Objection #11

OBJECTION #11: The trouble with anarchism is anarchists. They are verbalists, voluntarists, and romantics. They do not understand the problem and they don't want to. They do not know how to solve the problem and they don't want to. They are dreamers, not doers.
What prompts these remarks is the preposterous article in your Spring, 1978 issue. Ron Classen challenges you there to be specific and concrete, and you respond with some general and vague reasons for being general and vague. Good grief!
Let me suggest that there is a specific and concrete method for penetrating to the root of political government and destroying it. For lack of a better name, let's call this method "direct democracy." The idea behind direct democracy is that as soon as governments must entice customers to support their services rather than being able to coerce them into supporting them, then governments will begin behaving pretty much like any other industry and a host of ancient problems traditionally associated with government will vanish. This is not an overnight project, but it can be accomplished gradually and it is the only feasible approach there is.
I don't really expect romantic anarchists to accept this approach. Given their utopian attitudes it is certainly no surprise that they fail to see the importance of consumer sovereignty. Every practical man however knows the power of the pursestring, yet this reality seems to have escaped anarchists. Which leads me to predict that anarchism, when it comes, will not be achieved by anarchists, or at least not by romantic anarchists.
I have yet to see a single anarchist document that evidences the slightest awareness or understanding of what is, really, a very simple and obvious defect in the government industry. At first glance you'd suppose that everybody who took Economics 101 would fully understand the problem.
Consumer sovereignty means that each consumer only has his share of control over industry's total revenues. to the extent that an industry insists on doing what customers don't want, under consumer sovereignty it shrivels and eventually goes broke. End of problem. To the extent that it does what its paying customers want, they give it the revenues it needs and everyone is happy. No problem.
But when any industry finds itself able to enjoy supplier sovereignty (supplier sovereignty is the ability of the supplier to control its own total revenue) it goes unstable and flagrantly acts contrary to its customers' desires. Government is just another industry. Remember, an industry is defined in terms of its products, and governments are firms engaged in supplying certain kinds of products (sweeping streets, killing crooks, pushing papers).
But all existing governments are political governments. Politics, the acme of supplier sovereignty, is counterproductive wherever it exists. The government problem exists because political governments enjoy supplier sovereignty. Similar problems would exist with any industry that enjoyed the same. This problem can be solved only by eliminating supplier sovereignty and establishing consumer sovereignty. In doing so no utopia will be created. Governments will become no better than other kinds of firms. But they will be no worse, which is the important thing.
What is needed is for citizens themselves to directly and continually be able to determine the total revenues and how these revenues are spent of each and every taxing agency to which each citizen is liable. It's that simple. He who controls the pursestrings holds the final reins of power.
[At this point, there is described in some detail a system for establishing and conducting "preliminary budgetary ballots." These, the writer says, could be incorporated into the official, annual election process--MEC]
Elected officials, who naturally desire to be reelected, will stray little from their constituents' expressed desires. Eventually the process can be made binding as a fiduciary duty upon all elected and appointed officers of government. At which point political government will have been exterminat