Justice without a monopoly

par Roman Perdeanu

Libres!!, Nr. 69, pp. 165-166.

“Freedom must be restored in all industries still organized in common, the judiciary and the police as well as education, religion, transportation, manufacturing, tobacco, etc.”

– Gustave de Molinari

Without justice, a society descends into crime and corruption. To bring justice requires an organized force. Everyone agrees. Shall the abolition of the state monopoly be discussed, the first concern is always about how to organize justice without this monopoly. Yet this very same universal concern is what ensures that, once free, people organize themselves effectively toward this common and urgent goal, whereas a monopoly consists precisely in preventing them from doing so! Among a free people, each individual is both free and responsible for (i.e. is owner of) his own defense, his own justice. One may choose to delegate (or not) the partial or total management of it to whomever one wills, on a free market, according to one's own interests, one's own values. Associations, insurance firms, alliances, confederacies naturally arise: union is strength. But where there is no monopoly, this union happens under the condition of a voluntary membership, which is also the freedom to leave the agreement at any time, if the terms have become hateful or just short of being the most beneficial. A forced union is rape. A permanent forced union is slavery.

Why don't these groups wage war to each other? Their interest refrains them. For war is expensive. No one wants to wage war at his own expense, only at the expense of his subjects, fruits of past conquests, and his enemies, desired fruits of a future conquest. Now a state monopoly is exactly what allows a ruling caste to seize the wealth of the conquered past and future. Only such a monopoly creates an incentive to large-scale war. And crime committed through this monopoly exceeds in fact all other forms of crime by several orders of magnitude. Just count the hundreds of millions of victims of various genocides, of prisoners of concentration camps, of people ruined and starved, the trillions hijacked by the Heads of States and their minions, and realize that between so-called public crime with a monopoly and so-called private crime without monopoly, the choice is easy. Where private criminals thrive, is precisely where honest people are prevented from defending themselves by this monopoly that leaves dishonest people act, out of incompetence, corruption, indifference and malfeasance combined, in a phenomenon called anarcho-tyranny. There will always be isolated criminal psychopaths, outlaws regardless of the justice system. But there will be fewer of them in a society where individuals are treated as free and responsible adults, rather than as irresponsible children to be brainwashed, collectivized, oppressed. Now, except for these irreducible cases, war is the specific activity of an organized criminal class, overwhelmingly public or otherwise in bed with the state, and private in comparatively very small quantity.

Once this class is eliminated, how are honest people to settle their disputes? Their voluntary associations define in advance rules for resolving disputes: between members according to association by-laws, between members of different associations according to mutual agreements between associations. What if some members feel betrayed by their association? They can challenge it and appeal to other associations of which they are also members already or that they quickly join. The important point is that the power relations that ultimately resolve the conflict will be established after the facts are known and with hindsight, through the voluntary support of citizens toward one alliance or the other, defending one party or the other. This is the opposite of a system where the winner is known in advance, and where only matter the whims of the rulers, who are both judge and party in all conflicts. The rulers claim to be guarantors of justice. But who guarantees the rulers? They would have us believe that the people has control over these rulers, because they can sometimes choose between the right wing and the left wing of an Establishment which completely controls them rest of the time? And they would have us believe that when conversely each individual can change his alliances at any time without any monopoly or duopoly, the people's control over the resulting balance of power would be non-existent?

Where people voluntarily choose their judges, those whose decisions often lead to scandal and are rejected, thus contributing a negative value, making consensus harder to reach, will soon lose their customers. Those whose decisions command respect because they are based on facts established beyond doubt and on principles as clear as they are just,will make a fortune providing this vital service: creating appeasement. To err is human, and even the best judges will have to get insured against their own mistakes: for, like everyone else, judges will be fully accountable, civilly and criminally, for their mistakes and their breaches of trust, if, after an appeal, it turns out their decisions were made out of incompetence or malice. In addition, as professionals, they will be held to higher standards of behavior than the general public (not lower ones). This is the opposite of a monopoly system of pseudo-justice, where the bureaucrats aping justice claim an usurped immunity for all their decisions and criminally prosecute those who dare criticize their decisions and their authority.

The State, through its subsidized schools and mass-media, indoctrinates us with propaganda about its supposed indispensability. And so citizens here have as much trouble imagining the organization of justice without the State that oppresses them as North Koreans have trouble imagining the supply of food without the State that starves them. Yet nothing is simpler than that: just look at what happens, has always happened and will always happen where no monopoly dominates: once free, people organize themselves efficiently towards their own interests, without undergoing the public servage to a monopoly that exploits them in its own interest. For every interest is private. Badges and uniforms, wigs and dresses do not magically transform into altruistic angels humans who are just as selfish as others. What they do is ensure that the members of the ruling gang will protect each other against the attempts by the oppressed public to achieve justice and freedom. That is why the first issue with State justice is not his proverbial slowness, nor the exorbitant cost of its operation, nor that of its prison system, nor its chronic inability to distinguish between innocent and guilty; this issue is not even the inhumanity of its bureaucratic machine and its penalties either mechanical or arbitrary, sometimes excessive, sometimes lax, always biased towards friends of the monopoly; the first issue with monopoly “justice”, is the very corruption of any notion of justice.