Since voters implicitly recognize the virtual meaninglessness of their one vote, they have little incentive to inform themselves in detail about candidates, issues, and polices. As with any monopoly, there is a lack of incentive to provide high-quality services. Further, there is no reason to believe that localized violence resulting from disputes over private dispute resolution would be any greater than the amount of violence currently arising from the state’s clumsy, unjust, and inefficient dispute resolution and police services. My contention is that my imagined opponents are confusing a dispute over definition with a dispute over values. Okay, we must expand the definition to include the immediate threat of violence. Now we have a situation in which, if one wants dispute resolution services, one must go to the state. It is judging its own cause; resolving a dispute with another in its sole discretion. The common law system was and is based on application of a few essential principles to a wide variety of different scenarios. Anarchy, as we are using the term, is a value-neutral, descriptive term for situations in which there is no common authority governing the relations of parties. However, all we have done is create a new form of anarchy, because now, there is an anarchic relationship between the newly created state and its own citizens.
Courts in the United States, for example, have elaborate and fairly inflexible rules of procedure many of which seem designed to serve the needs of the court, not the litigants. Republic – government strictly limited by a constitution to narrowly defined functions such as national defense, police protection, and resolution of disputes through courts. This lack of solicitude is the direct and inescapable result of the very monopoly powers we are told courts must have! If this happens in the middle of a wrestling match, however, it is not a breach of the peace because I have his consent. Returning to the original point, it is misleading to say that self-government is anarchic since that fails to distinguish self-government from all other forms of government, all of which have inescapable anarchic elements. For example, when people use the term civil disorder, they are usually referring to riots and other forms of widespread acts of violence against persons or property. The response by those charged with protecting people and property is part and parcel of the criminal’s breach of the peace.
In fact, most people could not understand most legislation even if they spent several hours reading it. So we learn that the pillowy androgyne is, in fact, male and suffering from a pituitary deficiency that has kept him closeted for all his 30 years and dependent on family in a warren of low-rise hutong slums now slated to be flattened for high-rise development. The truth is, there is no human political system imaginable that is not anarchic! Do you mean to suggest there is another political system better than democracy? We must seriously question whether the primitive and ungainly political technology of democracy can possibly keep the peace in tomorrow’s world. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. The government can only exercise powers delegated to it by the people. At least some portion of the high crime in these states can be attributed to democracy’s inefficiencies at smoothing ethnic and religious tensions.