Marketable Aggression

I'm making a rambling and (I hope) constructive critique of market anarchism. Right now it's two little videos where I argue that free markets depend on "religious" presumptions of individual freedom. On my last entry, a youtube user left a comment asking how I think people in a market anarchist society would be able to respond to violent invasion if "we exclude the possibility of selective market-based violation of individual autonomy". I responded that I do believe that some violent retaliation can be legitimate (and thus shouldn't be called a "violation"), but that that retaliation must be proportional and discriminate, and that non-discriminate or non-proportional retaliation is illegitimate regardless of the market demand for it. I thought it was a fairly tight response. But maybe it was too focused.

I didn't have to concentrate on proportionality. I could have just mentioned what a lot of people today think should count as crimes. Most people I know think pedophiles should be thrown behind bars - even the non-violent pedophiles. Most people I know think the producers, sellers, and users of heavy drugs should be thrown in prison. Most people I know think the practice of keeping more than one spouse at a time is an affront to the natural order of things, and that it is within the "public interest" to legally forbid such abominations.

The policies mentioned above are all violent actions that many people would willingly demand in order to get what they believe would be a more secure environment. And all these marketable uses of violence are initiations of violence, which should go against any libertarian's code.

Then there's other kinds of marketable violence. Most people I know think it's okay to force kids to go to school - that is, to confine a non-aggressing child in a particular place regardless of his or her saying "no". Most people I know think it's okay to give kids shots against their will. Most people I know aren't disturbed in the least bit by infant genitle mutilation. Most people I know think spanking is as good and right as little league baseball.

It's easy to imagine that, if we were to get competition in governance today, our legal systems would not be libertarian (it might be better in some regards than the statist system we have now, but it wouldn't be libertarian). A market "anarchist" society without widely-shared and firmly-held beliefs about the sovereignty of the individual, and without widely-shared and firmly-held condemnations of encroachment onto the individual, would be little more than a bundle of all the worst things about democracy tightly wrapped together with all the worst things about capitalism. The political rules of a society are deeply intertwined with the prevailing sentiments of it. If we wish to ever see a world where we are free to choose otherwise, then the freedom to choose has to be something like a dogma.