I am an anarchist. I know a few of my readers figured this out from the emails they sent me after recognizing names like Walter Block and Thomas Woods in the text of my columns.
I even saw this guy on campus wearing a Murray Rothbard shirt one day. I gave him the highest of fives and nearly threw up a rainbow.
I’m usually not too fond of referring to myself as an anarchist when discussing politics around people with whom I’m unfamiliar, simply because the idea of a stateless society has been so far removed from the political sphere.
Robert Anton Wilson explained it best: “Most people think, if you say you're an anarchist, that means you’re getting ready to throw a bomb at a building. They don’t understand the concept of voluntary association, or the whole concept of replacing force with voluntary cooperation, contractual arrangements, and so on. So ‘libertarian’ is a clearer word that doesn't arouse so much immediate anxiety on the part of the listener. And, then again, libertarians, if they were totally consistent with their principles, would be anarchists.”
I want to briefly explain the origins of anarchism and also where the ideology is going. Anarchism does not stand for chaos, as many would believe; it stands for a world without rulers — not without rules — that allows for each individual to formulate voluntary contracts with other willing parties.
The reason that many people think anarchists are about to throw a bomb at a building is because anarchism has its roots in communism.
Disrespect for private property rights and an unwillingness to fight for your freedom lead to an aggressive mob-rule society, which is why the anarcho-communism of Kropotkin and the anarcho-pacifism of Tolstoy don’t make any sense to me.
We’ve seen enough history to understand that collectivized economies don’t work, especially centrally-planned collective economies.
As anarcho-capitalists, we’re also voluntaryists, meaning that anyone in our stateless society can form a commune if they decide, so long as they don’t impede on our preference for capitalism.
This isn’t a pipe-dream either.
I’m not going to pretend that Somalia is perfect by any means, but the country’s economy had impressive growth throughout its 15 years as a stateless society.
The CIA factbook even states that telecommunication firms provided wireless services, money exchanges existed without a formal banking sector and militias maintained security for individuals and businesses.
The two most basic tendencies of human nature match up perfectly with anarchism. If people are good, there’s no reason to have rulers govern them. If people are bad, there’s no reason to risk putting one of them in the position of absolute power to invade foreign countries.
And, let’s face it, when it comes to most things, we’re living under a dictatorship. Don’t’ pretend as if you’ve ever gotten to vote for a foreign policy measurement. Unless you count voting for the Libya-bombing, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama as a functioning democracy.
The government is not a conspiracy. It’s not a ploy to take over the world. It’s a simple pattern of thought that the world can be controlled by some centrally-planned, manual mechanism.
It ends in slavery and hunger and death — always has, always will. The continuity of elections is our fashionable way of slowly but surely committing suicide.
And we better snap out of it soon, or else one day we’ll wake up with the shackles around our ankles that we ourselves locked into place.
This is the last newspaper column I’ll ever write for The State Press before I transfer to another university. I sometimes look back at my old columns from a few years ago and feel ashamed.
My beliefs about society, international relations, the economy — they were based on hollow rhetoric provided to me from both sides of the party line mixed in with a few of my own personal values.
It took such little time after speaking with Ron Paul and studying at the Mises Institute to see the logical flaws I had once so vehemently supported.
I stopped seeing elections as measurements of consensus, and started seeing them as coercive battles between two ideologies trying to compete for who will have the guns for the next two or four years.
I stopped confusing corporatism for capitalism, money for wealth and theft for funding. And, most importantly, I learned to accept and correct my own inconsistencies, realizing than any product or service provided by the government is entirely feasible in the free market, every voluntary cooperation and mutually-beneficial exchange included.
The one piece of advice I’d like to give my readers: Use your voice to shout out your opinions at the loudest possible volume.
It is always better to be wrong than seem correct. I remember debating people at the Mises Institute during my earlier political days, and it felt terrible. I hated when words like “blowback” and “quantitative easing” were thrown at me because they made no sense, and I wanted to turn away from politics, never to look back.
But I kept debating and feeling like an idiot until that one day when everything clicked. The pain and headaches I absorbed through these times gave me the ability to notice patterns in economics, finance and foreign policy that were blurry in previous months.
I promise you that nearly every libertarian and anarcho-capitalist — whatever you’d like to call us — we’re all ashamed of our past political beliefs. But the proud acceptance of a past defeat is what unites us all under the shade of the tree of liberty.
Thank you all for reading my column these past few years. This confession has meant everything.
Goodbye, and good luck.
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
