: do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it :

If you want to learn more about Minarchism, look no further

As many of you know, I am, essentially, a minarchist. Not an anarchist, a minarchist. Which I guess is kind of like a mini-anarchist, meaning a little bit of an anarchist (hey, there’s no government like no government”!).

The difference between minarchists and anarchists is that minarchists DO believe in a form of a “state”, while anarchists don’t.

The form of government in Minarchism is also known as a “Night Watchman State”.

Many libertarians are minarchists, and some are anarchists.

Both Minarchists and Anarchists agree that governments largely screw up economic transactions whenever they intervene, and that economic transactions between peoples who are not under duress or coercian (read: threat of force against their will) should not be interfered with by the “state”.

Minarchists believe the role of the state is essentially to protect private property and the rights of individualsm, and to do very little else.

Ron Paul is probably the most high profile minarchist in the US today. Most of the Austrian Economists - whose views I believe are, by and large, economic “gospel” and do more to explain human behavior than any other discipline - are minarchists. To learn more about Austrian Economics, read this.

And to learn more about minarchism, read this!

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July 8, 2008 | Filed Under Politics 

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3 Responses to “If you want to learn more about Minarchism, look no further”

  1. Rob Martinsen on July 8th, 2008

    Drex I just perused your blog. . . I love it. I didn’t know whether to click the link to Austrian Economics or minarchism first. I’d never heard the term minarchism but it really does fit my tendencies as far as how I think society should run. I do have a couple of question marks though…. eg. I get really squeamish when I think about extending personal liberty in the area of say drug use prostitution etc. especially when the church seems to encourage us to vote against measures that would legalize such things. BTW, that seminar we went to in VA so long ago really affected the way I look at government and society.
    Ron Paul, I really like alot of his ideas but his thoughts on the war in Iraq make me so uncomfortable that I couldn’t support him. What say ye???

  2. Drex Davis on July 8th, 2008

    Yes, it’s always hard to say “OK” when others might want to practice something in their lives that we are personally opposed to morally (or the church we belong to).

    I guess, in my head, there’s a big difference between calling something moral and calling something legal. I’m free - my freedom of belief and speech - to call such behaviors immoral, to work to dissuade people from engaging in such, etc.

    One thing to keep in mind is that people’s behavior still cannot infringe upon the property rights of others, and people swamped by vice often spill over into violating the property rights of others (i.e. you operate a vehicle under the influence of drugs, you’re likely going to do something that will violate the property rights of others and result in the ruination of your life).

    In a free market I wouldn’t have to employ, for example, a tobacco user . . . whereas now it’s “illegal” to do so. It could be argued that we’d be able to create a world that reinforce our morals more easily in a minarchist world because the state would not force use to associate with others we consider immoral.

    I believe in a truly minarchist society (no state-run safety net for vice), vice would dry up b/c if you indulge it, you’ll likely end up dead, not getting a check from the government (with money taken from people who chose to be productive, which is really just theft). . .

    Yeah, the Institute for Human Studies continues to have a lasting impression on me, and I still read Peter Bottke’s blog (he’s the Austrian Economist we heard several times there).

    I guess, for me, the problem with not being a minarchist, is that any other form of government ends up being a tyranny, deciding for citizens what they say and do.

    I’ve heard this argument against gay marriage - “If gay people can marry, then they’ll get the tax breaks that married people do, which were intended to lessen the tax burden on married people so that they’d have families”

    To which I reply, “So take away taxes altogether and then the families wouldn’t have to have any burden at all!”

    As far as the church is concerned, if we lived in a truly minarchist country, I don’t think they’d be involved at all, because the church would be free to operate. The reason the church has to get involved is because people (by way of the goverment) are trying to use the government to control religious institutions - trying to use the backdoor by way of government to force the church into practices that the church doesn’t want (but which special interests want to force it to do).

    On the other hand, in a minarchist world, the church might still be polygamous, a state of affairs which, personally, I would really struggle with. The reason I say “might still be” is b/c if you read the revelation by President Woodruff, he says that he had a vision that the government would destroy the church if polygamy were not abandoned (tyranny of the government over the free practices of consenting adults). So he chose to save the church from the destruction by the state, at the expense of a policy and practice (and, at the time, a practice that was widely accepted as an eternal doctrine).

    Anyway, we don’t live in a minarchist world, so I understand the church’s need to get involved in such . . . it’s a protection against an encroaching state . . .

    That’s my opinion, anyway.

  3. Drex Davis on July 8th, 2008

    I’ll probably turn the above into a blog post at some point and clean up some of the muddy/incomplete thoughts, etc, and expound on other areas . . .