CHAZ And Libertarianism
2020-06-21
There have been comparisons of CHAZ to a libertarian area, lately. It doesn’t quite surprise me, generally folk couldn’t tell libertarianism from anarchy from in-the-original-sense communism. But it bothered me that few were there to point out the difference between anarchy and liberty.
Liberty vs Anarchy
Look, we could get all terminologist on this. But let’s just draw an easy line - anarchy is where there are no rules and the mob determines what happens. Liberty is where people are not allowed to screw with each other, but are otherwise free to pursue their interests.
Let me give a demonstration of anarchy, and how a libertarian zone wouldn’t allow it to happen with this clip (alternate). In 60 seconds, an armed man takes issue with a street vendor, flips a table full of goods, and punches the vendor in the face. There’s no police to arrest the guy for assault and battery, so how would this be different in a libertarian utopia?
Libertarianism concerns itself with two things above all else - property rights, and the non-aggression-principle. These are whole fields of study, but you can sum it up by saying "don’t hit anyone, and don’t screw with other people’s stuff."
As soon as someone breaks those rules, the property owner is obliged to respond in kind. The owner may have hired security for such a situation, or it may just be them taking care of their own business. In whatever case, if the property owner decides you are no longer welcome on his property, you can be removed.
This case isn’t at all like libertarianism because; the vendor doesn’t own the land.
In this specific case, he’s just in the street. There was no agreement by anyone about his presence there, he just set up shop, and nobody has objected (until now). In an anarchic situation, or a communist (again, Marx/Engels post-capitalist sense) situation, there is no land ownership, and this is the only way to organize things. But you can see the problem - there’s no "rules" that he can cite for being able to do business there. So he stays at the pleasure of the mob.
Since he doesn’t own the land, if the mob decides they don’t like him, they will remove him and steal/destroy his shop. It could have nothing to do with the shop - they might decide that he’s an unperson who needs to be removed. He might have said something they find offensive - regardless of the severity of his offense, the mob dictates if he stays or not.
The mob eats the least-radical member of the mob, which makes the mob more radical, so then someone else is the new least-radical member. It spirals into absurdity.
In a liberty-based situation, this guy would own the land and his shop. He’d be selling things for prices (instead of handing them out and hoping for the best), and he’d be able to determine who he wants to sell to. Anyone who started anything would be under his rules - because it’s his land. And he could remove them. Now, you’re probably thinking "but he was clearly outclassed, the only reason he wasn’t severely hurt and his shop destroyed was the mob pulling the aggressors away". That’s true - and it would still be true in a libertarian world.
See, the difference here is that in the CHAZ, the mob’s principles are based on being as ardently faithful to a set of racial and sexual principles.
They don’t have a shared idea for what they want a society to look like - just who they want to exclude from it.
A liberty-based society would have the principle that property ownership is important, and the non-aggression principle is sacred. The mob would still help remove the aggressors in the video, but they would never turn on the shop owner for expressing wrongthink.
Independent Judiciaries
I want to make a note here, because in both cases the obvious question is "well, without police, what’s happens after the threat is stopped? Does the aggressor just go scot-free?"
Ideally, everyone would probably agree that someone unaffiliated with either party step in, and make a ruling that they agree to abide to. Something like; "You owe him for the damage you did to his property, plus some for the punch to the face." Fans of restorative justice could have the victim and offender sit down and hash their shit out, and the victim would determine in what manner the sentence should be handed down. Perhaps the offender works at the shop for a week to make up for what he did, maybe he produces something that he agrees to donate to the shop for a week, whatever. They figure it out.
But critically lacking in the CHAZ is this concept of "unaffiliated third party." There is no independent judiciary. While we’re used to having this in America, it’s a relatively new concept. Previously, judges were appointed by the monarch or emperor, and served as executors of his will. Someone commits a crime against another? The judge decides what the king would want done, and hands that sentence down - to be carried out by the king’s soldiers. Feudalism made this significantly more complicated, but we don’t need to get into it. Suffice to say - courts were not independent, and didn’t even need to make rulings based on laws, until fairly recently.
People who think "capitalism == incarceration state" should note that at no point have I suggested that the aggressor’s freedom should be taken away. "Jail" is not mentioned once. Imprisonment is a very common first-offense sentence in modern times, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes an aggressor just won’t quit. There are people who are just bad seeds. Or drug addicts, or mentally unstable, or deeply hateful, or whatever. Maybe the punishment doesn’t deter them from wanting to hurt others. In that case, imprisonment (or exile) makes sense. It doesn’t have to be a first step, though.
I’m not here to write legislation for a hypothetical libertarian society, so I won’t try to go into exact sentencing guidelines or whatever. But I hope it illustrates that the things that exist today are broken, the CHAZ especially, and we’ve got all the fixes right in front of us. We need only apply them.
