Anarchists and Minarchists

There is a group of people who hold individual liberty to be a value and an end in and of itself. We believe that man cannot be fully human without the capacity and freedom to chose how to lead one's life. A life of servitude and obedience to the master and to unjust authority is not the life deserving of the word human. It is rather a reduction to the level of an animal or a plant. A plant cannot draw its own path. It cannot choose which action to take in light of its circumstances. So too are the animal's choices strictly limited to its ability to adapt itself to the environment. Only humans are unique in their, in the words of Murray Rothbard, "ability to reason, to make conscious choices, to transform their environment in order to prosper, or to collaborate consciously in society and the division of labor." To reduce one's ability to chose based on one's reflections and values is to deny in part the humanity to this person.

One might hastily object that this reasoning entails also the freedom to aggress against another person or their property. But the argument does no such thing. It puts forth exactly the opposite. Every aggression is necessarily denying humanity to the person on the receiving end of the aggressive act and is therefore contrary to the argument, which states only that one person should not deny the freedom to choose to another person. The argument puts natural limits on choices where aggression against another person or property is involved.

Yet within this group of people who defend individual liberty there are factions, as there must be wherever people differ in opinion or principle. As one faction, known as the minarchists, believes that to secure individual liberty and the rights which are its corollary a government with a monopoly on force and taxation is necessary, the anarchists like to point out that this very institution is the antithesis to the principles it is supposed to be protecting and that even provided that this limited government situation should be reached, as it arguably was in the earliest hours of the American Republic, the situation is not sustainable and the institution always grows into an intrusive entity.

However, this might not be the central issue of our day. As we look around we see that the various governments round the globe in their military boots and with all-invasive powers have practically no limits on what they can or cannot do. Our society is worlds away from the ideal of either one of these two factions. Even as the ideal worlds we paint in our respective imaginations do not overlap perfectly, we should and must concede that the road we wish to travel is to a large extent the same road. We should therefore as fellow travelers join hands and may our paths then once again split in honest disagreement when our dissent can, by the blessing of all that is good, actually make a practical difference.

This is not to say we should compromise on our principles and stop advocating what we think is right. There is a difference between opportunism and pragmatism. An opportunists is a person without any principles who takes selfish advantage of any situation. A pragmatists deals with actual occurrences and tries to better the situation by working towards his ideal without having to compromise his principles. And I, for one, shall certainly never tire of conveying what I think is the proper framework of human interaction.



Matej Avsenak Ogorevc