Factionalism Pt 1

It has been a while since my last post, in that time I have given thought to my ideas here and there as time allowed and I now have a basic theory on how things would work.

I would best describe Factionalism as a form that governments can take, with a good dose of free-market capitalism injected into them - they must compete on the free market for members to join them. And they may not force anyone to remain apart of them if they choose to leave, therefore not subject to that faction any longer.

Now before you think: 'Hey wait I thought Anarchy was without any governments', allow me to explain that I never was against some structure in society only that I oppose the use of force against the general public in order to maintain it. In this regard the concept 'government' takes on a whole new meaning and to avoid it's use of the word from now on, instead I will call it a Faction.

Factionalism can only truly exist within Anarchy, the two are intertwined. Governments have a tendency of arbitrarily drawing lines on a map and saying everything on their side is under their jurisdiction. This cannot be. Governments also don't allow voluntary membership, they say your free to leave the country but this is false since you can't bring your home with you. Plus you'll just end up inside someone else's jurisdiction instead. This is not characteristic to a society which respects private property. It is in essence a monopoly of power in a given area, this is also not a characteristic of a free market. In order for Factions to compete on a free market, the monopolies have to be shut down and that's where Anarchy comes in.

Factionalism's basic theory is that groups of like-minded people will form in order to improve each other's lives in the absence of one of a few established monopolies on power. Anarchy provides the ability for these groups to start with a fresh slate. It's important to note that only if the Anarchy is touched off for the right reasons and a sizable group of people must adhere to it's doctrines or will it just not result in the desired effect. Just like in Russia's communist revolution, it was started by Anarchists but they were later stabbed in the back by the communists who wanted to set up the direct OPPOSITE of Anarchy, a totalitarian state.

Factionalism maintains that given people will naturally form groups to improve each other's lives is already a proven theory, it is under this guise that the first governments were formed. But the key here is that it is voluntary, and remains so. That anyone may form a new Faction without having to resort to a revolution in order to do so! So if there was to be one principle or one law all Factions must obey it is that they may not force people to remain members or subject to their rules.

Now this has further implications which gets into abolishing 'national borders'. You see if I own a house in Faction A and I want to move to Faction B, and it requires me to leave Faction A's borders then I can't very well take the house with me. Thus this is a form of coersion and violates the basic principles of Factionalism. The only way Factions might have any sort of border is if the Faction itself owned all the private property as a collective and so by leaving the collective group you forfit your claim on the property. This would be a communist faction, and in an environment where people are free to leave I just don't see it as being popular and certainly not being able to maintain such large jurisdictional areas that current nation-states enjoy, maybe a few hundred acres at best.

Factions then, for the most part would entangle themselves and overlap and be defined more by zones of influence rather than set borders as people move and settle down near to where their faction started. If one joined a faction you'd be agreeing to follow their rules or be cast out or pay whatever penalty is prescribed. Again, if one didn't like the rules presented, you could leave at any time, but if you did break the rules before renouncing your faction then you still might be subject to it's penalties. Otherwise one could go and steal a bunch of stuff, renounce his affiliation to the faction then not be subject to the penalty of theft.


What would be the rules and penalties under Factionalism? Well I do not know specifically what they would be but they would be up to the leadership of each faction. But here is something to consider: Current nation-states often will take the ills of society and place the burdens of it back on it's people mostly in the form of taxes. Under Factionalism, people may come and go at will, meaning Factions must compete on a free market model for members. Just like in a free market, you do not attract customers by imposing all sorts of restrictions on them, or by setting your prices too high. In contrast, a Faction will not attract people if it tries to tax them too much or impose too many unreasonable rules on them.

So it would follow that things like jails would not be built or used, since they cost too much to operate, a Faction could not afford to operate these jails and then also provide sufficiant services to attract members. Also jails constitute somewhat of a violation of Factionalism's basic tenant of voluntary membership. A person in jail can't decide what faction he belongs to, it would be far too easy for one Faction to lure people in with goodies only to lock them in jail for life for the most minor offense and then use their free labor to provide those services to attract new members! Almost like what we have now, do not convicts clean up our roads and make license plates, etc?

I think that the methods of choice will be exile or death for punishments. If a Faction kills people for just ordinary things, or has a justice system that seems morally defunct or does not accurately convict people of moral crimes then they will be scared off and not join the Faction. This is why the use of exile, or banishment from the Faction works best. From a moral standpoint it comes out perfect. In a world of voluntary societies, it also means the organizations themselves get to decide who joins and who doesn't. Just as the people decide which Faction to join freely come and go. If a Faction bans someone innocent of an infraction it's no big deal since he can just join another or if he chooses, hack it on his own or start his own darn faction. Banning him alone doesn't cause him to loose his property or have to move or anything else. (unless he was in a collectivist Faction)

But wouldn't we just have a bunch of evil people running around freely then? Maybe, but that's hardly different from now. Besides they wouldn't last long if they kept screwing around with other factions and did not have one of their own to provide protection, they would be responsible for their actions alone.

But now we're getting into how justice works itself out, to be continued in Factionalism Pt 2.

Government Agression

Been thinking about how I should define Factionalism for a month and still not quite ready to make a posting about it. However an incident has come to my attention which shows that Governments rule by fear and violence.

Enter Ed and Elane Brown, a married couple with a dental practice. Apparently they didn't think paying their income taxes was right. So they decided not to pay it. Legal battles ensued and eventually the state escalated the disagreement to violence by surrounding their house with heavily armed police and snipers not to mention armored cars.

Seems a bit overkill, Mr. Brown certainly has a right to defend himself and his property even from the so-called 'authorities'. Now they are in a stand-off and it will be interesting to see what happens. But what is clear is the Government's position is a lose-lose situation. If they kill Mr. Brown, he becomes a martyr. If they back off then they could encourage more tax protesters to act.

If only more people would have such courage such as this!

Ed and Elane's blog: http://questforfairtrialinconcordnh.blogspot.com/

Moving Forward

In previous posts I went over the problem with governments and the main justification for governments known as laws. If it can be agreed upon that government enforced laws do not necessarily make for a better society then the question remains how we shall deal with evil. There's no easy answer to this, and depending on your religious background you might have different opinions.
However, if everyone can recognize some universal morals on how people should treat one another known as 'golden rule' or 'common law'. Once that common ground is established then most people will know how to function in a civilized manner. It's the small minority of dastardly people who seek to gain power through immoral acts which ruin things for everyone. I have a few points to illustrate how they might be dealt with. In a more anarchistic society such things are more often allowed to come to their natural conclusions, I will provide some examples and points.

• A more vigilant society.

People won't be dependant on cops to protect them; in a truly just society everyone is responsible for enforcing their own rights and the rights of others. Criminals breaking into homes will more likely be blown away by gun-owning homeowner. This is a natural, self-interest reaction, time tested method which stops crime instantly.

• Crime intervention organizations.

This applies to the above point, in a more vigilant society it is likely that groups will form in order to stop crime as they see it happening. They wouldn’t be cops because they wouldn’t have any authority whatsoever over other people, but only the same authority (which everyone has anyways) to intervene when they see crime going on.

• Criminals will kill themselves off or be killed off by a more vigilant society.

Obviously a well armed vigilant society is the criminal’s worst nightmare! The criminals’ potential for being caught and dealt with is drastically more probable. In a cop enforced society the citizen is unable to react to attacks without fear of being prosecuted themselves. Furthermore, if the perpetrator gets away before the cops can see it they may get away. But woe to the criminal who every victim is potentially able to deal with them how they see fit! If the criminals are exiled or separated somehow from the moral people, they will just kill each other off instead. (explained below.)

• Moral people will separate themselves from the criminals.

Since there is no state monopoly on justice, people with similar beliefs and morals will be free to band together and on their own private property, regulate who lives among them. This may seem elitist, but it really is not since anyone else may do the same. This is getting into my theory of Factionalism and will be discussed later on.

• Less law means fewer problems.

Many times societies create their own problems and their own criminals by declaring certain activities are ‘illegal’. Good examples of this are prohibition in the 1920’s, and the ‘war on drugs’. While these activities might be bad in some instances, they do not violate basic morals. If someone wants to get high on drugs and possibly die then that’s their own problem. There is no need for anyone’s forceful intervention, although some of these activities are regrettable and self-destructive. Also there’s plenty of laws which government needs to gain funds which if not followed escalate into violent proportions. Laws cause violence through unnecessary escalation of disputes. A drug addict will either overdose and die or seek help, either way problem solved with no intervention necessary. A person not paying taxes will conflict with government officials and it could escalate into a shooting match. Is the problem that the person tried to maintain his rightful claim on his property? NO! The problem is the government ultimately needs to resort to violence to fund itself.

• Crime doesn’t pay. (for real this time)

The most successful criminals are in the government itself! Are we to believe that the white-house spends 10,000 dollars on a toilet seat? Or how about the billions of dollars of which congress cannot find which was spent on government contracts in Iraq? Are these criminals likely to get caught? Not at all since they are apart of the monopoly on justice, then they are de-facto above the law. Or how about the more obvious facts about governments, that they on a daily basis violate the same laws they enforce! Governments are allowed to do the following crimes:

Murder: They may execute people and start wars.

Theft: Eminent domain and taxes.

Libel: Governments lie all the time.

These are but a few examples, but they mostly cover all the other categories of moral violations. Clearly it does pay to commit crimes; one could become rich easily by getting in the powers of government. With government gone advantages to crime would be limited, and one would be unable to continue doing it with impunity.

• Less necessity for crime.

No restrictions or government seizures concerning private property will exist. On the other hand no laws that protect excessive wealth exist, lest a monopoly may gain power through sheer wealth. More wealth will naturally be available for everyone by the natural circumstances of the world. Homelessness will be non-existent since anyone may claim land which is not being used and just build a home, no permits, and no permission. You wouldn’t even have to purchase the land unless someone else had already improved upon it and therefore had a rightful claim upon it. Not to mention resources the government consumes would then be available to the public. People would be more self-sufficient grow their own food etc. One of the reasons there is crime is because people feel it is the only way to gain what they want. If we can remove all these artificial barriers to wealth, more options arise to gain these things outside of crime.

I could come up with more examples, but the better way to deal with crime is to get at its root causes rather than just try to discourage it with punishments. I conclude that a more free society solves many crime problems all by itself. Anarchy empowers everyone to deal with crime themselves and it also eliminates many root causes for crime. More detail on how this is true will be in the following posts. Some questions arise on how would we prove a person committed a crime without courts? Or what legal system is in place? How can the economy provide so equally in order to undermine the reasons for crime? This is all covered under my theory of ‘Factionalism’. To be defined in another post.

Virgina Tech madness

Instead of continuing on points in my other posts, I felt compelled to comment on the massacre at Virginia Tech. If you look at this incident in depth it can illustrate the points I had previously made.

Point one: Law does not stop the law-breakers, they will commit crimes regardless.

Here we can see that guns were banned from the campus, even though the state of Virginia has a carry concealed weapons laws. Obviously the gunman forgot to look at campus rules!

Point two: Laws do not protect you and neither does its enforcers.

Again, it's clear the gunman was free to do as he pleased. Where were our so-called 'protectors' or 'law-enforcers’? Cowering behind their cop cars for TWO HOURS. Also instead of going in to the rescue they just arrested students trying to flee the campus from this mad-man. So what were they thinking? Well their reasoning is they couldn’t let the gunman escape in the chaos, so all the students had to stay, the campus was in lockdown.

It's clear catching the perp is more important than saving lives. If letting the students flee for their lives saves even one student and lets the perp go free, then so be it! But what's more likely is that the perp will get trampled under the masses of fleeing students!

Instead the students obeyed for the most part and were then slaughtered. This is because they had false hopes that our 'heroes' in SWAT uniforms would come and save them. Again illustrating that dependence on the state for the resolution of social problems is dangerous. Had America been more like a true Anarchy or in the process of converting (Libertarian Government) then more students would probably been armed and taken the gunman out. Furthermore the mentality of letting the cops deal with it rather than dealing with it yourself would not had been present.

On another note, I do not hate the people who are cops. I think many of them have good intentions but they are misguided in letting a state dictate their actions rather than what their conscience dictates. I hate the system that controls them, making well intentioned people nothing more than thugs to do the state's bidding. If peaceful social change is to ever occur, the cops must be the first ones to see the truth of the matter and convert.

Overcoming objections

I have recognized a definite pattern in the objections on forums discussing the topic of Anarchy. Also this pattern has been seen in people I have talked with; I believe it to have its root foundations in the emotion of Fear. People are afraid of the concept of not having enforceable laws, they think if cops aren’t out there to use force to keep the law, everyone will go crazy and start killing each other and etc. I simply tell them that even with the so-called laws and our form of judicial 'justice' there will still be bad people doing stuff to good people. Any intelligent person would concede this is true as we all hear about such and such murdering this person on the media all the time so it is obvious people still do these things anyways. Sure the murderer goes to jail or is executed, but what good does that do to the victim? Or what about all the people who do commit crimes but thanks to the ineptness of our judicial system, go free?
The discussion will continue and most likely, it is also conceded that our judicial system is not perfect, but it's good that it's there because if it wasn’t more people would commit crimes. And usually this is the end of the argument, the statist opinion can't logically go any further than this, but it does leave some questions open. For one thing, there is no proof that I can find to support that more people would commit crimes, technically speaking if there is no law there can be no crimes!
Of course we all have things we would not like done to us, having our stuff stolen, being hurt, etc. And I agree, I wouldn’t like these things either, but these things are moral issues not legal ones. A good standard to use is the golden rule; don't do anything to others that you wouldn’t like done to yourself. If you like being hurt and have your stuff taken, sorry, you’re crazy. This is one philosophy that transcends race and religion, as I am sure the majority of the people in this world would agree with it.
What we need is morality to replace law, for law only creates an artificial morality which is not universally accepted by its subject populace - hey I am living proof of this! The law creates Fear, not morality. Fear the government for what it will do to you if you do not obey its laws. Instead of doing what is right because you know it is right and honorable. This is never learned by most people because there is only fear to go by. Morals are not taught in schools, and only fear governs people's actions on what to do or not do on moral issues. These being the case, if people have no real morals they will, when they can, commit crimes when they think they can get away with it. Because the simple fact is, there is no mental process in their heads to govern their actions that is independent of the world around them, here is a simple example:

Jack walks into a candy store, the clerk is standing with his back to him. Jack thinks, 'hey I can take some candy and he'll never know!' So Jack takes candy. Obviously his thoughts are logically sound, but immoral. The clerk can't see him; he has the power to take the candy he wants. Since fear is the only morality there is no mental process past this conclusion, thus it is dependant on if the clerk is watching him or not. If the clerk had been watching then he'd think: 'Hey he's watching me, I better not take candy or I could get in trouble.'

Enter Joe, someone who was taught morals. Joe walks into a candy store, the clerk is standing with his back to him. Joe thinks, 'hey I can take some candy and he'll never know!' but then thinks. 'But I know stealing is wrong, I shouldn’t do it.'

As we can see in this example, fear is not an issue. Joe decides to do the right thing because it is right, not because the clerk is watching him. We could argue that most people in the world today have some morals anyway, but law is still needed because people still decide to do the wrong thing. I absolutely agree that people have free will; they can knowingly do the wrong thing. However it isn’t as likely if they know something is wrong. Also it's fair to claim if someone doesn’t believe something is wrong, once the fear is removed by circumstances then they would be more likely to do something wrong.
Furthermore, I'd wager that the same people who do wrong when they know it is wrong would be the same people who do wrong with or without laws. The rest are just ignorant of morals. This be the case, it makes more since to instill morals in people than to provide fear from laws. Laws create a very dangerous situation, because if for some reason the government was taken out by natural disaster or violent revolution there would be no fear to encourage laws. People would go crazy as the statist would claim. We are in agreement on this. This is why I support libertarianism as a transition; most people aren’t ready for Anarchy yet until the masses become morally enlightened. Some of us are ready however, why should the masses hold us back? More on that later.

In conclusion I state that people who do wrong and are aware of morals will commit wrongs regardless of law; they will commit evil when they can get away with it. This makes the claim that law is necessary, a weak one. Law is one of the justifications for government; therefore its justification is also weak. It may be true more people would do wrong without law, but if they do it's only because they are ignorant of morals. Morals will allow people to govern their own actions justly, avoiding the dangerous situation law and government creates by making law and government unnecessary.

So what can we do about the people who do wrong then without law? This is another common question and I'll address it in my next post.

What is a Libertarian-Anarchist?

It's been a while since I've made a post. I am somewhat of a procrastinator anyways. I'll get to the point, as a Libertarian-Anarchist I believe that we aren't quite ready for full blown anarchy without some sort of transition. William Godwin stated in his work: Inquiry into political justice in 1793 that once people were able to come to a higher moral enlightenment they would be able to live their lives justly without the need of laws. A form of government that is smaller and the least coercive as possible, while promoting morals which are self-evident I think would be a perfect transition. You can go to www.lp.org to find out more about the Libertarian party.

As for my anarchist side, that's a little more complex. It seems there is quite a few versions of it, but one thing is for certain they all oppose government. You can read an anarchist FAQ here: http://www.infoshop.org/faq/index.html

But on that note, the above source doesn't favor anarcho-capitalism that much. There are some things about capitalism I like, and some others I hate. I would say I mostly take the mutualist point of view. Info on this can be found at: http://www.mutualist.org/

On the other hand, I also recognize that the 'free market' can behave irrationally and could benefit from some central planning, or a more communistic anarchism. But only if a free market parallels it, creating a duel market system which would give the best of both worlds, but more on that later.