The New Anarchy

Anarchy, literally "without a ruler/chief/governor," has long been placed on the far-right fringe of many political spectra. Being that it is the opposite of statist ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism, that placement makes sense.

What happens, however, when government is the anarchy?

The other morning, I had the blues trifecta: I was shocked, saddened, and angered by the plight of investigative journalist Andy Ngo, as detailed in Douglas Murray's recent column. Ngo sought to do what journalists do - inform the world of a problem in its midst. His near-fatal mistake? Picking the wrong problem to report on.

Ngo went to Portland to learn and inform about Antifa. An entity that simultaneously doesn't exist, exists but is peacefully righteous, and will ***k you up if you dare cross its path. Not only was Ngo beaten to the point of permanent impairment, he received no justice or even support from the people responsible for protecting individuals' rights and prosecuting those who violate them, i.e. the various justice departments in America. He attempted to seek justice in civil court, but became the poster child for being unable to get a fair trial. The jury intimidation alone would bring a wistful tear of approval to Al Capone's eye.

Low-level crime is a growth industry in America's major big-government cities. Shoplifting cost Target $1.2 billion last year. Walgreen’s has closed a number of locations in San Francisco due to "organized retail crime." Mom-and-pops are locking (at significant expense) staples like detergent behind plexiglass. A combination of bail "reforms" and broad non-prosecutions by progressive district attorneys has taught criminals how much they can get away with stealing and how quickly they'll be back on the street - if they're even arrested. Since non-prosecutions make the effort of arresting pointless, police departments are simply looking the other way. Smash-and-grab videos litter the news and social media.

At the core of all this is the abandonment of one of government's core duties: the protection of individuals' rights.

I've always been skeptical of anarchy, and that includes the anarcho-capitalism (ancap) that abuts (and some say overlaps) the spectrum of libertarian thought. I've never heard an adequate theory as how ancap would handle organized aggression by another nation, or how individuals' rights would be protected.

But, at least the anarchists try to theorize how private-sector solutions might spontaneously arise due to demand for such.

Not so, when the anarchy is government-sponsored. As is almost invariably the case, when government does something, it impedes or totally prohibits private-sector substitutes. Government restricts, via regulation and sometimes outright prohibition, private works of charity, for example. Likewise, government restricts or outright bans private theft remediation efforts, both overtly and via its monopoly on jurisprudence. If you hire a security guard to detain shoplifters, but your only option is to hand them over to a system that won't do anything with or about them, why even bother.

And, sure enough, many corporations have simply given up on enforcement, issuing directives that employees do not interfere or impede criminals, and even firing some that do.

As with state-sponsored everything else, state-sponsored anarchy is even worse than the more traditional form.

Not that long ago, I'd have posited that "state-sponsored anarchy" was an oxymoron. Turns out, the notion has been cogitated in the past, with one writer coining the phrase "anarcho-tyranny.” The provenance of that phrase isn't great, to put it mildly, so I won't name the coiner here. It is described in Wikipedia as:

when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law.

with

Commentators have invoked the term in reference to situations when governments focus on weapon confiscation instead of stopping looters.

driving the point home.

Guilt-by-association and genetic fallacies aside, it is quite fair to challenge the current model of excusing criminality based on identity group membership while infringing on fundamental individual rights to property and self-defense, and expectations that government will do its job.

These pockets of government-sanctioned anarchy are still relatively small, but they are having an outsize impact on public perceptions. That they have not fully engulfed the nation yet is of little comfort to the people who've been robbed or beaten, and the rise of low-level lawlessness is likely at the root of the increase in high level crime in some places (see: homicides in Washington, D.C.).

There's been backlash in some states over the aforementioned bail "reforms" (always trust government, when it tries to fix problems, to fix them wrong), but others are ignoring the lessons of recent history, so expect the criminal element to quickly figure out how much they can steal, from where, and how often. Since such reforms seem to coincide with jurisdictions that make gun ownership and other forms of self-defense more difficult, we can predict the consequences.

Among which will be the standard retort:

If you object to crime, you must be a racist.

A tragic story just crossed my attention: a University of South Carolina student was shot and killed “as he apparently tried to enter the wrong home on his off-campus street.” A friend wondered whether the growing sense of lawlessness has raised people’s levels of fear, to where some such situations might more easily tip to the tragic side. While the South Carolina story is still unfolding, we’ve seen, in such cases as George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, the results of the government’s abandonment of its duty to secure the safety of citizens. Nature abhors a vacuum, and while some citizens accept an elevated level of fear as their new normal, others won’t.

As a libertarian, I default to a rejection the initiation of force (aka the Non-Aggression Principle), and believe that everyone else should as well. Protecting yourself and the fruit of your labor is not, however, an initiation of force - the initiator is the person who would violate your rights. People, even in the most minarchist societies, empower proxies (aka government) to protect their rights. While the state cannot claim a monopoly on force in any reasonably free society, it can and does claim such a monopoly in adjudication of those rights violators. What are we to do when the monopolist won’t do that which he has monopolized?