This post is going off on a bit of a tangent, but I felt like I had to address this...:
I take issue with this label. First of all, even complete anarcho-capitalists can and will often vote for candidates who want to significantly reduce state aggression, even if they won't eliminate it entirely. Case in point: Ron Paul! The rigidly idealistic anarchists may disagree, but the pragmatic anarchists realize that you cannot eliminate state aggression overnight...if you did (through violent revolution, for instance), the slavish masses would simply erect a new government just as powerful as the last. The public must become educated before they will agree to reduced state aggression, muchless abolished state aggression - so in the meantime, reducing the burden is a better short-term goal than doing nothing.
Secondly, calling people "statists" merely for voting unfairly lumps them into the same category as the real totalitarian statists that the term is commonly reserved for, such as Communists, fascists, Hillary Clinton, etc.
Sure, anyone who believes in the existence of a state whatsoever can technically be considered "statist," but that's not how the term is commonly understood. Because of its connotation, it's misleading and even insulting to apply the label to a minarchist, any kind of libertarian, or even an old-school conservative / classical 19th century liberal. Along with anarchists, people believing in any one of these ideologies fundamentally believe in the supremacy of
individual rights, and while we all have disagreements, our commonalities are so much greater. We all stand together in our belief in individual rights, and we stand against the
real statists, who believe in the supremacy of the state and/or collective even when their ideology calls for massive rights violations or sacrificing individuals against their will for the "greater good."
I believe that unless you conservatively reserve your use of the term "statist" to people who actually deserve its widely accepted connotations, you risk alienating people who you should consider very strong allies in most respects...especially considering the real enemies you're facing.
When it comes down to it, the disagreements anarchists have with minarchists, classical liberals, etc. are mainly twofold:
- They disagree on the means for maximizing the practical exercise of our basic rights: In other words, they disagree on how much government, if any, is necessary to keep the peace and ensure liberty. Anarchists are on the extreme ideological end of the spectrum, since they argue that no aggression, taxation, or existence of a state is justified whatsoever. Furthermore, they argue that liberty is maximized in practice by a society that condones no legal aggression.
As an aside, giving away my minarchist leanings: While the last statement is true, absence of government cannot by itself automatically educate people about non-aggression or make them understand the equal and fundamental rights of all. It should be obvious by the way our idiotic populace consistently votes for state expansion that these principles are largely lost on them, and that an absence of government would merely create mob rule and mob justice (somewhat similar to unfettered democracy, except thankfully without the supposed legitimacy of the state making people blindly loyal to the will of the majority). In today's society obsessed with witch hunts and the like, you should expect that under anarchy, anyone merely accused of a terrible crime (like child molestation for example) would be lynched instead of given a fair trial...and the crowd would be too big to stop. The fact is, our culture is so screwed up that most people don't even BELIEVE in a fair trial anymore, and it's ironically only the herd's worship of government authority and conditioned response against vigilantism and "taking the law into your own hands" that is keeping them from lynchings.
- The various "shades of gray" individualist groups also disagree with anarchists in particular about whether the ultimate goal should be maximizing the practical exercise of basic rights at all, or whether the ultimate goal should be legally condoning no aggression whatsoever. Even if, hypothetically, states are absolutely necessary to make laws and fund courts and peace officiers, and even if absolute mob justice would inevitably and always result from the absence of a state*...even if all of these things were true, pure anarchists would still say that even a small amount of state aggression (taxation for performing the most basic functions) is intolerable in comparison. They would say it's better to have unrestrained mob violence everywhere than to permit the existence of a single entity that everyone recognizes as having the "legitimate" authority to engage in aggression...even if it only commits the bare minimum necessary - and equally against everyone (i.e. without unfairly sacrificing certain individuals for the "greater good") - to minimize the sum total of aggression committed against individuals. Frankly, I disagree with this absolutist stance against government, because I feel that it's self-defeating to the practical goals of liberty.
(*For the record, I don't think anarcho-capitalism is inevitably quite SO disastrous as that, but in our current climate, people are nowhere near ready for it. I think that if we lived and were educated for many generations in a society with a minarchist government, people might eventually be ready, but...when it comes down to it, I still think anarcho-capitalism has some inherent flaws that outweigh the inherent flaws of minarchist government in terms of maximizing liberty - that's irrelevant to the discussion, though.)
That is precisely why they should not be given too much power. Most people can not handle too much power. It tends invariably to corrupt them.
