David McElroy

If you were a slave owner in the United States in the 19th century, you probably owed your wealth and continued income to the continuation of slavery. If someone made the case to you that slavery was morally wrong, your first thought probably would have been, “But if we free the slaves, who will pick the cotton?”

The idea of ending slavery was a scary thing to many people in Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many people owned human beings who had been brought from Africa in chains. Those people worked in their fields and did all sorts of manual labor for them. The idea was deeply ingrained in society and it was accepted by many people as right and moral.

The abolition movement was a challenge to all of that. The abolitionists didn’t try to explain to plantation owners how they could earn a living after the slaves were freed. They couldn’t offer completely pragmatic plans for how society was going to go through the transition from slavery to universal equality of rights among races.

They simply made the case that slavery was a moral abomination. Some of them used gentle persuasion. Some of them preached fiery sermons, but still advocated peaceful change. And some, such as John Brown, tried to spark slave rebellions through violent means.

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When armed men attacked Dan Halsted in the dark of night as he walked home in a safe neighborhood of Portland, Ore., he ran screaming for someone to call police. What he didn’t know is that his attackers were police officers — who tased him in the back five times and beat him.

Police were in the area looking for someone who had spray-painted graffiti on a nearby building. Halsted just happened to be walking by, so police attacked him instead.

“I was walking home and all of a sudden a flashlight came on in my eyes and I stopped, and I heard a voice say, ‘Get him!'” Halsted told Portland television station KATU. “And I heard footsteps coming at me, so I turned and I ran. I didn’t know what was going on. I was screaming to call the police the whole time, and I didn’t realize this was the police because they never identified themselves at all.”

In the arrest report, the officer made up a story about Halsted running down the street with a couple of other people. In reality, he had been in a restaurant with other people. He was never charged with any crime, but the city didn’t want to compensate him for the attack. So after four years, he finally sued.

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It’s a bad movie that you might have seen before. It tends to show up whenever an advocate of voluntary cooperation explains how society could operate without state coercion. Right on cue, the zombies from “Night of the Living Statists” rear their heads and mindlessly intone, “But if there’s no government, who will build the roads?!”

The zombies can’t hear your response, so it’s useless to try to give them facts and explain how things could be done in a way that’s better for everyone if roads and other such things were provided as private services rather than as coercive government monopolies. For those who are open to the facts, though, is there any evidence that people can actually cooperate voluntarily for their own interests?

As a matter of fact, there’s quite a bit of evidence of that.

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