False dichotomy: Your choice isn’t coercive state vs. lawlessness

By David McElroy · July 15, 2011

Classic comedian Henny Youngman frequently used a joke in which someone would ask him, “How’s your wife?” His reply: “Compared to what?” When people are asked how they like the modern nation/state, you can’t evaluate their answers without knowing “compared to what?”

If you allow someone else to frame a debate, he can control what your answer is going to be. If you allow the state and its supporters to frame the debate as being between the coercive state on the one hand and the lawlessness and casual violence you see depicted anywhere without the state on the other, most rational people are going to opt for the state as the lesser of the two evils. But it’s a false dichotomy.

Some libertarians or anarchists (of various stripes) want to live in a world with no rules and no order. I want them to be able to live that way, but I don’t want my part of the world to look like that. I want voluntary order, but I want it organized by somebody other than the coercive state — and I want a choice of whose system to live under. What’s more, I want the choice to establish my own system to compete with the others if I want to.

A friend of mine sent me a link to a story that NPR’s Planet Money team did a couple of weeks ago about PorcFest, which is a popular annual “freedom festival” in New Hampshire sponsored by the Free State Project. The headline on the NPR story calls it “libertarian summer camp.” Among other things, the reporter talked about how the bacon he bought for breakfast hadn’t been inspected for safety and how financial transactions were difficult using differing systems of gold and silver. The implied criticism is that this is the way things have to be without the coercive state. Is that true?

I like knowing that there’s a pretty decent chance that my food is safe. I’d rather not have to be concerned about negative consequences from eating the food as a guide about how safe a restaurant is. But it doesn’t have to be a choice between a state coercing inspection or else no inspection at all. You might have a system by which some restaurants display a certification from a private company that they’ve been inspected for the sorts of things state health departments do today. Or you might have areas with higher standards — cities operated by a company that requires all of the vendors inside to operate by certain standards. The people who chose to live there would understand the standards the company required (and wouldn’t live there if they didn’t agree with the standards). In yet other areas, there might be no standards at all, places where people would prefer no rules of any sort and would simply trust each other until something went wrong.

The key is that the standards would be different for different places — and people would have their own choice about which system to live under. I think a lot of libertarians would initially say they want to live in the wild openness of no rules, but I suspect they’d soon find that they like rules that achieve reasonable purposes — as long as they have a choice about which system to live under.

We can have a modern, safe and efficient world without the coercive state. In some areas, the control would be even tighter than what it is in a state-controlled city today. Some people will want to live in an ultra-safe and secure environment — sort of like a neighborhood conceived and operated like Disney World — and they’re going to be willing to give certain controls to someone else. I don’t know what all the choices will be like. I just know that the market will evolve to reflect what people want to choose from, just as any functioning market does.

Personally, I think you’d be crazy to live in a lawless area with no rules of any kind. You might think I’m crazy for wanting to live in a safe, controlled environment where the lawns are manicured and everything looks perfect. The point isn’t that we should each convince a majority to agree with our vision of what the world should be and then enforce it on each other. The point is to accept a world where we’re each allowed to create our vision of a city or community — and then let people choose whether they want to join us or not.

The question isn’t one of “the coercive state or lawlessness.” The question is one of “coercion or choice.” What you then build with your choice is up to you and the people who choose to live with you.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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