Every State is in Anarchy

Who […] is the “final arbiter” in the U.S. system? The president? He can be impeached. The Congress? Its laws can be declared unconstitutional. The Supreme Court? Its rulings can be ignored (as Andrew Jackson did), or it can be bullied into acquiescence (as Franklin Roosevelt did). The voters? They can be disenfranchised by state law. The state governments themselves? Ask Jefferson Davis. Sovereignty does not reside at any single point in the governmental structure; any ruling by one part can in principle be appealed, or overruled, or simply ignored, by another — just as under anarchy. If most of the time the various components of government achieve relatively harmonious coordination, what enables them to do so is not a “final arbiter.”

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[G]overnments are composed of people, not impersonal robots; and being part of a government doesn’t make people any less likely to have disagreements […] What happens, then, if, say, a legislature makes a determination […] and a court strikes it down as unconstitutional? Well, sometimes such disagreements lead to violent conflict — civil wars, coups d’état, and the like — but usually they don’t, because the existing incentive structures tend toward cooperation. Economic theory and historical evidence alike indicate that the answer is much the same under anarchist legal systems.

A government is not an individual; it is a large number of different people, with different interests, interacting. And no one member of that group, unless he or she is a Kryptonian, can by his or her own personal might secure compliance from the others. Moreover, all the members of government combined possess insufficient might of themselves to subdue all those they rule, as well. Thus no government can achieve anything unless there exists a substantial degree of cooperation, both within the government on the one hand, and between the government and the governed on the other. If such cooperation were impossible without some higher agency to direct and enforce it, then the higher agency itself would be impossible for the same reason. There is never a “final arbiter.” There is no such thing, actual or possible, on God’s green earth.

What is possible, and often actual, is that an existing pattern of institutions and practices proves stable and self-reinforcing — that people act in ways that give one another an incentive to keep cooperating, for the most part. Certainly no legal system can function unless most disputes end up getting practically resolved one way or another. But in real-world legal systems (whether state-based or stateless), most disputes do not go unresolved forever — not because there is a “final arbiter,” but because the patterns of activity in which most of the participants engage or acquiesce don’t allow the indefinite continuation of disputes.[1]

From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.[2]