Today, in an article on the good Dr. Ron Paul, titled “Paul as Paladin,” James N. Herndon wrote:
“How on earth did our forbearers manage to survive without the warfare/welfare state? I daresay they, indeed, lived a different existence, one often of privation, but one never lacking in pride. They understood that no man, under God, would presume to bestow rights upon another. For with every right that is given, a thousand freedoms are taken. And they knew that personal safety requires personal vigilance.”
This gave me pause. Sure our forbears didn’t live as comfortably as we do…but I wouldn’t posit the warfare/welfare state as a condition for increased material abundance. I fear too many people already assume that without government and its regulation, redistribution and aggressive foreign policies we wouldn’t have a hope of progress, fairness and security.
Nothing could be further from the truth, good patron, as Joel Bowman explains below…
Whiskey & Gunpowder
By Joel Bowman
May 11, 2011
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Freedom, Naturally: A Review of Morris and
Linda Tannehill’s The Market for Liberty
It is at times useful to imagine how a truly laissez-faire society, one entirely emancipated from the shackles of state coercion, might exist and operate. Morris and Linda Tannehill examine this very idea in, The Market for Liberty: Is Government Really Necessary?
Market for Liberty imagines a totally free society; one with no government intrusion whatsoever; one in which the free market is left to respond to the demands of individuals, without recourse to institutionalized coercion — implied or actual. Is such a stateless existence even possible, much less preferable? Or, as so many contend, is it merely an academically contrived utopia?
Morris and Linda Tannehill address all the usual fears and protestations that a truly non-governmental — i.e. anarchist society — conjures up.
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Whenever there arises in conversation the mere suggestion of a totally free, laissez-faire market, the possibility that human beings might even be able to survive (much less thrive) without the safety net of State control, apologists for “benevolent government” invariably step atop their soapboxes and ask:
“Yes, but who will provide education for the masses, if not the public schools?” or “Who will care for the sick and weak, if not the public hospitals?”
Indeed, these are questions that deserve thoughtful, honest answers. But these questions assume realities that are not in evidence.
They suppose that “the public” (i.e., the state) actually has money to “provide” these services, rather than, as is actually the case, first having to expropriate (steal) it from private, productive individuals. Furthermore, the fallacy of benign governmental control relies on the idea that governments can provide essential services more reliably and cost-effectively than the private sector.
But as the Tannehill’s argue persuasively, the free market provides solutions that governments would never dream of. “The big advantage of any action of the free market,” contend the Tannehills, “is that errors and injustices are self-correcting. Because competition creates a need for excellence on the part of each business, a free-market institution must correct its errors in order to survive. Government, on the other hand, survives not by excellence, but by coercion; so an error or flaw in a governmental institution can (and usually will) perpetuate itself almost indefinitely, with its errors being ‘corrected’ by further errors. Private enterprise must, therefore, always be superior to government in any field.”
[It is worth mentioning here that corporations acting in collusion with the state are NOT private enterprises as the Tannehill’s define them. They are simply entities that have co-opted the government’s “gun-for- hire” to do their dirty work for them. Think Wall Street “bailout” recipients and their army of D.C. lobbyists. Indeed, think any institution at all that seeks unfair protection or promotion from the state.]
The lines on the battlefield between the comfort of State control and the liberty of anarchy are familiar to all. The State is a protector, one side argues. The State is a prison guard, the other side argues.
- How, the statist is heard to question, might common disputes find resolution without the currently preferred monopoly of the state’s courts?
- What about private monopolies that would ruthlessly jack up prices and bleed us working class proletariats to death?
- By what means might a laissez-faire society offer protection from foreign aggressors?
- How might the personal liberties underpinning the whole system be protected if it were not for the tireless work of the state’s police and its myriad other law enforcement agencies?
- Indeed, the statist continues, how would “the law” itself even come into being, and in what shape would it find application, in the absence of the all-knowing, all-powerful state?
The Tannehills
Discussions criticizing the state’s myriad shortcomings and follies are many. The Tannehills’ Market for Liberty takes the extra step in providing viable, concrete solutions to state-sponsored dilemmas. The Free Market, they argue, can correct the State’s tendency toward costly excesses, and can do so peacefully and voluntarily, simply by following price signals from the market itself.
Market for Liberty is, for all intents and purposes, a very real, practical solution set to those most commonly presented excuses for acquiescing to governmental authority. The government is not merely a “necessary evil,” the Tannehills argue. “It is necessarily evil.”
Of course, Market for Liberty does not project a utopia in which acts of violence simply disappear and where every individual immediately sets off on a long road to perfection. Rather, the authors illustrate how individuals acting in their own self-interest, coming together to engage in mutually-beneficial exchanges, are thus incentivized to act with honesty and integrity.
“The history of governments always has been, and always will be, written in blood, fire and tears,” the Tannehills assert. In Market for Liberty, they show how freedom is not only an alternative to the State, but a far superior one worth, at the very least, our immediate and undivided attention.
Regards,
Joel Bowman
P.S.: Market for Liberty is one of those crystallizing works, logically and eloquently written, without recourse to Orwellian “Newspeak” to drive its point home. If you have ever considered freedom as an option, but were unsure as to how it might work in practice, we encourage you to add a copy of Morris and Linda Tannehill’s classic to your reading list. At a couple of hundred pages, more or less, it’s a quick, easy read...but one that will nourish your thinking about liberty and freedom forever.
We’re (slowly) putting together a Recommended Reading List, a way to read along with editors and contributors, a way we can discover and learn about liberty and its application together. And, as far as this editor is concerned, there are few better places to start than Market for Liberty. Feel free to pick up a discounted copy here and begin/continue your own intellectual journey towards true freedom today.
And, as always, feel free to forward and/or repost this review as you wish. Liberty is a powerful message...the more people it touches, the better chance we have of seeing it realized in our lifetime.
What Liberty Really Means is featured at Whiskey & Gunpowder.
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