Libertarian Anarchy

Many people accuse market anarchists of being Utopians; of assuming that everyone will become angels once the government is abolished. However, this is simply not true. Criminals will likely always exist. Market anarchy is the best way to punish criminality and reward voluntary, cooperative behavior.

Here is an example of a Utopian communist-anarchist, Osho:

Man has not come to the point where governments can be dissolved. Anarchists like Kropotkin have been against the government, the law. He wanted to dissolve them. I am also an anarchist, but in a totally opposite way to Kropotkin.

I want to raise the consciousness of human beings to the point where government becomes futile, courts remain empty, nobody is murdered, nobody is raped, nobody is tortured of harassed. Do you see the difference? Kropotkin’s emphasis is to dissolve to the governments. My emphasis is to raise the consciousness of human beings to the point where governments become, of their own accord, useless; to the point that courts start closing, that police start disappearing because there is no work and judges are told, “Find some other job.” I am an anarchist from a very different dimension. First let people be ready, and governments will disappear on their own. I am not in favour of destroying governments; they are fulfilling a certain need. Man is so barbarous, so ugly, that if he is not prevented by force, the whole society will be in chaos.

I am not in favour of chaos. I wants human society to become a harmonious whole, a vast commune all around the world: People meditating, people without guilt, people with great serenity, silence; people rejoicing, dancing, singing; people who have no desire to compete with anyone; people who have dropped the very idea that they are special and have to prove it by becoming the president of America; people who are no longer suffering from any inferiority complex, so nobody wants to be superior, no body brags about greatness.

Governments will evaporate like dewdrops in the early morning sun. But that is a totally different story, a totally different approach. Till that moment comes, governments are needed.

Clearly, Osho wants to achieve the truly Utopian goal of a mental evolution of all mankind, where no one will even commit crimes. But his error is to believe that government is the only way to prevent chaos. He is ignorant of the market anarchist insight that justice and protection can be provided more efficiently and voluntarily by the market.

The practical anarchist solution is the one presented in The Market for Liberty (also in pdf), by the Tannehills:

We are not envisioning any Utopia, in which no man ever tries to victimize another. As long as men are human, they will be free to choose to act in an irrational and immoral manner against their fellows, and there will probably always be some who act as brutes, inflicting their will upon others by force. What we are proposing is a system for dealing with such men which is far superior to our present governmental one—a system which makes the violation of human liberty far more difficult and less rewarding for all who want to live as brutes, and downright impossible for those who want to be politicians.

This is the goal of market anarchists: to sweep away the chaos of government and allow the order of a voluntary market society to flourish. We, too, do not favor chaos. We want the most moral, rational, and just society – the stateless society.