Yes, both anarchy and minarchy can lead to tyranny, but anarchy leads to it almost immediately, and offers no remedies other than organizing one's own gangs and resorting to violence. In a well-designed constitutional republic, power is divided and balanced, and there are nonviolent remedies that people can use to correct abuses, with the aid of a written document that is not too difficult for most people to understand, and which can serve as a guide and rallying point around which they can unite to restore compliance. We might complain about all the departures from strict compliance from our present U.S. Constitution, mainly due to the governing factions uniting with one another under the influence of special interests, but the nonviolent remedies are still in place, only waiting for enough people to use them. In a constitutional system, even one as degraded as ours has become, it still requires fewer people to restore compliance than it does to do so in an anarchic order, which only requires a few people to destroy it irretrievably. A constitutional order also offers the opportunity to cultivate the kind of civic virtue needed to sustain it, whereas anarchic orders have historically demonstrated no such tendency, but rather just the opposite. No system is guaranteed to endure forever. The best argument for the U.S. Constitution is that it has worked as well as it has for as long. Critics of its excesses tend to see the glass as half empty, but the majority of the people see it, properly, as half-full. Some people might experience tyranny, but most do not, in most of the things they want to do. It is important to put things in some kind of objective perspective.
Anarchists also need to consider the scientific evidence that the idea of "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon", as a remedy to free-riding, is not just an invention of statists, but is part of our genetic heritage as social animals. See my blog article, http://constitutionalism.blogspot.com/2008/01/genomic-contract.html . -- Jon ---------------------------------------------------------------- Constitution Society 7793 Burnet Road #37, Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001 www.constitution.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------
