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Carl Watner (1948-)
Historian, author, has written for Reason, Libertarian Forum, and The Journal of Libertarian Studies. Publisher and editor of The Voluntaryist.
Voluntaryism is the doctrine that relations among people should be by mutual consent, or not at all. It represents a means, an end, and an insight. Voluntaryism does not argue for the specific form that voluntary arrangements will take; only that force be abandoned so that individuals in society may flourish. As it is the means which determine the end, the goal of an all voluntary society must be sought voluntarily. People cannot be coerced into freedom. Hence, the use of the free market, education, persuasion, and non-violent resistance as the primary ways to change people's ideas about the State. The voluntaryist insight, that all tyranny and government are grounded upon popular acceptance, explains why voluntary means are sufficient to attain that end.
Voluntaryism is a dual doctrine, having both a positive and a negative side. As a brand of anarchism it is the doctrine that all coercive government (what most people would refer to as "the State") should be voluntarily abandoned; that all invasions of individual self-ownership rights should cease. This is its negative side. Its positive side is that all the affairs of people should be conducted on a voluntary basis. It does not argue for the specific form that voluntary arrangements will take; only that the sovereignty of the individual must remain intact, except where the individual coerced has already aggressed upon the sovereignty of another non-aggressive individual.
Voluntaryism does not require of people that they violently overthrow their government, or use the electoral process to change it; merely that they shall cease to support their government, whereupon it will fall of its own dead weight. If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself.
The attempt to use governmental or political processes to reform or abolish the evils of coercion is not a voluntaryist means because it rests on coercion. The distinguishing marks of voluntaryism -- that it is at once both nonviolent and non-electoral in its efforts to convince people to voluntarily abandon the State -- set it apart from all other methods of social change. The voluntaryist insight into the nature of political power does not permit people to violently overthrow their government or even use the electoral process to change it, but rather points out that if they shall withdraw their cooperation from the system, it will no longer be able to function or enforce its will.
Nor do they realize that the power of any government is dependent on the cooperation of the people it governs, and that government power varies inversely with the noncooperation of the people... As people accept the structural trap called politics, they fail to realize that their actions support and undergird the State. Their demand for government services - from Social Security benefits to police protection - is what fuels the State.
Most people are capable of high values and responsible behavior, but once they enter the seductive garden of politics, they no longer notice that its wonders cannot be reconciled with individual responsibility and their own personal moral values of honesty and hard work. It is not usually apparent that what they are doing or supporting is vicious and would not pass the test of ordinary decency. So long as the criminality is veiled by the political process, most people accept it because they do not see that it conflicts with their basic values. The main tragedy of political government is not only that the voters are the ones pointing the gun, but, most importantly, that the indecency of this act is concealed from them by the political process. It is the concealment that is the tragedy. The concealment is not the result of some conspiracy by some distant elite: it is inherent in the political process.
Each person, by voting, sanctions the violence used by agents of the State. The link in the chain of responsibility for that violence surrounds each voter when he pulls down the lever in the voting booth. Voting is an act of presumptive violence because each voter assumes the right to appoint a political guardian over other human beings. No individual voter or even a majority of voters have such a right.
Revolutionary implications stem from the simple voluntaryist insight that no ruler exists without the cooperation and/or acquiescence of the majority of his or her subjects to be ruled. One might say that nonviolence is "the political equivalent of the atomic bomb." To call nonviolent resistance "passive" or "for sissies" is to totally misunderstand its import. As Hannah Arrendt pointed out, the use of nonviolent resistance is one of the most active and efficient ways of action ever devised by human beings because it cannot be countered by fighting.
Freedom and private property are total, indivisible concepts that are compromised wherever and whenever the State exists. Since all things are related to one another in our complicated social world, if one man's freedom or private property may be violated (regardless of the justification), then every man's freedom and property are insecure.
Power to compel people, to control other people's lives, is what political power is all about.
It is a contradiction to say that aristocracy or voluntaryism asks for privilege, which can only be upheld by violence. Coercive grants of power are contrary both to the doctrine of perfection and voluntary means. What the aristocrat and the voluntaryist want is that people come to share their attitudes toward life. Neither "may accept nothing which others may not have upon precisely the same terms, and the terms are unremitting, passionate effort. ... It is not a matter of birth, or occupation, or education. It is an attitude of mind carried into daily action..."
Certainly some behavior may be irrational, vicious, immoral, religious, irreligious, (etc., etc.) but the first question the voluntaryist asks is: "Is it truly voluntary?" The voluntaryist spirit attacks the State on precisely this basis: although certain government goods or services may be essential, it is not essential that they be provided by government. Whether we object to what governments do (i. e., the provision of whatever product or public service, whether it be public schools, the post office, etc.) is beside the point. Voluntaryists oppose the State because it relies on force for its very existence. We oppose the State because of its means, regardless of its ends.
A regime of proprietary justice allows all economic systems to compete on a voluntary basis and there is no reason why voluntary cooperatives could not exist side by side with voluntary communes or voluntary capitalist companies. How people choose to conduct their voluntary affairs in the absence of the State is up to them.
In advocating an all voluntary society, voluntaryists place the burden of proof on those who wish to justify any form of the coercive State. The advocate of any form of invasive coercion -- State or non-State -- is in a logically precarious position. Coercion does not convince, nor is it any kind of argument at all. In fact, the initiation of invasive force is a confession of the failure of the invader's persuasive powers.
Health care or vaccination may be important, but if they are to be achieved by force (the means) they "ipso facto" become tainted. If those who advocate compulsory vaccination or State health care must rely on force to accomplish their goals, then there is something drastically wrong with their ends. Vaccination or health care is either good or bad. Its goodness removes the need for compulsion and its badness destroys the right to coerce those who oppose it.
Similar arguments may be applied against the State itself. Either it is good or bad. Its goodness should avoid the need to apply invasive force (for it should be possible to persuade people of its goodness) and its badness already speaks for itself. If a government cannot rely wholly on voluntary support, then it deserves not to exist. Statists, in their anxiety to coerce others, already demonstrate their own lack of faith in the prescription they suggest.
Voluntaryists do not operate on the principle that everyone necessarily knows his or her own best interest, but only that everyone should have the right to pursue his or her interests as they deem best. "What is being asserted is the right to act with one's own person and property and not the necessary wisdom of such action." So long as you "do your own thing" with your "own" person and property you in no way violate the spirit of voluntaryism.
The fact that the State coercively monopolizes the administration of justice (courts, police, and law code in a given geographic area) makes the State, and its employees, automatically suspect. If there are certain natural laws of justice, then there is no reason for government to become a coercive monopolist. Because the principles of justice are grounded in objective, natural laws, they fall within the province of human knowledge by all who choose to study them and reason them out. Just as we do not require a government to dictate what is right or wrong in steel-making, so we do not require a government to dictate standards and procedures in the realm of justice. If it is possible to verify objectively that one legal procedure is valid, and another not, then it does not matter who employs the procedure in question. We should look to reason and fact; not to government. On the opposing hand, if there is no such thing as natural law and natural justice, then government could certainly not claim to administer a thing which did not exist. In such case there would be no need for government.
The voluntaryist spirit attacks government and coercive monopolies where it hurts them the most: it destroys whatever legitimacy they lay claim to and urges the withdrawal of the consent and cooperation on which all organizations depend.
"The freedom to discover truth" is what competition is all about. It is only through voluntary exchanges that the truth of the market place can be discovered. "The subjectivity of human wants" implies that only individuals participating in an exchange can be the legitimate judge of their own interests. "Competition is a learning process" where self-ownership and property rights "provide an incentive to make individuals responsible for their mistakes and give them an incentive to learn." It is only under voluntaryism that this learning process and self-responsibility are able to exist.
With freedom, in the end we might attain our highest desires, but on the other hand, compulsion assures us that we would lose both freedom and our most highly cherished ends. A poor freedom is always better than a rich slavery.
Voluntaryists have a clear understanding of the nature of power (what they call "the voluntaryist insight") -- that all governments and human institutions depend on the consent and cooperation of its victims.
Governments know that they can terrorize individuals into submitting to tyranny by grabbing the body as hostage and thus hoping to destroy the spirit (of conscience and resistance within the individual). But if one repudiates the body and will have nothing to do with it, the spirit remains free. This is the essence of total non-cooperation with one's oppressors.
If people think their activities influence the outcome of elections and policy, they are complacent in accepting the outcome. The appearance is political freedom gives power to the people to direct their own political destiny, when in reality they are being manipulated by a system designed to minimize the effects of their input and insulate the decision-making process. Political freedom is no freedom at all.
Common sense and reason tell us nothing can be right by legislative enactment if it is not already right by nature. If the politicians direct us to do something that reason opposes, we should defy the government.
Moral action alone is sufficient to nullify State legislation. Legislation is not needed to abolish other legislation. Harmful and unjust political laws should simply be ignored and disobeyed. We do not need to use the State to abolish the State, any more than we need to embrace war to fight for peace. Such methodology is self-contradictory, and self-defeating, and inconsistent.
Individuals make the world go round; individuals and only individuals exist. No man has any duty towards his fellow men except to refrain from the initiation of violence. Nothing is due a man in strict justice but what is his own. To live honestly is to hurt no one and to give to every one his due. Justice will not come to reign unless those who care for its coming are prepared to insist upon its value and have the courage to speak out against what they know to be wrong. Let it not be said that I did not speak out against tyranny.
The use of coercion to compel virtue eliminates its possibility, for to be moral, an act must be uncoerced. Freedom of choice is a necessary ingredient for the achievement of virtue.
Violence contains none of the energies that enhance a civilized human society. At best, it is only capable of expanding the material existence of a few individuals, while narrowing the opportunities of most others.
It is impossible to 'wage a war for peace' or 'fight' politics be becoming political.
Might does not make right; the end never justifies the means; nor may one person coercively interfere in the life of another.
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