Pat Buchanan's Implicit Argument for Anarchy

WorldNetDaily: A national emergency

Where is Bush? All wrapped up in the issue of whether women in Najaf will have the same rights in divorce and custody cases as women in Nebraska. His legislative agenda for the fall includes a blanket amnesty for illegals, so they can be exploited by businesses who want to hold wages down as they dump the social costs for their employees - health care, schools, courts, cops, prisons - onto taxpayers.

Now, it is obvious given the rest of the piece that Mr. Buchanan is not advocating a stateless society. He clearly wants government to exist and he clearly sees at least one problem (illegal immigration) that all governments ought to address. But read that section above carefully. Disguised within is an argument for a society that respects property rights and no government can respect property rights with the consistent absoluteness they deserve^*.

...businesses who want to hold wages down as they dump the social costs for their employees - health care, schools, courts, cops, prisons - onto taxpayers...

Mr. Buchanan calls out a surprisingly broad array of government services in that last sentence and does so with a small degree of derision. I think it is clear he doesn't want the "social costs" of educating Americans, providing them health services, and a full system of justice to be placed upon the shoulders of the American taxpayer. His ire is directed at enterprises hiring illegal immigrants, but if his argument is taken seriously, it implies a few things.

First, he might be saying these "social costs" shouldn't be paid by Americans when the costs are incurred by illegal immigrants. It's quite fitting with Mr. Buchanan's general nationalist stance to take this position. However, break it down to the fundamentals: why should Americans (determined by place of birth or process of naturalization) have a aggressive right to the products of my labor (taxation) but not Mexicans, Brazilians, or Hondurans? Other than for sheer fiscal pragmaticality, how can you say only Americans should benefit from the taxation in America? This is an assertion for a human right that is limited to only special humans. It doesn't make sense, nor would it be a legitimate right in the first place. Mr. Buchanan and other nationalists are wrong on this. It doesn't really matter who benefits from a fundamentally wrong practice.

The second implication is more interesting. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan really means businesses ought to be responsible for these "social costs"; maybe he means it should be part of one's employment benefit package (or something you can buy on the free market), services that are not financed through the immoral hand of government wealth confiscation. But by divorcing such taken-for-granted "essential basic services" that just about everyone on this planet believes ought to be provided by the state, he's nearly ripped out the heart of the consensus agreement for justifying the it.

Mr. Buchanan doesn't mention military defense and border security, leaving them to be the last obstructions on the tracks on this train to anarchy. However, there is a considerable pool of intellectual effort devoted to the theory of privately producing defense and security services. I won't go into this now, but if readers have questions, I'll respond in the comments below. Suffice to say, it is not impossible, impractical, or immoral to choose sources of security that are not created out of coerced collectivization. My own, slightly rushed contribution to this is my A Conceptual Analysis of Public Goods - The Case of Nationalized Defense.

Mr. Buchanan can't really hold that taxpayers ought to have these minimal-state obligations imposed upon them. Either it is right to tax someone to provide for the services of others (and, occasionally, for the taxpayer him- or herself), or it is wrong. If it's right, then we get stuck in that massive swamp of interest group warfare where everyone fights over a slice of each other's pie. If it's wrong to steal from one to give to another, then we proceed to the simple conclusion: everyone has an absolute right to the property they legitimately own and any violations of that right can be met with the only justified use of force: self-defense.

Such a free society, where all aggression is frowned upon and prohibited through voluntary agreements and associations, is leagues from the United States in both form and substance. It would be, strictly speaking, an anarchy.

Is Mr. Buchanan asking for such a society?

Where is Bush? All wrapped up in the issue of whether women in Najaf will have the same rights in divorce and custody cases as women in Nebraska. His legislative agenda for the fall includes a blanket amnesty for illegals, so they can be exploited by businesses who want to hold wages down as they dump the social costs for their employees - health care, schools, courts, cops, prisons - onto taxpayers.

© 2005 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Given the tone of that passage, he may be closer than he thinks.

Footnote
Objectivists desire a government funded through voluntary donations, so that vision of government escapes the problems of involuntary taxation. However, despite that, the Objectivist conception of government can and should outlaw legal and defense systems that compete with the services the government provides. Given that those alternative systems can be provided and produced without engaging in aggression, I consider their outlawry to be an invasion of their owners' property rights. Therefore, even the best vision of government still threatens individual rights.

Posted by Drizzten at August 30, 2005 10:57 AM