a model libertarian society?

I’ve gotten a ton of backlinks from a splog. The “Links” section on my stats page is now virtually useless, since all the links back to my blog get swamped by the incessant backlinking from that one spam blog on Blogger. The interesting thing is that the splog is ostensibly all about jokes, and none of the links on their page visibly lead back to any of my posts, but they found a way to create backlinks to a zillion WordPress and Blogspot blogs in an attempt to make their Google ads profitable and drive up their search rating.

This kind of thing sort of reminds me of the sad fate of Usenet, the Internet newsgroup system.

Once upon a time, before the emergence of the vBulletin forum, I was a dedicated Usenet participant. I had a long list of groups to which I subscribed, and things were fun. This was in the pioneer days of the Intartubes, in the early-to-mid-1990s.

Towards the end of the 1990s, Usenet newsgroups became increasingly difficult to actually use for their purpose, because spammers essentially started taking over many newsgroups. Before long, most of my favorite newsgroups were completely unusable, since nobody wanted to download a few megabytes of newsgroup spam to get to the few real posts buried in all that spam.

I’m the administrator of a well-respected firearms discussion board, and the only thing that keeps the vBulletin forum system from suffering the same fate as Usenet is the increasingly sophisticated technical anti-spam arsenal built into the software. Still, I have to delete at least a dozen users and their associated drive-by spam posts every week–people who do the virtual equivalent of dropping their pants and shitting into someone else’s front yard, leaving a steaming pile of cell phone, sneaker, or iPod spam.

Now, the Internet is in many ways the model for a libertarian society–very little regulation, and minimal government interference. Free speech and free markets all the way. What the Internet lacks, however, is a mechanism to effectively and consistently punish those who would visit fraud on others, or infringe on virtual property rights. In real life, you can have anything from a neighborhood watch to a pintle-mounted Ma Deuce on the front porch to discourage those lawn-shitters, but in the virtual world, you’re mostly limited to banning their IP address and cleaning their mess off your virtual lawn.

This leads me to my conviction that a minimal government is a necessity for a functioning society, because there needs to be a mechanism to safeguard the rights of the citizen who can’t do so themselves, and put the retaliatory use of force under objective control. The Internet lacks such a mechanism by design, and as a result, it’s infested with scammers, fraudsters, thieves, and people who walk all over people’s property rights because they can–because there’s nothing in place that provides an effective deterrent to force or fraud.

Maybe that’s where the anarchists and “anarcho-libertarians” have it just as wrong as the Communists and the Socialists: they don’t take human nature into account. Where the Commies fail to recognize the human drive to act in one’s own interests, the anarchist crowd fails to recognize the lack of rationality in most people when it comes to pursuing those interests.  While libertarians and Objectivists advance rational self-interest as the most important guiding principle, they, too, fail to take into account that, while everyone pursues their self-interest, few people do so rationally.

Since you can’t reason with the unreasonable, the only other option left to protect your rights is force, which brings us right back to why we need a government. Its first and (ideally) only function is to a.) protect the rights of those who cannot do so themselves (since an inability to answer violations of one’s rights with force leads to the spammers and thugs of the world to walk all over the weak members of society), and to b.) make sure that the use of that force is under objective control, so the whole place doesn’t merely devolve into a sort of feudalism, where the people who can afford to buy the most enforcers and hire the most judges get to run the show.

Usenet turned into a spam-filled wasteland because there are no property rights on Usenet, and no way to enforce them even if there were any. In the absence of a way to enforce such rights, the cell phone spammers and 419 scammers of the world will move in and use any available avenue and patch of virtual real estate for their own purposes, even if it destroys the very thing they use as a marketing vehicle. These people pursue their self-interest, but without the rationality required to make a libertarian society work. They’re like locusts, feeding off of resources until they’re destroyed, and then moving on to other pastures.

Still, with all its theoretical flaws, the beauty of libertarianism is that it proposes the maximum amount of freedom and property rights for those who play by the rules, and the least restrictions on defending the same rights against those who don’t play by the rules. (The rules being “Keep your hands to yourself”, and “Mind your own business”, which makes for a rather short and uncomplicated criminal code.)

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