Liberty Requires The End of Government
Written by: Mpiyakhe Dhlamini
Any resort to violence except for the purposes of self-defense is the clearest indication that the person does not possess the basic intelligence required to be a member of society. Unfortunately for us, most people fall into this category (we see this by the fruits of democracy, more and more government, and thus violence) and therefore it is folly to think we can belong to the same polity as these people and be okay.
We need to start seriously thinking about how to form our own enclaves and how to defend these, whether or not the violent give their consent. We need to figure out how to rob the state of its power over us. Doing this is not just a matter of chasing some ideal state that we have theorised; it is actually a matter of survival and ensuring that our progeny live in peace.
As much as sovereign debt represents a claim on our as-yet-unborn descendants' property, so too does the very existence of government. Government exists under the assumption that it can and should be able to tax your descendants. If getting rid of the debt is a moral imperative, so too is getting rid of government. We have observed that the long-term trend is that governments grow towards a point of crisis and, maybe, shrinks because of economic reality. But that only lasts for a while.
The reason I keep making the point about the size of government is because government can only grow at the expense of your liberty, i.e. more taxes, more regulations, more legislation etc. Any attack on your liberty is a direct, violent attack on you, the individual. It therefore follows that as much as the growth of government is a bad thing, so too is its very existence. There is no optimal government size in which all of our liberties are perfectly preserved. You, as an individual, have to accept that the only person who can defend your life, liberty and property is yourself and no one else.
Of course, this does not exclude cooperation with neighbours and relatives for self-defense, but once you give up control of the smallest part of your life to someone else, you are now part slave and can no longer call yourself truly free. That is how governments are born, when people give up the right to control some part of their own lives but not just that, in doing so give up their children and grandchildren's right to the same.
The reality is that all of us are born governing ourselves like it should be. Some clever fellow is not content with this, however, and seeks to convince you that he can handle his own as well as your affairs. If you refuse and have not made adequate arrangements for your own defense, he simply tells you that he will be running your affairs from then on at the point of a spear, a sword, or a gun.
No sane person would call this state of affairs freedom. Furthermore, the man who is arrogant enough to think he can run the affairs of others must have something seriously wrong with his mind. Someway or another, though, more than 7 billion human beings live under these conditions, not because it is impossible to imagine a better way to live, but rather because it seems as if most of us are weary about having to think and do for ourselves. There’s a deep-rooted fear of taking charge over our own selves and a fear of our fellow man and what he might do with his freedom.
Finally, as an anarchist, people often assume that my individualist views imply that I am against cooperation with other people. This is not true. In fact, if I did hold such a belief it would directly contradict my pro-market views, for what is the market if not individuals cooperating for each person’s self-interest? The market is one part of how anarchy will replace government functions; the other parts include charity, volunteering, etc. and all of these will require cooperation with others. The crucial difference is that no one will lose their God-given rights in the course of this cooperation, unlike the “social contract”.
Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a libertarian, writer, programmer and an associate of the Free Market Foundation