them. There's no
real economic difference between action movies and dramas, and there's no
politics involved either. If we want our genre on the big screen, we need
to treat it as what it is, a market problem.
In other words, if we really want to break out of the mold cast by our
competitors we basically should dump from our minds the ingrained model of
governments and anarchism and the whole terminological baggage, and save
that rhetoric merely for propaganda value, if it is determined to be a
valuable counter-marketing ploy. To be honest to ourselves though, we must
admit that is really not the war we are fighting. We are all far more
influenced by the advertising/education we've grown up with than we'd like
to admit, and that needs to change if we are to force the market to cater
to our desires.
November 18, 2002
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=333
"We're up for sale,everything that we know is up for sale." Current hit
song lyric.
