WHICH IS BEST: GOVERNMENT, ANARCHY, OR PROTECTORATE?
An analysis by G. Edward Griffin of the video series entitled Statism Is Dead.
© 2009 Updated 2009 July 15 by G. Edward Griffin

Statism Is Dead is a five-part video commentary by Stefan Molyneux that will challenge your deepest convictions about political reality and the nature of government. It can be viewed on YouTube here. If you are in a hurry, you can start with Part Three and get the main message here.

I recommend that everyone watch this presentation even though I have several fundamental points of disagreement, which I will get to in a moment. The points of agreement, however, are numerous, and they relate to certain features that need to be discarded from our present political environment if we hope to build a better world for future generations. It is for those insights that I commend this series.

POINTS OF AGREEMENT
Mr. Molyneux makes an unassailable case for the inevitable degeneration of government, any government, into a totalitarian regime. Based on the widely held belief that governments should have an unrestricted monopoly on coercion, it is inevitable that predators will gravitate into government and convert it to a legalized criminal syndicate. His case is amply supported by history and logic. I will not elaborate on this theme, because Molyneaux already has done a superb job of that to which there is little that I could add.

Statism Is Dead acknowledges that the American Republic was an exception to this historic pattern but that it, too, eventually succumbed to the relentless magnetic attraction between government and the predator element (corrupt politicians, lobbyists, and enforcers) to the point where, today, the United States federal government and many state governments have become oppressive.

POINTS OF DISAGREEMENT
Having shown that all governments degenerate into tyrannical regimes, Molyneaux concludes that, if we want to avoid having this pattern repeat in the future, we have no choice but to build a world without governments. The preferred alternative, he says, is anarchy, which he describes more gently as “volunteerism.”

At first, the choice of anarchy over statism might appear to be inescapably logical inasmuch as no one, as far as I am aware, has ever theorized an alternative. Which do we choose: government or anarchy? Given that governments always degenerate into tyranny, the option of anarchy becomes a serious candidate, because it is assumed we have no other choice. I contend, however, that there is a third option and that it is the only option that passes the test of history and logic.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT
The Founders of the American Republic were well aware that they were attempting to create something fundamentally different from what had been done before and even different from what their constituents expected. They were expected to create a new monarchy to replace the old. Instead, they set out to create something so different that they often referred to it as an experiment.

The experiment was that they created a state with substantial limitations on its power. They built a beta model, not for a government, but a protectorate. They wanted their creation to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens but not to govern them. Unfortunately, they made the mistake – and I think it was a fatal mistake – of referring to their creation as a government. They simply borrowed the common word that applied to the monarchies of Europe and assigned it to their new invention. The purpose of a government, by the very nature of the word, is to govern. Once they accepted that word, the experiment was destined to fail.

A protectorate is negative in its function. It acknowledges the legitimacy of collective force but only for the protection of life, liberty, and property. A government, by contrast, is positive in function. It assumes the right to use collective force for any purpose it wishes, so long as it can claim that it is for some “good” purpose. Predator politicians can always come up with an appropriate justification for that.

Had the Republic been described as a protectorate from the outset, every time Americans speak of it they would be reminded that its purpose was to protect them, not to govern them, and this would have gone a long way to perpetuate the Founder’s intent. To be sure, this by itself would not have been sufficient to prevent the predator class from infiltrating the protectorate and turning it into a government after all, but it would have been a great deterrent and could have slowed the process for another hundred years. It was, after all, a beta model. Like all experiments and first releases, it inevitably would fall to future users and future generations to improve upon its design, not scrap it.

A GOVERNMENT IS A GOVERNMENT - NOT
When this concept was first presented to a Libertarian friend of mine, he objected that, as long as the state has the authority to use coercion, it is still a government, even though it may be restricted to a defensive role. He wrote: "A government is a government. Even 'anarcho-capitalist Protection Agencies' are governments! ... If they are to pursue justice, they are still obliged to initiate force against suspects, even if they aren't clients."

Unfortunately, my friend was focused on the old vocabulary and had not yet opened his mind to the possibility of a genuine new entry into the political lexicon. What I am presenting is not just a re-hash of the old concept in which "limited government" is expressed in terms of quantity (how much government), instead of purpose (what shall government do). With the old concept, he would be right: government is government. A lot or a little, it always suffers from mission creep and eventually will become tyrannical. However, if it is limited to a negative, defensive function, then there is little room for mission creep, because there is no possibility for legalized plunder, which is the primary incentive for expanding government in the first place.

A corrupt sheriff or chief of police might become a secret accomplice of the local crime syndicate, but that is not legalized plunder. It is a criminal conspiracy to use a legally establish public office to perpetuate or protect acts that are entirely illegal. That is a far cry from collectivist laws that make plunder of some citizens for the benefit of others, not only legal, but mandatory, and it is this legalization of theft that becomes a magnet for predators to seek government employment.

A protectorate is not a government. An aircraft with no wings or tail that cannot fly but is limited solely to ground travel is not an aircraft any longer. It is an automobile. If a truck is deprived of its steering ability, and its rubber tires are replaced by steel flanges that run on rails, it is no longer a truck. It is a train. Likewise, a state that has been deprived of its authority to use coercion for any purpose except the protection the life, liberty, and property of its citizens, cannot be classified as a government. It is a protectorate.

If we and our neighbors hire a security guard to patrol our neighborhood, and if we authorize him to use force against intruders for the limited purpose of protecting our lives, liberty, and property (each of us has that right of self defense, so we can delegate it to the guard), that does not give him the authority to govern us – with the obvious narrow exception of insuring that we, ourselves, do not threaten our neighbors. When our contract with guards or state administrators is strictly for defense, we do not create a government. We create a protectorate.

This is not a new concept in political literature but, in this context, it is a new word. It is far overdue because, without it, it has been impossible to even talk about the negative concept of the state without resorting to long and cumbersome sentences of explanation. At last we have the right word. It is my hope that this word and the concept behind it will become a global meme, a common expression whenever political ideologies are compared in the future.

WE NEED A PROTECTORATE, NOT ANARCHY
The next freedom construct must be, neither government nor anarchy, but a protectorate. It must be an improvement on the first American Republic. It must include a statement of political ideology, such as The Creed of Freedom, that will proclaim the philosophy of liberty. It must include a warning against allowing the new model to be converted back into a government. These things are possible, and it is up to us who have witnessed the decline of the Republic and who have understood that collectivism is the great destroyer, to become the architects and builders for new protectorates in every country in the world.

WHO WILL WATCH THE WATCHERS?
I am a strong advocate of volunteerism. In a protectorate, volunteerism will be the driving force of progress. I know it will work far better than coercion, but I am equally convinced that our social contract with each other must include the use of community authorized force, if necessary, for protection.

On this issue, Mr. Molyneaux asks the question: “Who will watch the watchers?” That is an excellent question. If we authorize a neighborhood security patrol to carry arms and watch over our homes or if we authorize a national guard to deploy weapons of mass destruction to deter a foreign enemy from an attack, how can we prevent the same old pattern from returning? If some people are authorized in our protectorate to use weapons to protect us, what is to stop the predator class from moving into those groups and using that power against us?

There is an answer to that; but, first, we should ask the same question about how this could be prevented under anarchy. Under anarchy, there would be no way to stop a well-organized and funded military force (possibly from a region where an aggressive government was still in operation) from taking over. The theoretical answer is that volunteerism would do it. Hundreds of thousands of people would volunteer for military preparedness and donate enough money to develop and acquire the necessary weapons.

I think we ought to be skeptical of that answer but, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and say that pure volunteerism, without taxation, would be sufficient to build a military force in advance of the need capable of deterring any militaristic enemy on the planet, and this could be accomplished entirely through voluntary donations of money and personal time. In that event, I would say that it would work exactly the same way in a protectorate. The primary difference is that, in a protectorate, the defensive nature of the state would be formally acknowledged and institutionalized in the social contract called the Constitution, and it would be organized ahead of the need instead of after.

WE MUST WATCH THE WATCHERS Perhaps the most important element is that, in either a protectorate or under anarchy, there would have to be a watch-dog committee of enlightened citizens who, acting entirely apart from every other institution, would be dedicated to keeping the public informed on issues and events relating to their freedom, for there is no system that will long endure if the public is not enlightened of its founding principles. Even a theoretical “peaceful anarchy” would need that kind of support to keep it from reverting back to tyrannical government. That is the most often overlooked feature in discussions of this kind. An uninformed public always can be easily led by tyrants and demagogues. Preventing that is the role to be played by Freedom Force International.

STATE CAPITALISM
At a much lower level of disagreement, I must object to the repeated use of the term State Capitalism without a clarifying definition. My reason for this is that these two words are, in a sense, mutually exclusive; and, in another sense, synonymous with fascism or even communism. Molyneaux uses the term in a pejorative sense, and I concur with that when it implies government involvement with capital, but in the more classic sense in which capitalism is perceived as a constructive opposite of communism or socialism, it deserves to be separated from the rest. The bottom line is that the word really has no absolute meaning. As I have stated elsewhere, the only meaningful words in this arena are collectivism and individualism.

PRODUCTION DOES NOT CAUSE TAXATION AND TYRANNY
The analogy of governments becoming farms for humans is compelling, and I think it serves a good purpose in getting people to think critically about their role in society, but certain ancillary arguments related to that are, in my opinion, off the mark. For example, Molyneaux states that freedom leads to production which leads to taxes which leads to tyranny and collapse. It would be difficult to argue with this chain of events historically, but my objection is to the implication that each of these steps is the cause of the following step.

Flowers bloom and then crickets appear, but the crickets don’t appear because the flowers bloom. Both the blooming of the flowers and the appearance of the crickets are caused by the arrival of spring and the warming of the season. They are associative phenomena, not causative. It is my view that increased taxation and tyranny are not caused by freedom or productivity but by the growth of government to accomplish aggressive (as opposed to defensive) goals and the influx of predators into positions of power. The criminal element would be far less attracted to state employment if they were strictly limited to a defensive mission. In a protectorate, there would be great freedom and productivity with very low taxation and zero tyranny.

RELIGION IS ANOTHER TOPIC
Another point of concern with Statism Is Dead is the needless (in my opinion) slam against religion. The case for corruption of government is conclusive by itself without including religion. For many people, the political theme of this presentation is a big pill to swallow without challenging religious convictions at the same time. Mixing the two themes may needlessly repel people who otherwise would be receptive to the message.

IT IS NOT PARANOIA TO CONTROL IMMIGRATION
As I get to the bottom of my list of negative points, I am reminded of Molyneaux’s statement that those who are concerned about illegal immigration are being led to paranoia by their oppressive leaders. I don’t buy that. To be fair, he didn’t use the word “illegal.” He said that people were paranoid about immigration, but that line was delivered over a photograph of illegal aliens crossing the Rio Grande River, so the meaning is clear.

Under anarchy, of course, there would be no state boundaries and no limitations on regional population movements. In theory, this may sound high minded and consistent with freedom, but in the real world, life, liberty, and property can become endangered by limitless mass migration. The concepts of life, liberty, and property vary widely from culture to culture, and it is not paranoia to be aware that one’s way of life can become endangered by a massive influx of those who may hold contempt for it. In my view, laws setting conditions and limitations on immigration are well within the defensive function of the state and would be appropriate in a protectorate.

NOT ALL IDEOLOGIES ARE EQUAL
Finally, in Part 3 Molyneaux says: “All ideologies are variations on human livestock management practices. … The opposite of ideology is not a different ideology but clear evidence and rational principles. The opposite of ideology is philosophy.”

OK, it’s definition time again. The American Heritage Dictionary defines ideology as “The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.” The Merriam-Webster On-Line Dictionary says: “A systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture; a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture; the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program.”

Based on this, just about everything Mr. Molyneaux has advocated in his exposition represents an ideology. I don’t know why he would want to disassociate from this word unless it is because so many unsavory world views also are ideologies. However, according to the dictionary definition of the word, the answer to the old, worn out ideology of statism and collectivism is, indeed, a new ideology called individualism. Rather than the ideology of anarchy, the ideology of individualism, flourishing within a protectorate, is the next model of freedom.

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