That is the question ! serving as the theme of the latest issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. This time the controversy between minarchists and libertarian anarchists about the feasibility and desirability of libertarian anarchy revolves around three thorny issues :
1. the old objection raised by Nozick regarding eventual monopolization of security and judicial provision of services by a geographically dominant protection agency, which is tantamount to creating a government, and his justification for this – criticized in the past by Randy Barnett, here, and by Murray Rothbard, here, and now by Eric Roark.
2. Randall G. Holcombe’s short but engaging article, Government : Unnecessary but Inevitable ?, where he reinforces Nozick’s view concerning the unsustainability of a competitive protection services market arguing that not only efficient security provision seems to require monopoly status but that important incentives are at work for making the provision of security a secondary focus of agents, the primary one being simply plunder. Governments are not established to produce benefits for their subject, but to rule people and to extract resources from them.
Thus, ultimately, market exchange analysis, which relies on the assumption of voluntary exchange, argues Holcombe, seems an inappropriate tool for the analysis of security production. Moreover, he argues that in an anarchic world where irregular plundering occurs there is little incentive to produce, consequently, the establishment of a single organized group of plunders, i.e. the state, will – despite the increase plundering on a regular basis – facilitate increase production and by doing so the overall level of welfare of both victims and tyrants. The anarchist reply to Holcombe came first from Peter Leeson and Edward Stringham in the Independent Review and then from Walter Block in a previous issue of the JLS. A new clash between Block and Holcombe takes place in this new issue of the JLS mainly concerning the allege determinism of Holcombe’s statements on the unavoidable nature of government.
3. Last but not least, Jordan Schneider argues that market provision of law and order lacks the means to insure objective rules of justice while Roderick Long tries to show that, in a libertarian anarchy, decentralized competition provides sufficient incentives against abuse.
Each critique of libertarian anarchy has it’s own merit. Interestingly enough, except maybe for Nozick’s critique, the two other objections raised against private provision of security don’t tell the story of some sort of market failure to produce an optimum quantity of public good. Holcombe, tough rejecting contractualism, fallows Buchanan’s insights in the Limits of Liberty and ultimately concludes that market exchange analysis is ill suited to understanding security provision when power is taking seriously into consideration. Schneider’s critique, on the other hand, builds on a critical point made by Ayn Rand in defense of a minimal state designed to protect the rights of individuals : the state is (or should be) the institution that maintains the universal standards of justice upon which a free society is founded, or in her own words : “Government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control – i.e., under objectively defined laws” (“The Nature of Government” in Virtues of Selfishness).
