True, But Irrelevant

The defining libertarian political principle is the idea that every person owns his own life, and others should not use coercion against him unless he has committed crimes against them.  Anarchists have argued that by the mere acts of funding their activities through extortion and asserting  authority over people who have not consented to it explicitly, all governments violate this principle.  Many libertarian thinkers have worked vigorously to try to refute  this claim – unsuccessfully and, I think, unnecessarily. The fact is the anarchists are right in their observation, but it does not matter that they are right, because the conclusions they draw from it are wrong. For it does not follow at all from the fact that all governments, even strictly limited ones, violate people’s rights to some degree that a society without a government would  produce the maximum attainable levels of liberty and respect for people’s rights.  Nor can anarchists produce examples  in history where such societies thrived or plausibly could have thrived. Rather, if anything,  the evidence of history indicates an anarchist  society would not survive long  as a free one before being subjugated by external enemies or torn apart by internal conflicts with those within it who did not accept its principles, leaving its inhabitants with less liberty than they might have enjoyed otherwise.  (Of course small anarchic communities have existed and thrived from time to time, but, as far as I can tell, only under the umbrella  of some state or in very remote and effectively unvisited places.)

In any particular context  the goal of libertarian political action should be to work for the freest society possible within that context while seeking  to alter  the context in directions making more liberty possible.  The context and understanding it are crucial for making specific decisions. For example during most of  the 19^th Century the United States faced no significant threat from foreign enemies and had no need for a large army. Friends of liberty would have been right to oppose creating one. But during the awful summer of 1940, creating huge and powerful American armed forces as quickly as possible was the least bad alternative the situation allowed, and friends of liberty would have been right and serving the cause of liberty to support doing so.

Recognizing the importance of context does not mean descending to cynicism or utilitarianism or abandoning ideals. It means only getting the facts and taking them into account before deciding what to do, something which is usually a good idea in just about any area if a person cares about the outcome of what he is setting out to do.

As to the anarchists, if they can find a large group of people reasonable, peaceful, and just enough to live freely and harmoniously with disputes between individuals or organizations solved by referring them to mutually acceptable, voluntarily chosen arbiters and a place for them never needing protection from outside enemies and free of violent, disruptive internal discord, they should go for it and  send the rest of us gloating postcards  from their new utopia.  It would nice to believe that someday and somewhere such a society might be possible, but I know of no such people or place ever having existed. So we need governments. Thomas Paine, as usual, said it very well. Government at its best is a necessary evil. The trick is to prevent its being an intolerable one.