In 1994, Sam Francis originally coined a term: “anarcho-tyranny.” He described this phenomenon as “the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.”
In a previous article (and in an forthcoming paper), utilizing Rothbard’s typology of intervention, it was argued that the state—following coercive taxation and monopolization or competition suppression—can intervene through doing “nothing,” that is, paid non-delivery of promised and monopolized service. The core elements of interventionist non-intervention include 1) the binary intervention of coercive taxation where citizens are forced to pay for a service regardless of whether or not they receive it; 2) the triangular interventions of monopolization or competition suppression where the state claims exclusive domain over the service provision; and, 3) non-delivery wherein the state then fails or refuses to provide the monopolized service for which it has extracted payment. These three are the minimum requirements for interventionist non-intervention. Additionally, intensifying elements may be added, which include prohibition of self-help alternatives, the maintenance of the coercive framework, and legal immunity from consequences of non-delivery.
Interventionist non-interventionism combines these elements to create something qualitatively different from other forms of government failure or intervention. This is not deregulation, in which all regulatory and coercive elements are removed; it is not privatization, since the state maintains its monopoly; it is not austerity, since the revenue extraction continues; and it is not anarchy, since the state actively prevents voluntary order. In this way, non-delivery—the state doing “nothing”—also becomes a coercive intervention. The specific combination of extraction, monopolization, and non-delivery creates systematic harm while preventing solutions.
While there is overlap with the concept of “anarcho-tyranny,” there is an important distinction between anarcho-tyranny and interventionist non-intervention. The concept of anarcho-tyranny implies in the first part of the term—anarchy—a total absence of government involvement, however, that is often not the case. It is not that there is pure anarchy—absence of government—allowed in selective cases and tyranny in other cases, but rather that the “anarchy” (disorder) described by anarcho-tyranny is state-imposed disorder. This chaos and disorder (termed “anarcy”) happens within, and largely because of, the state system, not independent of it.
Anarcho-tyranny implies that what citizens often experience are merely two polar and problematic extremes—total absence of the state and the repressive, over-active presence of the state. The problem with this analysis—while useful colloquially—is that it presents “anarchy” and tyranny as two opposite and problematic problems on a spectrum, as if the lack of the state and the tyranny of the state are qualitatively equal problems. In actuality, the modern states are involved in both of these elements. Francis does seem to make this point, perhaps demonstrating that “anarchy” may not be the most precise term for what he describes:
You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things—corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation—but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them. Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state [or other criminals the state ignores]. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin. (emphasis added)
Here, Francis basically argues a similar definition and description of interventionist non-interventionism—naming it anarcho-tyranny—but this overlooks the fact that what he describes takes place within and because of the state paradigm. He admits that mere anarchy—absence of government—does not accurately describe the situation he observes, but that the state is there but “the state does not perform. . .” Government is strategically tyrannical and strategically absent, but this all takes place within the state system and because the nature of the state makes paid non-delivery a viable and tempting option.
Defining situations with precise terminology is important. In this case, anarcho-tyranny—contradistinguished from interventionist non-interventionism—implies that, in certain cases, there is too much government (tyranny) and in certain cases there is not enough government (anarchy). This entails that state elites simply need to change their priorities, and that more state control in certain cases is necessary when the problems are actually created by the nature of the state system, its monopolization of services, and its paid non-delivery of services.
Interventionist non-intervention, not anarcho-tyranny, is the predictable result of state monopolization, guaranteed revenue, and subsequent abandonment of services. The state has not disappeared or become absent; it has monopolized or nearly monopolized service provision, coercively taxed for revenue, and then abandoned its “obligation” to provide the service. In short, it is not anarcho-tyranny, but rather tyranny in different forms—tyranny in extraction, tyranny in prohibition, and tyranny in abandonment. This phenomenon is a combination of binary and triangular interventions.
Misesian Insights and Bureaucracy
The insights of both Mises and Rothbard implied—with one small step—this very phenomenon, even if they did not specify it outright.
Mises’s Bureaucracy makes the case that the state’s guaranteed revenues disable true economic calculation and insulate it from the discipline of profit and loss. No private firm could survive by charging customers for undelivered goods and services. Yet the state—enjoying monopoly and compulsion—can even extract revenue for services incompletely provided, poorly provided, or even services never provided. This reality explains how interventionist non-interventionism is even possible: only a monopolist—exempt from market feedback and discipline—could enjoy the peculiar privilege of paid non-delivery. In fact, the incentives make total sense from a public choice perspective: if revenue is guaranteed, why even bother expending energy and resources to provide the services? If an individual is given a choice between paid delivery of a service, which involves opportunity costs, and paid non-delivery of a service, paid non-delivery often appears rational.
When a government coercively taxes citizens, gives a bureaucracy a budget (which is incentivized to expand) to provide some service, incentivizes not solving the problem (making it irrelevant), and then the bureaucracy either creates a service or offers a contract to private companies to provide the service (inviting cronyism), the service is disconnected from the consumer who has already been required to pay for it. Putting his finger on the essential issue, Mises wrote, “In public administration there is no connection between revenue and expenditure.” Lacking profit and loss, such providers have no feedback mechanism concerning how much to supply relative to how much consumers demand. Further, there is little to no competition in this process (though the free market sometimes provides competitive alternatives to state-provided services). Even assuming the best intentions, market decisions become political decisions.
Further, in another direction, bureaucracies—though receiving funds at taxpayer expense—may not have adequate resources to meet their official obligations, thus resulting in shortages, unsatisfactory performance, unresponsiveness, and/or selective service delivery. Thus, the combination of binary and triangular interventions can lead to interventionist non-intervention wherein the state monopolizes or nearly monopolizes the provision of some good or service, taxes the populace to pay for it, and then fails to deliver or even refuses to deliver the paid-for service.
Mises seemed to generally, although not totally, assume that a government service provider will actually provide some amount of the promised service. While Mises acknowledged shortages and inefficiencies—lesser forms of paid non-delivery—it seems he was one simple step away from another logical alternative: bureaucratic structures and incentives might also make it viable and rational for government service providers to simply refuse to provide service. If there is a monopoly in a system where the state severely limits or eliminates private competition, the net taxpayers pay for the system whether it serves them or not.
Rothbardian Insights
Fundamentally, as Rothbard recognizes, the main economic issue of government services is the disconnect between revenue extracted and service provided. When the service provided is disconnected from voluntary payment, the market mechanisms of prices, opportunity costs, economic calculation, supply meeting demand, and profits are removed. The service provider receives revenue whether the consumer benefits or not. In fact, the service provider—whether a government bureau or a government contractor—receives revenue whether the service is provided or not. Writes Rothbard,
The resources needed to supply the free governmental service are extracted from the rest of production. Payment is made, however, not by users on the basis of their voluntary purchases, but by a coerced levy on the taxpayers. A basic split is thus effected between payment and receipt of service. This split is inherent in all government operations. (emphasis in original)
And again,
On the free market, in short, the consumer is king, and any business firm that wants to make profits and avoid losses tries its best to serve the consumer as efficiently and at as low a cost as possible. In a government operation, in contrast, everything changes. Inherent in all government operation is a grave and fatal split between service and payment, between the providing of a service and the payment for receiving it. The government bureau does not get its income as does the private firm, from serving the consumer well or from consumer purchases of its products exceeding its costs of operation. No, the government bureau acquires its income from mulcting the long-suffering taxpayer. Its operations therefore become inefficient, and costs zoom, since government bureaus need not worry about losses or bankruptcy; they can make up their losses by additional extractions from the public till. (emphasis in original)
After reading this quote, plus others, it seems that Rothbard—like Mises—was one simple step away from interventionist non-intervention, in fact, Rothbard’s argumentation infers it. Due to the inherent and fundamental split between service and payment, insulating government services from losses for poor performance, it follows that the same reality also shields government from losses for non-performance. There is no incentive for government actors to give up monopolization or coerced revenue extraction, however, the simple fact of the disutility of labor creates a powerful incentive for them to give up performance of the service altogether or at least curtail it severely.
The severance of the vital connection between revenue and service, the increased demand on public services that are declared “free,” the absence of economic calculation to guide the allocation of scarce resources, the absence of profit for satisfactory service and insulation from loss, the full or partial monopolization of services and the absence of competitive pressure from valued alternatives, the disutility of labor, and the costs of service fulfillment versus the benefits of non-delivery all tend toward interventionist non-interventionism—monopolized services are guaranteed revenue and lead to the rational policy of paid non-delivery. While Rothbard may not have stated it directly, his analysis infers interventionist non-interventionism.
Lastly, it is not a leap to say that, since Rothbard understood that interventions—like all human action—necessarily take place through time and are rarely isolated, singular events, his analysis leads to the likelihood that the state would perform both binary and triangular interventions in a process or combination. Recognizing the combination of factors mentioned above—monopolization, coercive taxation, limited resources, lack of economic calculation, and protection from losses—it seems only natural that Rothbard’s analysis points to the reality of paid non-delivery or interventionist non-interventionism. Rather than creating a new category altogether, this article simply draws a conclusion which is inferred in the work of both Mises and Rothbard.
