Peter T. Leeson is at it again

A few months ago the economics world observed the passing of Gary Becker, the academic economics pioneer who brought the profession into new areas of human interaction, such as crime, families and drug addiction. While he is gone, his influence lives on and it's clearly made a big impact on economist Peter T. Leeson who just wrote a book on anarchy and self governance.

In 2009 I read Leeson's previous book on pirates, The Invisible Hook, and since then have followed his academic papers when he writes about the economics of football hooligans, medieval ordeals, and gypsies. The new book is titled Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think.

Tyler Cowen has shared a paragraph from the book:

Twenty-two of thirty-seven street gangs Jankowski (1991: 78-82) studied have written constitutions. Sicilian Mafiosi follow a largely unwritten code of rules, and recently police found a written set of “ten commandments” outlining the Mafia’s core laws…Kaminski (2004) identifies extensive (yet unwritten) rules dictating nearly every aspect of Polish prisoners’ lives, from what words are acceptable to use in greeting a stranger to how and when to use the bathroom. And the National Gang Crime Research Center considers constitutions so central to criminal societies that the use of a constitution is one of the defining characteristics it uses when classifying gangs…

I'm not an anarchist and I don't want a society without a government, but I support most efforts to limit the scope and reach of government. Leeson's writing is always clear and intriguing and I recommend anyone in economics check him out.
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Why we need a government

Every now and then, it's important to go back and focus on the little nuances in my views that critics exploit and twist beyond recognition.

In this case, it's the important need for a government to protect and manage society.

We've all witnessed the condescending snickering from lefties who present Somalia as a model for what libertarian and the Tea Party politcies would bring. They are blurring the line between classic liberalism and anarachy, which is no different from labeling someone a Stalinist because they support food stamps.

But critics do have a point that we spend all of our time talking about the problems with government, but are often silent on the good it can do. It's the same way flood victims speak little of drought and dehydration. We're fighting an uphill battle and we don't think we can budge the pendulum, let alone cause a backswing.

There are important roles for government, such as thwarting violent savages and thieves, and our society would crumble without a legal and judicial system. We also need to fund basic education and infrastructure like roads to keep the country operating.

I did a story a few years ago about a private road with a dozen houses. The homeowners wanted it to become a public road so it would be plowed by the public works department in the winter. The town required it to be leveled and graded just to apply for consideration. This would cost about $30,000 and there was no guarantee the town would accept it.

The residents could not get everyone to pay. Some people wanted to be free riders, and the road was never fixed. They would all have been better off if the government could step in and force everyone to pay.

Economist Robert Frank spoke about the economics of hockey helmets. Players can see more without helmets, and if given the choice, will not wear one. However, that only gives them an advantage if the other players wear helmets. Without rules, no one will wear helmets and the chances of injuries increase, yet no one will get an advantage. Rules are needed to enforce hockey helmets.

The same is true for the business world. If you can save money by dumping unwanted toxins in the river, the companies that do will gain an advantage. That's why we need a government to restrict pollution and other negative externalities.

Even Ludwig von Mises had good things to say about governments:

Government as such is not only not an evil, but the most necessary and beneficial institution, as without it no lasting social cooperation and no civilization could be developed and preserved. It is a means to cope with an inherent imperfection of many, perhaps of the majority of all people. If all men were able to realize that the alternative to peaceful social cooperation is the renunciation of all that distinguishes Homo sapiens from the beasts of prey, and if all had the moral strength always to act accordingly, there would not be any need for the establishment of a social apparatus of coercion and oppression.

Just because I don't want the government telling people what increments of soda they are allowed to purchase doesn't mean I don't want the government to stop people from selling turpentine labeled as soda. The government can, and often does, screw things up, but I would never seek to abolish it.
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Utilitarianism for the greater evil

Good ideas have a tendency to crash and burn when they move from the textbook to the streets.

Like every former Philosophy 101 student, I accepted utilitarianism's call to commit a limited amount of evil in order to vanquish a larger evil. The classic case is the "innocent fat man" where a group of people are stuck in a cave that is starting to flood from high tide. An innocent fat man becomes stuck in the only exit, and the only way to save the lives of the innocent people is to dynamite porky.

There's also the trolley problem, where five people standing on railroad tracks are oblivious to a speeding train, and the only way to save them is to throw the switch and redirect the train to another track where it will kill one person instead of five.

Of course, it's never that simple in real life. These fables assume godlike knowledge of the situation. What if the cave was only going to flood knee-deep levels and there were small holes to breath from? What if the five people on the train tracks weren't oblivious to the train or were planting a bomb?

They also assume a dichotomy of actions. Do nothing, or kill. There's no option to swim out of the cave, wait for rescuers or warn the people on the tracks.

Case in point a video posted this morning of far-left leaders discussing rioting and violence as ways to achieve their goals. This wasn't a collection of ground level recruits who said something idiotic or atypical. This was a public meeting last month at the New School in New York City about what the goals and tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement should be. After some generic anti-capitalist nonsense, activist leader Yotam Marom said:

Why are we, like harassing ourselves about broken windows and bombs when we should be talking about police brutality... I don't even want to get into the questions of whether it's ethical or not ethical to use violence in such and such. That's why I said earlier that it's about context... This system is incredibly violent and no amount of broken windows will ever add up to the misery of loss of human potential that these systems of oppression have yielded.

Marom and several other speakers at the summit invoked utilitarianism as a justification for violence. They believe that the system, man is so evil that it's excusable to use violence to reach their political goals.

If there's one lesson we can take from the Soviet Union, it should be how much evil can be heaped upon the innocent in a bloody quest to rid the world of an imagined devil. There is no one alive who can evaluate the suffering caused by murderers like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and say that was a better society than one that would have existed under capitalism.

And just like those communist murderers, the violent far-left is eager to spill blood to fight capitalism because they believe it causes more evil. This is what utilitarianism has brought the world.

This is the secular version of holy genocides carried out by religious men who committed atrocities in the name of a peaceful god. Every religious war is an exercise in utilitarianism. People who consider themselves good and just will become butchers when fooled into believing their actions are justified because of words written in a book, be it the Bible, the Quran or Mao's Little Red Book.

These utilitarian thugs assume they understand how the world works perfectly. People like Marom are so confident that capitalism is an evil that they are willing to injure or even kill people. Utilitarianism plus ignorance equals innocent victims.

When you ask people if a violent action would be justified to stop the Nazi war machine in World War II, and then turn that logic to stopping a peaceful system like capitalism, you end up creating evil in the name of a greater evil.

Utilitarianism also assumes false dichotomies, such as violent actions or peaceful protests are the only options. They think their violence will be more effective than peaceful actions and haven't considered that there is a world of other ways to reach their goals.

The same fallacies apply to the few cases of abortion doctor assassinations and the idea that we should torture a suspected terrorist to prevent a future attack. How do you know for sure he's a terrorist and that he can provide information to stop an attack? Torture use sounds great on paper, but it gets murky when you factor in the potential innocence of the suspect.

In theory, utilitarianism is a compromise for the greater good. It can do good things like help the poor and save lives. But in practice, it becomes the ultimate act of hubris. It justifies human sacrifices in the names of false gods. We are all flawed thinkers, but it assumes perfect information.

Utilitarianism carries a great potential for evil and should be handled like plutonium. It can improve things when used responsibly, but when combined with ignorance it makes the world far worse.
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Inside an anarchism convention

I'm finally getting around to expanding on my "Knee-deep in subculture" tag where I record my observations from interactions with various groups, which so far includes yoga hippies and the Occupy Boston protest.

In January 2008, I attended a free weekend anarchism convention in downtown Portland Maine that was promoted on an acquaintance's MySpace page. I wanted to hear what they were all about, as I was still somewhat new to calling myself a libertarian and expected to find a lot of common ground.

I was completely wrong about that.

I was also completely wrong in my jokes that an anarchist convention would be fatally disorganized. There was about 40 of us sitting close together on the carpet while the organizers spent more than an hour explaining the rules for us. The weirdest one was how we were to use "caususes" in case we belong to minority groups that are offended and wanted to pause the meeting.

For example, if someone said something about gays that a gay person didn't like, they could pause everything like a Zack Morris "Time Out." All the gays would discuss the issue outside while everyone else waited in silence until the gay caucus came back in and presented their findings. Fortunately, that never actually happened.

We were told to introduce ourselves by our names, why we were there and what gender of pronoun we preferred. Seriously.

I made no attempt to infiltrate the group as a rebel. I wore a tie while everyone else was in gutterpunk garb. Most of the attendees were in their teens or early twenties and there was one bearded elder who attended Woodstock and never hatched from his tie-dye cocoon.

The discussions were like a pageant for who could display the most economic ignorance. I quickly learned the difference between individual anarchism, the kind I was hoping to hear about, and collective anarchism, which is just ho-hum anti-capitalism, anti-corporation, anti-globalization Marxist opium dreams. There was applause when someone talked about their "vote for no one" campaign, which included putting signs around town that said "Don't vote, they're all Nazis".

Everyone spoke starry-eyed about the concept of "rising up," where the general public would become swayed to their side and overthrow the system from the inside. No one offered example of this actually happening. I repeatedly heard people say that graffiti messages would help the public learn and appreciate their political messages. During a workshop on how to get Bank of America to stop loaning money to companies that perform mountaintop removal mining, one girl suggested that they go into a Bank of America branch and smoke a bunch of cigarettes to mimic air pollution, and this would cause the employees to rise up and change the company from the inside.

This suggestion received a ton of applause, and no one questioned that giving low-level bank clerks a tough time is going to sway them to your side, and even if it did, how that would translate to changes in corporate policy.

To their credit, activists from Earth First! had a good understanding of focusing on cause and effect to achieve their goals, instead of just feel-good public spectacles. They lead a discussion on spiking trees to stop logging companies. Someone in the audience spoke up about how tree spiking poses bodily risk to the laborers and they were immediately shushed by everyone else. An Earth Firster said they were just talking about effectiveness of the tactic now, and would discuss the ethics of it later. That discussion never happened, as should be expected.

After a free lunch of vegan-friendly food swiped from dumpsters, everyone started talking about how they were going to stop the "Iron Sea." This sounded menacing, and I finally asked what it was.

It turned out to be the upcoming 2008 Republican National Convention, or RNC. We broke into groups to brainstorm ways to disrupt the RNC, and everyone submitted illegal ideas like sabotaging the bus system and blocking the streets to keep people from attending the convention. It was clear the spirit of democracy was absent.

I learned that anarchist protesters divide themselves into different sections depending on their rioting preferences. Non-violent people will be in one place and those who want to assault the police and burn cars go elsewhere. They have "medics" with red cross decorations to help get pepper spray out of rioters eyes and they get free legal help from the National Lawyer's Guild activist group.

This should sound familiar with anyone who read the Occupy Boston post I made last week when I interviewed Mark. The same breed of violent protesters are intertwined with the gentle reformers of Occupy Wall Street, and I don't think enough supporters realize who they're marching with.

The anarchists were not the least bit shy about talking about these intentions to commit violent crimes. I was a clean-cut guy in a tie and vest who was taking notes and they still spoke about openly about terrorizing political rivals. These groups start riots and when they get arrested they lie to the public and say they were peaceful protesters who were attacked by evil police.

There are anarchists who don't participate in violence, but they are still willing to work with the bomb-throwers. Tolerance of evil is corrupting. I think it's telling that they claim the police are Nazi-like thugs, but a lot of their tactics depend on the police respecting their civil liberties, like chaining their hands together in tubes or tying themselves to buildings. How would it have gone if a group had chained itself to the gates of Auschwitz?

I'm not sure if anyone from the convention was part of a group of masked rioters arrested at the Republican National Convention for the usual stuff: fighting police, burning cars and macing old women. The local alternative weekly repeated all the usual lies in support of the rioters, and then praised them when a judge threw out the case because their masks spoiled photographic evidence.

This is what I've been trying to warn my liberal friends about when they say they support the Occupy Wall Street movement and tolerate the extremists inside. Anarchists are brutes who want to violently overthrow the country, and they have murdered people on Wall Street before. I've seen masked men in Boston with my own eyes and I can't overlook the threat they represent. These people want blood, not reform, and I have trouble seeing how anyone could justify having them as allies.
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