From the Vault. By PFS member David Dürr. Translated from David Dürr, “Bürgerlicher Anarchismus: Das Abendland schwimmt koedukativ,” eigentümlich frei (05 März 2017). Eigentümlich frei (“peculiarly free”) is a German magazine edited by André F. Lichtschlag. Other Dürr articles at eigentümlich frei.

Bourgeois Anarchism: Minimal States and Pickpockets—Even Petty Criminals Are Criminals

by David Dürr

Are you a minimal statist? Are you a convinced libertarian who grants the state not a single bit more than looking after the protection of people from mutual violations of life, body, and property, and absolutely nothing else? Not even traffic rules on the road, and certainly no social programs for the poor and weak? This is, of course, not because you do not care about chaos on the streets or the plight of poor and weak fellow human beings, but because you know that order and prosperity establish themselves much better without state intervention. So, are you someone who knows exactly that the state is not the solution but the problem, and therefore must be reduced to an absolute minimum—a minimal statist, in fact?

Perhaps I am addressing quite a few readers and authors of *eigentümlich frei* here; people I genuinely like, of whom I know that human freedom is a sincere concern to them, and that not a few even find it difficult to grant the state anything at all. I know from some of my friends that they would prefer to abolish the state altogether right away, but they say that this is unfortunately not possible; for a bare minimum of basic stability in society, a minimal state is simply needed.

With all due sympathy for these freedom-lovers: Is it not precisely the bare minimum of basic stability in a society that is better left in the hands of the people than with a small but nonetheless illegitimate monopolist?

The state is not a fundamental problem because it does this or that, or because it does so much and ever more, but because through its actions it encroaches upon the respective private spheres of individual human beings, and does so simply out of its own absolute power.

Taxes, to name a prominent example, it takes “unconditionally”—that is, regardless of whether those affected have voluntarily committed to them, or whether they have caused any damage and now have to compensate for it. There is, therefore, a lack of inner justification and thus ultimately of lawfulness, regardless of whether it is a head tax of 100 euros or a 60 percent income tax—just as a small pickpocketing in the crowd at the marketplace with a loot of ten euros is no less unlawful than a professionally and cinematically executed bank robbery with a loot of 100 million. Of course, the pickpocket can expect a lighter sentence if caught than the gang of professional bank robbers, but they are both criminal.

Now, proponents of the small state will resist this comparison with the small pickpocket: The legitimacy of the minimal state, they argue, lies not in the fact that it steals only a little, but in the fact that it is not theft at all. Unlike the pickpocket, who uses the stolen money merely for himself, the state deploys it in the interest of all. And this is where the difference between the cautiously acting minimal state and the bloated maximal state comes into play: while the latter presumes to decide over everything and anything in people’s lives, the former restricts itself to the absolute minimum needed to protect people from mutual encroachments.

That is then rather like the excuse of the caught pickpocket: He doesn’t need the money for himself, but to protect the people in the marketplace from mutual encroachments; after all, it’s absolutely swarming with pickpockets there!

***

Related

• Kinsella, Hoppe, Dürr, et al. The Universal Principles of Liberty
• Hoppe, Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State
• ——, Reflections on State and War
• Kinsella, The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It
• ——, What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist
• ——, What Libertarianism Is

U.S. — British tourists visiting the United States have reportedly been surprised by the quality of American food, and also the fact there are no violent hordes of rape gangs roaming the countryside.

I have long opposed the idea in mathematics that there exist “real numbers,” e.g., that the square root of 2 is a “real number.” Or that pi is a real number (or any kind of number).

Is pi 3.14 … (where the ellipsis is supposed to be part of the number)? Yes, pi is that, if you recognize that 3.14 is an interval.

The key concept is the standard of precision. Anything less than that is effective zero, or “nill.” The concept of “nill” is the key to everything in mathematics. Nill is all those intervals shorter than the interval that you take as the minimum in your context.

For example, if your minimum for length is 1 mm, then nill is some but any interval shorter than that. E.g., .9 is nill, so is .09, and .000212 and any decimal number smaller than 1 mm.

Epsilon (ε) is often used for a very small amount so I use ε to denote half of the minimum. so we can say “± ε” to cover all existing but dispense-with intervals.

ε is shrinkable. It is only fixed in a given context, being determined by the minimum interval you can use or care about.

Accordingly, all the following are true:

pi = 3.0 ± ε

pi = 3.1 ± ε

pi = 3.14 ± ε

pi = 3.14159 ± ε

and so on.

Pi is defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. But there must be some standard of precision to calling any concrete shape a circle, and to measuring its diameter.

And that standard of precision varies with your purpose and with the measuring technology available. Bracketing every decimal value of pi with ± ε acknowledges these facts.

So, you may ask, “What is the difference between saying pi is a real number designated by 3.14 … and saying pi is a range of numbers between 3.14 – ε and 3.14 + ε?”

The difference lies in the whole conception of mathematics. The “real number” doctrine claims that there is a number, but we need to get to infinity to find it. My view holds that there is no single number for pi and the irrationals but there is a range of intervals, adjustable by going to a higher resolution.

The first is mystical, the second is hard-headed engineering.

And by denying that pi (or any irrational number) is a number, I preserve the essence of the concept “number”: a fixed sequence of symbols used to measure quantity.

Pi is a number? Then what is the number after pi in the sequence?

That’s unanswerable.

The concept of “pi” is a mathematical device, and it uses numbers. But “pi” is not a concept of a number. Pi is number-like, it is numeric; you might call it and the irrationals “numerands.”

Note that I am not saying that only integers are numbers: 4.2 is a number, and we know what comes next: 4.3. 5/8 is a number, and we know what comes next: 6/8.

“. . .” is not a part of any number. For that matter, ± ε is not part of any number.

Numbers are concepts for counting—counting either discrete entities (4 apples, 5 apples), discrete parts of entities (2 slices of the whole pizza), or the number of times a continuous quantity exceeds a standard quantity laid off against it.

“The table is 18 inches wide” means that the table’s length exceeds 18 inch-marks on the tape measure, but not the 19th; the 19th inch-mark goes past the edge of the table. So the designation is: the table is between 18 and 19 inches wide. If you measure more precisely, nothing changes. “The table is 18 3/16 inches wide” means its width exceeds 18 3/16 but not 18 and 4/16.

(If it seems to be exactly 18 inches wide, that means its length is between 18 minus ε and 18 + ε, where 2ε is the smallest you can see.)

There are no irrational numbers and therefore no real numbers. That doesn’t mean things like pi and the square root of two have no role in measuring quantity. They do.