Friday, June 10, 2011

You Can't Escape Government

Various people have been writing posts about Gurgaon, a section of India which has managed to achieve extremely rapid economic growth despite having essentially no provision of public services. The obvious lesson to draw, taking it at face value or shallower, is that libertarianism and/or a kind of quasi-anarchism works just great, and so, not surprisingly, various liberal writers have gone about deconstructing that conclusion. But ultimately I think the point here is very little about economics and more about fundamental misunderstanding of political theory. Kevin Drum writes:
Basically, Gurgaon has turned into something from a dystopian science fiction novel: an archipelago of self-contained corporate mini-cities that provide their own power, water, sewage, transit, postal service, schools, medical care, and security force.
Because of that word "corporate," we assume that this is a kind of stateless world, that there is no government. But that's simply untrue. To see why, consider the following question: what is government?

Government is a lot of things. In most modern societies governments provide a whole host of public services, including most or all of the things in the above list. But at the root, government is simply power. Someone rules over you, that is to say governs you, if they have the ability to exercise power over you. There are a lot of different ways to exercise power. No one's really invented outright mind control yet, I believe, though in some sort of magical universe where hijacking someone's mental faculties and/or muscles was possible that would be the strongest form of power. A slightly weaker version of this would be to chain someone's hands and feet, and then use them like a puppet, but that would be kind of silly.

Most actual exercises of power, then, don't involve controlling a person, or literally removing someone's ability to decide for themselves what to do with their mind and body. Rather, they involve making a person decide to do what you want them to do. You do this by what economic wonks would call changing their incentives: for instance, tell me who your co-conspirator was or I'll break your knuckles. The person didn't want to give you the name before you make this threat, but they prefer ratting out their partner to having their knuckles broken. It's an exercise of power that got the person to make the decision you want them to make. There are lots of ways to do this, and they don't all involve physical violence. Threats can take other forms, and bribes can be just as effective.

But physical violence is more or less the root of power. It is, first of all, the most "natural" form of power. If you strip away all the layers of human culture, the money and the relationships and the social status and everything else, the one form of power you can't remove is the ability to punch someone. There is no way to entirely remove the threat of physical violence. Moreover, while most other forms of power are a lot more subtle then outright violence, roughly speaking brute physical force has the greatest potential coercive power. That's because there are very few people for whom the most important thing in the world is not somebody's life, either their own or that of a loved one. The most effective form of coercion, therefore, is likely to be threatening to kill someone, and killing people is the kind of thing that can really only be done by physical brute force.

Government is about power, and the most fundamental component of power is physical force. Government, then, is at least very closely tied to the ability to wield physical force. More concretely, perhaps, government is an entity with the power to issue commands to the people in a given region, and to back up those commands with the threat of physical force. So, let's ask: who is wielding the physical force in Gurgaon? Well, one of the services provided in these company towns is a security force. Those would be the people with guns, so they're the ones with the physical power. Except that, while they hold that power, they aren't really the ones using it, because they are in the employ of the corporations whose towns these are. So ultimately the ones with the ability to use physical force are those corporations. We have here a corporatocracy, government by corporation.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's bad, mainly because corporatocracy is not remotely democratic. The genius of democracy is that if you have an area of land governed by a democracy, the only ones with the ability to use force against the residents of that territory are the residents of that territory themselves, in an assembled whole. If the democratic government also follows some rules of good government, like using that power only in "general" ways (i.e., prescribing that anyone who robs a bank will be hauled off to jail under threat of violence, instead of just deciding to attack or threaten to attack a given person), then we're approaching an idea of legitimacy, that the power is being used in ways that aren't basically oppressive and wrong. Gurgaon-style corporatocracy doesn't have anything resembling legitimacy, just power. But that's sort of beside the point, which is that this isn't an anarchy. There's still someone ordering other people around, backed by the threat of physical force. And that's the government.

More broadly, of course, the point is that you can never get anarchy, not really. You can never make it so that no one has the power to boss other people around using the threat of violence to enforce their dictates. Why? Because you can't take away the potential threat of raw physical violence. In a civilized society like ours, the state criminalizes violence by ordinary citizens (and backs up that prohibition with the threat of even greater violent power than any ordinary citizen can muster), thereby granting itself a monopoly on the use of force. But suppose you just don't set up an organization called a government with the power to use physical force on a scale no private individual can match, and therefore able to acquire a monopoly on force. Then you just have Some Dude who happens to be the most physically powerful person in the land, the person who could beat up anyone else in the area. He can tell anyone else what to do, and they have to obey him on pain of pain; conversely, no one can tell him what to do. He's the government. So in the absence of a formal government, you just get government by the strong, or might makes right.

This is basically the substance of The Once and Future King; pre-governmental Britain is a world where the strongest knights go around Ruling people, and King Arthur, guided by the time-traveling political scientist Merlin, first becomes the strongest power in the land and then uses that power to try and move his kingdom away from this might-makes-right system. As far as I know, the best way to do this is to set up an organization with a practical monopoly on physical force, and then constrain it by making its actions accountable to the people over whom it rules, and by requiring it to issue laws general in scope. That's called democracy, and if you also want to take some things and make them just plain off limits for this force monopolist, you call it liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy is not perfect, mainly because nothing can be. Other sources of imperfection include the fact that people rarely vote based on their notion of the general will (a Rousseauian concept, basically meaning the good of the whole polity), but rather based on self-interest, and the fact that people are often quite ill-informed about matters of public policy. As a result of all of this imperfection, you have people complaining about the government, and wishing the government would go away. These people call themselves libertarians. But the problem is that you cannot reach a state of perfect anarchy except on a desert island with no one else around (in which case you're still not very free; see this). As long as there are other people around, either some of them will be able to boss you around, using the threat of force to back themselves up, or you will be the person able to boss all of them around, using the threat of force to back yourself up. Obviously, the second position is a lot cushier, but there's still government, it's just that you're it.

As long as people are interacting with other people, there is government. The only question is whether the government is legitimate or illegitimate.

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