300 Years of Justice and Liberty:

When Government was Against The Law

“Anarchy might be great, if only it could be enforced” – Joseph Sobran, Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian

“’But what would you replace the state with?’ The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be ‘replaced.’” – Joseph Sobran, The Reluctant Anarchist

The Garden of Fire and Ice:
When Government was Against The Law.

A common objection to the advocacy of a State-Free, or “anarchist”, society — is the claim that the maintenance of an ordered, peaceful human society would not be possible without the institution of Forcible Government, the institution of the State. And indeed, this objection might carry a lot of weight – if it weren’t for the fact that the last time folks decided that they could get along just fine without any such Government at all, they only managed to maintain an ordered, peaceful society for… well, over 300 years.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Free Commonwealth of Iceland, AD 930 – 1262.

Iceland first began to be settled around AD 870, principally by Pagan refugees from Norway “fleeing the harsh rule of the Norwegian king Haraldur Harfagri (Harald the Fair-haired), who is believed to have been uniting some parts of modern Norway during the period”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iceland). In addition, it is known that “Culdees”, Celtic Christian monks and evangelists from the Presbyteric Christian community of Iona, had begun to settle in Iceland by this early date (“History of the Scottish Nation”, http://www.reformation.org/vol2ch28.html). These Celtic Christians of Ireland and Scotland had their own, similar reasons to flee to the North: their churches were organized along the most ancient of Christian organizational structures, the Presbyteric structure of Acts 15 – in which assemblies of Elders or “Presbyters”, freely elected by their own local congregations, governed the Church in mutual council together – and during this time, a new theory of Church organization, that of monocratic domination by the Roman Pope, was extending its power northward by fire and sword, and replacing the elected Presbyters of these ancient Hibernian Christian churches with the Pope’s own appointed Priests.

So we see that Iceland was settled largely by people with good reason to distrust the power of Forcible Government – Pagans fleeing the Norse King, and Christians fleeing the Roman Pope. And so, as Iceland became completely settled over the next 60 years — it is perhaps unsurprising that when these peoples decided upon what form of State should rule over them, they decided that it would be best if they should be ruled by No State at all.

This is not to say that Iceland was a country without laws. Indeed, it was said of Iceland that “they have no king except the law.” (http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/society/text/laws.htm). What Iceland did not have, was any form of Forcible Government – for “Instead of a king they had local chieftains (“Godhar”)…. These men who were law-makers did not have power just because they held the title godord. They were powerless ‘unless he could convince some free-farmers to follow him.’ This kept tyranny and injustice in check. Jesse Byock states in his book that, ‘leadership evolved in such a way that a chieftain’s power and the resources available to him were not derived from an exploitable realm.’ This was because free farmers could change allegiance between godi without moving to a new geographical location. “The legal godi-thingman bond was created by a voluntary public contract.” The ability to switch legal systems without moving, is key to a decentralized system. It creates secession down the level of the individual, making all governance structures formed truly voluntary.” (http://mises.org/daily/1121)

A citizen of the Free Commonwealth, thus, enjoyed a degree of liberty virtually unprecedented in human history, precisely because the law-givers were forced to compete for the citizens’ allegiance, and to compete for the fees required to provide Justice and other government services. No one law-giver enjoyed any legal right whatsoever to compel any citizen to accept his rule, or to pay his demanded taxes. Since all governing structures were truly and completely voluntary, the defining characteristic of forcible Government — the power of the State to compel the citizen to obey its governance and pay its required taxes – simply did not exist; indeed, legally could not exist.

In short, the foundation of three hundred years of Icelandic Justice and Liberty could therefore be summed up in one simple statement:

Government – was Against The Law.

However, the liberties enjoyed by the Anarchistic Free Commonwealth of Iceland did not last forever (although, 332 years was at least a pretty good run – considerably longer than the United States of America has existed thus far) – and to understand the causes of its downfall, we return once again to the villains of our thus-far happy tale: The Norse King, and the Roman Pope.

By AD 1000, seventy years after the full settlement of Iceland and the institution of their Anarchist Commonwealth – the power of the Roman Pope had come to hold sway over the Norse King, and with him the powers of the Norwegian State. And where once Christianity had been founded upon a Declaration of War against the State (http://slave-state.org/blog/2010/11/28/christianity-as-a-declaration-of-war-against-the-state/), now the Roman Pope employed the mailed fist of the Norse State to introduce into Iceland, that rocky little garden of fire and ice, the Serpent of forcible taxation. Under threats from the powerful Roman Catholic King of Norway, Iceland – formerly a country enjoying relative religious liberty and equality for both Pagans and Presbyteric Culdee-Christians — had chosen mass conversion to Roman Catholic Christianity in AD 1000. Although their local churches retained many of their more-ancient elective and presbyteric traditions for several hundred years, the Roman Church did succeed by AD 1100 in coercing all the Godhar into universally imposing a small, but mandatory, tithe upon all citizens of Iceland for the support of the Roman Church. And while Icelandic Bishops were still elected after the Presbyteric fashion, rather than appointed by the Pope, the existence of this mandatory tithe created a potential source of revenue unconstrained by any accountability to the people.

Over the next hundred years, some of the more ambitious Godhar gradually began to pursue, and succeed, in securing election as Bishops – thus gaining control over a stream of “Religious” revenues with which to build their own private armies, from which the citizenry of Iceland could not opt out or change their allegiance as they could with any and all “Political” taxes. These Godhar-Bishops, with their guaranteed stream of church revenues, were thus able to gradually displace Godhar who held to the old ways, and who still only collected voluntary taxes freely paid for services rendered. By 1230, domination over the country had become concentrated in the hands of five or six wealthy, powerful families, and civil wars between them began to break out in earnest. Finally, by 1262, the destructive effects of mandatory taxation had run their full course in ravaging Icelandic society, and the Icelanders traded away their liberties for the security provided by the Norse King, and submitted to Norwegian rule. The Icelandic Free Commonwealth, founded 332 years earlier by refugees from the tyranny of Norway’s first monarch, Harald Fairhair, fell at last under the yoke of a Norwegian King.

And in the downfall of their liberties, the Icelanders proved, many centuries before James Madison, the accuracy of his pronouncement: “Practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government is essential to the purity of both”.

– The Theonomic Libertarian

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One closing observation, for the sake of comparison: historians have now concluded that “examination of the historical evidence indicates that the murder rate in Iceland during the Sturlung Period — the era that Icelanders regarded as so intolerably violent as to justify abandoning their political system — was about the same as the murder rate in the United States today.” (http://libertariannation.org/a/f13l1.html)

In short, Icelanders concluded that their Anarchy had failed, only when their Murder Rates got as bad as… what we currently suffer under the “protection” of Government, today. Prior to the institution of mandatory tithing and the attendant rise of the powerful Godhar-Bishops, during the Icelandic “Pure Anarchy” period when Justice was administered by Godhar who had to compete for Citizens’ allegiance and voluntary taxes, their violent crime rate was much lower.