Ep. 105: How Anarchy Works: 4 Reasons Private Law is Better Than the State

BAP – Ep. 105 – Kerry Baldwin
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[00:00:00] Jacob Winograd: People say that anarchy can’t work because people are sinful. Yet here’s the thing, the state is made of humans too, right? And they have all the power. So maybe the real question isn’t how is society gonna function without a state, but really how do we even manage to function with one?

[00:00:22] Narrator: If Christ is king, how should the Christian consider the kingdoms of this world?

[00:00:28] Narrator: What does the Bible teach us about human authority and what it means to love our neighbors and our enemies before we render unto Caesar, what is Caesar’s? Let’s know what it means to render unto God. What is God’s? This is the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, the modern, prophetic voice against war and empire.

[00:00:54] Jacob Winograd: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christian for Liberty Network. I’m your host Jacob Win grad. I am excited today to give you a interview I’ve been working on for a while, Kerry Baldwin, who is a co-host over at Reformed Libertarian and also the creator of her own project, known as Mere Liberty.

[00:01:17] Jacob Winograd: She is rejoining me on the show and we’re kind of doing something I’ve been talking about for a while, which is tackling how Anarchy works. When I did like my soft relaunch of the show last year with my, what is Biblical Anarchy Redux, I then went through some episodes answering common objections to anarchy.

[00:01:37] Jacob Winograd: But you know, once you get past all the philosophical quagmires and all of the general questions about how can you even have civil governance without the state, and what does anarchy mean? What does libertarianism mean? What does the non-aggression principle and can these things be established? In the Bible, are they in accordance with biblical principles?

[00:01:59] Jacob Winograd: I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job at laying out that case over the entirety of my podcasting and writing career. But then even more so in sort of this, soft relaunch that I’ve done where you could, I don’t know, maybe it’s like a season two of the Biblical Anarchy podcast, to put it a better way.

[00:02:17] Jacob Winograd: But people are always going to come down to asking, well, maybe this is like true on paper, but what we have is a state, and unless you can demonstrate. That society is going to function the way it seems to function now without a state. Then it seems like this utopian pipe dream. And so Carrie and I actually go back and have a conversation referencing articles she wrote years ago on this exact question on the plausibility of stateless civil governance.

[00:02:48] Jacob Winograd: So I’m gonna go ahead and kick it over to her and I talking about this, and then I’ll give a little conclusion on the other side. Well, hello everyone. I am with Carrie Baldwin again today. Carrie. How long this has taken to get together has brought me back to my very fundamentalist Baptist roots where you just blame everything on the devil.

[00:03:09] Jacob Winograd: And so I just know that we’re about to have a really fantastic and important conversation because of how many times we’ve had to, I mean, just a comical amount of times that we’ve had to reschedule this for, for various reasons. Either things on your end, things on my end, technical difficulties. Yep. It’s been a whirlwind, but you know, God willing, we are.

[00:03:28] Jacob Winograd: I did all the proper speaking in tongues and sprinkling of gold dust beforehand, so I, I think this will go off without a cinch.

[00:03:38] Kerry Baldwin: We’re in trouble if you’re speaking in tongues.

[00:03:42] Jacob Winograd: Oh, I know. I know. Carrie, so you’ve been on the show many times. You’re also one of the few people, I think the only person who’s ever been a short guest host of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast back when I lost my voice.

[00:03:53] Jacob Winograd: But just go ahead and just reintroduce yourself a little bit, give people your background and the things that you do before we get into tonight’s conversation.

[00:04:01] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah, so my name is Kiri Baldwin. I am the proprietor of the website, mere liberty.com. And there I write articles and do podcast episodes and all kinds of things.

[00:04:15] Kerry Baldwin: Basically challenging and rethinking paradigms. And part of my work is also teaching people how to reflectively and critically think using the Socratic method. And that started off with online courses and has morphed into me establishing a micro high school here locally in Albuquerque. So at any rate, all of my work can be found@meliberty.com.

[00:04:40] Kerry Baldwin: But that’s a brief short intro.

[00:04:43] Jacob Winograd: It’s a shame that the stuff we’re talking about tonight is good and interesting, but we’ll have to have you back on at some point in the future once the micro school has had some more time in the sun. But I’m very interested in that topic as well as a parent of five and someone who homeschools.

[00:04:59] Jacob Winograd: Mm-hmm. We’re here tonight to, or today, whenever people are. I’m so used to when I have guests on that, I’m doing it in the green room, but this is not live. So whatever time you’re listening to this, we’re having a conversation about anarchy and having governance without the state, which for some people just is gonna be somewhat of a review.

[00:05:20] Jacob Winograd: But as the show has grown and since I re did like a soft, soft relaunch of the show back in episode 89 where I did like a second edition, a redux version of what is Biblical anarchy, just been going back and, with the new audience and new people coming in, giving some of the fundamentals of the worldview, of the principles of the theory.

[00:05:43] Jacob Winograd: And I wanted to also do an episode talking about just. So we agree on the moral principles. Now, how does this work in terms of like having governance without the state, because there’s a lot of practical questions and misconceptions people have, and instead of reinventing the wheel, I thought that I would have you on because you did a good job tackling this sort of the, the theme of what I’m getting at here in a series of articles you wrote back before the Dark Times before COVID, they’re pretty old on the, the plausibility of stateless civil governance.

[00:06:19] Jacob Winograd: It was a four part article. I did want to, as you did in the article, do a brief thing here at the beginning where you talk about why this is important because even though sometimes you can, we, we can feel like maybe all this talk about theory is a little pie in the sky, considering that while libertarianism is generally monarchists and anarchists and we’re.

[00:06:43] Jacob Winograd: If we’re all, the metaphor is often that we’re on the same train and we get off at different destinations, well, we’re both like, we don’t even see our destinations, they’re so far away. But why is it important to talk about anarchy, stateless, civil governance, and in all of that, as you mentioned in the article, despite wanting to, be ecumenical, for lack of a better word, with our monarchist libertarian brothers and sisters.

[00:07:09] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Well, I think now, way back when I wrote these articles, the, the concern among libertarians really was just minarchy versus anarchy. And, minarchy being [00:07:20] sort of synonymous with the night watchman state, right? So very, very minimum amount of civil governance from the state. But still something like the state still exists in a, in a monarchist perspective.

[00:07:35] Kerry Baldwin: I think this is becoming a, a question again, because you have. We now have post libertarians, right? We have people who are, we have Christian libertarians or former reformed libertarians who are now adopting Christian nationalism and sort of reverting back to this authoritarianism. And so all these questions are coming up again about, okay, really, how practical is it that we can expect a state to not exist or even be small, right?

[00:08:06] Kerry Baldwin: These questions come up when it comes to things like immigration. Do we need borders? If we need borders, how do we enforce it? And that sort of thing. And so I think one of the reasons why these articles are still important is when they go back to foundations, right? What is, what, what legitimate civil governance look like?

[00:08:29] Kerry Baldwin: And how do we know that it’s. That it exists, what are the key features of that? And then go through some of these other questions like, does man’s sinful nature make the state necessary? Like, okay, maybe, it’s logical that anarchism is, is legitimate, but is the state still necessary because of sin?

[00:08:51] Kerry Baldwin: So there are just all these questions that pop up because of various, issues that are at play, whether it’s the sinfulness of man or the practicality of things like immigration and that sort of thing.

[00:09:03] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, I think that I agree with everything you just said there. I, I think, as someone myself who has, dealt with this tension of, we’re so far away from a even monarchist libertarian society, and so I, along with other libertarians, voted Trump this last time around thinking that maybe there was a chance that he could at least, I don’t know, like just even.

[00:09:25] Jacob Winograd: Pump the brakes a little bit, on this, flying towards the edge of the cliff at the fastest speed possible. And that hasn’t quite worked out yet. And while I’ve decided we need to go back to the theory because, well that didn’t work. So, you try something doesn’t work, you learn from it, you move on.

[00:09:43] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Others were doing this beforehand, and even increasingly so since the election are just, they’re no longer seem to even be concerned with the theory. They’re just focused with the current crisis. And I’m not saying what’s going on around us is unimportant, but if we don’t like the, the so practical concerns matter, but you can’t even navigate the practical, practical concerns or have a thoughtful conversation or evaluation of consequences without a firm grounding in first principles and understanding the.

[00:10:16] Jacob Winograd: The nature of the state or the anatomy of the state to, yeah, to, to quote Ross Bard. Yeah, exactly. I think that, you know that, so sometimes it, it’s like anything when you, it’s always good to go and get, re refresh yourself at the source. And so that’s kind of what I’ve been doing. And I think, yeah.

[00:10:33] Jacob Winograd: Your observation there is pretty astute, I think. So I wanna start out with article one, which is gonna be helpful here because it’s gonna help us define terms with what we’re talking about here. You begin by defining the state in a way that might strike the unlearned when it comes to libertarianism in a way that seems like very obscure or just not what they’re used to thinking of when they think of the state, they might think it’s strangely technical or overly narrow.

[00:11:02] Jacob Winograd: And you define the state as a coercive monopoly on law. Enforcement or otherwise known as civil governance over a specific territory. So before we go deeper, can you explain the definition, why we distinguish the state from civil governance and why that’s, very foundational?

[00:11:21] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah, so there’s a few reasons.

[00:11:23] Kerry Baldwin: First of all, the sense of the word state has changed quite a bit over time. The current way that we use. The word in common parlance today only goes back to the 16th century, but it’s a word that indicates an organization of the body, politics. This, the, this, the etymology of the word, it doesn’t indicate any sort of political philosophy.

[00:11:47] Kerry Baldwin: And the political philosophy is really where you get into the, okay, how do we actually administer civil justice? What is justice? What is enforcement? What is law? That’s where. In a political philosophy. That’s where those things come into play with the word the term, the state. It’s only the body politic.

[00:12:06] Kerry Baldwin: Okay. So that’s common parlance. That’s the normal etymology of the word. So we’re not as anarchists, we’re not doing anything new with this word. And so not only do we emphasize this, this correct distinction that it, it is an organization and not the system of civil governance itself. We also point out that the organization.

[00:12:30] Kerry Baldwin: Is necessarily monopolistic. Okay? So this is an entity that is claiming that they are the only ones who have the authority to implement a political philosophy or execute the laws that are derived from that political philosophy, whatever it is, right? So you can have a fascist state, you can have a, democratic state, you can have a communist state, you can have a state that’s, a republic as the United States began.

[00:12:58] Kerry Baldwin: But the key thing here for anarchists is that it’s a monopoly organization. Now, this is foundational, not just for semantic reasons. That’s really, I want to establish that we’re not inventing new terms here or new definitions, but then there’s the question of God ordained civil governance, right?

[00:13:20] Kerry Baldwin: We can talk a lot about different political philosophies and some of those political philosophies. Are compatible with the Christian faith, and some of them are not at all. And so what we’re talking about as far as Christians are concerned is we’re talking about the God ordained role of civil governance.

[00:13:38] Kerry Baldwin: What did God design or, write into the fabric of reality. And so with that we hold to something called sphere sovereignty. And sphere sovereignty is the idea that God has prescribed certain offices of authority within society and spheres in which they operate. So this can be the family, this can be the church, this can be civil governance, can be education, business like there’s many different spheres of society.

[00:14:08] Kerry Baldwin: So if we use the family as an example, parents are authoritative in their family. Pastors and elders are authoritative in the church and. That pattern of authority though, is strictly limited. It’s not universal. There are things as a parent that I cannot do to my children just because I’m the parent.

[00:14:30] Kerry Baldwin: And so that’s true in the church, and that’s true in civil government. So in fact, in the Protestant traditions, both reformed in Lutheran, [00:14:40] they believe that the authority of civil governance is derived from the family structure. The idea that, you have certain people who hold an office of authority over others.

[00:14:53] Kerry Baldwin: So we recognize those, those spheres of society, and we recognize that they have limited authority. No one has, none of them have universal authority, and they’re prescribed for God, or excuse me, prescribed by God and meant for our good. And we don’t take the state to be properly acting within. The sphere of civil governance.

[00:15:15] Kerry Baldwin: Some people argue that, okay, yeah, you have a sphere of civil governance, but the state fills that sphere. We actually argue that it’s the state’s very existence because it’s monopolistic is itself a violation of God ordained civil justice.

[00:15:30] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And we’ve, we’ve talked about sphere sovereignty many times on the show.

[00:15:35] Jacob Winograd: You and me or Greg coming on the show as well to talk about it, I think even did a solo episode a while back on it. So I’ll have those linked in the description or show notes for this episode so people can go learn more about what that concept is. I mean, so I think you, you kind of highlighted there a little bit, but is there anything else you would bring up regarding sphere sovereignty and why that’s not just like a, a side here?

[00:16:02] Jacob Winograd: It is, part of what undergirds our vision for stateless civil governance and also, again, people can reference the episodes for a more robust explanation of it, but a brief summary where we derive sphere sovereignty from, because I anticipate people new to it will be like, well, what is this?

[00:16:21] Jacob Winograd: Is there, what’s your scripture citation that says the words that there are, these sovereign spheres in society? So, yeah. Just, just a, again, like I don’t want to, just succinct enough because we’ve done hours. I mean, on my show, on your guys’ show, we’ve done hours and many articles on this, so

[00:16:40] Jacob Winograd: it would take a long time to do an exhaustive explanation.

[00:16:43] Kerry Baldwin: Right? So the concept of sphere sovereignty actually comes from the Dutch reformed tradition in Abraham Kuer. It is not a theology, it is a social ontology. So it is definitely philosophy, but it is grounded in the idea that, God created the world and he created it with a certain natural order to it.

[00:17:03] Kerry Baldwin: And that natural order in entails certain laws. And those laws govern the way we operate. So there’s a way that the church is supposed to operate the, the, there’s a way that the family’s supposed to operate. There’s the way the state is supposed to operate. And if you are in one of those fears and acting outside of that ordinance, then you are in violation of that, of that ordinance.

[00:17:27] Kerry Baldwin: So I.

[00:17:30] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, summation. Well, as you were explaining that, it just made me think of like the people who will deny or, or object to is fear sovereignty. At least non libertarians who object to it will object to that. But then almost like they do believe in fear sovereignty. They just believe that there’s only once fear and it’s the state.

[00:17:47] Jacob Winograd: Because if you say, well, we believe God ordered society, it’s like they will agree with that. But obviously how God ordered society is, is the monopoly state, just subsumes everything and tells everyone what to do at all times. As if like, which just, I mean, and I agree it’s a social ontology, but it’s, derived from a biblically informed worldview.

[00:18:11] Jacob Winograd: And doesn’t seem to me that when you, read in Genesis or anywhere in the Bible that God is giving us a strong. Ink inkling that the way he’s ordered society is just that, like the state takes care of everything,

[00:18:25] Kerry Baldwin: right? Yeah.

[00:18:26] Jacob Winograd: The magic genie and the lamp. So, so, so to speak.

[00:18:29] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. It’s like, it’s like the one thing that has, no boundaries.

[00:18:32] Kerry Baldwin: No parameters, right. And that doesn’t even begin to make sense.

[00:18:37] Jacob Winograd: Yep. So in, in the first article, you engage Locke’s idea, John Locke, his idea that civil governance requires three things, impartial judges. Generally known and agreed upon body of law and effective enforcement. But then you flip the script arguing that these can exist without a state and that actually locks arguments for a state are just stronger arguments for anarchy or for stateless civil governance.

[00:19:06] Jacob Winograd: Can you walk us through those arguments and what you think Locke’s own criteria, disqualifies bin aism and flips the narrative on its head.

[00:19:15] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. So the first one is the need for impartial judges. And this is, this has become like a joke on the internet, right? Like you hear of a complaint against a, a police department, and the police department says, okay, we’re going to investigate ourselves.

[00:19:33] Kerry Baldwin: And then inevitably they come out and they report. We’ve investigated ourselves and found ourselves innocent of these, these complaints. We’ve done nothing wrong. Well, well, cash,

[00:19:43] Jacob Winograd: cash Patel and Pam Bond, and all them told us that there’s, there’s no Epstein files, there’s no yeah. Client list.

[00:19:49] Jacob Winograd: So, and just, you can trust us guys,

[00:19:52] Kerry Baldwin: right? This would be like Jacob, this would be like, you and I have a dispute. You claim that I’ve stolen your tv. And so we go into arbitration and I say, you know what? I’m gonna be the judge in this case, and I didn’t steal your tv. So, it’s.

[00:20:09] Kerry Baldwin: It is fallacious on, its on its face to say there can only be one entity doing civil governance when that entity is comprised of humans who can commit crimes and need to be held accountable for those crimes. In fact, I mean this, this brings up, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s some drama with President Obama right now.

[00:20:34] Kerry Baldwin: Yes.

[00:20:34] Jacob Winograd: Yeah.

[00:20:34] Kerry Baldwin: And Tulsi Gabbard is, is basically declassifying a ton of information suggesting that Obama was part of, the. Russian intervention and elections story, whatever that was. And the story from the Press Corps or one of the, the, one of the journalists in the Press Corps was asking, I forget the, the name of the woman who’s the press secretary, but she was asking the press secretary, Hey, doesn’t Obama have immunity from this sort of thing?

[00:21:07] Kerry Baldwin: Because he is the president. ’cause he is acting within his role. As, as president, and I’m sitting here thinking, acting in the role of president doesn’t mean you get to commit crimes and say this is, this is part of being president like our. I mean, on paper, our system of government was that nobody’s above the law, especially the government.

[00:21:31] Kerry Baldwin: And now it’s like, yeah, the president’s definitely above the law. You can, he can commit crimes. It’s in the, it’s in the course of his normal duties. And so this is, on its face is a problem. You can’t have a system of justice where those who are administering and enforcing justice cannot be held accountable for their injustices.

[00:21:53] Kerry Baldwin: And so this is one reason why Locke’s argument for anarchism is actually more of an argument [00:22:00] for statelessness. Did I sum that up? Yes. Yeah. Do you have any questions about that one before I move on to the second?

[00:22:08] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, I think just one more, useful aside like this, just, it’s a bit of a tangent, but it reminds me of one of.

[00:22:13] Jacob Winograd: IAnd Spooner’s criticisms of the Constitution, which was that one of the fatal flaws was that you gave the federal government, its, it its own ability to interpret, it’s it’s of the constitution is to bind to government and to be like, here are the rules that we are applying to government to like say what it can and can’t do.

[00:22:36] Jacob Winograd: And then the interpreter of that contract is the government. That’s one of the fatal flaws. And that’s why it’s not surprising that especially over the last, the last century, the Supreme Court has been one of the, for as much as people focus on the presidency and Congress, and granted the President and Congress appoint the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court, the judicial system has been one of the greatest incursions on liberty and ways in which government powers have been expanded and re redefined.

[00:23:04] Jacob Winograd: So it’s another example of, of this concept in action, I think.

[00:23:08] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s right. And I mean, you can draw the correlation to the economic side of things and people get that. Like they understand that, pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be making the rules by which they keep things safe without impunity.

[00:23:25] Kerry Baldwin: And so it seems obvious to lots of people when you put it in, in economic terms and less obvious when you put it in civil governance terms. But I think that there are plenty of examples where we can, we can say no, look, you can see there’s a real unjust, I mean, the freaking Epstein files for crying out loud is a perfect example.

[00:23:49] Jacob Winograd: Yep.

[00:23:50] Kerry Baldwin: Agreed. So, yeah, there’s so many. Okay, so the second one. So the first was the need for impartial judges. The second is a need for a generally agreed upon a known law and. It’s very easy for us. Very naturally human beings understand that things like murder, theft, rape are all crimes, right?

[00:24:15] Kerry Baldwin: That’s, these are intuitive because it’s, we would argue, is written into the natural order. So you don’t have to convince anybody that those, that those should be laws that you should have laws against, murder, theft, rape, et cetera. But then you get into the situation where, you have a state and they think, well, we can make any law we want, and then they start stacking up the laws.

[00:24:39] Kerry Baldwin: In fact, there’s an ancient Greek. I wanna say stoic who, and I don’t know the quote exactly, but he said something to the effect of, the more corrupt a government is, the more laws they have. Because the more laws you have, the less agreed upon and less known the law becomes. Right. And then it becomes a matter of finding the loopholes or having the right lawyer or going in front of the right judge.

[00:25:05] Kerry Baldwin: And again, I refer to the Epstein Niles garbage, like, you can’t have a situation where you have a monopoly over civil governance. And that law remains agreed upon and known right to the masses. Plus there’s just the impractical aspect of that. Not everybody’s a legal scholar, right? You have to go to law school in order to understand the law.

[00:25:34] Kerry Baldwin: And even when you go to law school, you don’t specialize in the whole gamut of the law. You specialize in one part of the law, right? And so it’s just, especially in our system right now, it is. It is beyond that. So why is this actually a reason for statelessness when you have, so in a stateless civil governance, you have a polycentric legal order.

[00:25:58] Kerry Baldwin: This isn’t just decentralization, right? You have a polycentric legal or order, which means that you have legal agencies competing. Against one another. But when one legal agents, legal agency actually produces a set of, a law or a set of laws through court, through case precedent that actually makes sense and is good law, then the other legal agencies will start, will start adopting it.

[00:26:28] Kerry Baldwin: And that sort of universal adoption, number one is voluntary. And number two happens because it’s agreed upon and known, right? It’s understood and people are able to understand it, and you don’t need you, you don’t need a whole lot of expertise in order to do to, to do that. So the stateless aspect, the polycentric legal aspect, necessitates keeping that, that body of law agreed upon and known.

[00:26:58] Kerry Baldwin: Any thoughts about that one?

[00:27:00] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, I mean, it occurs to me that if the whole idea behind the American Revolution was and I guess not, this is the American Revolution, but even like the enlightenment and sort of the, the ideas that came from that was that government gets its authority from the consent of the governed.

[00:27:17] Jacob Winograd: Like, well, how can you consent to a body of laws? Like, forget all the, the pitfalls about like democracy and representative government, and believe that there’s no qualms there at all. It’s like the laws themselves have to be like, understandable and like, and this, this will be jumping into the next part, but like executable in a rational, understandable fashion to actually like be able to bind people to them and, how can you, how can people consent to that, which they don’t.

[00:27:46] Jacob Winograd: Comprehend, right? Mm-hmm. And, and, and so especially with how long our bills tend to be nowadays and how obscure they are, and the fact that we don’t, the, the authorities will, will, reading the bills is half the battle then interpreting the bills. Yeah. Over time is the other half of the battle.

[00:28:05] Jacob Winograd: So it’s, it’s just a it, it’s just a nightmare. And the lack of competition is what enables it.

[00:28:10] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Well, and I would, I would argue that our, our congress, our legislators could not themselves explain what the law actually is. I don’t think they could do it,

[00:28:23] Jacob Winograd: no.

[00:28:23] Kerry Baldwin: Okay. So then the, the last, the, the last criteria that lock that Locke has for legitimate civil governance is the need for effective law enforcement.

[00:28:33] Kerry Baldwin: And, this is, this is. This manifests in sort of two ways. Number one, it’s only effective if you have a known and agreed upon body of law, right? If a police officer has to guess at what this law means, he is either going to enforce it to stringently or he is not going to enforce it at all. And we used to hear this a lot more in libertarian circles about unenforceable laws, like seatbelt laws, for example, are, are unenforceable.

[00:29:07] Kerry Baldwin: We already see this in so, so we see enforceability in terms of like private security or even there, there’s even private police forces that exist right now and. [00:29:20] Those are when you’re dealing with the tangible enforcement, right? So I stole your tb, you need somebody to get it back from me, right?

[00:29:32] Kerry Baldwin: You’re gonna hire somebody to strong arm it from me. You know that’s an effective law enforcement. If you can just create laws out of nowhere that are ineffectively, forced, enforced, and that includes inconsistently enforced, then you have a system of injustice.

[00:29:52] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, that makes sense. And I, I don’t know, maybe you can give a better way of articulating this than I can, but I feel like a lot of the mistakes that conservatives make, especially liberals may be in their own ways, but conservatives will often.

[00:30:07] Jacob Winograd: Put the cart before the horse. I don’t know. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m struggling to find the right metaphor here. They just assume like, well, this thing is bad, so we just need to ban it. Right? Like, and it just, to them just makes some kind of like intuitive sense that like, well, you don’t want, we’ve talked about this before on the topic of abortion, it’s like abortion’s bad.

[00:30:26] Jacob Winograd: Therefore we just need the federal government just to pass a very blanket, very simple, ban on abortion. Then when you think about that in execution though, when you think about different forms of abortion, what it would take to actually enforce an abortion ban, and then if, in terms of it, when women can have an abortion just by taking a pill in private, how are you going to enforce that without creating some massive surveillance state?

[00:30:54] Jacob Winograd: And then what is the, what is the. The form of enforcement for the, for justice. Even if you do have a case where someone legitimately brings a, a case of a, a, a wrongful termination of pregnancy, it’s like, how do you handle that? And there’s no thought that goes into that a lot of times from conservatives.

[00:31:13] Jacob Winograd: And so sometimes I think we as libertarians aren’t even saying that there aren’t, like, we would agree that abortion falls under the sphere of civil governance, but for the governance to be legitimate, the execution of the law has to be held in, done in such a way that it doesn’t A, create more injustices and b, that like, it’s actually, just, just having laws that cannot be enforced is.

[00:31:41] Jacob Winograd: It’s twofold. It’s, it, it, it’s almost like doubling the tyranny because now you are, ’cause there’s the, the scene and the unseen consequences of those kind of walls.

[00:31:50] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. This is sort of like sh shoot first ask questions later and both sides do this. Yeah. They both do it with their, with their pet social issues.

[00:31:59] Kerry Baldwin: It’s like, oh, I don’t want this really bad thing in society, and so go ahead and, use your legal violence to, to, to take action against it. Not only is it the, abortion is, is abortion is an interesting topic, so I’m gonna actually use the drug war as an example. Right.

[00:32:21] Kerry Baldwin: You have. You have conservatives who don’t like, they don’t like drug use, they don’t like legalized drugs or anything like that. And so they’re totally okay with the cop who’s just pulled you over who lies about smelling pot in your car just so that he can, search your vehicle and even plant the stuff.

[00:32:43] Kerry Baldwin: Right. So we’ve heard those stories on the left. One great example of this has to do with CYFD and notifying the state of child abuse cases. And this has come up since I’ve, established this micro high school. But when you’re a mandatory reporter and the way the, the law is written in New Mexico, for example, anything can be considered abuse.

[00:33:07] Kerry Baldwin: And if you don’t report it, you’re in trouble, which puts you in a position of having to, be a spy or, presume the worst about a situation just to CYA, because there’s this shoot first ask questions later mentality. And that’s, that itself is an injustice. The reason why our, at least on paper, the American system of government held the government to the same standards as, as the people was to keep this sort of thing from happening.

[00:33:44] Kerry Baldwin: Right. It’s you have, what’s the principle now with, I’m forgetting it. Well, at any rate, you’ve got, you’ve got principals now that say that, if you’re acting within the, the course of your normal duties for police officers, for example, you can violate rights as long as you’re, doing your job.

[00:34:04] Kerry Baldwin: And it’s like, no, the whole point of having you guys around. Was to protect our rights, not violate our rights. Right. And we’ve Well, I mean, it’s completely flipped it. Yeah.

[00:34:14] Jacob Winograd: Well, like, something you talk about over at Reform Libertarians, which I touched on in my updated, what is biblical anarchy that’s really fundamental to a biblical view of civil governance is the principle of proportionality or the, the, the Lex TAUs.

[00:34:28] Jacob Winograd: And that’s kind of what’s at stake here, is that without proper enforcement, you’re either going to not actually punish the crime correctly or adjudicate the crime correctly, or you’re going to overcorrect and, proportional response is really key here. And that can get, law can be complicated and, and that’s why you have case law and people who practice law and they study, obscure edge cases that are hard to figure out the proper.

[00:34:55] Jacob Winograd: Way to adjudicate difficult cases. And the beauty about a polycentric legal order is that instead of this being done through a monopolistic system with all the bad, and like everyone understands the monopoly is bad in every other area of the market, but when it comes to law, it’s like, no, we need the monopoly.

[00:35:14] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Well, the, the thing about the monopoly and there’s, there’s so, there’s so many data points to support this. The thing about the monopoly is when, when you have a monopoly, then it grows, right? Becomes leviathan. And so now you have the administrative state and the bureaucratic state and the deep state and all of these different aspects, aspects of it.

[00:35:37] Kerry Baldwin: And so it grows beyond, it’s, it’s even, even its capability to do the job that it’s claiming authority to do. Right. And it becomes impossible to, for you to actually do it like. The NSA collects data on all Americans all the time, but probably they don’t have enough manpower to be able to pay any attention to any, to all of, all of the all Americans that at one time.

[00:36:08] Kerry Baldwin: So they still don’t actually know that that information, whereas with a polycentric legal o order, things become much more practical. Right? You can only do so much within your own legal agency. You’re competing with other legal agencies. People are reviewing your. Your services, are they good? Are you producing good law?

[00:36:29] Kerry Baldwin: And that sort of thing. And so you’re going to niche down, you’re going to, you’re gonna do all the things that entrepreneurs do in order to make their business work. And [00:36:40] entrepreneurs will do not overcomplicate whatever they, get their hands on. It’s all, Occam’s razor, make it simple.

[00:36:47] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Make it understandable. And then it’s more functional and then you don’t have the situation where people are taking power where they shouldn’t be, but also where they’re incapable of doing it.

[00:36:59] Jacob Winograd: Yep. No, agreed. So. Moving on to article two now, which we won’t spend too much time there, but there’s just a common objection that you addressed there, which I often address.

[00:37:12] Jacob Winograd: I think I actually just addressed it in my last episode real time as we’re recording it. But it’s the whole, well, man is sinful and fallen and of course we as reform used the term totally depraved or mm-hmm. Total, total inability. And so just because of that, like we, we need to put these fallen, sinful, depraved, scheming people in charge of society.

[00:37:35] Jacob Winograd: Right. Just to give them, it’s like, which I mean I, I’m kind of saying it in a mocking way, but that’s the objection is man is sinful, therefore we need a state. And so I’ve had my own way of tackling it. I’d love for you to, put one more nail in that coffin for me.

[00:37:51] Kerry Baldwin: Yes, we’re all totally depraved and sinful, and therefore we need some totally depraved, sinful people to have total control over all the rest.

[00:38:01] Kerry Baldwin: But yeah, the phrase that I use is never concentrate power in the hands of sinners. Obviously, sinners have God ordained authority in various spheres. We discussed that earlier, but it’s limited. It’s strictly limited. No human being has universal power and authority that is Christ’s. So, God’s ordination for any form of human authority is necessarily and strictly limited.

[00:38:30] Kerry Baldwin: So authoritative or legitimate civil governance is, is itself strictly limited. It’s not whatever the state claims authority over, that’s number one. Number two, when concentrating power in the hands of sinners, it doesn’t matter if somebody claims Christ or not, they abuse that power. Another perfect example, speaker Johnson getting ticked off at Congressman Massey for pushing the Epstein files release and then claiming that Johnson is being persecuted as a Christian for not releasing them.

[00:39:07] Jacob Winograd: Yes, yes. You don’t

[00:39:08] Kerry Baldwin: get to claim, claim Christ, commit crime and then like this is what happens when you co, the Christian

[00:39:13] Jacob Winograd: thing to do here, Carrie, is to run cover for the child pedophile ring. I’m not to center that Chris, but for you two purposes. But yeah, that’s the Christian thing to do.

[00:39:25] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:27] Kerry Baldwin: There’s not a single benevolent sinless monopoly. And putting Christians in that role doesn’t make it any better. Tolkien’s metaphor of the one ring of power is totally apt. Yeah. It’s a temptation that exists because of sin, not because God ordained the ring, so to speak, which he did not. Civil governance is limited.

[00:39:49] Kerry Baldwin: It’s right here. And we are allowed to operate authoritatively within that, within that sphere, within that ordination, but not outside of it. And when you concentrate power in the hands of sinners, what a sinners do. They go outside of God’s ordained, framework

[00:40:05] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. To, to use biblical language.

[00:40:06] Jacob Winograd: Before the days of the king in the land of Israel, everyone did what was right in his own eyes. And then in the days of the king, everyone did what was right in the mind of one person’s eyes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Doesn’t really make it even when the King kings were halfway decent in loved God. Still with a disaster half of the time.

[00:40:26] Jacob Winograd: I mean, right. So, well, and

[00:40:29] Kerry Baldwin: again, we don’t do this within o other authority structures. Right. Now, the patriarchal listening to this will say, well, yeah, we do, we do that with husbands. No, you don’t. You do not concentrate power in the hands of a, of a sinful husband, which all husbands are sinful. All wives are sinful when you do that.

[00:40:51] Kerry Baldwin: Abuse happens when you do that with the state. Abuse happens when you do that in the church with pastors. Mark Driscoll is an example of this. With Mars Hill, when you concentrate power in the hands of sinners and they hold positions of authority, it becomes corrupt and abusive. So this like. Yeah, you don’t concentrate power in the hands of sinners.

[00:41:16] Kerry Baldwin: Sinner sin does not nece, sin doesn’t necessitate the state. It does necessitate civil governance. It does not necessitate the state.

[00:41:24] Jacob Winograd: Yep. Agreed. Article three was on economics hierarchy in the state’s inevitability, which this is probably the of all the objections I hear is the one that it doesn’t even actually, it doesn’t do the thing people think it does.

[00:41:40] Jacob Winograd: It doesn’t actually prove the state is legitimate. All it can do is black pill you and make you think that, well, the state’s inevitable, so why fight it? Yeah. It doesn’t actually like prove the state is legitimate or morally like, morally legitimate and doesn’t have any contradictions with, with its roles.

[00:41:57] Jacob Winograd: It’s just kind of like, well, and because, and listen, it’s possible. Maybe we’ll always have a state, but I don’t think it’s guaranteed logically or biblically that. We’re just always gonna have a state, but this is an objection that comes up a lot. Or another way of putting it is that like, well, if free markets and voluntary associations are just so effective, well why hasn’t, why haven’t free markets won out over the state?

[00:42:21] Jacob Winograd: I actually got this exact question when I was all on Andrew Wilson’s crucible show last year from one of his q and A audiences, and I think I gave the same answer you’re about to give, but I’ll let you give it.

[00:42:33] Kerry Baldwin: So yeah, so this is, this idea of inevitability is based on some false assumptions. And actually this argument comes from, ironically, a libertarian Robert noic in his book, anarchy State and Utopia, and this actually.

[00:42:51] Kerry Baldwin: This drives me nuts because this is the standard book that is issued in the vast majority of philosophy courses, political philosophy 1 0 1 courses, where they’re introducing libertarianism. They almost always use no Z’s book. And so if anybody’s been. Exposed to libertarianism at all in college. It’s probably through this book through a political philosophy class.

[00:43:15] Kerry Baldwin: So that’s where it comes from. The problem with arguing this though, is that one must make certain assumptions about the nature of the free market and social relations that are unwarranted and simply untrue. And so those are, those assumptions are, there’s three of them. One is you must give up your right to private self-defense and effectively hand over hand that over to.

[00:43:42] Kerry Baldwin: A state of some kind where, whether it’s minimal or not. And then once you give it up, you can’t get it back, right? The second one is that competing civil justice agencies would resort to combat, not arbitration. And then the third assumption is that peaceful agreements [00:44:00] between agencies constitute federalizing or unification of those agencies.

[00:44:05] Kerry Baldwin: And so we actually argue against that. Number one, you’re, we have inalienable rights. The word inalienable means non-transfer transferable. And so inalienable rights don’t suddenly become liable just because, I hire a lawyer to defend me in a court case, or I hire a prosecutor to to charge somebody who’s committed a crime against me.

[00:44:31] Kerry Baldwin: I’m not giving up my rights by doing that. I’m hiring somebody to uphold my rights in those cases. So. Non-transferrable rights don’t suddenly become transferrable simply because a monopoly wants them. We always retain our rights even if we hire somebody to defend those rights on our behalf. The cost of combat, the cost of combat is way too high for this to happen in a polycentric legal order.

[00:44:58] Kerry Baldwin: The reason why wars exist, and I’m pretty sure Scott Horton has, has mentioned this a number of times. The reason why wars exist is because of the state. The state has the money through taxation to actually pay for the weapons of war needed in order to. To make

[00:45:18] Jacob Winograd: work. Don’t forget the money printer, Carrie.

[00:45:20] Kerry Baldwin: Right, the money printer. So, when you have a polycentric legal order, you have a bunch of legal agencies. I mean, they would be maybe not quite as prevalent as nail salons, but on, closer to that level than, one entity that’s taking care of the legal order for everybody like, a city council or something like that.

[00:45:42] Kerry Baldwin: And you just don’t get that situation. Like the free market when there’s competition between different sectors of the free market, they don’t resort to war. I think that doesn’t happen. It does happen on the black market, but that happens for, for different reasons, which we can talk about. But war is not something, or just, violent combat is not something that the free market.

[00:46:06] Kerry Baldwin: Resorts to because the cost is way too high. And then peaceful agreements don’t constitute unification. Let’s say you and I are neighbors and we dislike each other, but we’ve agreed that your very yappy dog is not allowed on my property. And so you corral him or leash him in a way that prevents your dog from coming on my property.

[00:46:29] Kerry Baldwin: We don’t suddenly have a unification. I still don’t like you and your yappy dog and I will otherwise choose to not associate with you. We just have an agreement that you keep your dog off my property. So you know, that doesn’t constitute a unification. So basically all the presumptions that have to be made in order to argue that the state is inevitable just aren’t true assumptions.

[00:46:51] Kerry Baldwin: They, they’re false starters.

[00:46:54] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, no, I think that makes perfect sense. So now we’ll move on to the, the big one, the last one, article four, which is the plausibility of stateless civil governance. And you, to start, you argue that the biggest obstacle to accepting stateless civil governance isn’t logic or history, its imagination.

[00:47:13] Jacob Winograd: So let’s imagine for those people who struggle with imagination, and we can’t obviously, do this perfectly, but what’s the basic idea of, we wake up tomorrow and the state is gone. What are we proposing is filling the gap? And we’ve kind of touched on this already briefly, but that’d be more specific.

[00:47:32] Jacob Winograd: What fills in the gap of the state for enforcing law and providing defense?

[00:47:38] Kerry Baldwin: Right. So first of all, this, this whole problem with imagination, I just wanna touch, touch on real quick. So the reason why people have a problem with statelessness is ’cause they cannot imagine what it’s like. So number one, there’s a familiarity bias.

[00:47:53] Kerry Baldwin: People are not familiar with what polycentric law looks like. They are familiar with what the state looks like. And so it’s very easy to just get stuck in that, that frame of of reference. You also have the Overton window. This is just formed by habit and education and propaganda and public discourse.

[00:48:11] Kerry Baldwin: People don’t normally talk about what civil governance would look like without the state. And then you have something called plausibility structures. And these are sociocultural context for systems of meaning. So, for example, in the 1950s, no one would have imagined what phone use would look like today because they lacked the social con context.

[00:48:35] Kerry Baldwin: That doesn’t mean that phones. Like what we have now could never have happened just because people in the 1950s would not have been able to imagine it. And so that’s number one. Number two is what would fill, what would fill the gap? So obviously instead of monopolistic civil governance, non monopolistic, civil governance would, would fill the gap.

[00:48:57] Kerry Baldwin: So instead of a single legislature for a given, geographic location or single court or single law enforcement agency, you would have a multiplicity of them. Like I said, I, I mentioned this briefly with the analogy to nail salons. Probably not quite as prevalent, but that’s the idea. There would be people with that skillset, that desire to serve.

[00:49:23] Kerry Baldwin: And they would be competing in the market and you’d have an opportunity to use their services and determine if they were good, valuable services. And the people who are successful at providing a good service, they survive the market. And those who are not they die and they go away.

[00:49:41] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. I it’s, it’s a lot like how car insurance works.

[00:49:44] Jacob Winograd: And car insurance is one of the few field in insurance that’s not super hyper regulated like health insurance is. There’s still some regulation state by state, but like, so I know a lot of people who’ve been in car accident, I’ve been in a car accident and, I, I even, know people who’ve been in really, really bad, like multiple car pileups and it’s just, it’s amazing how private arbitration solves these things.

[00:50:10] Jacob Winograd: Relatively quickly compared to how state arbitration works. Yeah. Is the state, state arbitration can sometimes, like you’re talking years, like, like how many times have you heard, like something like a court case in the news and then a couple years later you’re like, oh wow, this court case is just now happening because all of the gridlock and procedure and bureaucracy that happens before it actually ’cause you, you have to like have pretrial and then finally goes before trial and it can get drawn out.

[00:50:37] Jacob Winograd: Whereas pri, private arbitration is not perfect ’cause nothing is, but there’s this incentive for private arbitration to like, hey, progressive with State Farm and State Farm with Allstate. Like they, they have stuff worked out ahead of time. Like if we have. Clients of ours, they get into an altercation like we know ahead of time how we’re going to handle it.

[00:50:59] Jacob Winograd: And we’ve already worked out different scenarios Yeah. And contingencies and things like that. And they just get to work right away with figuring out, use that fault and, and coming up with some kind of, and a lot of the cases get, get settled. Right. Even when people have full tort.

[00:51:15] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah.

[00:51:16] Kerry Baldwin: Well what’s interesting is if, if people actually read the terms of [00:51:20] service on whatever thing they have to select, I agree. To the terms of service, to almost always, there’s a section in the terms of service that waives your right to arbitrate before the state and instead says, if there’s a problem, we’re going to use private arbitration.

[00:51:37] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. There’s a section in terms of, of service agreements almost always that, waves that and says, we’re gonna do this privately. So yeah the, the, the framework actually already exists. We have private arbitration. There’s private law enforcement actually that already exists. Private courts just basically, judges who are employed by the state now if they’re worth their salt.

[00:52:00] Kerry Baldwin: So they could open up their own, their, their own adjudication business. It’s those sorts of people who are really good at problem solving and seeing two sides of, of an argument or three sides of an argument and in arbitrating that dispute. So, these aren’t actually unfamiliar things when you get get down to bras, tacks, but they’re also not totally foreign either.

[00:52:26] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. So I wanna briefly touch on, ’cause we, we, we’ve talked on this bef a little bit already in the episode about how even the idea that like these agencies would just become competing warlords doesn’t really check out because as it turns out, and Bob Murphy’s done a good job on this, Hoppa also done a good job on this, is that fighting it out with guns when you don’t have the ability to tax is just way more expensive than seeking the peaceful solutions because of all the, it’s a lot easier to like hire a couple lawyers.

[00:52:58] Jacob Winograd: Talk it out, then hire a bunch of men with guns and tanks and missiles. Right. And have them, constantly on the standby and constantly fighting these things out than having to settle lawsuits and worrying about collateral damage. Like when, when you take out like the immunity of the state, which protects a lot of these actors from, from any liability, a lot of that gets solved.

[00:53:23] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. But I think part of what sort of like bars, people’s imagination. To how this kind of works is that they have an incomplete conception of justice, not just like in the abstract, like what is just, but just like, like how to resolve injustice. And so there’s different conceptions within the libertarian school of thought of how you go about justice, whether that’s restorative, restitution, things like that.

[00:53:50] Jacob Winograd: So can you cover some of that just in terms of like what justice looks like in a, polycentric legal order in a stateless society and, and kind of how that sort of maps onto this ability for, the market to handle these sorts of things.

[00:54:05] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Well I think that the way it would work out in the market is you would have different sorts of agencies providing different sorts of administration of, of justice.

[00:54:16] Kerry Baldwin: I think that you would have restorative justice agencies who can deal with, a level of injustice that is. More repairable than others. You might have, ones that are dedicated solely to violent crimes. You might have, private prisons that go along with that. If you have like a, a case of a serial murderer.

[00:54:37] Kerry Baldwin: The point is, is that the market provides that based on the needs of the market. And so if the market has a need for, peaceful arbitration through a restorative justice model where victim and perpetrator are able to talk and come to understand each other, and the perpetrator is able to make re recompense for his crimes without like, ruining his future, like what you get.

[00:55:07] Kerry Baldwin: And in the prison system today like that would be an option. So one thing that people don’t understand is that order naturally arises through the coordination of human actions, not only in the market, but across societal spheres. Natural order doesn’t naturally arise because the state said something.

[00:55:28] Kerry Baldwin: In fact, I think the more the state says things, the more disorder and chaos you get.

[00:55:33] Jacob Winograd: Right. So, well, well this is, this was one of the, so this is, this leads right into the next question, which is I think one of the falsies at play here, which is at economic observation from the Austrian school, but it applies.

[00:55:47] Jacob Winograd: Two, the state is the problem of economic calculation. Mm-hmm. Which is the big myth behind the idea of a central planner, which is what monopoly governance is. It’s, it’s so people who don’t know. So what I mean by central planning is a command economy, like total socialism or communism, the state runs everything.

[00:56:07] Jacob Winograd: And even your average, status economist, even though they advocate for mixed economic policies, will say, well, we can’t have a total command economy. Right. ’cause they see how badly that, I remember this anecdote of like, back when there was the Soviet Union, it wasn’t Soviet Union, it was communist China.

[00:56:26] Jacob Winograd: And like they had like a position for people to determine what the prices of things were. And then when that guy came over here to the states, he wanted to meet up with. His American counterpart. But it was just like, we don’t have that, like, for that as our kind, like, like we don’t have a, a government bureaucrat that decides how much everything costs.

[00:56:45] Jacob Winograd: Right, right. So, so we understand generally that command economies don’t work, but that, that those same incentives and drawbacks apply to law as well. You can’t, and just all of society, and this is why I think we started by talking about sphere sovereignty, is that we believe society is ordered, but it’s not ordered through.

[00:57:05] Jacob Winograd: I mean, it’s ordered through a central planner with his, which is God, but there’s no man, there’s no earthly man run central planner, which keeps that order going. God has ordered society in a way where it is, it’s so complex, it cannot be monopolized.

[00:57:22] Kerry Baldwin: Well, and the reason for that is because society isn’t a monolith.

[00:57:26] Kerry Baldwin: The whole point of sphere sovereignty. Like even within, say, take the sphere of the family, for example, there isn’t one family, there are many families right now. Are there functioning families? Yes. Are there dysfunctional families? Yes. Are there ideas about the best way to raise your family? Yes. Are there ideas that are competing with each other?

[00:57:50] Kerry Baldwin: Yes. Are those ideas competing in such a way as to take up arms against one another or try to eat each other up? No. You don’t have families who are going to war with each other over, co-sleeping or vaccines or what school to send their kids to, those sorts of things. So it’s the same thing with government agencies or governing agencies.

[00:58:13] Kerry Baldwin: In a polycentric legal order, would there be functional civil government agencies? Yes. Would there be dysfunctional ones? Yes. Would there be ideas about the best way to. To civilly govern? Yes. Would those ideas compete with others? Yes. Would those ideas come up and take arms up against one another? No, they wouldn’t do that.

[00:58:33] Kerry Baldwin: So, when it’s not just decentralization, which, the monarchist would be [00:58:40] an advocate for decentralization. It is polycentric, it is the market saying, okay, let’s solve the problem. Like, this is what entrepreneurship is, is we see a problem in society, we see a need, we’re going to try to solve it.

[00:58:54] Kerry Baldwin: And the conditions for that order are no different than, the, the natural order that arises from, competing cell phone companies. Samsung and Apple only go to metaphorical war against each other. They never actually, they, they never actually take up arms against one another.

[00:59:14] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Well, I think what undergirds a lot of what we’ve talked about is that one of the core fallacies at play when we’re talking about civil governance and stateless versus having a state is the nirvana fallacy or the no perfect solution fallacy, where people just, they want to have some kind of like, well, you need to explain to me how everything gets solved out and worked out perfectly before.

[00:59:39] Jacob Winograd: I believe that your proposal is better than the status quo. It’s like, but that’s not the standard because the status quo, it basically, all the complaints about anarchy are really just descriptions of the status quo, right? Mm-hmm. Like the whole warlord are gonna take over. Okay. Like, what do we live in a peaceful world right now?

[00:59:58] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Like, we got that, right? I mean, yeah. So, and, and the, yeah. I mean, you just go down through the list and so yeah. I think that’s something that has to be. Brought up here we’re talking about like, how do we order society and if there’s one disadvantage that market, it’s not even a disadvantage.

[01:00:15] Jacob Winograd: I’m, I’m, but it, you can think of it kind of like a disadvantage is that the market is innovative, but it, it works slowly in a sense that as problems arise, they don’t always get solved immediately. And people just think, well, wouldn’t it be nice if we had this central planner, the state that just came in and just passed along, solved the problem?

[01:00:35] Jacob Winograd: It’s like, but that, the point is you don’t know how to solve the problem. The market doesn’t even know right away, but the market’s, the mechanism by which society, through these different spheres and different problems that arise organically, figure out how to best solve the problem or meet the needs or et cetera.

[01:00:54] Kerry Baldwin: Right. Well, so here’s the thing about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are people who are problem solvers, and they are people who are not afraid, like somebody who starts a business with an entrepreneurial mindset. So there are business owners out there who do not have an entrepreneurial mindset, but an entrepreneur is going to jump into the deep end of the pool and figure out how to swim.

[01:01:20] Kerry Baldwin: They’re that kind of personality and they’re, they’re the ones who are taking on a risk based on what they, they know that they’re capable of doing and what they’re capable of learning. And so entrepreneurs are in a constant state of, Hey, there’s this market need. I’ve got the skill. How does that go together?

[01:01:42] Kerry Baldwin: And, how can I solve this problem? Yeah. And maybe it’s a problem that I can’t solve, and so I leave it alone and I stick with my niche, but somebody else is gonna come along, another entrepreneur is going to come along and say, you know what? I’ve got a skillset for that. I’m gonna jump into the deep end of the pool on this.

[01:01:58] Kerry Baldwin: And so entrepreneurs take on a, a ton of risk. It is a calculated risk, but they’re doing it based on a skillset and knowledge that they have, specialized knowledge they have. And even capital if that comes into it. But they’re the problem solvers and entrepreneurs are the ones that are like, come at me with it. ’cause I can, yeah, I can adapt quickly. And I’ll say this one last thing. One thing that I’ve learned just from being an entrepreneur myself is when you’ve got this big monstrosity of an organization, they can’t pivot quickly. It’s like trying to turn the Titanic away from the, incoming iceberg.

[01:02:41] Kerry Baldwin: You can’t move that thing. And so when problems come, it’s that big monstrosity that actually can’t adapt to what’s coming. When you have, smaller entities, they, they have the capacity to pi to pivot. They are flexible enough and agile enough that they can move and pivot with what’s coming at them.

[01:03:03] Kerry Baldwin: So it is way more advanta advantageous for us to do this with our civil justice system. Because it’s so important. It should absolutely be polycentric in nature. We need those on those civil justice entrepreneurs to be able to problem solve and take what’s coming and, and pivot and adapt and improve.

[01:03:26] Jacob Winograd: Agreed. The last question I wanted to ask you, which I feel like we’ve again sort of touched on here and we’re setting it up already, is just, what do we do right now while we still live under this giant monopolistic state? Are we just kind of like waiting for it to collapse? Are we, go to voter away to freedom?

[01:03:45] Jacob Winograd: Or is there a way that we can like the these app, because we started this conversation by saying that the principles matter to help guide us. So how does this help guide us into what we can do now? That can help us to live in accordance with these true principles, and that hopefully has the added benefit of moving us more in the direction of a society that is ordering itself properly as opposed to, under the direction of fiat.

[01:04:14] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Well, I mean it’s, it’s interesting to answer this question because usually people, when they ask this question, they’re looking for the answer from a central planner. They are asking libertarians as though they are central planners. And I distinctly remember Ron Paul talking about, he gets asked the question, should I, should I run for congress?

[01:04:35] Kerry Baldwin: Should I run for office? And Ron Paul’s answer to that was, well, no, not necessarily, and actually probably not the problem solvers. So if you can imagine what society is supposed to operate. On, right? If you’re accepting the argument that a polycentric legal order or the market can hand handle civil governance, then you have to ask yourself the question, okay, what does that look like and what am I doing in that, that particular situation?

[01:05:03] Kerry Baldwin: Are you good at law enforcement? Open up a private, a private investigator business, or, open up your own security business. Are you good at, arbitrating disputes? Well open up a business of, of private arbitration, but it may not even be that. It may not be in the realm of civil justice at all.

[01:05:23] Kerry Baldwin: You may fit into it in terms of something else entirely. Maybe you practice medicine or you’re an educator or whatever. You turn that into an entrepreneurial pursuit and the more of the. The more of the economy that is solving the problems that the state is trying to take over and solve itself. Number one, you’re producing evidence that the market can solve the problem, and number two you’re keeping the state from being able to take that on, in, into totality.

[01:05:54] Kerry Baldwin: And so, what should we be doing? Well, you should be thinking like an entrepreneur, at least in the sense [01:06:00] of what is my skillset and how can I serve my neighbor in that skillset in a mutually beneficial way? And go after that, whether that is in the realm of civil governance or that’s in the realm of education or medicine, or.

[01:06:14] Kerry Baldwin: Shoot, even being a parent, if you’re a parent, be a parent. That’s what you do. You opt out of the state. You don’t, as much as possible opt out of the state and what they’re doing, and as much as possible start doing things within an entrepreneurial purview that is solving those problems instead of having the state solve those problems.

[01:06:37] Jacob Winograd: I’ll really quick here, plug my recent conversation with Spike Cohen and he does a great job of this. You are the power, which is this basically grassroots, nationwide for now might be expanding, but organization where they basically just, anytime the government is intruding on individual people’s lives and they, they hear about it, they just organize grassroots actors and people to call or whatnot and just like urge the people to do the right thing.

[01:07:05] Jacob Winograd: And there was this one instance he told me about where I think it was this church created or sponsored, at least organization that was dealing with the homelessness problem in a particular city. But the city got mad and tried to ban it ’cause they had received a bunch of funding. From either the state or federal government to handle this problem.

[01:07:24] Jacob Winograd: And they were worried like, wow, well we, we got this money to solve this problem and if you guys solve the problem, then we can’t keep the money and, hire all these people we wanna hire. And so they started to try to, prosecute and arrest this organization and you are the power stepped in and help to protect their, protect the right of the market too.

[01:07:42] Jacob Winograd: So the market was solving a stake, like a, not really a market problem, but the, the market. That’s it. Going back to earlier people said, why doesn’t the market went out over the state intervention? Sometimes it does, right? Like, if more people do the kind of things you’re talking about and like what Spike talks about and does, it can, we’ve seen even as corrupt.

[01:08:06] Jacob Winograd: Enough public outcry has got them to back out of wars or prevent them from doing certain interventions. So the we are not powerless. It doesn’t mean that, as, as we’ve talked about, we’re reformed libertarians, it’s not gonna be perfect. We can’t perfectly achieve that like dominion mandate here on earth right now on this side of the eschaton.

[01:08:26] Jacob Winograd: But you know what we can make a difference right now. And these principles help to kind of like be that north star, to understand how God’s society works, how it’s ordered, how civil governance works. And we can, as you described, their, orient ourselves along that, along those principles. And that not just improves our lives, but it as a act of the market through spontaneous order, I think improves the lives of everyone around them.

[01:08:52] Jacob Winograd: So, Carrie, I’m gonna give you the last word as well as a chance just to, again, plug yourself and remind people where they can find all of your work and socials and things like that.

[01:09:02] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. Well, I wanna say two things. Number one, you are the power is way more effective at grassroots organization than the grassroots former employer of mine, grassroots Voldemort, that talked about before.

[01:09:17] Kerry Baldwin: Before we not

[01:09:17] Jacob Winograd: say his name,

[01:09:18] Kerry Baldwin: we dare not say his name or its name. Anyways if you don’t have a, you are the power chapter in your area, please consider starting one because I man, they are. They are amazing. The other thing that I would say is, despite. Trump being like a freaking turncoat. He, one of the reasons why he got elected the way he did was because he appealed to the, to the same sort of messaging and ideas that Libertarians and anarchists hold to.

[01:09:53] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. And that is, that’s why he

[01:09:55] Jacob Winograd: gave so many of us.

[01:09:56] Kerry Baldwin: Yeah. That is the first time I think in American political history where libertarians have been courted as much as Trump courted libertarians. Yeah. And so even though he did it for nefarious, obviously nefarious purposes, and I don’t think politicians should be trusted, but that says something about the effectiveness of our message and the fact that we should keep.

[01:10:20] Kerry Baldwin: Keep doing what we’re doing, even if it’s on social media. But getting local and spreading that message locally is going to be one of the most power powerful things that you can do. Other than that, like I mentioned before, you can find all my work@mereliberty.com. I am actually hoping to relaunch Mere Liberty and the Dare to Think Podcast in the next few months once things settle down with this new micro school that I’ve established, which is a fun entrepreneurial endeavor in itself.

[01:10:54] Kerry Baldwin: But I will also be reopening courses for my Liberty seminar, which is teaching youth and adults how to think critically using the Socratic method. And that’s gonna come with all kinds of new upgrades since I’ve learned all kinds of new stuff from running a school. So.

[01:11:11] Jacob Winograd: Awesome. That’ll lots of stuff

[01:11:12] Kerry Baldwin: on the horizon.

[01:11:14] Jacob Winograd: Yes. Well, like I said before, definitely gonna have, I want to get you back on as soon as possible once you’re, up and running with the school and everything to talk more about that, because that is another example of everything we’ve just talked about in action. Yeah. And I’m just really excited to see what you do with it.

[01:11:30] Jacob Winograd: I thank you again for coming on, Carrie. I think this was hopefully notifying conversation for everyone to just learn more about, not just the underlying theory, but just how this plays out in the real world and just to, I don’t know, just again, as you said, the normalcy bias and we don’t talk about these things much and this is part of pushing back on that Overton window to, this was the, when I first joined, I think I’ve said this a bunch of times on my show, but I’ll say it again.

[01:11:55] Jacob Winograd: When I first joined LCI, norm and, and Doug were like, okay, we like your content, but like, you gotta keep the word anarchy in the title. And I was like, I was like, I mean, yes, we have a conversation about it, but like, that’s what we do. Like, yeah. Like don’t let people be turned off by like, oh, anarchy.

[01:12:12] Jacob Winograd: That’s scary. It’s like, just make it not scary. Be like, oh, does it mean what you think it means? Let’s just talk about it. That’s what we did here, so thanks. Thanks everybody for listening. Thanks again, Carrie, for joining us again, and we’ll talk to y’all again real soon. Alright everyone. Well, I hope that you enjoyed that conversation.

[01:12:30] Jacob Winograd: And listen, I’m sure that there are still questions and there are people who are still going to find themselves unconvinced, but hopefully this is just another step in the road for you if you’re exploring these ideas to realizing that this isn’t some crazy tinfoil, like people practicing weird cult rituals in their backyards thing.

[01:12:53] Jacob Winograd: But that anarchism is an actual robust and serious political philosophy that does have answers to these questions. And I think that these are compelling answers to, and, and really, as I said, even like in my cold intro. I think that we just need to push back against this assumption that undergirds a lot of this conversation, which is that the state is order and anarchy is disorder, and maybe colloquially anarchy has this [01:13:20] association with the word chaos.

[01:13:22] Jacob Winograd: But when I look around the world today in our own country, on the world stage, I see a lot of chaos and I don’t see a lot of order. I don’t see a lot of order as God ordains it. And although we can’t perfectly create a society that upholds justice here on this earth, we do know, I think after conversations like this that there are better and worse ways to go about that.

[01:13:47] Jacob Winograd: And monopolizing and centralizing power is. Just not a way that I think holds up at the very least, as I’ve said before, even if I haven’t convinced you of a stateless society, I think these arguments on the other hand become the strongest arguments for why we have to then default to that knight watchman state, that limited monopoly that we give only what is absolutely crucial to, and once we’ve given it that, just that little bit, you gotta either, you got two options from there.

[01:14:21] Jacob Winograd: You either fight tooth and nail to make sure it stays that way, or you consider what Carrie and I talked about today. So that’s all I have for you. I look forward to talking to you guys again next week, as I always conclude by saying Live at Peace Live for Christ. Take care.

[01:14:35] Narrator: The Biblical Anarchy Podcast is a part of the Christians for Liberty network, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute.

[01:14:43] Narrator: If you love this podcast, it helps us reach more with a message of freedom when you rate and review us on your favorite podcast apps and share with others. If you want to support the production of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, please consider donating to the Libertarian Christian institute@biblicalanarchypodcast.com, where you can also sign up to receive special announcements and resources related to biblical anarchy.

[01:15:11] Narrator: Thanks for tuning in.

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