Tom Woods recently had a guest on his podcast who destroyed the last objection to Anarchy I had with this brilliant article from 1995. (Obviously I read this several years ago). It is ironic to think how old such an argument is now, considering his proposed solution to the problem of the arbitrariness of the law is much like a phrase I frequently used at the time; namely that "There is adequate remedy under the law". The common law definition of Crimes and Torts already covers 100% of all the stuff that "there oughtta be a law" for.

As such, everything else is just "I rule you" BS by some dedicated satanists, but mostly misguided do-gooders. It's trivially obvious to me as a mathematician; No proposition (law) can ever mean the same thing when it's axiomatic underpinning (assumptions) change. In the context of the Law, no two people have the same assumptions. With Friendly "Public Service" like this, you don't need enemies.

Which brings me to another influence that brought me to anarchy; it is this same differences in assumptions that lead to the infinite variance in ordinal preferences of market actors. When reading the first few chapters of Mises' Human Action (which I was amazed to find most people actually skip reading), the reason centralized planning (and ergo all the "I rule you" BS) fails became crystal clear. Much like Prof. Hasnas' notes in the podcast, a system of rigid rules -- cardinalizations of ordinal preferences (justice in his case, production in Mises') can only produce tyranny and privation. Nobody is comfortable laying in Procrustes' Iron Bed. Yet all too many are eager to stuff others into it.

The reason for all this, of course, is a legitimization myth (as the professor notes), which is currently the "Rule of Law", and it's resultant lemma of the "Nuremburg Defense" and other similar "Horizontal Enforecment" schemes. Speaking of such legitimization myths, leads me back to both the most profound book I recently read and the book that turned me on to liberty in the first place. Larken Rose's The Most Dangerous Superstition takes a core myth of the statists, and stakes it as effectively as the Professor kills the "Rule of Law". The collectivist argument of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' rests on the idea that some groups and individuals empowered thereby somehow transubstantiate and are allowed authority that is not granted to any single individual in said group. This argument basically falls on it's face without taking the axiom of synergy in groups (sum(parts) > sum(parts)) on faith.

Yet I realized that despite the stark clarity of Larken's message it was really the same thing that Bastiat tried to say in The Law. When one really asks "What is Justice" like Bastiat did, you realize that the collective notion of providing social justice can not be legitimate, nor can it produce society or justice. All it can do is exalt some at the expense of others, leading to shouts of "...but what about MY pillage???" until the situation degenerates into "everybody robs everyone", when true justice means "Nobody robs." Meanwhile, society collapses due to no rational expectation that deferred gratification will pay off. Every city is renamed Barter Town, because everyone was too busy playing Master Blaster to realize that they should have been trying to escape from thunderdome.

I think I'll leave with a passage from Professor Hasnas' The obviousness of Anarchy:

...if people were ever to seriously question whether government is really productive of order, popular support for government would almost instantly collapse.

It certainly did for me, and it will for you too, if you seek the truth earnestly. One need but look around like the professor suggests. I will add one thing to his essay on "National Defense" -- Look Around. Washington's centralized army lost almost every battle whilst the militia pushed the British off of the colonies.