[Editor’s Note: The following post TDV legal correspondent, Jim Karger, who reports this week from Puebla, Mexico]
Regardless of your brand of Voluntarism, let me make a suggestion:
Lighten up.
When I read the screeds of some Libertarians and anarchists, including some of my own, they often come across as strident and arrogant. A good recent example is Paul Craig Roberts, one of the most articulate, well-credentialed critics of the U.S. government. His otherwise well-reasoned arguments are made less persuasive when he engages in name-calling and hyperbole. His excellent piece, "America: Totally Discredited", sounds whiny and even juvenile in places when he uses adjectives like "fool," "moron," and "liars." Hyperbole is neither necessary nor effective in rational argument. Solipsistic name-calling has never caused anyone to wake up. Indeed, belittling others who believe differently, regardless of merit, nets no converts. To the contrary, it results in defensiveness and the closing, rather than the opening, of other minds. One only need to read or listen to Ron Paul who has been a highly effective advocate of libertarian ideals not only because of his genius but because he is likable and his empathy for others radiates from his words and demeanor. Even icons on the left of the political spectrum admire and respect him.
Yesterday, I was reminded of the soft side of anarchy and voluntarism while visiting Puebla, Mexico. As our bus pulled up to the hotel in the center of this historic city of 3 million people, I saw a little girl, about 4 years old, through the window at an ice cream stand set up on the sidewalk. She was trying to get the attention of the owner, a woman doing a brisk business selling homemade ice creams. She at first ignored the pleas of the little girl, who was a little dirty but a lot precocious, who refused to give up. She danced, played the canisters of ice cream like bongos, tried to engage the owner in conversation, always smiling, laughing. I decided when I got off the bus that the first thing I would do was buy her the ice cream she was working so hard for. But before I could leave my seat, I saw the woman reach deep into one of the plastic buckets, scoop out ice cream and put it into a small cup. Without even looking, she handed it to the little girl who smiled and mouthed "gracias." The woman smiled gently, and then quickly went back to serving the paying class.
No government was involved in this transaction. No bureaucrat told the woman who likely supported an entire family with her ice cream stand that she didn't have the right permit, and no one outlawed the little girl from trying to garner the charitable attention of someone who was probably in the same spot 20 years earlier. No one waded through State paperwork that would somehow make the little girl entitled to her treat, rather than simply grateful for it.
One doesn't even have to live outside the Nanny State to see this dynamic. It even happens in the land of hustlers each and every day.
Rational self-interest expresses itself not in the virtue of selfishness in its ugliest manifestations but in responsibility assumed voluntarily by individuals who reach out for those who have been dealt a poor hand of cards. By voluntarily assuming that responsibility as individuals, we make government unnecessary. Pursuing our own short-term self-interests to the exclusion of the needs of others results in nothing other than the belief by a majority that a central authority is needed to sort it all out, to make it right. Those espousing various brands of voluntarism who stridently and loudly worship self-indulgence and consumption to the exclusion of the needs of others only insures the existence of the very state they so despise.
So, I am suggesting that voluntarism not only has a soft side, but is by its nature soft. At its core is the absence of force and the seeking of a meeting of the minds, of voluntary agreement. Those of us who do not want government taking money at the end of a gun and feeding the child on the street corner in Puebla know that we need to do it ourselves. Those who recognize that the failed and soon-bankrupt social and economic programs of the 1930s are not the answer to poverty should not extend that belief to deny that poverty is a problem or that it will magically self-rectify without voluntary acts of individual kindness.
Such is a way life here in Mexico where homelessness is rare even in the face of poverty and even absent a vast government social net. Why? Because families step up and voluntarily take care of their own. It is their history, their culture, and it was once our culture, too, until it was sacrificed at the altar of consumerism masking itself as rational self-interest.
Morris Berman, US expatriate and noted historian now living in Mexico observed in Why America Failed: The Roots Of Imperial Decline that “progress” is defined in the US strictly in terms of what is tangible. "What we lose, however," he observes, "is intangible, and thus it is difficult for most people to understand what they are actually losing. Is it progress to have forty-seven (or whatever) different types of razor blades available on the market? Is it progress to have dinner with a group of friends while half of them spend the evening talking on their cell phones (usually right at the dinner table) rather than to each other? Or when a group of Wal-Mart shoppers literally trample someone to death to get their hands on discounted DVD players, and then refuse to get out of the way when the medics arrive? If this is progress, I’m not sure we can endure much more of it."
Each of Berman's examples fall under the heading of self-interest, but there is nothing rational about them, not in the long-term. Berman cites Douglas LaBier, a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C., who contends the problem in the United States is an "empathy deficit disorder," a fancy term for not giving a damn about anybody but one's self." LaBier claims that empathy is a natural emotion, but that Americans unlearn it from an early age because ours is a society that focuses on acquisition and status and avoids inner reflection. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification." In fact, it is no justification at all, but should rather be the result of doing the right thing well, and the oft-forgotten part of the right thing is helping others less fortunate than one's self.
I submit that voluntarism works because of empathy, not in spite of it. While capitalism and rational self-interest define the best economic path forward, Vance Packard was right when he admonished us “to see that cherished values and integrity of the soul have more to do with a well-spent life than self-indulgence.”
When I got off the bus, I watched the little girl carefully, hoping against hope there was an adult somewhere close by that she called her own. Then I saw her Mother, sitting on the street, holding her little brother who was sleeping in her lap, as she held up her hand to the passing crowd. A few who passed put a peso or two in her hand, not asking for anything in return, not seeking any accolade, and probably not even understanding why they were giving on a conscious level, but intuiting a need to help, to preserve their own humanity and their culture to the exclusion of the state which strips all donative intent and empathy from the act of giving, an act essential to our humanity.
It is hard to know how this dialectic will play out, but I humbly suggest that those of us who genuinely believe that we can do better than government should start by spouting less cruel hyperbole at those who still promote the state as the answer and instead step forward to prove that it is not.
