Hatzopoulos Ioannis
During the last two centuries there were proposed and tested by the “system” various ideologies on how people to live together and be happy. Communism, socialism, facism, democracy, etc.
However, although anarchy was there it has not been tested yet, and as I understand this is what you propose to do. I personally do not trust any paternalistic ideology including anarchy because they fit to the description of F. Niche who considers ideology a donkey that people follow to find their happiness.
I have a quite different view which is summarized in my work concerning education and if you are interesting you may find it in the following links: http://www.env.aegean.gr/labs/Remote_sensing/EnglishBlock/publications/Hatzopoulos-Hsss-Us.pdf http://www.webmazine.org/issues/bull237/documents/rightWrong.pdf
According to my views if there are individuals who care about people and quality in life they have to look deeply inside the human mind and try to free it from the intellectual rape which is persistently and methodically applied by the system. With other words they have to help people develop a healthy mind which is obtained by the effort of the logic to keep balancing desire and anger (Plato The Republic).
To achieve this healthy mind state it is important to understand the destructive mechanisms used by the system to disturb this balance through the intellectual rape process as follows:
(a) wildification mechanisms to increase the anger,
(b) marketing mechanisms to increase the desire and
(c) excessive faith and mutual support mechanisms to neutralize the mind.
Professor Ioannis (John) N. Hatzopoulos
University of the Aegean, Department of the Environment Visiting professor at Chapman University, Orange CA, USA
Tel. (714) 289-2016 E-Mail: ihatz@aegean.gr
www.env.aegean.gr/labs/Remote_sensing/EnglishBlock/Remote_sensing2.htm
GIVE ANARCHY A CHANCE
The recent financial crisis confirms that anarchy is much better than democracy. Only kleptocrats and looters do better in democracy.
Wars, terror, massacres, and misery are instigated by governments, not people. Anarchy is an ideal limit;
the closer a system is to anarchy, the better it is. We should all strive for anarchy now. Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862) was an important early influence in individualist anarchist thought in the United States and Europe.
Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, and tax resister. Celebrated economist Murray Rothbard(1926 – 1995) constructed the theory of individualist anarchism and proved it’s the best possible political system on Earth.
Greece, the cradle of democracy, has become the cradle of kleptocracy. Since democracy has deteriorated to kleptocracy, especially in Greece, citizens now consider anarchy.
Murray Rothbard defines the state as that institution which possesses one of the following properties: it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as taxation; and it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service over a given territorial area.
Anarchist society is one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
The Rothbardian definition of the state is not arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history.
The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state.
To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways.
Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors.
If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership.
Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way coercive.
Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term coercion can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it physical violence or the threat thereof, with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument.
What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion. It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare.
In short, the state claims and exercises a monopoly of crime over its territorial area.
The second criticism Rothbard would like to defuse is the common charge that anarchists assume that all people are good and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society.
Rothbard confesses that he does not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess – and Rothbard does not believe that they are open to the charge – he certainly does not adopt this view.
Rothbard assumes with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In Rothbard’s view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal.
If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime – theft, oppression, mass murder – on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
In a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are good in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos.
Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection.
The anarchist view holds that, given the nature of man, given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad.
The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that needs to be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
Many people think the state is vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced.
Rothbard’s contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection.
Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection.
We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task.
All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder.
No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
It is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives.
Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men.
Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family.
In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.”
Rothbard submits that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state.
When we start from zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
The anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry.
To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on?
Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market.
Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society. One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible.
Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light.
Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible.
Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service
