(SCENE:  at a chi-chi coffee shop in South Minneapolis.  Mitch BERG’s eyes go a little wide with sticker shock before he orders a light roast with room for cream and Splenda)

(As BERG turns to leave, he notices a table with three diners – Carpal POX, Garth MULLER and Viktor VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE.  He tries to slip out the door, but MULLER notices him).

MULLER:   Mitch!  Come over here! 

BERG:  OK.  (He puts his coffee on the table and sits).

POX:  You call yourself a libertarian-conservative.

BERG: Er – yeah, sure.  If we insist on labels, that’s  probably as accurate a label as possible. Provided you throw in “fiscal conservative, social libertarian and legal originalist”. 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  That is impossible.  Libertarianism isn’t compatible with Conservatism. 

BERG:  Perhaps.  That’s why I call myself a libertrian-conservative; small l, small c.  I believe in limited government.  

POX:  It’s impossible to “limit” government. 

BERG: Well, it’s certainly difficult.  We’re into three centuries of fighting that battle now. 

MULLER: That’s why we anarcho-libertarians advocate no government at all.

BERG: Well, good luck with that.  Seriously.  You find a way to abolish formal government, you let me know.  Keep us posted.  I’m all ears.

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  Most of the world’s problems come from government oppression.  That’s why we follow the “NAP”. 

MULLER:  The “Non-Aggression Principle”.

BERG:  Right.  Basically the Golden Rule – do unto others as  you’d like them to do unto you.  I got that. 

POX:  With government out of the way, people will follow the NAP. 

BERG:  Well, there you’re up to one of the two reasons I left the Big-L Libertarian Party.  Because for small communities, the “Non-Aggression Principle” works just hunky dory, for a while.  But then you get to one of the most timeless principles of human nature – one best articulated by Mr. Carlton, on the classic “Bob Newhart Show” back in the seventies.  “People are trash”. 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE: How cynical of you!

BERG:  Right.  Well, maybe not “trash”, but fundamentally corrupt.  It’s one of the basic principles of conservatism; people are by their nature troublesome creatures…

POX: …and so they need big, bad, macho government to keep them in line. 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  Yeah!

BERG:  Wow.  And you call me a cynic!  That’s one way of looking at it.  Another way is that people need to agree on a few ground rules by which people interact with each other, and when worse comes to worst, enforce those rules.

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE: EnFORCE!  See? 

BERG:  Well, yeah – there’s violence inherent in the system, yeah, yeah, I get it. 

POX:  The idea that people are fundamentally corrupt is a social construct. 

BERG:  So is the ideal that they’renotfundamentally corrupt. 

And since I’m being idealistic, let’s run it down.  There are exactly two legitimate reasons for “government”.  Jointly protect our society from those who’d do us harm, and ensure that contracts between people have some means to be enforced.  That’s it.   Government should – and must – be a free association of equals, mutually consenting to whatever rules are to be agreed on. 

POX:  Right.  Like government ever stays within limits. 

BERG:  Well, yeah – there’s constant tension between liberty and law.  And if you get to be idealistic-to-the-point-of-pollyannaish about how “anarchy” would play out, then I get to be idealistic about how “limited goverment” should work. 

Anyway, it’s the complete inability of a “libertarian” society to address either of those two communitarian demands – a reasonable level of security, and the ability to be reasonably certain contracts will be honored – that are why I left the Big-L in the first place. 

For example:  let’s say someone flies overhead in an Anarcho-Drone and shoots an Anarcho-Ray at every city, county, state, province, region, nation and other political boundary in the world.  Poof.   All government is dissolved.

MULLER:  Sounds good.

BERG:  Yep.  But then someone – let’s say those danged Methodists – decide they’ve taken enough guff from those darned Catholics. 

MULLER:  But they won’t.

BERG: Why?

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  How realistic is that? 

BERG:  Have you ever actually read history? 

POX:  Lots. 

BERG:  OK.  So you’re saying that if everyone treats others the way they want to be treated, nobody – no “have-nots”, no insane, no sociopaths, no nobody – will decide that it’s easier to take what they want, food or money or sex or whatever, than to get it the way everyone else does? 

MULLER:  I’ll just depend on the people in my voluntarily constituted group of anarcho-libertarian neighbors to help me out.

BERG:  You weren’t listening.  I didn’t say “Methodist”.  I said “Methodists”.  Plural.  They’ve ganged up – as society’s ne’er-do-wells often do, whether they’re Methodists, Crips, Gambinos, Thuggee or what have you.  And as your voluntarily-constituted neighbors – the ones within earshot of your house – see the Methodists tearing your house apart, perhaps they suddenly exercise their free will and don’t help out…

MULLER:  …well, that’s sure cynical of you.

BERG:  And let’s say they do, and you kill and drive off and capture some of the Methodists.  Then what?

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  We shoot them. 

BERG:  Because you can, right?  Your due process is whatever your animalistic emotions tell you it is after seeing what they did to Garth’s family?

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  Hell yeah!

BERG:  So when someone in your voluntarist anarcho-libertarian group falsely accuses you of a crime, you want that same sort of “due process?”

POX:  The “justice system” often fails today!

BERG:  Stipulated!  And irrelevant!  Except that ideals, in contact with nature – whether they’re your ideals or mine – always break down. 

But let’s be less alarmist and stop picking on Methodists.  Mr Pox – in your job, you get paid in cash in advance for the work you do, right?

POX:  Of course not.  That’s not the way business works.  But I make sure I convert any money I get into something of value as soon as I can…

BERG: …which is also great, and also irrelevant.  If your employer or client doesn’t pay you, what do you do? 

POX: I see what you’re doing, Berg.  You’re trying to back me into a corner!  But I’m not falling for that.  I support voluntary governments. 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  Think “Government by Subscription”.

MULLER:  Because why should I be tied to a government by dint of where I was born?

POX: Under this plan, people would voluntarily join groupings of people and pay, voluntarily, for the “services” – protection, courts, infrastructure, whatever – that they promise to provide. 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  And you can drop your subscription any time you want. 

BERG:  OK.  So a “subscription” usually implies some sort of contractual obligation; you pay a fee, you get a service for some length of time. 

POX:  Right.

BERG:  So if you pay your government for a month of service…

POX: …yep.

BERG: …and then, hypothetically, use six months of services – a fire, a police investigation, whatever…

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE: OK…

BERG:  And then decide to skip to a different voluntary government – let’s call it Government B – owing your first voluntary government, Government A, a ton of money or services, then what?

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  Then Government A goes after you in Government B’s court. 

BERG: What if Government B doesn’t recognize Government A’s claim as valid?

POX:  Then they fight it out. 

BERG:  How?  With what? 

POX:  I suppose worse comes to worst, it’s a form of warfare. 

BERG: Y’know, that sounds a lot like a series of “protection rackets” to me. 

MULLER:  Well, it’s all irrelevant.  Come “the Collapse”, everything will be anarchy. 

BERG: Why do you say that? 

MULLER:  People won’t be able to afford government. 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE: And then we’ll have peace. 

BERG:  Right.  Because the record of humanity when all hell breaks loose is so good.  Actually – I take that back.  90% of humanity does look out for each other pretty well.   LIke on 9/11 – without any authority around, the vast majority of the people in the Twin Towers organized themselves and got themselves, and the handicapped and injured, out of harm’s way while “the authorities” were still struggling to figure out what was going on. 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  There’s no way that 10% of society doesn’t react positively to a crisis. 

BERG:  Well, we can certainly hope so, can’t we!  At any rate – have any of you ever read Mel Tappen? 

POX: Who? 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE: Sounds like an angry white guy. 

BERG:  He was an economist back in the sixties and seventies.  And a libertarian with a big L.  He was calling for ending the Fed long before most of you were born.  He was also one of the godfathers of modern “Survivalism”, which is a term that means a lot of things to a lot of people.  Anyway – he cited a truism about human behavior in crisis conditions.  In an extended, life-or-death crisis, one person in ten will steal food.  One in 100 will kill for food.  One in 1,000 will resort to cannibalism, and one out of 10,000 will actively hunt humans. 

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:  There is just no way that is true. 

BERG: Well, maybe.  I mean, Tappen also swore up and down that the economy was going to completely collapse from the debts and deficits by the mid-eighties.  He died in 1978, so it’s irrelevant to him – but let’s say that his bromides are as accurate as his predictions; let’s knock ’em back by an order of magnitude.  Let’s say that…

• 1 out of 100 will steal food in a crisis
• 1 out of 1,000 will kill for food
• 1 out of 10,000 will resort to cannibalism, and
• 1 out of 100,000 will actively hunt other humans for food. 

Now, let’s say “the Collapse” is just that.  Complete collapse.  Within a one-day walk of this coffee shop, as we sit here today, there are about two million people.  In a complete fiscal and social armageddon, that means there are 20,000 food thieves, 2,000 who’ll kill for food, 200 cannibals, and 20 human-meat hunters can get to where you are, right now, in 24 hours.  And by definition, their only “Non-Aggression Principle” is “I can not be aggressed against if I get my target first”, and their “Golden Rule” ends at “Do unto others…”. 

POX:  Wow.  You make anarchy sound so…

MULLER: …scary.

BERG:  Nah, I’m just being an anti-Pollyanna.  Now, since birds of a feather flock together, let’s say 20-30 from the “Will Kill For Food” tribe get together – voluntarily! – and lay siege to Viktor’s place.  And he calls the two of you, and me, together to bail him out.  And you (points at POX) and Garth get your guns and start heading over – but I decide out of my own enlightened self-interest that I’d rather defend my place. 

POX:  I’d shoot you for cowardice. 

BERG:  Huh.  Seems…aggressive?

VON SCHLIEFFERNBERG-MOLTKE:   So you say we should give up liberty to protect against a paranoid fantasy?

BERG:  No.  I say that humanity gives itself challenges that no individual human can deal with alone.  And so humans gather – ideally via mutual consent – and agree to ground rules, and try to keep people from taking advantage of the ground rules just as surely as they do the lack of them.  And doing that is a whole lot more difficult than banking the future a pseudo-religious faith in the goodness of human nature – but also the only way to stay ahead of both of human nature, whether they operate as individual contract frauds or bands of thugs. 

POX: Aliens!

(And SCENE)