Voluntary Boundaries

EVERYDAY ANARCHY

By Stefan Molyneux

POLITICS AND SELF-INTEREST

Truth is so often the first casualty of self-interest. In the realm of advertising, we can see this very clearly - the company that sells an anti-aging cream uses fear and insecurity to drive demand for its product. "Your beauty is measured by the elasticity of your skin, not the virtue of your soul," they say, "and no one will find you attractive if you do not look young!"

This is a rather shallow exploitation of insecurity; clearly what is really being sold is a definition of "beauty" that does not require the challenging task of achieving and maintaining virtue. In the short run, it is far easier, after all, to rub overpriced cream on your face than it is to start down the path of genuine wisdom and integrity.

In this way, we can see that the self-interest of the advertiser and the consumer are both being served in the exchange, at the expense of the truth. We all know that we shall become old and ugly - and also that this fate need not rob us of love, but rather that we can receive and give more love in our dotage than we did in our youth, if we live with virtue, compassion and generosity.

However, there is far less money to be made in philosophy than there is in vanity - which is another way of saying that people will pay good money to avoid the demands of virtue - and so the mutual exploitation of shallow avoidance is a cornerstone of any modern economy.

In the same way, being told that "anarchism" is just bad, bad, bad helps us avoid the anxiety and ambivalence we in fact feel about that which we both fear and love at the same time. Our educational and political leaders "sell" us relief from ambivalence and uncomfortable exploration - inevitably, at the expense of truth - and so far, we have been relatively eager consumers.

SELF-INTEREST AND EXPLOITATION

The CEOs of large companies receive enormous salaries for their services. Let us imagine a scenario wherein a small number of new companies grow despite having no senior managers - and appear to be making above-average profits to boot!

In this scenario, when business leadership is revealed as potentially counterproductive to profitability - or at least, unrelated to profitability - it is easy to see that the self-interest of business leaders is immediately and perhaps permanently threatened.

In addition, picture all the other groups and people whose interests would be harmed in such a scenario. Business schools would see their enrolment numbers drop precipitously; the lawyers, accountants and decorators who served these business leaders would see the demand for their services dropping; the private schools that catered to the families of the rich would be hard hit, at least for a time. Elite magazines, business shows, conventions, life coaches, haberdashers, tailors and all other sorts of other people would feel the sting of the transition, to put it mildly.

We can easily imagine that the first few companies to see increased profitability as a result of ditching their senior managers would be roundly condemned and mocked by the entrenched managers in similar companies. These companies would be accused of "cooking the books," of exploiting a mere statistical anomaly or fluke, of having secret managers, of producing shoddy goods, of "stuffing the pipe" with premature sales, of actually running at a loss, and so on.

Their imminent demise would be gleefully predicted by most if not all self-interested onlookers. The CEOs of existing companies would avoid doing business with them, and would doubtless combine a patronizing "benevolence" ("Yes, you do see these trends emerge once every few years - they bubble up, falter, and die out, and investors end up poorer but wiser") with fairly-open fear-mongering ("I’m not sure that it is a good career move to work at these sort of companies; I would consider it a rather black mark on the resume of any job-seeker…") and so on.

Should these new companies continue to grow, doubtless the existing business executives would get in touch with their political friends, seeking for a political "solution" on behalf of the "consumers" they wished to "protect."

Entrenched groups will always move to protect their own self-interest - this is not a bad thing, it is simply a fact of human nature. It is thus important to understand that what is called unproductive, negative, "extreme" or dangerous may indeed be so, but it is always worth looking at the motives of those who invest the time and energy to create and propagate such labels. Why are they so interested?

THE ROBBER BARONS

We can also find examples of this in the phenomenon of the "Robber Barons" in late 19th century America. The story goes that these amoral predatory monopolists were fleecing a helpless public, and so had to be restrained through the force of government anti- monopoly legislation.

If this story were really true, the first thing that we would expect is a 1-2 punch of evidence showing how prices were rising where these "monopolies" flourished - and also that it was these helpless and enraged consumers who thumped the ears of their legislators and demanded protection from the monopolists.

Of course, it would be purely absurd to imagine that this was the case, and it turns out to be a complete falsehood.

If an unjust price increase of 10%-20% was imposed upon ground beef, the net loss to the average consumer would be no more than a few pennies a week. It is incomprehensible to imagine any consumer - or group of consumers - combining their time and effort to pursue complex and lengthy legislation for the sake of opposing a tiny price increase. The cost/benefit ratio would be absurdly out of balance, since it would doubtless cost most of these consumers far more in time and money to pursue such action than they could conceivably save by reducing such an unjust price increase.

Are you pursuing legal action against Exxon for higher gas prices?

Of course not.

Thus to find the real culprits, we must first look at any group which can justify the pursuit of such complex and uncertain legislation; the purchasing of legislators, the writing of articles and other efforts spent to influence the media, the desperate pursuit of a highly risky venture - who could possibly justify such a mad investment?

The answer is obvious, and contains all the information we need to know to disprove the claims put forward.

The groups most harmed by these supposed-monopolists were, of course, their direct competitors. Thus we would expect that the primary - if not sole - sponsors of this legislation would not be the outraged consumers, but rather the companies competing with these "Robber Barons."

Clearly, if these monopolists were unjustly increasing prices, this would be an endless invitation for these competitors - or even outside entrepreneurs - to undercut their prices.

Ah, but perhaps these Robber Barons were achieving their monopolies through preferential political favors such as forcibly keeping competitors from entering the market.

Well, we know for certain that this could not be the case. If these Robber Barons actually did own the legislature, then their competitors would be highly unlikely to take the step of attempting to influence the legislature, because they would know it was a fight they could not win. If these "monopolists" were gaining massive and unjust profits through political favors, then their competitors who were shut out of such a lucrative system would be completely unable to funnel as much money to the legislators. Furthermore, those making the laws would be exposed to blackmail for past deals if they "switched sides" so to speak.

Thus without examining a single historical fact, we can very easily determine what actually happened, which was that:

1. The monopolists were not actually raising prices, but were lowering them, which we know because their competitors did not take the economic route of undercutting on price, but rather the political route of using the force of the state to cripple these "monopolists."
2. The monopolists were not gaining market share or unjust profits through political means, because the legislatures were still available for sale.
3. The consumers were entirely happy with the existing arrangement, which we know because the competitors had nothing to offer that the consumers would prefer to the existing state of things.

This hypothesis is amply borne out by the accurate historical evidence. Where these "Robber Barons" dominated the market, the prices of the goods they produced went down, sometimes considerably - in the case of using refrigerated railcars to store meat, a price drop of 30% was achieved in the span of a few months.

Clearly, this did not harm the interests of the consumer - but it did harm the self-interest of those attempting to compete with these highly-efficient businesses. Sadly - though, with the temptation of the government ever-present, inevitably it seems - these competitors preferred to take the political route of attacking their successful rivals through the power of the state rather than attempting to innovate themselves in turn and compete more successfully in the free market.

What about the argument that the Robber Barons used violence to create their monopolies, by threatening or killing competing workers?

Well, even if we accept this argument as true, it serves the anarchistic argument far more than the statist position.

If you hired a security guard who continually fell asleep on the job, and permitted the facility he guarded to be robbed over and over again, year after year, what would your reaction be? Would you wake him up and promote him to the rank of global manager of a highly complex security company? Would his rank incompetence at a simple task make him your ideal candidate for an enormously complex job?

Of course not.

If a government is so amoral and incompetent that it permits the murder of innocent citizens by the Robber Barons, then clearly it cannot conceivably be competent and moral enough to protect citizens from the complex economic predations of the same Robber Barons. A group that cannot perform a simple function cannot conceivably perform a far more complex function.

Over a hundred years later, we can still see how effective this propaganda really is. The specters of these "Robber Barons" still inhabit the imaginary haunted houses of our history. The role of government in controlling exploitive monopolies remains unquestioned - and how many people know the basic facts of the situation, principally that it was not the consumers who opposed these companies, but their competitors?

When we look at political "solutions" to pressing "problems," we see the same pattern over and over again. Government-run education was not instituted because parents were dissatisfied with private schools, or because children were not educated, or anything like that - but rather because the teachers wanted the job security, and cultural and religious busybodies wanted to get their hands on the tender minds of children. The "New Deal" in the 1930s was not instituted because the free market made people poor, but rather because government mismanagement of the money supply destroyed almost a quarter of the wealth of the United States.

Time and time again, we see that it is not freedom that leads to political control and an increase in state violence, but rather prior increases in political control and state violence.

The government does not expand its control because freedom does not work; freedom does not work because the government expands its control.

Thus we can see that freedom - or voluntarism, or anarchy - does not create problems that governments are required to "solve." Rather, propagandists lie about what the government is up to ("protecting consumers" really means "using violence to protect the profits of inefficient businesses") and the resulting expansions of political coercion and control breeds more problems, which are always ascribed to freedom.