Middle East, Part Two: Capitalism, Democracy and the Mirage of Human ‘Rights’

Image by Renjit Krishnan

“The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears for me, for now I say to you my word about the death of peoples.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

What shall we make of the mass rioting in the Middle East? As an anti-state libertarian I obviously rejoice whenever I see the people shake off the shackles of state power. I see an opportunity for liberty, a free market, a chance for voluntary co-operation and therefore economic progress. Although I do admit that I do not really know what the long-term aspirations of these people are for the future of their societies, what plans they have, if such plans even exist at this stage. Frankly, I see it from the vantage point of the laissez-faire capitalist and libertarian radical. I see, first and foremost, a chance to roll back the state, a chance for freedom. You may say that this is a personal bias. Ok, but here is my question: are the comments in the mainstream media or the statements from Western politicians any less biased?

It is my impression that they assume somewhat too readily that what all these people want, and what they need, is democracy. They are in need of a different government. And the assumption is that they should want our type of government, the highest form of government, the most enlightened one, the one that marks the ‘End of History’: parliamentary mass democracy on a national level, one woman/man, one vote.

What about individual freedom and economic progress? Naturally, our commentators seem to say, but you get that in the bargain. The democratic state is precisely so desirable because it is a guarantor of freedom and human rights and economic progress. Basically of everything you could wish for. Democracy has become synonymous with justice, freedom, progress and rising living standards. But this is the result of fuzzy thinking. Or propaganda. Democracy and freedom are two very different things. Democracy and capitalism are also two very different things. And democracy is, I believe, overrated.

Maybe this attitude of the politicians and the commentariat is understandable. If you spent all your energy on the political process, whether as a practitioner or a commentator, there is little to make you feel better about yourself than seeing poor people is some far away land risking their lives to establish the very political order of which you are a representative.

But let’s be honest. It has not escaped you that, back home, the democratic state is not doing so well. Everywhere it has been operating for more than a few decades, it has become a bloated, blundering, ceaselessly meddling, increasingly authoritarian, wealth-consuming, debt-accumulating burden on the citizenry, an obstacle to the citizens’ voluntary and productive cooperation.

Frankly, the democratically legitimized nation state of the West is yesterday’s model. It is past its prime. It is on the way out.

Rather profanely, it is now in the process of going bust.

The present economic crisis will see the demise of the state paper money system. Then it is curtains for the nation state because the only way the nation state was able to justify its existence after the loss of its historic crutches, religion and monarchy, was by reinventing itself as the modern client state, in which the voter is the consumer of state services. It is clear that the state has failed in this role completely. After the ‘withering away’ of the nation state, something new will come, and that could be, if one is optimistic, a breakthrough for real liberty: an increasingly stateless society, based on voluntary cooperation and market exchange. Sounds crazy? I think that this is what we are ultimately moving towards, and for purely utilitarian reasons. It simply works better.

I think it is fair to assume that a driving force behind the present unrest in the Middle East is economic in nature. People in the Middle East may not just strife for political ideals but, rather more practically, they may want better jobs, higher incomes, a higher standard of living. But if that is a reasonable assumption, then the people in the Middle East should embrace freedom and capitalism. If they want to move out of poverty, they need capitalism more than democracy. They need less government more than they need a different government.

Capitalism, or the market economy, is a social tool. It is apolitical and decentralized, and it allows peaceful cooperation and an extended division of labour in society. It does not need a guiding central authority. It is without state. It is anarchic, and that is its strength.

The market economy is maintained by those who participate in it voluntarily because doing so increases their chances of better meeting their individual material needs.

All the market needs to come into existence is the absence of force and restriction.

Democracy, by contrast, is a political arrangement. It is a mechanism by which society decides who controls state power. But how much state power does society need? How much can it take? Does voting and rule by majority guarantee that state power will be used to the benefit of everyone, or even a large group of people? Is that even possible? Does the right to vote guarantee freedom and harmonic coexistence?

It is a peculiar mark of our present political culture that we don’t ask these questions of democracy any more. We have simply elevated democracy to the status of unquestionable ideal. Democracy has become short-hand for anything that we deem good about society. In polite and sophisticated company one cannot talk of democracy disparagingly. By contrast, the attitude towards capitalism is often anything from agnostic to outright hostile.

That the democratic state is a guarantor of individual liberty is a myth. Even more bizarre is the notion that it secures the ‘rights’ of minorities. How can a system that decides what is the common good by counting heads incorporate minority views? Here, the market is at a fundamental advantage. If I want to buy something that only I want, I just need to find that one person who will sell it to me. If the two of us come to an agreement, the trade is concluded to the mutual benefit of both of us, regardless of what all other people in society think about our transaction. In order to benefit from cooperation on markets, the seller and I do not have to reach a society-wide agreement, we don’t have to build a consensus. This is one reason why there will always be more experimentation and innovation in markets than in politics. Indeed, the market economy strives on differences of views, tastes, knowledge and ability. More opportunity for exchange! The state needs uniformity. Customized politics is an oxymoron. In politics, the motto is always, one size fits all.

The state is – everywhere and always – the territorial monopolist of compulsion and coercion, of legalized violence, even a state with a democratically elected government. As Ludwig von Mises said: “Government is essentially the negation of liberty”.

Most people believe that such an entity is still needed. I disagree. Markets can supply everything the state can, only better. Laws, courts, schools, security services (police), all of this has historically come about through voluntary agreement, because people saw the benefit of these institutions and made arrangements for their provision, and funded them voluntarily.

Another widespread fallacy is the belief that the democratic state is a guarantor of human ‘rights’.

Well, the topic of ‘rights’ is a thorny one. Many of my fellow libertarians base their libertarianism on the notion of unalienable ‘natural rights’. Some of these thinkers have, over the years, had great influence on my thinking, such as the American anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard. However, I have come to the conclusion that the notion of inborn rights is a fiction. As the American historian of anarchism, James J. Martin, quipped, “nobody knows where your natural rights are like they know, for instance, where your pancreas is.” Without an anatomical locus such ‘rights’ are hardly a part of your nature. You don’t have them by merely being human. They are philosophical concepts that are used for political purposes.

I have a rather utilitarian approach to ‘rights’. If you need them, you have to assert them. For people in North Korea any notion that they have a right to private property or to free expression is but an airy-fairy political concept with no meaning for their lives until they assert these rights by pushing back the state. And waiting for the state officials to become enlightened and give the ‘rights’ to you  - does the state ‘own’ them in the first place? – is usually not a good strategy.

If we allow the notion of ‘rights’ just for argument’s sake, it seems undeniable to me that every state qua state must stand in opposition to what people may justifiably claim to be their rights. This applies equally to the democratic state.

I can claim that my right to the full fruits of my labor is trampled on by a democratic state. If I earn an income of a certain size, entirely legally and on the basis of contractual and voluntary agreement with other members of the community, the state assumes the right to confiscate half of it and employ it for other purposes. The state makes me work, six months of the year, for its own budget. You may say that I get things in return for my taxes but the majority that votes for these laws does not care if I consider that a fair bargain. The state takes my income away under threat of violence. Given the current levels of taxation in many modern democratic states, it appears as if the state ultimately owns all property, and the people have to lease it back by paying rent (taxes). If you don’t pay, the state takes your property.

Property rights in democratic states are highly conditional.

Another example: Most democratic states limit your right to defend yourself and your family against aggression. In my adopted home country, the United Kingdom, I cannot bear firearms. If I were to find myself in a situation where I, or my family, were at meaningful risk of unprovoked acts of aggression, and if I felt that the state-provided security services (the police) were not efficiently equipped to protect me (or my family) I would still be barred from arming myself, even entirely for the purpose of self-defense. My right to self-defense is being restricted by a democratically legitimized state.

You may say that you think these restrictions are justified. But why? Because of some higher ideals, such as public safety or social justice? Is that not the type of argument that ANY state resorts to when curtailing individual liberties? So what are these human ‘rights’ worth then if they can easily be subjugated to some higher value, like the welfare of society, the nation, the environment, the revolution, the state religion? And who determines what these higher goals are? The majority?

Will these restrictions of my rights appear to me any less arbitrary simply because they have been handed down by legislators from political parties with a numerical majority at the last election? Do 49 percent of the population have to accept that their rights are whatever the other 51 percent deem appropriate? There is no reason to assume that the majority is clever or virtuous, and I have no reason to accept its judgment over my private affairs.

The Peters who are taxed by the state to pay the Pauls have obviously no ‘right’ to their full income. At least, the democratically legitimized state does not give them that right. Maybe because more Pauls than Peters vote. That doesn’t make it right or wrong in any absolute sense. But just as the people in the Middle East now assert rights that they didn’t have before, and even the North Koreans may assert some new rights at some stage, so may the Peters in democratic society claim a larger ‘right’ to their income.

The notion that the democratic state accommodates or appeases any opposition to its monopoly powers automatically and harmoniously, simply via the process of periodic elections is naïve. If people decide they need more ‘rights’, they will find ways to assert them. Every state exists in opposition to parts of its population.

Deciding things by majority vote may have worked when society was still under the spell of ‘classical liberalism’, or just the common-sense notion that most people can sort out most things in their lives by themselves. There was restraint back then. This time has past. Democracy seems to encourage whatever meddling and intervening instinct the human heart harbors. In the United Kingdom it has become illegal for me to start even an entirely private club if it allows its members to smoke. That is a human right I apparently don’t have. And the preceding government has, within twelve years, declared an additional 3,000 acts criminal.

My point is not that all states are the same. Differences exist, of course. States can be democratic states, monarchic states, totalitarian states. The adjectives do still matter. Despite all the restrictions in the UK, it is my chosen home and I, like many others, still prefer it to many of the countries where people are now rioting. But the democratic state, too, is a state. It is a monopolist of legalized violence. As such it is a suboptimal tool for organizing human cooperation and peaceful coexistence. The dynamic, apolitical, denationalized and decentralized market economy is so much more powerful in delivering to its participants what they want. And it has now gone global, making this awesome division of labor more powerful the more people participate in it. The nation state, democratic or not, is increasingly an anachronism. The future will be a stateless global economy. Maybe not quite the ‘end of history’ but the next chapter. If we don’t see the death of politics then politics will have to survive on a much smaller scale. Tiny and local. In small communities and towns democracy may still work.