I think Paul is being parsimonious. He knows the Roman believers had enough sense to realize that States do injustices. What they may NOT have realized is that God did, in fact, authorize the State to avenge as a means of deterring injustices (Rom. 13), whereas individuals are NOT authorized to do that (Rom. 12). That being the case, we can recognize that though States do injustices just as parents do, it does not follow that societies are better off without States any more than children are better off without parents.

Asher, what Mises etal call anarchy is not actually anarchy at all. It's government answerable to the consent of the governed to the MOST RADICAL degree--market style accountability. Each time consumers choose new service providers, they are essentially "voting out" the service providers that didn't perform as well, in their collective opinion. But it is still a form of DELEGATING power to a SERVICE-PROVIDER. And the only reason why, to use Jefferson's phraseology, governments can be instituted by men to secure God-given rights is BECAUSE God has delegated that right (and duty, actually) TO MAN.

But that right/duty is not INHERENT in the created order. Per scripture, it did not even exist until after the Flood. Prior to that time, God forbade ALL vengeance, best I can tell from what is written. And it is that fact (that the right/duty to institute governments is not an inherent right/duty) that needs to be TAUGHT to people so they will know WHY governments can legitimately exist and, therefore, what they can legitimately do, as well as what our duty TO THEM is.

It is very easy for a person who doesn't think things through to infer that because governments fail so miserably in their divine objective that we have no duty to pay taxes. Paul is explaining why that proves too much. It would prove that one could actually know that anarchy is BETTER than government. And Paul is telling us straight up that God has a purpose for the State that we are to RESPECT and act in accordance with. Much of what the State does disgusts us all, but so does what many parents do. It's the institution of the human government and parenting that we can't rationally oppose.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 9/18/2010 2:38:50 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 9/18/2010 2:48:33 PM (GMT-5)

Let's make sure we're even on the same page. Don't the libertarian anarchists approve of MARKET-based service providers which "provide," as a service to the MAJORITY of the consuming public, the use of force against certain persons as either "punishment" for deterrence or mere incarceration? If not, I'm reading different stuff than you are. If so, how is that not just another form of government?

As for the "wild" West, I don't disagree that people should be able to use force for self-defense. It's VENGEANCE that individuals are forbidden to do by scripture.

As for taxes, I don't suppose there isn't a time to NOT pay taxes. That is a judgment call though. It is a duty in either case, though--to pay or not pay. Since when is duty not pragmatic?

Post Edited (Similitude) : 9/18/2010 8:16:14 PM (GMT-5)

The following is an article from LewRockwell.com in defense of anarchism. The last paragraph is what I'm interested in here, because, Asher, you brought up Iceland.

(2) Hobbes: Government Is Necessary for Cooperation

Probably the most famous argument against anarchy is Hobbes. Hobbes’ argument is: well, look, human cooperation, social cooperation, requires a structure of law in the background. The reason we can trust each other to cooperate is because we know that there are legal forces that will punish us if we violate each other’s rights. I know that they’ll punish me if I violate your rights, but they’ll also punish you if you violate my rights. And so I can trust you because I don’t have to rely on your own personal character. I just have to rely on the fact that you’ll be intimidated by the law. So, social cooperation requires this legal framework backed up by force of the state.

Well, Hobbes is assuming several things at once here. First he’s assuming that there can’t be any social cooperation without law. Second, he’s assuming that there can’t be any law unless it’s enforced by physical force. And third, he’s assuming you can’t have law enforced by physical force unless it’s done by a monopoly state.

But all those assumptions are false. It’s certainly true that cooperation can and does emerge, maybe not as efficiently as it would with law, but without law. There’s Robert Ellickson’s book Order Without Law where he talks about how neighbors manage to resolve disputes. He offers all these examples about what happens if one farmer’s cow wanders onto another farmer’s territory and they solve it through some mutual customary agreements and so forth, and there’s no legal framework for resolving it. Maybe that’s not enough for a complex economy, but it certainly shows that you can have some kind of cooperation without an actual legal framework.

Second, you can have a legal framework that isn’t backed up by force. An example would be the Law Merchant in the late Middle Ages: a system of commercial law that was backed up by threats of boycott. Boycott isn’t an act of force. But still, you’ve got merchants making all these contracts, and if you don’t abide by the contract, then the court just publicizes to everyone: "this person didn’t abide by the contract; take that into account if you’re going to make another contract with them."

And third, you can have formal legal systems that do use force that are not monopolistic. Since Hobbes doesn’t even consider that possibility, he doesn’t really give any argument against it. But you can certainly see examples in history. The history of medieval Iceland, for example, where there was no one center of enforcement. Although there was something that you might perhaps call a government, it had no executive arm at all. It had no police, no soldiers, no nothing. It had a sort of a competitive court system. But then enforcement was just up to whoever. And there were systems that evolved for taking care of that.

My question, Asher, is what kind of systems evolved to "take care of " enFORCEMENT. And what did enFORCEment entail in those cases, if not force? As the author says, that system was something "you might perhaps call a government."

Asher, if you're expecting me to oppose an anarchy that resulted in more civility than what we currently have, then you want get that. The question is, can a people that has experienced the social evolution Americans have experienced devolve into anarchy without chaos? I doubt that very seriously. It's very difficult to get people to boycott, e.g. So our goal, as Noah Porter emphasized, is not near so much that of determining the best kind of government for a relatively ethical society, but that of determining what our DUTY (or lack thereof) is to the government we FIND OURSELVES under in the kind of society we are actually a member of.

Take paying taxes, e.g. If it is not our duty to pay taxes, then how is it more pragmatic TO pay taxes? Simply to stay out of jail? And if that's all there is to it, then aren't you saying that it is OK to subsidize thugs that unjustly harm others merely to attain peace for yourself? What kind of ethic is that? How is that different, in principle, than personally harming someone just to keep someone from harming you?

That's what I don't get as a consequentialist. And I have no idea how to make sense of non-relativistic ethics/duty except in terms of a consequentialism that accepts axiomatically that there is a moral order such that my highest natural good is consistent with and conducive to the highest natural good of all members of the moral community--even though this seemingly implies there are post-mortem consequences for "this-worldly" actions.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 9/18/2010 10:43:24 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 9/19/2010 12:38:37 AM (GMT-5)

Asher: Secondly, do you pay taxes, Jeff? Do you disagree that our current government are thugs...do you disagree that they unjustly harm others? Do you agree that taxes are theft?

Jeff: I think governments, by and large, are basically organized crime. As such, I think there can be times when paying taxes is actually wrong. But each person has to make a judgment call on that decision. What makes paying taxes a duty is the belief that governmental force still results in a lesser of evils than the evils that would result in a vaccum of power.

As for what a government is, it is a collective AGENT, collectively consented to, that uses responding force (and, ideally, praises the good as well) for the purpose of increasing over-all civility in a society. What you call anarchy, I call government. Indeed, the declaration of independence itself says governments are instituted among men and that any powers they exercise that were not delegated to them by consent of the governed are unjust. How is what you're saying any different than that?

What I'm contending is that the distinction that Rom. 12 vs. Rom. 13 is getting at is that individuals can not legitimately use responding force except in very rare cases where such force can be seen as the only manner of self-defense conceivable. Government (market-based or otherwise), on the other hand, uses responding force routinely for the purpose of deterrence.

And, yes, I'm all for your approach of defending the superiority of a govermental system that is more responsive to the free and informed consent of the governed. I just know that it it unlikely to happen in this country. But that doesn't mean we don't defend it. Defending it is merely defending the superiority of a more ethical society. For one is correlatively related to the other just as the passage in the OT you quoted implies. When a society wants a "king like all the other nations," it is evidence that the society is vice-ridden.

I think D and I are in agreement with you, we just don't see moving to a society with that degree of ethicalness as an easy task. And it does take an ethical change, not merely an intellectual one. But we couldn't have gotten to where we are in the first place if people had been sufficiently ethical. That's the point. I've talked to people that flat out admit they don't care about "fairness."

How do you reason with such people? Of course, they will be for fairness when they're the ones on the bottom of the dog-pile. But as long as they're on the top, they couldn't care less about fairness. That is how our government has been able to usurp tons of unconstitutional and unethical power unto itself--with the consent of people like that.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 9/19/2010 9:39:50 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 9/19/2010 10:47:16 AM (GMT-5)

Check it.  Anyone who believes the Bible HAS to believe in the idea of the "uncircumcised heart" ("heart of stone", etc): the heart that DOES NOT walk in the ways of God (love, righteousness, justice, etc).  And the Bible's INSISTENCE on the need for a "circumcised heart" (heart of flesh, etc that CAN walk in God's ways...which is IMPOSSIBLE to sustain without the Holy Spirit of Wisdom.  And it seems to be a simple matter of extrapolation to see that governmental leaders with "hearts of stone" WILL use whatever power they have to oppress others, not truly serve them.

Interestingly enough, neither anarchy nor governmental systems will work as they COULD work...if people's (and thus, society's) "heart" isn't transformed.

Post Edited (One Love) : 9/19/2010 10:52:57 AM (GMT-5)