Safnerism

So, you want to debate us Free Market Anarchists (FMAs)?  You want to “prove us wrong,”" knock some sense into us,” “teach us a lesson about the real world?” Well step right up then, we welcome any challengers!  But be forewarned, lest a potentially constructive debate degenerate into a hubbub of strained emotions (or friendships), a refusal to engage in future debate, or  you becoming one of us.*

We Were All Statists Once

The simplest reason for proceeding with caution, with all others being mere elaborations, is simply this: Each and every one of us was originally a statist.  We know how you think, why you believe what you do, and how you will argue in any debate.  We have gradually over time realized the many loopholes in the statist creedo–whether liberal, conservative, or otherwise–and discovered certain arguments that have demolished ones that we never even considered, due to the traditions and conditioning that we were subjected to as we grew up.  We have discovered a rare diamond in the rough, one that is only revealed to the small minority of people who put forth the dedicated effort, exert the right discipline, and place enough intrinsic value in truth and justice.  If you maintain these same characteristics, as we did, the process invariably results in becoming a free market anarchist.

We Have Experience

We did not come to hold these beliefs overnight.  Becoming an anarchist is not an instinctual or reflexive decision.  Scarcely many people have even heard of free market anarchism, much less correctly comprehend what this philosophy means.  Much like the market forces which we seek to explain, becoming a free market anarchist is a process, and not necessarily a goal.  We have ended up like this after months, years, even lifetimes of harrowing research and debating.  In all instances, we did not “choose” to be anarchists, but were led to this belief structure by the very fact that no effective alternative has been found.  We have exhausted all other possibilities, and have found no rational argument that can defeat the free market anarchist’s challenges.

We Are Veteran Debaters

We are hardened, experienced debaters.  We are one of the most marginalized strains of thought, debating is our only way of survival.  Therefore, since we still exist as a coherent movement, we are damn good at it.  Until now, we have all had our asses handed to us in debates before, so we have learned from our mistakes and only become stronger.  Being the radicals that we are, we’ve had to withstand attacks from all sides, we’ve simultaneously held down every flank – against the liberals, the conservatives, the neoliberals, the neoconservatives, the centrists, the minarchists, the constitutionalists, the Objectivists, the communists, the socialists, the fascists, the religious, even other brands of “anarchists.”

We Have Heard It All

Don’t presume that you can instantly derail us with a ridiculously obvious argument that instantly debunks free-market anarchism. We have heard every argument, from the economic to the moral to the political to the moral.  Any good free-market anarchist can instantly recognize and name all the overused (and defeated) popular arguments for a State and/or against market anarchy and their refutations without you even having to mention them:

• Economic “Market-Failures”: externalities (positive/negative, consumption/ production), provision of public goods (roads, utilities, natural defense), asymmetric information, natural monopolies, economies of scale, distribution
• Moral: “people are naturally evil/selfish,” Marxian “alienation”, “capitalism deadens the soul,” “capitalism is exploitative,” “greed will destroy us all,” the concentration of wealth and power, various religious beliefs
• Political: “anarchy is chaos,” “the Hobbesian war of all against all,” armed biker gangs scenarios, “monopoly must be outlawed,” the State must establish property rights, the State must protect against force and fraud, “the market is undemocratic,”
• Pragmatic: “anarchy is unfeasible,” utilitarian/consequentialist benefits of a State, “wouldn’t a State re-emerge if…”

We’ve heard all of them, for we ourselves used them when we were once statists.

We Are Logical

Our arguments are rigorously logical.  Emotion and irrational appeals are only ephemeral, they last only as long as the charisma of the demagogue proclaiming them.  Instead, logical arguments have near permanent staying power.  While we might add some emotional inflection to lightly embellish certain normative, aesthetic, or moral points, we firmly ground each and every argument on reason and logic.  We hold them to the highest esteem as the only true measures of valid truth.  If you do not value logic and reason as the only measures of truth, you have no business being in any debate, much less one against us.  These valuable tools cut through all lies and ignorance, both intentional and accidental.  Nothing can penetrate our position except superior logic.

We Are Consistent

If you are unfamiliar with our position, you might look at us and deride us for being “dogmatic” or “market fundamentalists” for repeating the same arguments. But the truth is that we are not being dogmatic at all, we are merely being consistent. This is simply because we have not found any logical reason not to believe in what we do.

Indeed we are the only consistent creed.  Let’s consider some alternatives:

• The liberals profess to oppose the horrors of violent warfare and offer every man to make their own choice as to how they live their life, yet in the same breath they would use the State to violently collect taxes and redistribute wealth as they see fit.
• The conservatives claim to uphold the “free market” and private property, but they would use the State to fight expensive & destructive wars as well as prohibit any action or use of property that is at odds with what they believe to be “moral” or “traditional” values.
• The minarchists claim to fight the evils of monopoly, force, and fraud, but would safeguard society with the most massive monopoly–a State, run by politicians, bureaucrats, and standing armies.
• The socialists want all (wo)men to be equal, but would apotheosize themselves to the level of infallible, despotic gods in order to violently graft society in their image.
• The communists would wait for “the new communist man” to arrive–free of greed, desires, inequalities, and competitiveness–impossibly negating the very characteristics that define human nature.

In short, the Statists would use evil to fight evil.  In addition, they would create a separate, deified class of “supermen” who are granted the legal and moral license to regularly commit crimes of murder, slavery, and theft with impunity simply by embellishing them as “war,” “conscription,” and “taxation,” all “in the public interest.”  In contrast, all private individuals who commit these heinous crimes are viciously pursued and punished by those who merely commit the very same crimes en masse.

We are simply those who do not tolerate such an obscene double standard.  Murder is murder.  Slavery is slavery.  Theft is theft.  Aggression is aggression, no matter who commits it.

Our Arguments Are Simple and Accessible

Our arguments are as compelling as they are simple.  They are logically deductive – they begin with strong, apodictically true axioms.

Economic:

• We act by employing means to arrive at ends.
• We focus our time tending to our most important end first.
• Time and resources are scarce.
• We prefer more rather than less.
• We prefer consuming goods in the present to consuming goods in the future.
• Labor is a disutility compared to leisure.

Ethical:

• All humans are moral agents and are entitled to the same treatment.
• The initiation of force against innocents (aggression) is wrong.
• Aggression against life (murder), liberty (slavery), and property (theft), are wrong.
• All individuals ought to live as they please so long as they do not aggress against another. (The Non-Aggression Axiom)

If you deny any of these statements, you have no right to engage in debate (for by debating, you automatically assume that you exist, act, have an end, are using scarce means, etc, etc) without contradicting yourself.

The benefit of relying on logically deductive arguments is that they are accessible to everyone.  There are no “privileged keepers” of the anarchist creed.  Anyone searching for truth and justice, whether they know of free market anarchism or not, can arrive at the same conclusions with the right application of discipline.

We Do Not Resort To Fallacies or Emotions

Our arguments do not need to be driven into a person through brainwashing, “tradition,” and subconscious conditioning (the same cannot be said of statism, however).  Our arguments instead are provable and universal.

In contrast, our enemies resort to fallacies to “explain away” our arguments.  This is either a result of an honest misunderstanding of ethics or how a market functions, or an intentionally malicious web of lies.  Instead of addressing the subject at hand through logical argument, they produce straw man arguments (attacks trying to disprove an irrelevant claim that we do not even make), appeals to tradition, appeals to the masses, appeals to emotions, attacks on our character (argumentum ad hominem), repetition (argumentum ad nausem), demanding a proof of the negative, shifting the burden of proof onto us, various red herring arguments, and various economic fallacies (most notably the broken window fallacy).  They cannot stand the logical penetration of our arguments against theirs, so they push the attack against us that is uncalled for (and with no sound backing).

We Are Passionate

We have a passion for justice, truth, and excellence.  Otherwise we would not be researching such profound metaphysical concepts. While there certainly are passionate statists of all degrees and and variations, our passion provides us with something unique.  The drive that led us to become anarchists has imbued within us a desire to continually research topics and arguments relevant to anarchism, so that we are perpetually learning new concepts and refining our arguments towards an unachievable perfection

We Are Self-Reliant

An anarchist has done his research privately, all on his own.  We are not taught these ideas in school.  You will not find any of these arguments in conventional literature unless you know where to look.  Therefore, we necessarily must be self-reliant, and can always back up our facts with multiple scholarly sources.

In contrast, Statists rely on popular delusions that prove nothing, or lies handed down to them from authority figures.  Statists often are unable to abstract away from simple examples to discuss the root causes of problems like justice, distribution, and often must resort to sobstories.

We Are Well-Versed

Being historically on the fringes of society and believing contrary to all the major conclusions of political philosophy, we “know thy enemy” very well, to quote Sun Tzu.  We are familiar with Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, and Rawls.  We know their arguments, where they succeed, and where and why they fail.  Aristotle once said that it was the sign of a mature mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.  We may even know more about your side of the argument than you do.  In addition, we are well-versed in books written by men and women that you, and the academic establishment, have probably never heard of – Proudhon, Tucker, Spooner, Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Kirzner, Long, and Molyneux.

We Are Universal

Statists are separated by countless arbitrary distinctions.  Each Statist is of course loyal to their own respective State through the dogmatic indoctrination of patriotism and nationalism.  Certainly few would advocate a World State – stuck in the mindset that “my country is the greatest.”  The same goes for religion – “only my religion is the correct one.”  These traumas defy (and refuse introspection with) logic and reason, but instead rely on irrational emotion and evocation of a subconscious fear or false sense of belonging, and merely amount to a mass-induced psychosis.  Regardless of the division, be it nationality, religion, ethnicity, race, culture, they serve the same purpose – to divide all of humanity against itself – a species where each person has more in common with all others than they have differences.  As a result, there can be no Statist “consensus” against the anarchist argument, for immediately following any alleged victory, jingoist infighting instantly would emerge out of these artificial barriers which the Statists have foolishly established for themselves.

In contrast, we are united by our ethical and economic argument for absolute, unrestrained liberty.  These beliefs defy all artificial boundaries of time and space.  The reason we have not become the dominant belief system is merely a problem of will – if all of humanity decided by their own accord one day – we could live in an anarchocapitalist paradise.

Well-Recognized Caveats

It is absolutely possible that we are completely wrong. Unlike some statists, we do not claim a monopoly on truth.  Indeed we advocate a continual search for truth by each and every individual.  We do have minor disagreements between ourselves, and that is encouraged for the sake of debate, refinement, and personal enlightenment.  But these contentions are extremely minuscule compared to those that divide statists, or even more, what divides statists from us.

We are tolerant and open-minded of other viewpoints, but only on the basis of logic.  If another viewpoint is presented that is logically superior to ours, we would gladly convert to it at the drop of a hat.  The reason is that we value truth and justice, not one specific political, ethical, or other philosophy.  But, the reason we are so “stubborn,” is because there has not as of yet ever been an argument or coherent framework of beliefs that has penetrated our defenses.

So I wish you the best of luck.  If any of these points phased you, I recommend you do some more research before you engage in a debate, otherwise, just ask us for our position on certain issues.

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* I make three assumptions for this article: (1) “We” refers to Free Market Anarchists, anarchocapitalists, etc. (2) Any use of “you” refers to the potential debater who is also a statist.  (3) All opponents of Free Market Anarchists are statists, for the one thing that unites them is that they would advocate the use of the State and violence to achieve whatever ends (be they liberal, conservative, etc, etc).  It is conceivable that certain other anarchists (socialist anarchists, for example) might oppose FMA, but merely on economic grounds.  Those minute arguments are not relevant here, as nearly all anarchists can fall into “our” position in the context of the above.