LANGUAGE WARNING: What I'm writing here sounds like "burble"(mathematician John Nash's term for "algebra" or "symbolic systems that don't clearly map to reality") or "gibberish" to commonplace unphilosophical "normals" or "conformists" or "pinks"(if one happens to be a member of the Church of the Subgenius). It also sounds like "burble" to well-trained computer scientists, especially if they are authoritarians. So, right off the bat, this essay will only appeal to 1% of the population that I most enjoyed encountering as a political activist: thoughtful inherent voluntaryists in search of further meaning from reality. I admit that this writing not concise enough, because it's tailored for people who want details (that I can deliver). By writing this, I'm describing reality, as I see it, for people who are interested. In the future, I've decided to tailor my writings more toward brevity, ease of reading, and humor, so this may be my final verbose post.
As I've noted elsewhere, the "anarchy verses minarchy" debate is not only a false dichotomy(a "false choice" or "a distinction without a difference" or "two labels for nearly identical phenomena/patterns found in nature"), it's also a useless debate. (It's always best to tailor words/labels/terms to their intended audience, if possible. Because that's true, I'm in the habit of providing multiple alternative terms for any activists who wish to be more effective who might be reading this. For example: computer scientists call communicators in a network "nodes" and the communication pathways "links," whereas mathematicians call them "points" and "edges." That said, "false dichotomy" is a Marxist term that's nonetheless useful to modern political debate. However, simply by using the term, I've already "turned off" people who assume that using a Marxist term implies I'm also a Marxist.)
The "anarchy v. minarchy" debate is highly useful to the incumbent government, because it divides the libertarian base all the way to its core, in approximately equal percentages that are likely due to the approximate distribution of introvert/extrovert and liberal/conservative psychological tendencies. These two broad psychological predispositions join one of two camps, disagreeing with each other in the following ways:
Anarchy Anarchists' primary problem with minarchy: Legitimate anarchists rightfully believe that minarchists are often corrupt. In fact, minarchists often are corrupt, because the general public is corrupt, and desires to "not move very far from the existing situation" due to timidity, stupidity, conformity, and servility. Because minarchists often wish to get elected, they regurgitate lies that the public wants to hear, or soften the truth of their statements so that those educated under the Prussian-style of education aren't "offended" by the unpleasant truths they speak. Anarchists suspect that the minarchists are not merely catering to the public, but that they lack principles. Usually, they are correct. (They are incorrect in rare cases of people like John Davis and Charles Allen, Lysander Spooner's abolitionist bosses, and the Libertarian Party's Dick Randolph). Such "minarchists" are simply identical to the Democrats and Republicans who came before them: people seeking the power of the office who are willing to say whatever is necessary to get elected. Because the incumbent power ("those currently in power in any political district"+"the networks of active voters who elected them"+"the demographics who could possibly be mobilized to become active voters and supporters") has around a 30% to 50% capacity to "swing the election toward their favored candidate, if they are determined to do so" those who wish to be elected, including the rare voluntaryist candidates, must "signal" that they do not significantly oppose the incumbent power base in its entirety, even if they inherently oppose one or more of the incumbent office-holders. This usually somewhat necessarily "softens the message," beyond stating radical anarchist libertarian messages, like Robert Higgs' "there are no good cops." (...But not always, since an eloquent Dick Randolph or John Davis can speak the truth to power, and be publicly-respected for it.) Because the message to the voters must usually be softened in the prior way, it's difficult to know for sure whether someone is the legitimate radical minarchist they claim to be (ie: Rand Paul is fairly good by comparison to the other legislators, but falls shy of being able to radically change the system: he doesn't have the knowledge or determination for that). The specific commonplace situation of an untrustworthy candidate is then the lens through which an oversimplifying anarchist views "all of electoral politics"(as if all candidates are untrustworthy, and change is impossible) ..especially if enough corrupt examples are seen. (But this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it eliminates the support that optimal candidates need to become a "first-wave of cascading displacement" ...as the Free Soil Party was, in the 1840s.) Language also becomes a problem here: "trustworthy" candidates are incredibly rare, so even those who correctly define the term "trustworthy" and argue on behalf of a rare legitimate radical minarchist candidate who might improve things become suspected of being gullible idiots (both because they have been fooled by sociopaths, and because they support someone who is not a sociopath, but is forced to sometimes sound like one, in order to be elected). ...This is mostly because there is no electoral benefit to any campaign or candidate stating the radical truths that "anarchists" use as a heuristic filter in judging whether a candidate is "trustworthy." (If enough voluntaryist libertarians were to win office that they created a significant demographic, this could conceivably change.)
Minarchy The primary problem(s) minarchists have with anarchy: Unless an aspect of anarchy is directly, anonymously, and forcibly implemented by a single highly-skilled person and their computer networks, anarchy lacks the ability to reduce the implementation of a single government policy, stop a single arrest, or interfere with forcible government parasitism in any way. Because anarchy is only directly effective, and because it is electorally-nonviable, it makes no sense to advertise that one is an anarchist, unless one is recruiting for engineers. Unfortunately, those doing such recruiting often pointlessly interfere with and marginalize electoral efforts that actually do improve people's lives, often proving that anarchists care more about their image than helping the millions of victims of government. Moreover, serious anarchist efforts must remain hidden, or the police state will simply attack those anarchists, using physical force. The "anonymity" requirement is for obvious reasons: Even non-anarchist radical minarchists like Schaeffer Cox have been targeted, framed, and imprisoned by the U.S. government. Ross Ulbricht was attacked by the deep state, framed, and imprisoned. Journalist Barrett Brown was imprisoned simply for truthfully reporting about the operations of U.S. intelligence agencies. Anarchists currently represent such a small demographic that the current lawless government views attacking them as "politically defensible" or "something they can get away with." Moreover: anarchist calls for help or organization often go unheeded, in political terms. Existing political networks fear being associated with anarchists: existing public conceptions of anarchy are conflated with the Haymarket riots and with Leon Czolgosz, and the networks that can be mobilized in support of them are tiny, in comparison to voting networks. If you cannot publicly ask for help, and cannot legally build a coalition under the laws that are currently enforced, your network will remain too small, and contain too few human brains to pose a threat to the existing state. If anarchists were not a tiny minority, it would be simple to elect anarchists to every state legislature, and simply nullify every existing law, rule, regulation, and control. Alternately, accessing the ballot with even a ballot initiative, such as the marijuana legalization initiatives recently passed in CO(2012), WA(2012), OR(2014), AK(2014), CA(2016), and ME(2016), has resulted in thousands fewer victims of the drug war (yet the anarchists who are encouraged by the existing police state mock such efforts with "vote harder" memes and the stupid conception that, because minarchists don't have the ability to abolish the entire coercive state all at once that they don't wish to do so). The "proposition 14" property-tax-cap initiative in California resulted in the prevention of millions of dollars from going to the government. There are many more examples, but the proof-of-concept is proved by the ones just mentioned. (These initiatives would not have passed without the support of candidates who favored them. By linking political runs with ballot measures, anarchists' legitimate criticisms of minarchists can be defeated, because the support of benevolent ballot initiatives signals and expands real moral virtue at some level. If a candidate doesn't want people to be arrested for breaking an illegitimate law, then that candidate is legitimate to that extent. The more laws this applies to, the more moral a candidate should be seen as being. (Even most anarchists believe that people should be removed from society for murdering someone. The FBI's ISU currently does this, assuming the information in John Douglas's books "Mindhunter" and "The Anatomy of Motive" has not changed much since he wrote them. Therefore, because anarchists can all be attacked on the grounds of "wanting the ISU to stop apprehending serial killers," they are always at a disadvantage of existing, highly-persistent public misconceptions. Moreover: such anarchists all lack a concise explanation as to why the existing misconception is wrong, because "the existing function would be replaced with an unknown and unknowable market-based phenomenon." ...which still leaves out: "After how long?" and "Who would be the final arbiter of conflicts arising from such competing phenomena?" ...which take too long to explain to a passing voter, sound dishonest, and perhaps actually are dishonest given the value priority differences between the anarchist and the mainstream voter he's speaking with.) Moreover, a practical and moral case can be made for all pro-freedom initiatives, which then signals who the intelligent and radical libertarian candidates actually are. For this reason, it is only intelligent to prioritize supporting libertarians who live in I & R States.
The prior leaves us in our current situation:
(1) A sizeable number of voters(usually between 33% and 66%) are sympathetic to libertarian minarchism, when they encounter it, and when it is seriously trying to get elected, which is almost never.
(2) A tiny existing group considers themselves to be "anarchist" and this group can be divided into two groups: (2a) People who have read Rothbard and the other serious political thinkers who claimed to be anarchists AND (2b) People who have not read much, and hate the government for personal reasons.
(3) A tiny demographic (less than 5%) is open to the idea of "anarchy" as defined (and misdefined) by the prior existing group. The idea of anarchy is naturally attractive to such people, because they see that the existing government is illegitimate, and that we'd be better off without it, even if it were replaced by nothing. (In short, these are the same people who would shoot a rapist, because they don't care how much value such a rapist might have as a normally productive person: the fact that he's a rapist places him "outside the protection of legitimate law and property rights.") These people often conflate "political relinquishment"/"principled non-voting" with "doing something for anarchy" or are simply lazy, and use the prior explanation as a rationalization for the laziness. In any case, this tiny demographic can always be portrayed by the existing state as "lazy and politically-uninvolved" because there are plenty of examples to point to of "lazy and politically-uninvolved" anarchists. In fact, even if non-voting is actually due to one's principles, it's always helpful to the exiting political establishment to portray all libertarians (anarchists and minarchists alike) this way.
(4) Most of the Libertarian base is not excited/passionate/determined about electing anyone to office, doesn't know how to elect anyone to office, and considers themselves Rothbardian "anarchists."
(5) Common libertarian explanations of "libertarianism" don't define "libertarianism," they very awkwardly define Austrian Economics and "anarchism," pushing potential supporters away from libertarianism with unnecessary, tangential complexity.
(6) Still worse, they tend to focus on a "John Galt" type "imaginary Romantic world" as opposed to "clear and obvious benefits of avoiding progress down the existing downward spiral toward totalitarianism"(a "classical liberal" libertarian view that would progress toward making it more difficult for government to punish individuals, rather than toward an imaginary specific utopia).
(7) Rather than "publicly-adopting a politically-viable minarchist stance," and "working toward electing libertarians," and then "improving the procedure of working to elect libertarians" ...most "libertarians" never do anything to actually take power from the existing state. ...This is because taking power from the existing state means SUCCESSFULLY interfering with at least one of the following steps:
(7a) 51% of a legislature votes for a law, or 67% of a legislature votes for a law, in cases where a 2/3 majority is required (such as in some states, to override the governor's veto, or to create a constitutional amendment to the state constitution).
(7b) Police arrest someone for a "mala prohibita" created by (7a), a non-crime that is now being treated as criminal by the government, which is claiming that the law from (7a) is legitimate, because legislators "passed it into law." It should be noted here that this is the fundamental concept of "liberty" "libertarianism" "the common law" "minarchy" "what anarchists mistakenly call anarchy" "freedom" and "classical liberalism" --the idea that the legislature has no right to pass an illegitimate law, even if the people who elected them support it. An implication of this idea is that laws must pass a specific test for legitimacy, and that there must be means of implementing these tests, if one is to avoid a "tyranny of the majority." (The idea that "all laws are legitimate simply because a legislature passed them" directly contradicts the legitimate conceptions of "the common law" that were held by MOST OF the Founders of the USA, including even big-government-advocate Alexander Hamilton, as evidenced by his final court argument from 1804, "People Against Croswell." If the prior (technically)"minarchist" conceptions of the law were followed today, then 99.999% of the laws now being enforced would no longer be enforced. Moreover, even people who considered themselves to be "in favor of following the law" would be placed in the minarchist camp with such an understanding. Most people do not know this combination of "Legal theory" combined with "Its History." Because this knowledge combines two subjects into a complex "idea network" or "memeplex," very few libertarians are even aware of it. Perhaps most interestingly, if 99.999% of laws were not being followed, and only the laws against force and fraud were followed, this would satisfy most "anarchists" that an anarchy existed, which means that it's the "pattern found in nature" that legitimate anarchists really want, and not the label, which isn't that useful anyway.)
(7c) A prosecutor decides to threaten someone who has been arrested with application of the penalties for breaking the law.
(7d) In order to avoid the possibility of cruel and unusual punishment (such as an undeserved prison sentence), the prosecutor's victim pleads "guilty" and accepts a lesser-but-still-undeserved punishment. Note that the punishment still meets the Eighth Amendment's definition of "cruel and unusual," because "all undeserved punishments" or "punishments not fitting the crime" are considered "cruel and unusual." However, because cruel and unusual punishments have become commonplace, and one definition of "unusual" is "uncommon," prosecutors have been successful in treating the "cruel and unusual" clause as a "package deal that only prohibits both" instead of a prohibition on either criterion. They've succeeded in doing so because the government schools have sufficiently dumbed the population down to the point where too few people object to the evil that has has become commonplace. Further, the government schools incorrectly teach that "cruel and unusual" only applies to "physical torture" ...and nothing else. This is incorrectly taught by providing examples of the tortures and public executions perpetrated by the British Crown, without the context of the illegitimate fines, fees, jailings without habeas corpus, and other forms of minor harassment that were considered "cruel and unusual."
(7e) The person being undeservedly punished then occupies a lower social status, and their publicly-available record is marked with a conviction. This weakens their ability to defend themselves in the future, and comes with additional legal penalties if they should happen to break another law. This then "weakens the defenses of the already-weak" and prevents them from improving their life, thus contributing to systemic weakness of their entire population to additional harassment and extortion that becomes "likely to payoff" for police harassers that started the process in (7a).
Unless libertarianism expands individual freedom by interfering with (7a)-(7e) prior, it serves no obvious useful purpose to its potential support demographic. Libertarianism can only plausibly promise to interfere with (7a)-(7e) prior by doing so to some small-but-significant, measurable extent, and claiming to do so even more if it is voted into power. Therefore, this is a good heuristic for determining who is a serious libertarian (and should therefore be supported), without bothering to be involved in the pointless, fruitless-for-40-years, useless, self-destructive "anarchy vs. minarchy" debate.
Yet, even when opportunities to support legitimate libertarians present themselves, libertarians do not support other libertarians. They don't walk districts for them, they don't finance their campaigns, and, in fact, when they do support other libertarians, it's often by sending a payment to the Libertarian Party, and "hoping for the best." (There have been, sadly, a few hundred delusional campaigns that were exceptions to this rule. The delusion is commonplace, because the National LP purposefully encourages is, rather than corrects it. This is a primary "tell" that the LP is infiltrated.)
After 15 years of working for the Libertarian Party, I can safely say: The direction of the LP is controlled by a few infiltrators who wish us to fail. I don't know if they're deep state agents with a totalitarian agenda, personally-corrupted by the finances they control, personally-corrupted by external threats, or working for the major parties: I just know that every decision they make is "the worst possible decision to make at the time it is made." (Because a political party is a cybernetic system, it can be analyzed as such. Adaptively bad decisions can't be explained by simple stupidity. Moreover, the people making those decisions purport to be politically-savvy. By "adaptively bad decisions" I mean: "decisions made regarding changing political conditions that reliably make a situation worse for the LP, its candidates, its finances, and its support base, than if no action had been taken at all.")
Mainstream voters (necessary to win any election) inherently resist a positive definition of anarchy, because they have been forced to call the police in the past, and, because the police occupy the domain of "conflict resolution" most people (even those who could be persuaded to call themselves "minarchist libertarians") refuse to call themselves anarchists. (They want the police to come if they are being attacked or a woman is being raped, no matter what the police's track records actually are. Although the police have a wretched track record in terms of "what they spend most of their time doing," they nonetheless do positively resolve conflicts on a rare but regular basis (distributed roughly along the "80/20 rule" or Zipf-Pareto function).
Even though the police often make matters worse, they tend to only make matters worse in areas that lack political power. This benefits the incumbent status quo by encouraging class warfare, and providing two incorrect-and-misleading views of reality over which those classes can fight. Since class lines often follow race lines, this also encourages racial division that Democrats and Republicans can capitalize on, framing the debate as "our good and proper regions" verses "those deranged other regions."
I have an incredible amount of experience here. I've registered several thousand people to vote as Libertarians in several states, because in several States, if the percentage of voters registered as "Libertarians" crosses a threshold, the Libertarian Party gains automatic ballot access. Polling bears this out, with major polling companies like Rasmussen claiming that people tend to vote 71% the way they are registered. (Libertarian success is amenable to statistical analysis, but there is a huge likelihood that the incumbent power, which already infiltrates the LP, would cause the polling to focus on the inconsequential, taking strategy off on yet another useless tangent.) Registering people to vote as Libertarians does an immense deal of good for the LP:
- It gives us an easy measurement to let us know when we should run libertarians inside of a specific voting district.
- It gives us an easy measurement to let us know when we should allocate more registration resources inside of a district, because we are close to a reachable goal in that district.
- It gives us the ability to measure how effective our outreach is at mobilizing registered libertarians at the polling place. (This requires political operatives who have a clue about human psychology. For example, I've heard several "dipshitarians" claim that "Libertarian voter registration doesn't actually result in more votes for libertarian candidates." ...Well, yeah, that's true, if the candidate is a humped up retard with coke-bottle glasses who can't speak a single coherent sentence, or continually mentions Ayn Rand, as if all the voters are expected to already have joined her official Irvine, California cult of strategically-stupid, Kool-Aid-drinking, homophobic, moustache-haters. ...Candidates ALSO have to be high-quality. ALL the necessary variables are necessary for a reason. They have to score "high enough" on each major portion of the test to get an "A.")
- It gives us a knowledge of when we must use dishonest language (not tell the whole truth) in order to have a chance of getting elected. (Due to feedback with the registrar.) It also lets us know to what extent we must "lead" opponents on any given issue. (This need not entail lying, but all cybernetic systems that survive must be capable of counter-acting attractive dishonesty from they cybernetic systems that oppose them. Skilled cybernetic systems do battle either live or die. The battle is "zero-sum" or "life or death." The low-vote-count loser of an election wins nothing. The high-vote-count-loser of an election only wins something if he wins the next election. Why? Because if you win a lot of votes, it's ALWAYS possible to win the next time by "upping your game."
Of all the things that "every libertarian should know, but none do," the final sentence in #4 immediately prior is the most important. It is ALWAYS possible to increase political support with a paid effort (unless the locals are delusional about how to do this --in that case, no amount of money will make any difference, because the idiots usually want to print a newsletter nobody will read, with no plan for distributing it). The paid effort necessary in many areas of the country, for many offices, is not that large. Often, it's around $10,000 or $20,000 to win a State Legislative office. The Democrats and Republicans gladly spend ten times this amount to win the same offices (we can spend far less than they do, and still beat them, by walking door-to-door. ...Or at least, we could have done this ten years ago, before Bill Redpath purposefully drove all the talent out of the LP. There is no effective counteraction for an effective face-to-face meeting, and libertarian activists like my former self, are desperate for such work).
I've recently been a very negative, pessimistic person. I believe that the USA is going to look much like Nazi Germany in the next 20 years, prior to AGI stripping humans of their leadership roles. After that point, things will either improve, or get even worse, as we face extinction.
...But I became negative in an interesting way. I became negative after becoming very optimistic. Over the past 15 years I was a political petitioner (which is a job in which all practitioners are commonly regarded as "human waste," in the case of Libertarians, both by their own party, and by the opposition). I did this because I realized that interfacing with the general public was the only means of effecting(causing the outcome/consequence of) political change.
You have to find out what nodes in a network will receive, communicate, and pass onward, if you want to find out what the network is capable of. I did that. In great detail.
The problem with my stating the prior is that nobody on Earth will believe that, except the people who already have done the same thing. This is a major reason we are not free. (Libertarians now often believe that the Libertarian Party has been doing everything wrong for the prior 40 years, but they mistakenly believe we've been engaging in effective political action during that time. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Libertarian Party began growing between 1978-1982. Dick Randolph ran effective campaigns during that time. The establishment then decided it was worth infiltrating the Libertarian Party, and running it into the ground. They appear to have done so with several "nonvocal members" who supported seemingly competent leadership that plausibly and reliably takes "anti-success actions that can be plausibly explained as accidental mistakes made against a strong mainstream opponent, in hindsight.")
Since Randolph made the stupid mistake of ceasing to "build outward"(continuing to get neighboring AK State Legislative districts elected to the SL) and instead tried to "build upward"(running for governor), the Libertarian Party has had no significant electoral successes. The 2000-2003 electoral successe in New Hampshire were actually pathetic misdirections of LP resources, because NH has the smallest, most numerous state legislative districts in the nation, meaning that NH will run out of electable libertarians long before they will achieve a simple majority on the state legislature. (There are over 400 seats in the 2-body NH State Legislature, so we need to win over 250 seats to have a simple majority in both. ...and this still isn't the 2/3 supermajority necessary to override the governor's veto.) ...Even worse, NH lacks a citizen-sponsored initiative and referenda process ...which means that the State Legislature can completely ignore the will of the voters, on any issue it likes, and there is no campaign process for addressing and popularizing that issue that the State Legislature needs to fear. (Unlike, as mentioned, the I & R process in the 23 other states, including the ones that have legalized marijuana.)
Most LP political operatives know the prior truths, but they are a tiny subset of actual libertarians. Political operatives become intuitively familiar with the psychological+philosophical components of networks. ...but they are a tiny percentage of "the total number of libertarians."
Most libertarians have incorrect ideas about how politics actually works. They believe that ideas and culture (and political power) change in ways that they actually do not. This is why they have achieved zero success in 40 years.
I'm not the first person to figure this out. Barry Goldwater supporter Morton Blackwell figured it out, in the 1980s. His formulation of "The Real Nature of Politics" is almost perfect. Unfortunately, he has aligned himself with "conservative," ...and conservatism is an illegitimate philosophy that allows for the existence of totalitarianism.
Libertarianism is mutually-exclusive with totalitarianism. As such, it's the only legitimate political philosophy. This allows us to dispense with arguing about the practical implications of Economics that only a handful of people comprehend. (In this formulation, an authoritarian philosophy results in a totalitarian system, as its manifestation in the material reality that surrounds us.)
In summary:
Libertarians should EFFECTIVELY immerse themselves in the political process. If they do this, then, even if they were previously anarchists, they will see a plethora of new ways to expand individual freedom, many of which are incremental improvements and do not require electing libertarians in a single pass. This means: (1a) Attempting to register Libertarians into the LP when they have an area where that is likely to make a difference, such as by a viable and articulate candidate running who has agreed to put in the necessary time to win or "do the candidate basics" (such as show up to speaking and fundraising engagements and allow himself to be interviewed interacting with locals). (1b) Work to elect viable candidates, on a message of restoring jury rights, and personally helping defendants win their cases by acting as expert testimony for defendants. (1c) Working to spread information about jury rights, even while campaigning for office. (1d) Working to restore individual freedom via the I & R (initiative & referenda) process if you are in a state where such processes exist.
The Libertarian Party is currently infiltrated, and useless, but that doesn't mean it must remain so. However, there are many backup infiltrators, so if we wish to supplant them, there must be a far greater number of politically-savvy libertarians than there currently are. "Politically-savvy" doesn't mean "aware of political and philosophical issues" --all libertarians adequately meet that description. It has nothing to do with philosophy: it has to do with intentions, and strategy. Being politically savvy requires 50% philosophy, and 50% strategy, to be scored like a conventional test. If more than 20 percentage points are missing, in total, that's a "C" grade. If more than 30 percentage points are missing, that's a "D" grade --money needs to be allocated to only "A" grade candidates (Like Charles Allen, Lysander Spooner's old boss, who was an abolitionist Republican). If we wish to have a serious and viable political movement in the USA, we will have to take charge of our local political situations, personally. If we wish to have a serious and viable political movement that runs presidential candidates that don't embarrass the local candidates and make them less effective, we must either run locally as major party candidates (and give up on this goal), or we must retake control of the Libertarian Party. Either is acceptable, but there are many benefits to controlling a separate party machinery that has a unique and at least semi-desirable name (an alternative would be to create yet another "new political party" and run it the right way). For one, the state communicates how many people are registered with that party, and this feedback allows for the creation of a feedback loop that increases the intelligence of your operation.
The term "anarchy" interferes with the public adoption of real freedom, and confers detriments with little or no benefit. Voluntaryist is an improvement over "anarchy" if one ignores Watner and Konkin and does not assume (3a) that every pattern under the general label "government" requires involuntary taxation, and (3b) that political relinquishment or "principled nonvoting" is also a part of the definition. The prior(3a) and (3b) have crippled libertarian outreach efforts for many years, by self-crippling the efforts of the already-money-and-time disadvantaged outreach messengers. If we ever obtain "anarchy," it won't be called "anarchy." (At least not unless it's the result of a technological singularity that increases intelligence levels enough for everyone to intuitively understand the legitimacy of Rothbard's arguments. Of course, if that were the case, it still probably wouldn't be called anarchy, because then there'd be no reason to upset the remaining idiots who refused to be super-modified to the point they could understand the label...the changes toward the pattern could be implemented, regardless of what the pattern was called.) Calling oneself an anarchist serves no purpose but to embolden the enemy, because it is a politically-ineffective label that helps the enemy retain network market share. Moreover: using the label "anarchist" actually reduces the likelihood of obtaining a pattern found in nature that most anarchists themselves would call "good enough to be considered anarchy." (This is true since most anarchists very dishonestly claim that "a purely voluntarily-supported government wouldn't technically be a government, and therefore couldn't be called a minarchy." ...But most Americans don't see it like this, so it's VERY stupid to alienate them with the term "anarchy." ...That is, if you care about the actual result of freedom, and not the term, "anarchy." Calling "voluntary government" by the label "anarchy" requires redefinition of the pattern from "absence of any offices of power" to "voluntarily-supported offices of power" ...because in either case, somebody must, using political power that rests on publicly-perceived legitimacy, arrest Ted Bundy when they are called to do so, and this person must be fully accountable, using some possible procedure, to non-payers. The prior procedure is what makes the term "governance" optimal, and not "anarchy." --Unlike a private service, the fact that payers and non-payers retain control over the scope of the actions of the entity that wields political power, is what makes it "government." ...and we're lucky this is the case, because still people want "more of the freedom America used to have." ...It's up to libertarians to define that freedom for them, and show them that "they've been libertarian all along, they just didn't realize it.")