Reason x Dave Smith -- A National Divorce?

[ClaytonB]

I watched this and found it pretty thought-provoking.

In the interview, Zach asks Dave about Rothbard's red-button thought-experiment (from his article, Do you hate the State?) -- if there was a red-button that you could push that would magically cause the State to vanish, would you push it? Dave's answer is yes, Zach's answer is no. My answer is also no, but not for the reasons that Zach gives. I think that Rothbard's thought-experiment is valid within the scope of making the point that the State is inherently criminal (an abstract point), but in terms of actual concrete-space solutions, the red-button has been tried many times already, and we well know the 100% outcome of that. The real question is why -- why does the tyrannical State always re-emerge even when there is a no-holds-barred revolution to drive out the tyrants and restore justice? The problem runs deeper than the scope of Rothbard's thought-experiment in his brief article on the evilness of the State, Do you hate the State?

In professional wrestling in the late-90's and early-00's, "Stone Cold" Steven Austin was a titanic force of nature on the TV screen and in the stadiums of professional-wrestling fans. One of his most famous punchlines was:

This is a perfect picture of what people generally understand the State to be. People generally believe in magical pixie dust, as though there is some kind of magical power in "BECAUSE STONE-COLD SAID SO", that is, "BECAUSE THE STATE SAID SO." Eminent domain is one of the favorite examples that statists like to raise -- if not for the State, then when you have a highway-project or rail-project or canal-project, any one of the property owners of land which the project would cross can choose to hold out and bid-up their land price as high as possible, basically holding the entire project (including the payouts to other property owners who have already agreed to the project) hostage. So, this is a common example that is held up where the "STONE-COLD SAID SO"-power of the State is vital to the public interest. The State moves in and says to the hold-out: "you will accept the going-rate for your land, where we have determined that $X is the going-rate, BECAUSE THE STATE SAID SO."

Part of the reason that this discussion is so difficult -- even when all parties have agreed to stick to a purely rational basis, such as a group of libertarians who have no pre-commitment to the State as a magical pixie-dust solution to every social ill -- is that the issues involved really are extremely subtle. Even when you feel that you have fully grasped the problem, it will often turn out that your understanding was incomplete and there were more subtle issues that you had failed to take into account. This has been my experience in my journey through libertarian political philosophy and I'm sure it is the experience of many others on RPF, as well. In the specific example of eminent-domain, there are other solutions that don't require a State. However, there is still some kernel of truth to the eminent-domain story, and that is why it is able to stay alive, despite the fact that it really does not justify the existence of the State.

To dive deeper, let's look at two vignettes.

The first vignette. A mentally-ill man who has gone off his meds is stumbling around through freeway traffic. He has nearly caused 3 collisions already and is inches away from dying, second by second, as cars swerve around him. A police officer who has vectored to the location turns on his circus-lights to warn oncoming cars and tackles the mentally-ill man and bodily drags him out of active traffic. The man is cuffed and taken in for mental evaluation.

Now, a pure-NAP libertarian argument could go something like this -- yes, the man is causing danger, however, a road is a public space. It's "intended" for cars, but that's just a social-convention, not a bright-line law. So, drivers being prepared for such possibilities is just part of the "buyer beware" price-tag of living in a truly free society. Therefore, the police officer's intervention was simply assault, not a heroic act of saving a mentally-ill guy's life and possibly the lives of multiple drivers who were prevented from being involved in a collision caused by cars swerving around this guy.

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The second vignette. A petty mall thief is caught red-handed, arrested, and taken to jail. Later, it is revealed to him that this was part of a sting operation. Because the thief is extraordinarily skilled, and as part of a plea-deal, the police anti-theft task force offers to rehabilitate the individual after serving their sentence and offers them a job on the anti-theft sting team. After joining, the thief discovers that police theft of private property through seizure (with a "warrant", of course), "forfeiture" and many other methods is rampant. He learns that his "true" mistake was trying to go it alone, rather than joining the big thieves who have much more effective methods of theft than slipping things up their sleeves.

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Cutting short moral argument is the essence of what the State is. We can go back and forth all day long about you did this, but he did that, but she did this other thing and how dare you, and anyone knows that it's blatantly immoral to do such-and-such. That's when we call in Stone-Cold: THIS IS THE BOTTOM-LINE BECAUSE THE STATE SAID SO. Everybody involved rolled their dice and left either a lucky winner or a crying loser -- either way, the problem was solved and the bickering stopped.

The state and crime meet in privilege. Privilege is the idea of two types of law -- one law for me, another for thee. The criminal acts out dual-law (privilege) even though he probably makes no explicit argument for it. The petty mall thief is living with the benefit of a society in which the vast majority of people are not thieves like him. He is able to steal, but he is not stolen from. This is not because he has some "stealing superpower" but because most people restrain themselves from giving into the temptation, and he does not. The State is an explicit form of dual-law. There are two laws, one for those who are not wearing badges-and-guns, and another law for those who are. This could not be painted in any higher-resolution 4k HDR detail than it has been in the last 10 years of headlines of police abuse in the United States.

The point of the first vignette is that those who object that plain-vanilla NAP libertarianism is not rigorous (cannot be universally applied to the real world, without further refinement) are correct. It is true that there are circumstances in which deliberative discussion and rational moral debate are not appropriate, and direct action (relying on ex post facto justification) is warranted. The police officer who tackles the mentally-ill man and drags him out of traffic is not "aggressing" against anybody.

The point of the second vignette is that the State is inherently criminal. And this is Rothbard's point in "Do you hate the State?" or The Anatomy of the State. For the State, the existence of extremely subtle boundary-cases like the mental-patient stumbling around in freeway traffic are just a convenient pretext for what they intend to do (crime, and lots of it). This is the tiny seed-crystal of Stone-Cold Steve Austin that they need in order to grow the monstrosity of the modern, omnipotent, absolute nation-state government. Examine the structure of modern criminal courts (or the government court-system generally) with the following "conspiracy theory" goggles on: everything that the criminal justice system does is intended to amplify as much as possible the range of behaviors and circumstances which fall into the boundary-case of the mental-patient stumbling through traffic which, otherwise, is so exotically rare as to be barely worth a footnote in any serious discussion of political philosophy. Suddenly, the vast mystery of the courts and statutory law will become crystal-clear to you... it's almost like having a super-power.

The rest of the anatomy of the State, then, is like a gigantic crime-laundering operation, where the crimes committed by the State are themselves being laundered with the mad deeds of mental-patients or the pathetic crimes of incompetents like our petty mall-thief. The difference between the hapless stars of our vignettes, and the State, is that the State is comprised of alert, rational, fully-functioning individuals possessed of all their faculties. So, the crimes the State is committing are nakedly grotesque. The thief might be stealing because the job market has been in a terrible crunch. The State steals as a matter of principle -- taxation is theft.

Rothbard's red-button thought-experiment doesn't tell you anything about how to solve the problem of the State, only the attitude with which we ought to be opposed to the State. It is objectively the case that the State is a criminal enterprise. I won't try to prove that assertion here but it is not even slightly difficult to prove. It is far and away the single largest organized crime operation in existence and all other forms of organized crime that are not joined to it, will either be annihilated by it, or co-opted into it.

But even if we could (and it is impossible), we cannot simply push the red-button since the overwhelming majority of people believe in the State-principle. They believe in its magical, Stone-Cold pixie-dust power to "resolve complex conflicts" for the public-good. For this reason, the red-button thought-experiment can't be taken to be a prescription about how to resolve the problem of the State, since pushing the red-button would only eliminate the symptoms, not the infection itself. That is, if you push the red-button, all the people who believe that the State can magically resolve complex problems by simply cutting the Gordian knot, instead of grappling with the underlying social and moral problems and using deliberative moral reasoning to work through them, will just re-converge back onto a new State, at least as bad as the one that came before, perhaps even worse. The State implicitly has grandma held hostage with a gun to the back of her head -- the threat to pull the trigger if you make an existential move against the State itself is not an idle one. Grandma really is going to the graveyard in that case. So, we need to first snatch that metaphorical gun out of the State's hand, Jackie Chan style, then push the red-button. This isn't really about guns or armed force, it's about popular beliefs.

Having said this, I want to point out that this argument is too often steel-manned and should, instead, be nerfed. The State does an exhaustively effective job of explaining all the reasons that its existence is inevitable and the unimaginable consequences of its collapse and dissolution. So, no further fuel needs to be added to that fire. By acknowledging that there is a valid point somewhere in there, which has been blown out of all proportion by the special-interests that comprise the State, we are not making concession to the usual hystrionics surrounding this topic. Yes, the State is holding much of the social order hostage and, assuming that a knockout-punch elimination of the State were possible, the day after would be marked by flowing rivers of blood. The reprisals would be apocalyptic in scale.

However, in order to snatch this terrorist's gun out of his hand, we don't need a super-majority of the public. They are the ones who are fighting gravity. It's an unimaginably difficult task to so reverse reality that the overwhelming majority of the public truly believes that your crime syndicate is actually the Savior of society and the only thing keeping us from instantly reverting to tribal primitivism. That's a lot of work and, as the neocons famously said, "We have to be right every time, they only need to find one hole in our defense." That's a precise statement of the problem facing the State crime syndicate. The syndicate must stop every single Rothbard, every single Hoppe, every single Dave Smith. Even one individual passing their defenses would collapse the entire syndicate, virtually overnight. But the converse is not the case. We don't need to refute every State lie. We don't need to expose every single crime of the State. We don't need to get fingerprints, names and addresses for all the specific criminal activities of the State. No, we only need to awaken 10-20% of the general public. If we can get that much of the general public to start thinking straight, and really analyzing the objective facts about the State, that will be the final death-knell of the State. Whether you want to call that an "unwinding" or a "collapse" is up to you, but the point is that an ordered dismantling of the State is the political equivalent of a Jackie Chan gun-snatch... there will not be rivers of blood flowing, even as the State crime syndicate is dismantled and hurled into the flames, once and for all.

Addendum

Too often, we libertarians tend to discuss politics in a kind of socio-cultural vacuum. We tend to assume that culture is something of no more political consequence than, say, this season's clothing fashion. The reality is that politics cannot be disconnected from its cultural and spiritual ramifications. Dave Smith and the LP sweep by the LPMC are exciting developments and I hope that its momentum continues to build. But the movement will fail if it is explicitly "non-religious". So far, it seems to be inclusive, but the leadership is not religious, as far as I can tell. The technique of single-issue coalition-building that has been done with abortion needs to be extended to the spiritual dimension, as well.

Ultimately, long-run, the church is the center of the public square in a truly free society. From our extremely exceptional modern blip of history, this might seem false. You don't "need" religion, it's just something that people believed for reasons of superstition or whatever. But you have a religion whether you want it or not; one need point no further than today's SJW Wokism, etc. to make this point. Nobody -- not even the bohemian, Randian rationalists of the Libertarian Party -- is truly objective, aloof, beyond. History demonstrates that there will always be religion and this follows from human nature. Stated another way, if it is truly free, and lawful, a stateless society will strongly converge to religious structure in very short order.

The counterpoint from the non-religious is that the clergy have a tendency to want to make the whole world a church. This is a fair point. And it's perfectly natural and harmless for the clergy to look at the world this way, as long as they do not become imperial about it. We do not have to become Amish if we allow religion to organically form into an integral part of modern life. And those who are strongly non-religious do not have to be excluded nor made into social pariahs. We can have 1A-protections in a truly free society, as a kind of "backstop" against unwarranted clerical power in the public sphere.

And this has me thinking -- could we use the Constitution as a secession template? If Texas or another state were to secede, could the US Constitution be used as a template? Throw out the Commerce Clause and the blatantly tyrannical amendments such as the 16th amendment, but otherwise, it's a tested document. It's at least a starting-point. This would resolve some of the worries that Zach raises about states breaking away and then turning into Taliban governments. It's not impossible, so his point should be taken seriously. And history and tradition are one of the best safeguards we know of against things going very far off the rails. So perhaps a state-secession where the seceding state adopts a gently modified and updated version of the US Constitution is a good starting-point in the direction of increasing liberty. It's an idea, at least...