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Of course, as unfavorable as these power asymmetries can be here in the modern-day US, they could be a whole lot worse – and in many places and times throughout history, they have been. The only reason why we aren’t, say, having to submit to the absolute rule of private feudal warlords nowadays (as opposed to just having to deal with private companies offering lousy working conditions) is because we have a government strong enough to keep such would-be oppressors in check. Without any kind of government protection at all, we’d find ourselves in a much less stable – and much nastier – situation; and unfortunately, there’s a long list of countries (including modern ones) whose examples can attest to this. As David Atkins writes:

[When] all central authority and protection break down completely, […] power localizes into the hands of local criminals and feudal/tribal warlords with little compunction about abusing and terrorizing the local population (e.g., feudal France, Afghanistan, Somalia, western Pakistan, etc.). As I said before:

Feudalism is the inevitable historical consequence of the decline of a centralized cosmopolitan state. That’s because the exercise of power by those in a position to wield it does not end with the elimination of federal authority: rather, it simply shifts to those of a more localized, more tyrannical, and less democratically accountable bent.

Urban street gangs in under-policed neighborhoods, mafias in under-taxed countries, and groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon invariably step in to fill the void where government fails.

And Fareed Zakaria puts it this way:

Without a government capable of protecting property and human rights, press freedoms and business contracts, antitrust laws and consumer demands, a society gets not the rule of law but rule of the strong. If one wanted to see what the absence of government produces, one need only look at Africa—it is not a free-market paradise.

From the comfort of our current position here in the First World, where things like outright violence and subjugation have largely been reduced to rare exceptions to the general norm of peaceful coexistence, we can easily be lulled into thinking that maybe we don’t really need all this government intervention to keep people from turning to coercion and abuse. After all, most people behave well enough and don’t have any problem getting along and respecting each other’s autonomy, right? So why should we expect that this would be any different in the absence of government? Well, it may be true that most people who’ve been raised in an environment where violence and subjugation have been mostly stamped out won’t generally be inclined to engage in those behaviors even if given the free opportunity to do so. But what most people are inclined to do isn’t really the thing we have to worry about here. There are unfortunately plenty of people for whom it would feel perfectly natural and rational to use coercion and even physical force to get what they wanted if there was nothing stopping them. So if peaceful coexistence is what we prefer, we have to have some mechanism through which we can stop such people from running roughshod over everybody else. In other words, we have to have a government that’s capable of using its coercive abilities to stand in the way of theirs. As Steven Pinker writes:

[Thomas] Hobbes’s analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a “pathology” except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.

But Hobbes is famous for presenting not just the causes of violence but a means of preventing it: “a common power to keep them all in awe.” His commonwealth was a means of implementing the principle “that a man be willing, when others are so too … to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.” People vest authority in a sovereign person or assembly who can use the collective force of the contractors to hold each one to the agreement, because “covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”

A governing body that has been granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes’s reasons for quarrel. By inflicting penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates the profitability of invading for gain. That in turn defuses the Hobbesian trap in which mutually distrustful peoples are each tempted to inflict a preemptive strike to avoid being invaded for gain. And a system of laws that defines infractions and penalties and metes them out disinterestedly can obviate the need for a hair trigger for retaliation and the accompanying culture of honor. People can rest assured that someone else will impose disincentives on their enemies, making it unnecessary for them to maintain a belligerent stance to prove they are not punching bags. And having a third party measure the infractions and the punishments circumvents the hazard of self-deception, which ordinarily convinces those on each side that they have suffered the greater number of offenses. These advantages of third-party intercession can also come from nongovernmental methods of conflict resolution, in which mediators try to help the hostile parties negotiate an agreement or arbitrators render a verdict but cannot enforce it. The problem with these toothless measures is that the parties can always walk away when the outcome doesn’t come out the way they want.

Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique ever invented. Though we debate whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence. Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the law. Many historians argue that people acquiesced to centralized authorities during the Middle Ages and other periods to relieve themselves of the burden of having to retaliate against those who would harm them and their kin. And the growth of those authorities may explain the hundredfold decline in homicide rates in European societies since the Middle Ages. The United States saw a dramatic reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the nineteenth century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of professional police forces in the cities. The causes of the decline in American crime in the 1990s are controversial and probably multifarious, but many criminologists trace it in part to more intensive community policing and higher incarceration rates of violent criminals.

The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with a long tradition of civility. As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 a.m. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).

The generalization that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often overlooked in today’s still-romantic climate. Government in general is anathema to many conservatives, and the police and prison system are anathema to many liberals. Many people on the left, citing uncertainty about the deterrent value of capital punishment compared to life imprisonment, maintain that deterrence is not effective in general. And many oppose more effective policing of inner-city neighborhoods, even though it may be the most effective way for their decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets. Certainly we must combat the racial inequities that put too many African American men in prison, but as the legal scholar Randall Kennedy has argued, we must also combat the racial inequities that leave too many African Americans exposed to criminals. Many on the right oppose decriminalizing drugs, prostitution, and gambling without factoring in the costs of the zones of anarchy that, by their own free-market logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies. When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they cannot protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so with a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral argument that our current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of nonviolent people.) Schoolchildren are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.

Of course, Pinker also acknowledges that government power has to have reasonable limits, qualifying his arguments with the important caveat that we can’t just allow government to use coercive force against anyone at any time, lest it become an even bigger problem than the ones it was meant to solve:

Where Hobbes fell short was in dealing with the problem of policing the police. In his view, civil war was such a calamity that any government — monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy — was preferable to it. He did not seem to appreciate that in practice a leviathan would not be an otherworldly sea monster but a human being or group of them, complete with the deadly sins of greed, mistrust, and honor. […] (This became the obsession of the heirs of Hobbes who framed the American Constitution.) Armed men are always a menace, so police who are not under tight democratic control can be a far worse calamity than the crime and feuding that go on without them. In the twentieth century, according to the political scientist R. J. Rummel in Death by Government, 170 million people were killed by their own governments. Nor is murder-by-government a relic of the tyrannies of the middle of the century. The World Conflict List for the year 2000 reported:

The stupidest conflict in this year’s count is Cameroon. Early in the year, Cameroon was experiencing widespread problems with violent crime. The government responded to this crisis by creating and arming militias and paramilitary groups to stamp out the crime extrajudicially. Now, while violent crime has fallen, the militias and paramilitaries have created far more chaos and death than crime ever would have. Indeed, as the year wore on mass graves were discovered that were tied to the paramilitary groups.

The pattern is familiar from other regions of the world (including our own) and shows that civil libertarians’ concern about abusive police practices is an indispensable counterweight to the monopoly on violence we grant the state.

This is absolutely right; as I hope I made clear in my last post, having government that’s completely unconstrained in its reach and power is one of the biggest mistakes a civilization can make. Having said that, though, it’s also important to recognize that just because it’s possible to have too much of something doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have any amount of it at all. If that were the case, then we could just as easily point to endless examples of people who’ve been harmed by, say, technology – victims of car crashes and factory accidents and aerial bombings and so forth – and conclude that therefore technology is evil and we shouldn’t have any form of it whatsoever. Obviously, that would be a misguided conclusion to leap to, since the positive benefits of using technology well significantly outweigh the negative effects of using it badly. The fact that technology can have negative effects along with positive ones doesn’t mean that we should abandon its use entirely; it just means that we should keep working to make it better, safer, and more effective. And the same is true of government. If we see instances of bad governments producing bad results, that doesn’t mean that the solution is therefore to stop having any kind of government at all; it just means that we should work to make those governments better. To quote John Atcheson: “The solution to bad government is good government, not no government.” And if we allow ourselves to forget that principle – if we buy in to the anti-statist idea that political institutions aren’t really all that necessary at all – we set ourselves up for disaster, not just in terms of outright violence in the streets but in terms of practically every other kind of socio-civil dysfunction we might imagine. Again, this isn’t just hypothetical speculation; it’s something we can see for ourselves in all the real-world cases where political institutions have collapsed. As Francis Fukuyama explains:

The kinds of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian’s paradise. The region as a whole is a low-tax utopia, with governments often unable to collect more than about 10 percent of GDP in taxes, compared to more than 30 percent in the United States and 50 percent in parts of Europe. Rather than unleashing entrepreneurship, this low rate of taxation means that basic public services like health, education, and pothole filling are starved of funding. The physical infrastructure on which a modern economy rests, like roads, court systems, and police, are missing. In Somalia, where a strong central government has not existed since the late 1980s, ordinary individuals may own not just assault rifles but also rocket-propelled grenades, antiaircraft missiles, and tanks. People are free to protect their own families, and indeed are forced to do so. Nigeria has a film industry that produces as many titles as India’s famed Bollywood, but films have to earn a quick return because the government is incapable of guaranteeing intellectual property rights and preventing products from being copied illegally.

The degree to which people in developed countries take political institutions for granted was very much evident in the way that the United States planned, or failed to plan, for the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq. The U.S. administration seemed to think that democracy and a market economy were default conditions to which the country would automatically revert once Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was removed, and seemed genuinely surprised when the Iraqi state itself collapsed in an orgy of looting and civil conflict. U.S. purposes have been similarly stymied in Afghanistan, where ten years of effort and the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars have not produced a stable, legitimate Afghan state.

Political institutions are necessary and cannot be taken for granted. A market economy and high levels of wealth don’t magically appear when you “get government out of the way”; they rest on a hidden institutional foundation of property rights, rule of law, and basic political order. A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous “wisdom of crowds” are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that “institutions matter”: poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions.

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