)This is a long one, I apologize…)

Gene Callahan writes on LewRockwell today that there is a profound difference between anarchists and minarchists:

I believe the … conception, that minarchists and anarchists are practically indistinguishable aside from a minor and practically irrelevant disagreement is profoundly mistaken. In fact, when it comes to what I regard as the most vital political question of them all, the gulf between minarchists and anarchists is immense, whereas that separating minarchists and, say, Stalinists is relatively small: Anarchists reject the notion that it is permissible to employ violence against someone who has not themselves committed an act of aggression, no matter how much one wants to get that innocent person to cooperate in forwarding one’s desired ends, and no matter how important one believes that end to be. Minarchists, to the contrary, defend their right to initiate aggression in any circumstance where they see the use of coercion as being really, really useful. The difference between minarchists and totalitarians is one of degree: the totalitarian just sees many more of his political goals as being important enough to justify threatening innocent but recalcitrant people into contributing to their achievement than does the minimal-state libertarian…

Nevertheless, I see the anarchist/statist distinction as the most fundamental political divide. Once one accepts the notion that initiating aggression is OK under some circumstances, then the case for human liberty has been abandoned, and all that remains is to argue over what degree of enslavement is acceptable.

Despite all the rhetoric, I simply can’t envision total anarchy working outside of a vacuum – feel free to berate me for lack of faith, if you will. So given that I’m in this sense biased, and not ready to throw the world to the wolves, my first response was something along the lines of “this wife-beating analogy is a straw-man argument, and a rather irresponsible one at that.” That said, he does make a compelling case, and I don’t dispute that the difference between minarchy and totalitiarianism is most certainly one of degrees.

To paraphrase Wilhelm Roepke though, this earth is populated neither by saints nor angels. I’m still inclined to believe that a certain amount of government is necessary, and optimal. The problem, however, is what to do with it once you’ve got it. We’ve seen history, that almost always and everywhere empires rise and the power of government exceeds whatever bounds previously restricted it. This is where minarchists come in – because like it or not, some form of government proper is common to pretty much the whole of history. We can practically take it as a given, that governments will exist, and in their abscence, men will conspire to create them. This, I believe, is the assumption under which most minarchists work. Given governments, it’s necessary to control their size, and keep it to a minimum. Sure, I’d love no government as much as the next anarchist, I just have a very hard time imagining it as reality.

So, as long as there exist nation-states not committed to the rule of objective law and property/individual rights, and as long as said states see it as advantageous to bully the loosely conglomerated anarchists, I think it’s foolish to assume that such bullying won’t occur. Here we can draw another parallel, without getting too tangential – that anarchy might only be feasible if the whole of the world (or at least a significant portion thereof) accepted it as a basic tenet. Imagine, for instance, a nation of any substantial size, devolving (or evolving, if you prefer) into anarchy. What is left certainly no longer is a nation united – indeed there is no nation without government.

Though the “nation” immediately ceases posing whatever threats it had heretofore posed to other nations, the spectre of national unity persists, and I imagine would persist for some time in the eyes of outsiders. I do not expect that those opposed to freedom, “enemies,” like Al Qaeda and their ilk, would A) understand the wholesale shift in paradigm, or B) give two-shits about it, even if they did understand it. And it’s here, in the infancy of anarchy where a former nation is most vulnerable, and least able to mobilize its own defense.

Consequently, I’d have to support the argument that “Once we reduce the scope of the state to providing defense and protecting life and property, then we minarchists and you anarchists will have plenty of time to argue about getting rid of the state completely.” I do not fault Callahan’s reasoning, and I agree in spirit with the distinction, but I fear he is equivocating the “initiation of the use of force” of hardline or even moderate Statism, and the advocation of the reduction of the use thereof, per minarchy. I think it’s fair to assume that we can’t just go anarchist “cold-turkey.” In this sense, I think that most minarchists are anarchists at heart, and so long as the existence of a state is a given, they strive for reducing its scope largely. We see minarchy as a necessary stepping stone and the most preferable path towards anarchy. Whether this path takes the course of Zeno’s paradox, or is ultimately realisable is another story.

My chief complaint is that I do not believe the minarchists in Callahan’s straw-man are by any means advocates of wife-beating. They live in a world where wife-beating is rampant, and they advocate wholesale reduction of that crime. In any continuum where zero is considered optimal, certainly anything that moves one towards optimality is beneficial.

Is this the same thing as advocating the use of force in necessary circumstances? Perhaps to some degree, but they are circumstances wholly outside our control. That states exist is given. The choice then is how to best play the hand one has been dealt. Sure, we’d all love to be sitting on bullets before the flop, but when you’re dealt a pair of 9s, the proper response is not to say “Well, we only believe in being dealt pocket Aces.”

Do I want to see wife-beating, or state-coercion? No. But so long as it is a necessary evil, those of us who want zero and those of us who would move towards zero ought to be comrades, and not view one another as diametrically opposed.

H/T The Radical Libertarian.