This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 18th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

For most people, anarchism would simply be a world without rules, chaotic and dangerous.

And the people who advocate it is themselves chaotic and

dangerous.

Author Michael Malice has assembled the anarchist handbook, a collection of essays from names

you probably know and names you don't, presenting a range of opinions

about how the world works and how it ought to work. We spoke earlier this month.

It seems so long ago, Michael, when I hosted you at the Cato Institute and introduced

you as the dear author of Dear Reader, the Un authorized biography of Kim Jong-I.

That is one point on a spectrum of the kinds of government that we can have, which is dynastic family communism slash dictatorship.

And in this new book you talk about anarchism and within anarchism there exists a spectrum and I

think people who are critical of anarchists almost universally are just

talking about one specific flavor of

anarchist if I understand some of the writings that you cite here.

Well it's it's not even one flavor it's one imaginary kind of straw man.

You know, I wrote the introductory essay in the anarchist handbook and I explain how

what are frequently described as criticisms of anarchism are invariably

descriptions of the status quo. So it's like anarchism is bad because in an

anarchist system you're going to have these warlords who wage war on people and it's like what do you think we have now?

It's it's so there's many criticism of anarchism some are more coherent than others, but the caricature, which is, I don't know how people

get this idea, but they seem to really be insisted on sticking to it, that was one of the reasons I wrote this book.

So that instead when people asked me how would anarchism resolve this, how would

...