Anarchism

Anarchy, as a political concept, 

is a naive floating abstraction: 

. . . a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare.  

But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy:  

even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; 

it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.

The use of physical force 

—even its retaliatory use— 

cannot be left at the discretion of 

individual citizens.  

Peaceful coexistence is impossible 

if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment.  

Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice—the use of force against one man  

cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, 

which is befuddling some of the  

younger advocates of freedom, 

is a weird absurdity called  

“competing governments.” 

Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists

—who see no difference between 

the functions of government 

and the functions of industry, 

between force and production, 

and who advocate government ownership of business

—the proponents of “competing governments” 

take the other side of the same coin and declare that since 

competition is so beneficial to business, 

it should also be applied to government. 

Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, 

there should be a number of different governments 

in the same geographical area, 

competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, 

with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is 

the only service a government has to offer.  

Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, 

since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms 

“competition” and “government.” 

Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, 

since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality 

and cannot be concretized at all, 

not even roughly or approximately. 

One illustration will be sufficient: 

suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. 

What happens then? 

You take it from there.

The common denominator of such advocates  

of “competing governments” is 

the desire to escape from objectivity 

to act on whim, 

and to deal with men rather than with ideas—

i.e., with the men of their own gang 

bound by the same concretes.

Ayn Rand - The Nature of Government - The Virtue of Selfishness