Table Of ContentA Spontaneous Order:
The Capitalist Case
For A Stateless Society
CHASE RACHELS
Copyright © 2015 Christopher Chase Rachels
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1512117271
ISBN-10: 1512117277
Cover Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0
DEDICATION
This work is dedicated to my son, Micha Rachels. May he grow up with a
free spirit, critical mind, and warm heart.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to first and foremost thank my wife, Michelle Ferris,
for standing by my side as an active participant in the fight against tyranny.
Her loving encouragement and support enabled me to see this project to its
end. Stephan Kinsella’s mentorship was likewise invaluable in its relation to
the precision and rigor of this book. My editor, Mattheus von Guttenberg,
also deserves recognition for his professional assistance in editing this work
and verifying the accuracy of its content. I would like to express my
gratitude for Will Porter, who was gracious enough to contribute one of his
brilliant essays (Chapter 0: Epistemology and Praxeology). I would also like
to give thanks to the following people who provided their support in a
variety of ways, though bear in mind this list is by no means exhaustive or
in any particular order: Luis F. Duran-Aparicio, Blake Williams, Jason
Bassler, Josh Hilditch, Chris Calton, Gary Simon, Mike Martelli, Joel
Richardson, Walter Block, Jeff Berwick, and many more!
CONTENTS
Foreword … 6
Introduction … 11
0. Epistemology and Praxeology … 19
1. Libertarianism … 45
2. Property … 66
3. Contract … 78
4. Money and Banking … 90
5. Monopolies and Cartels … 122
6. Insurance … 131
7. Health Care … 139
8. Law and Order … 147
9. Defense and Security … 172
10. Transportation Networks … 185
11. Education … 195
12. Poverty … 211
13. Environmentalism … 234
14. The Corporation … 259
15. Getting There … 278
Resources … 286
Foreword
MODERN LIBERTARIAN THEORY is only about five decades old.
The ideas that have influenced our greatest thinkers can be traced back
centuries, of course,1 to luminaries such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke,
Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill, and to
more recent and largely even more radical thinkers such as Gustave de
Molinari, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Franz
Oppenheimer, and Albert Jay Nock.2
The beginnings of the modern movement can be detected in the
works of the “three furies of libertarianism,” as Brian Doherty calls them:
Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Patterson, whose respective books
The Discovery of Freedom, The Fountainhead, and The God of the Machine were all
published, rather remarkably, in the same year: 1943.3 But in its more
modern form, libertarianism originated in the 1960s and 1970s from
thinkers based primarily in the United States, notably Ayn Rand and Murray
Rothbard. Other significant influences on the nascent libertarian movement
include Ludwig von Mises, author of Liberalism (1927) and Human Action
(1949, with a predecessor version published in German in 1940); Nobel
laureate F.A. von Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom (1944); Leonard
Read, head of the Foundation for Economic Education (founded 1946);
and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, author of the influential Capitalism and
Freedom (1962).
The most prominent and influential of modern libertarian figures,
however, were the aforementioned novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, the
founder of “Objectivism” and a “radical for capitalism,” and Murray
Rothbard, the Mises-influenced libertarian anarcho-capitalist economist and
political theorist. Rothbard’s seminal role is widely recognized, even by non-
Rothbardians. Objectivist John McCaskey, for example, has observed, that
out of the debates in the mid-1900s about what rights citizens ought to
have,
1
For more on this, see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling
History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs,
2007) and David Boaz, The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary
Readings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman (New York: Free Press, 1997).
2 See Boaz, The Libertarian Reader.
3 See Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism.
7
A SPONTANEOUS ORDER
grew the main sort of libertarianism of the
last fifty years. It was based on a principle
articulated by Murray Rothbard in the
1970s this way: No one may initiate the use
or threat of physical violence against the
person or property of anyone else. The
idea had roots in John Locke, America’s
founders, and more immediately Ayn
Rand, but it was Rothbard’s formulation
that became standard. It became known as
the non-aggression principle or—since
Rothbard took it as the starting point of
political theory and not the conclusion of
philosophical justification—the non-
aggression axiom. In the late twentieth
century, anyone who accepted this
principle could call himself, or could find
himself called, a libertarian, even if he
disagreed with Rothbard’s own insistence
that rights are best protected when there is
no government at all.4
We can date the dawn of today’s libertarianism to the works of
Rand and Rothbard: to Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957); and, especially, to
Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (1962), Power and Market (1970), and For
A New Liberty (1973), plus his journal The Libertarian Forum (1969–1984). For
A New Liberty stands today as a brilliant, and early, bold statement of the
radical libertarian vision. By the mid-60s, the modern libertarian movement
was coalescing, primarily behind the non-initiation of force principle and
the “radical capitalism” of Ayn Rand, and Rothbard’s systematic libertarian
corpus based upon the non-aggression principle or axiom. It is no surprise
that the Libertarian Party was founded in 1971, as these ideas, and the
liberty movement, were gaining steam.
In the ensuing decades many other influential works appeared
expounding on the libertarian idea, such as Linda and Morris Tannehill, The
Market for Liberty (1970), John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy
for Tomorrow (1971), David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (1973),
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Henri Lepage, Tomorrow,
Capitalism (1978), Samuel Edward Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto
4
John P. McCaskey, “New Libertarians: New Promoters of a Welfare State”
(published as a blog post on johnmccaskey.com, April 14, 2014).
http://www.johnmccaskey.com/joomla/index.php/blog/71-new-libertarians. See also,
Wendy McElroy, “Murray N. Rothbard: Mr. Libertarian,” (published on
LewRockwell.com, July 6, 2000).
8
FOREWORD
(1980), Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (1988), Anthony de Jasay, Choice,
Contract, Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism (1991), Richard Epstein, Simple
Rules for a Complex World (1995), Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a
Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (1996), David Boaz, Libertarianism: A
Primer (1998), Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty (1998), and, more
recently, Jeffrey A. Miron’s Libertarianism, From A to Z (2010), Jacob
Huebert’s Libertarianism Today (2010), Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an
Anarchist (2011), and Gerard Casey’s Libertarian Anarchism (2012).
These and other works expounding on the ideas of liberty have
their own strengths and merits, and many of them have their own
deficiencies and idiosyncrasies as well. Some, for example, are statements
only of the author’s personal vision and do not purport to describe
libertarian thought in general; some are minarchist, at best, and do not even
recognize anarcho-libertarianism as a type of libertarianism (Miron, for
example, says “libertarianism accepts a role for government in a few, limited
areas: small government, not anarchy”);5 and some do not sufficiently
appreciate Austrian economics and its crucial role in informing political
theory. And many of the earlier works are simply dated at this point—how
could they not be, being written before the rise of the Internet (1995) or
even before the fall of communism (1989–91)?
As libertarian thought develops and matures, there is a continual
need to restate our basic principles, to search for new ways of
understanding and conveying our views about the nature of human society,
the state, conflict, cooperation, and liberty. The way forward, if we wish to
spread and develop the intellectual edifice of libertarian thought, is to
extend and advance the most consistent, scientific, and rigorous foundation
for libertarianism. This is, in my view, the basic vision laid out by Rothbard,
which relies heavily on free market economic theory, chiefly that of
Rothbard’s mentor Mises, and as supplemented by the work of Rothbard’s
colleague and protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe, author of A Theory of
Socialism and Capitalism (1989), inter alia. This type of libertarianism is
distinct from others in many ways. It is principled and rights-based, not
utilitarian (not to say that it is impractical; as Rand pointed out, the practical
is the moral);6 it is radical, anarchist, and anti-state, not minarchist; it is anti-
war; it is systematic and rigorous, not a collection of ad hoc policy points; it
is realistic, sober and sophisticated about the nature of the state; and it is
heavily influenced by insights of free market and Austrian economics,
especially those of Mises and his “praxeological” understanding of human
5 Jeffrey A. Miron, Libertarianism, from A to Z. (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
6
See Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1998), arguing for a distinction between consequentialism and
utilitarianism; also idem, “Foreword: of Chickens and Eggs—The Compatibility of
Moral Rights and Consequentialist Analysis,” 3 Harv. J. L. Publc. Pol’y 611 (1989),
available at www.randybarnett.com.
9
A SPONTANEOUS ORDER
action.
Thus, Rothbard, influenced by and building on the insights of
earlier and contemporary thinkers, such such as Mises and Rand, first
presented a systematic vision of modern, radical libertarianism: anti-state,
pro-market, Austrian. This enabled Rothbard to adumbrate a broad
framework for liberty, from property to contract to punishment theory.
Rothbard’s analysis extends also to, or draws on, other disciplines as
necessary, such as epistemology, history, the nature of the sciences, and the
like.7
Additional advances to the essentially Rothbardian perspective on
social theory have been made over the years. Hoppe, for example, a diligent
student of both Mises and Rothbard, has emphasized the essential role of
scarcity in the need for interpersonal property norms, leading to a more
rigorous and streamlined restatement of the basic Lockean approach which
underlies Rothbard’s own radical libertarian system. Hoppe has also
extended Rothbardian analysis in the realm of political ethics with his
“argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights. Modern Hoppean-
Rothbardians are not only pro-market and anti-state: they are pro-
technology, anti-democracy and anti-intellectual property as well. They
promote the use of the Internet, smart phones and video cameras,
blogging, podcasting, Youtube, social media and phyles, encryption,
anonymity, VPNs, open source software and culture, torrents, wikileaking,
crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, MOOCs, 3D printing and Bitcoin to
network, communicate, learn, profit and spread ideas—and to counter,
monitor, fight, and circumvent the state. To increasingly render the state
irrelevant and to reveal it as retrograde, crude, and antiquated, not to
mention inefficient, cold, and evil.
Thus, while there is reason to welcome all new works, thinkers and
approaches that advance liberty and libertarian ideas, there remains a need
for treatments of the ideas of liberty that are explicitly anchored in anti-
state, Austrian-Misesian, and systematic Rothbardian ideas. We need sound
analyses and ideas, whether broad or narrow, personal or general, current or
timeless, academic or aimed at the general reader. Chase Rachels’s A
Spontaneous Order is one such work. This is a fresh approach which has all
the right ingredients: it is anchored in and aware of the anarcho-capitalist
and Austrian economic literature and insights, rather than trying to reinvent
the wheel; it is accessible and aimed at a wide audience; it is up to date; it is
lively and the author’s passion for liberty is clearly evident throughout.
Importantly, Rachels recognizes the fundamental role that economic
scarcity plays in the formation of social and property norms, as Professor
7
For a superb overview of the significance and scope of Rothbard’s work, and for an
incisive comparison of the systematic Rothbardian approach to the dilettantish
“razzle-dazzle” of Nozick, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Introduction,” in Murray N.
Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (2nd ed., 1998)
10
