A last defense often used by apologists for the State is to accuse libertarians and anarchists of being jaded and paranoid for our lack of faith in the system. Interestingly, a common thread between both conservatives and liberals is their purported ‘need’ for government intervention due to a lack of belief that people and organizations can be trusted to make responsible decisions – whether it’s former show guest Pastor Kinchlow advocating laws banning pornography because men will be unable to control themselves and it will destroy their marriages, or my own somewhat Progressive podcast partner Joe Ryan speculating about foodborne illness epidemics in the absence of FDA inspectors. Yet somehow, in the eyes of both generally intelligent groups, people who work for government and law enforcement exist on a separate plane to which this skepticism need not apply. It seems paradoxical, but I’m an empiricist and not a pundit and I DO understand it – and I’m here to teach you how to counter-act Statist thinking while making friends rather than enemies.

 

            This may come as a shock from a self-described anarchist with a very strong belief in personal responsibility, but people are predominantly products of our environment. We are neither generally good nor bad, but driven neutrally by our very few natural instincts. Our personalities and behavior patterns are largely defined by what we view as being socially acceptable in terms of acting on those instincts; a view that depends almost entirely on our experiences and how the world reacts to our choices. Further, most people only think about how their behavior impacts others and their community because of actual or perceived immediate or proximal consequences to themselves. It may be common for people to justify pro-social behavior and compliance with the law based on vague allusions to codes of morality; but I can tell you as someone whose favorite pastime is to question these and demand specific definitions that actual consistent moral beliefs are extremely rare, and behavior that lives up to them even rarer. Simply put, most people don’t act in belligerent disregard for others because they are worried this would come back to haunt them in some tangible sense in the near future – such as being fired, ostracized, arrested, hurt, and so forth. Morality has nothing to do with it. There is a relationship between shirking responsibility for one’s actions in the absence of likely consequences and proximity – such as people being more likely to defraud the government or steal from a large corporate employer than to cheat a small business whose owner they know; or even to litter on a State highway as opposed to on a street in their own neighborhood. But even that interaction of proximity and conscience is a matter of self-interest in the personal relationship and one’s own community, not of moral codes. To those made uncomfortable by this notion and hoping to dismiss it as the subjective outlook of some rebellious anarchist, I unapologetically remind you that I have degrees in multiple social sciences and have reached this conclusion because it is backed by virtually every collective behavior study I have ever read. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you take a break from reading this and Google the terms “Stanford Prison Experiment” and “Stanley Milgram”, just for beginners.

 

            Accepting the notion of responsibility being consequence-driven as opposed to code-based, it may seem I’m agreeing with Kinchlow or Joe Ryan that without rules and restrictions, runaway self-interest will motivate people and organizations to belligerent disregard for how their actions affect others – not only in for-profit economics but also in civil liberties such as gun ownership, sexual behavior, and so forth. But I’m not here to prove runaway self-interest wouldn’t do that. I’m here to argue that regulations and restrictions invariably have to be enforced by humans who are just as prone to runaway self-interest, and hence don’t work to curb it. There are other, far more reliable checks on runaway self-interest than government intervention, but government intervention tends to create in us an illusion of living in a responsible society that gets in the way of more effective mechanisms.

 

            Take the right to bear arms, for example. Most gun control advocates concede that the rationale for the 2nd Amendment is a need for self-defense both against criminals and government overreach, and that the vague term ‘arms’ was used intentionally to keep government overreach from legislating certain technology that could be used to control it as off-limits to the public. The popular modern argument is not about the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, but that it’s obsolete in today’s world of ‘scarily’ effective weapons. My counter-question is very simple – WHAT THE F* HAS CHANGED? It’s not unreasonable to fear that irresponsible people will use fully-automatic rifles, mounted machine guns, tanks, fighter jets, and nuclear bombs – all things that didn’t even exist in fiction in 1788 – as forceful means toward runaway self-interest with disregard for the well-being of others. But why doesn’t that fear extend to irresponsible persons working for government or even giving orders on its behalf? Legal restrictions that limit the ownership and abuse of weapons by Americans rely on compliance for fear of consequences such as being incarcerated, but since getting caught is actually somewhat unlikely many of those who fear these consequences still choose to take the risk and break the law. While illegally owned guns are rampant, disobedience of laws against victimizing others with them is actually pretty rare because the probability of negative consequences for violent crime is so much higher; including not only getting caught but also hurt in self-defense by the victim. Transferring the same logic to PEOPLE that work for government in general and law enforcement in particular, it’s reasonable to assume that many of them will shirk Constitutional restrictions and abuse their weapon-based power if the probability of negative consequences is low. The cultural assumptions of their credibility over the average citizen contribute significantly to said probability being low, and a disturbing uptick in this in the aftermath of 9/11 has been documented by numerous watchdog groups such as the Peaceful Streets Project. Hence, the other, arguably far more effective check on government excess is that people who embody the government also don’t want to be hurt in self-defense – and THAT requires an armed populace. I’m not advocating opening fire on legitimate law enforcement. But an agent of government that neglects the Constitutional limitations on their authority or uses it for personal gain is classifiable as a criminal, a violent criminal if this involves force, and reasonable self-defense applies the same way it would to a mugger in an alley.

 

            The same paradigm can be applied to virtually every domain of laws and regulations. There are invariably quacks who pose as doctors and medical professionals to make a profit while not offering safe or beneficial services, but quacks and cheaters also find their way on to the regulatory boards that hand out medical licenses and inspect facilities. It’s not unreasonable to worry about foodborne illnesses and general lack of quality control and sanitation in meat-processing plants, but whence comes the faith that inspectors and licensing officials have the competence and honesty to guard us against these, as opposed to take a bribe or simply neglect their jobs out of laziness? The same applies to developers and the enforcement of building and fire codes, regulations on corporate-union relations, transportation, banks and finance, the list goes on and on. If you believe that people will generally neglect their responsibility to the collective in order to make their jobs easier or increase their take – you are on target; but if you believe regulations and their enforcement are an effective check on this because bureaucrats are somehow not prone to the same self-interest pressures – you are hopelessly contradicting yourself. Just as people, including law enforcement, generally use force responsibly because its abuse naturally brings counter-force, so various goods and service providers including bureaucrats do somewhat reasonable work because low qualities will bring mistrust and a loss of customers to competitors. That includes bureaucracies who can lose their funding and functions to other agencies or even the private market if dissatisfied voters put the right pressure on elected politicians, but speaking quantitatively it takes far less for a private business to lose the trust of its clients or investors than for a government agency (or contractor or outsourced service provider) to lose the confidence of elected officials via public discontent. A similar quantitative difference even applies to small businesses versus large corporations, especially if the corporations are subsidized or protected by the government in some way.

 

            Hence, the reliable free market check on irresponsible behavior, or more accurately runaway and neglectful self-interest, is very simple – competition. No matter what laws and propaganda surround us, the most important deterrent to violent behavior is the expectation of violence in return. No matter what regulations or possible penalties loom over the head of a private business, its number one fear is losing its customers or investors because trust of their product has been compromised by negative publicity and mass-dissatisfaction. Before fearing laws about labor relations, most employers fear the dissatisfaction of existing and potential workers that doesn’t allow them to obtain and retain the talent to turn a profit – unions only provide an avenue to effectively synchronize said dissatisfaction and make demands in a collective fashion. Even for bureaucracies and agencies of government, the primary motivator to quality is the political consequence of loss of public confidence because it means loss of resources and functions. If we create a spectrum from most to least responsible and concerned about outcomes among these actors, we will invariably find that those facing the most competition (such as small businesses) tend to be the most accountable, whereas those insulated from these pressures by monopoly of function and complexity of retaliation (such as government agencies) are the least so. Transparency is also a significant factor because informed consumers are able to use competitive pressures far more effectively, which explains why government agencies hiding behind a purported need for secrecy such as the NSA and the IRS tend to be the least accountable of all, as demonstrated by recent scandals.

My expectation that most people will place their needs before the needs of others and require credible threat of personal consequences to deter excesses with this is not some jaded or angry outlook. It is an empirical understanding of my own species based on neutral observation and if you are made uncomfortable by it, it is because you don’t have the maturity to let go of fairy-tale beliefs about the world that surrounds you. In light of this empirically determined reality, the need for checks on irresponsible behavior is very real but advocating for responsibility to be monopolized by enforcement agencies is thoroughly contradictory and counter-productive. Responsible behavior is forced by the decentralization of authority, the knowledge by every player in a competitive system that living up to the expectations of other actors is profitable or in other ways beneficial, whereas not living up to these is contrary to personal gain.

 

            Taking a closer look, we discover that our entire political system of checks and balances is based on this principle – between branches of government, between Federal vs State vs local, even guarantees of rights to individuals at every level. THIS is why libertarians blow the whistle every time we see the Federal government trying to monopolize regulatory authority away from the States, even on issues where we might ideologically side with the Federal government such as Roe vs Wade or the 1990s throwing out of State anti-sodomy laws. We find a Federal monopoly on these authorities to be infinitely more dangerous than the abuse of power by a few bigoted and culturally delayed State governments, and the tenures of George W. Bush and Barack Obama are all the evidence we need to demonstrate why this is a legitimate fear. When it comes to laws, regulation, and responsibility in general, we unapologetically and reasonably fail to see how a bureaucracy or law enforcement agency – especially a Federal one that is relatively difficult to hold accountable – should be trusted with a monopoly on functions and powers that our conservative or liberal friends are worried private actors will abuse. Private non-profit groups in the last several years have made strides in forcing law enforcement to control itself and obey the Constitution using such simple actions as filming their activities. Why can’t similar consumer watchdog organizations take on the functions of examining food, drugs, structures, banking and finance practices, and so forth – letting irresponsible corporations and providers go down in infamy as consumers dump them for their competition? No doubt, such a system will have some costs, such as some consumers getting poisoned by blighted food or swindled by predatory lenders. But it doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth advocating. It only has to be better than the existing regulatory disaster where these same things happen daily, but where the economy is also slowed to a snail-pace and taxed painfully by the costs of regulation and government.

 

            Americans on both sides of the political spectrum who advocate for ‘fixing’ the regulatory system in order to reduce these costs are fundamentally misled about human nature and how it impacts the effectiveness of regulation. For optimal function, society ought to employ human nature for collective benefit rather than futilely try to counter-act it.
 

 

 

About the Editor:

Neurotoxin holds a dual BA in Psychology and Political Science and an MSW with a specialization in Community Organizing. Politically, he is a “structural anarchist”; a school of thought that believes in treating all power structures as facts of nature that should be accounted for but not preserved. This school of thought dictates that policy ought to be driven solely by its empirically calculated outcomes.

Neurotoxin is the co-owner of Edge of Chaos – a political podcast and blog that can be found @ www.edgeofchaospodcast.com and http://www.facebook.com/theedgeofchaos.