Libertarians for the State

I have been thinking about the concept of “legitimacy” lately and what makes a government legitimate. In my opinion, there is no objective standard of legitimacy, and a government will be more or less legitimate depending on how many of its subjects acquiesce in it or consent to it and the depth of this acquiescence or consent. The more legitimacy the government enjoys, the less costly it is for it to rule its subjects. The government has to engage in a balancing act in which it optimizes returns to the rulers by fleecing the subjects as much as possible while simultaneously avoiding increased costs that will ensue if the subjects resist governance.

Repressive government can be expensive. If you tax too much, you will stifle the economy on which you are preying. Jack booted thugs don’t come cheap, and surveillance programs and prisons and other forms of overt coercion are all expensive and counterproductive. It is far better to convince a gullible population that the government is serving them and is necessary to protect them from foreign and domestic enemies. In order to do this, you may have to arrange to give the appearance of serving and protecting and to make it seem as if the subjects had freely chosen the rulers. This is a neat trick, and it is easier to pull off than you might imagine.

Is there a libertarian definition of “legitimacy”. I imagine that the young fellow at Positive Liberty is talking about a form of “legitimacy” when he writes, claiming to enlighten his readers about libertarian theory:

“Iran is simply not a sovereign nation, in accordance with libertarian theory at least. According to libertarianism, “sovereignty,” if it exists at all, exists only when a government respects the natural rights of the citizenry and is based on some form of consent (although, again, this last element is in some dispute). No sovereign is legitimate who tramples on individual rights and enslaves its people; such a “sovereign” is in fact a criminal, and can be dealt with as such, either by his own people or by bystanders who choose to intercede.” http://positiveliberty.com/2006/01/thoughts-on-the-questions-and-answers.html

In his view, the legitimacy of a government is determined not by its subjects but by other governments! If the rulers of government A believe that government B is not sufficiently deferential to the rights of B’s subjects, A is entirely justified, from a libertarian standpoint, in attacking B. It is hoped that the oppressed subjects of B will not be unduly inconvenienced by this intervention.

I am not among the libertarian intelligentsia (it would be a sad state of affairs for libertarianism if I were), but even I can tell that the idea that libertarianism advances the notion that the legitimacy of a government is granted by yet another government is absurd. If all the governments in the world suffered a repressive regime to exist, perhaps because of its military might, that would not confer any legitimacy on it at all.

The Positive Liberty contributor's view of things would justify, on a “libertarian” basis, a government’s intercession in another state’s civil war on the side of the government against its rebels. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish the Positive Liberty contributor's view of things from the view of the Neo-con Death Cult. Presumably, it is up to the government to decide when another government is sufficiently legitimate and when aggressive war would be justified.

UPDATE: A commenter has pointed out that Positive Liberty is a group blog and that the post I have referenced does not reflect the views of the other members. Accordingly, I ought not to refer to this as the "Positive Liberty" view, and I have changed this to the "Positive Liberty contributor's view".