Minarchism
Minarchism is the position that the state should be limited to protecting persons and property against aggression, and should do nothing else. Its characteristic list of legitimate functions is short: defence against invasion, police against domestic aggressors, and courts to adjudicate disputes. The term is generally attributed to Samuel Edward Konkin III, who coined it to distinguish limited-state libertarians from anarchist ones.[1]
Minarchism is often called the night-watchman state theory, after a phrase used dismissively by Ferdinand Lassalle and adopted by its defenders.
The argument
The minarchist case begins where the anarcho-capitalist case does, with the claim that aggression is illegitimate, and diverges over what follows. Minarchists hold that protection against aggression is the one service that cannot be supplied competitively without producing the very thing it is meant to prevent: competing agencies with the power to use force would, on this view, either fight or combine, and a single agency is preferable to either outcome. A limited state is therefore accepted not as a good in itself but as the least bad institutional answer to the problem of enforcement.
Robert Nozick gave the best-known version of the argument in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), attempting to show that a minimal state could arise from a condition of competing protective agencies through steps that violate no one's rights, and that no more than a minimal state can be justified.
The Rothbardian objection
Murray N. Rothbard and later Hans-Hermann Hoppe rejected the position on the ground that it exempts one agency from the rule it applies to everyone else. A state funded by taxation takes property without consent, and a state maintaining a territorial monopoly on adjudication does so by prohibiting competitors from offering a service they are otherwise entitled to offer. On this reading a "limited" state is not a small amount of aggression but a licensed one, and the limits are not enforceable, since the body that interprets them is the body they constrain.[2]
The historical form of the objection is that no minimal state has stayed minimal.
Who counts as a minarchist
The label is applied loosely and often anachronistically. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek defended a strictly limited state on consequentialist grounds and are commonly described as minarchists, though neither used the word and both were writing as classical liberals rather than as participants in a libertarian intramural debate. Ayn Rand argued for a government confined to police, armed forces and courts, financed voluntarily, but rejected the libertarian movement and its terminology. Care is needed in attributing the position to writers who predate it.
See also
References
- ↑ Gordon, David. "The Kochtopus vs. Murray N. Rothbard", 2008.
- ↑ Murray N. Rothbard. The Ethics of Liberty.