Market anarchism

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Market anarchism (or free-market anarchism) is a label commonly used to describe a number of individualist anarchist philosophies that assert that all the institutions necessary for the function of a free market, such as money, police, and courts, should be provided by the market itself.^[1] That is, they oppose a compulsory monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. The term "free market" is used to denote non-coerced and non-fraudulent exchange of goods and services, which market anarchists believe necessitates the elimination of the state. The difference between state-provided defense and market provided defense is that the former is provided through taxation, while the latter is supported by voluntary payments.

The term "free-market anarchism" is used to label the philosophy of Murray Rothbard^[2], which is also referred to as anarcho-capitalism. Rothbardian free-market anarchists believe that property may only originate by being the product of labor, and may then only legitimately change hands by trade or gift. However, some market anarchists, such as Benjamin R. Tucker believe that land should not be considered to be owned if it is not being used or occupied. And, unlike anarcho-capitalists, they hold a normative conception of the labor theory of value where it was believed that if prices are not proportional to labor exerted then "usury" is taking place. However, they tended to believe that prices would align with labor in laissez-faire setting, so long as large disparities of wealth created by state interferance in the market were first dealt with. Market anarchists also include agorists^[3], who are “soft propertarians,” and voluntaryists.

Unlike anarcho-communists, market anarchists do not believe the inequality of wealth is necessarily a bad thing, though some may believe that some extreme disparities are harmful to the market and due in part to government intervention in the economy. They believe that the state has created a social structure of privileges handed out and enforced by government in a system they call a mixed economy or state monopoly capitalism.

Stefan Molyneux’s Lew Rockwell.com article on market anarchism, entitled, "Market Anarchism: Are You Guys Crazy or Just Nuts"^[4] defines market anarchism as:

"… a broad term referring to the theory that voluntary free market relationships can – and should – replace all existing coercive state authority. It is derived from taking the principle of the non-initiation of force to its ultimate conclusion, and accepting that if using violence is wrong for one person, then it is wrong for every person. If stealing is wrong for me as a private citizen, then it is also wrong for everyone – including those in the ‘government’."

[edit] Notes

^ Lavoie, Don. Democracy, Markets, and the Legal Order: Notes on the Nature of Politics in a Radically Liberal Society. Published in Liberalism and the Economic Order, by G. Tyler Miller. Cambridge University Press, 1993. p. 115
^ "This volume honors the foremost contemporary exponent of free-market anarchism. One contributor aptly describes Murray Rothbard as 'the most ideologically committed zero-State academic economists on earth'." Review by Lawrence H. White of Man, Economy, and liberty: Essays in honor of Murray N. Rothbard, published in Journal of Economic Literature, Vol XXVIII, June 1990, page 664; "[Rothbard's book, For a New Liberty,] synthesizes an advocacy of Lockean rights to life, liberty, property, and defense, an appeal to the free market as the most efficient and decentralized "social" device for the allocation of resources, and a sociological and historical analysis of the State as being inherently aggressive and exploitive. The product of this synthesis is Rothbard's free market anarchism." Review by Eric Mack of For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard, published in the American Political Science Review, Vol 71, p. 332
^ Interview with Samuel Edward Konkin III, Smashing the State for Fun and Profit Since 1969
^ http://www.lewrockwell.com/molyneux/molyneux23.html