Advice to the Young Anarchist

by Gil Guillory

So, you are congenial to the ideas that:

1. taxation is theft; and

2. entry to lines of production should not be restricted

Or, to use Randy Barnett’s positive formulation of Constitutional Constraints on Power, you embrace:  

1. The Nonconfiscation Principle: Law-enforcement and adjudicative agencies should not be able to confiscate their income by force, but should have to contract with the persons they serve; and

2. The Competition Principle. Law-enforcement and adjudicative agencies should not be able to put their competitors out of business by force.

And you desire to help achieve this state of affairs, and might even want to enter a field of work that will help you to do good while doing well.

Look no further than these professions:

Mediation

Mediation is currently quite unregulated. It is a growth industry, and allows people to bypass the courts, opting for a creative, mutually-agreeable settlement. Classes in mediation are available from many organizations. I recently completed one offered by the Dispute Resolution Center of Montgomery County. It cost $150 and was 8 days in length; for that price I also committed to perform 6 supervised mediations to get my certificate, and another 18 volunteer mediations over the next 18 months.

There are, in fact, many dispute resolution centers throughout the US that mediate on all manner of cases, including: divorce, victim-offender, business-customer, landlord-tenant, employer-employee, homeowner-homeowner’s association, neighbor-neighbor, and insurance claims cases. There are also great mediator associations, such as this one.

If you become trained and build a caselog at a volunteer facility, you can branch out into mediation for pay. Top-paid mediators in the field sometimes have formal training in psychology or social work. Oddly enough, it is a challenge for most lawyers to become mediators, since they must break with the adversarial paradigm and embrace the role of the mediator: a neutral party that offers neither advice nor opinion, but assists the parties in defining issues, developing creative solutions, and reaching agreement.

Arbitration

For the lawyer, arbitration is an especially worthwhile career choice. Also largely unregulated, arbitration truly strikes at the root of the state by muscling in on its monopoly of adjudication. Like mediation, anyone can hang out a shingle and claim to be an arbitrator. However, customers often look for an affiliation with the AAA, the NAF, or some other organization, and proof of competence by way of formal training and experience.  

Private Security

Relatively untapped by anarchist entrepreneurs, the field is open to provision of crime reporting services, insurance-patrol contracts, and all manner of investigative, and offender agent services.

I have mentioned before that I am currently working on such a business plan, but The Woodlands, Texas is not the only possible venue for such services.

It is worth noting that these three spheres of interaction are synergistic. For instance, if a Tannehillian insurer-patrol-investigative business sends a monthly newsletter to its customers to report on crime in customer’s area, it would be a natural fit for private mediators and arbiters to advertise in the newsletter. From the anarchist viewpoint, this is Kennedy’s Hope: that consumers pay to be bombarded with messages that mediation and arbitration and private security are preferable to the state’s provision of these services.

It is also worth noting that if anarchists are drawn to these professions, as I think they would be if they knew of the opportunities, then anarchists will have a disproportionate influence on the evolution of these professions and their underlying institutions. We might hope that more and more arbitrators regard themselves as the last stop, with no expectation of appeal to the state. These expectations, one would expect, would find expression in advertisements, counsel, and the pronouncements of professional societies. By extension, the populace would adhere to the opinion of experts in the field, and tend to regard arbitration, more and more, as a process with no appeal to the state.

Do good doing well. I expect to see many of you as investors, entrepreneurs, and/or workers in the fields of mediation, arbitration, and private security.