Debunking statist arguments : "Anarchy is exploitative!" part 1

A few months ago, I wrote a series of entries on the stupidity of Steve Kangas' Liberalism Resurgent FAQ - debunking his arguments in support of altruism, liberal "equality" and the "social contract", amongst other nonsense.

However, I wrote these entries before I became a market anarchist (I write entries many months in advance - I am writing this on the 4th of May). Therefore there is one glaring absurdity that I did not refute at the time - his arguments against anarchy.

His basic reasoning mirrors that of the so-called "anarcho-syndicalists", who believe that the coercive central state should be replaced by a multiplicity of coercive democratic states in the workplace - but he doesn't even have the decency of being an anarchist. His central premise is that anarchy gives power to individuals who would then abuse this power against others. He fails to notice that, even if his argument is correct (which it isn't), then this applies all the more to the state ! Despite his worship of democracy, all that democracy ensures is that power is distributed in different ways than in a monarchy. It does not at all change the fact that all states are inherently a monopoly of power.

The page this is taken from is "In Defense of Democratic Government", but you need to scroll down to get to the argument. I will now start at the relevant paragraph. Here we go :

One selling point of anarchy is that individuals become "king of their own castles." No one can tell you what to do with your property.

On these two sentences alone we can already observe that :

1. Kangas loves his statist rhetoric. By associating individuals with "kings" and property with "castles", he's poisoning the well, putting an image of the individual as tyrant and of the community as benevolent. He will come back to this theme later.

2. Kangas doesn't know anything about anarchy. Individuals in an anarchy can't be "king of their own castle" and do whatever they want with impunity. They have to negociate the interaction between their value system and that of other people. Market anarchy is the only form of social organization which acknowledges that people can have honest differences in values, and that we should resolve these disagreements like grown adults, not like petulent children "doing their own thing" and fighting each other because they cannot negociate. And liberals are perhaps the most childish of all on that count.

Remember this "individual as king" rhetoric that he set up here, because it continues in the very next sentence :

That may sound nice, until you consider that this makes dictators out of business owners and landlords, and subjects out of workers and tenants.

Now he turns the volume up on the rhetoric front, with the words "dictators" and "subjects". These words only apply to the state, which imposes a singular value system on an entire population. No individual can appoint himself "dictator". In fact, as we'll see later, it is Kangas who wants to create dictators of "business owners".

Go to part 2.