In 1994, Sam Francis originally coined a term: “anarcho-tyranny.” He described this phenomenon as “the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.”

In a previous article (and in an forthcoming paper), utilizing Rothbard’s typology of intervention, it was argued that the state—following coercive taxation and monopolization or competition suppression—can intervene through doing “nothing,” that is, paid non-delivery of promised and monopolized service. The core elements of interventionist non-intervention include 1) the binary intervention of coercive taxation where citizens are forced to pay for a service regardless of whether or not they receive it; 2) the triangular interventions of monopolization or competition suppression where the state claims exclusive domain over the service provision; and, 3) non-delivery wherein the state then fails or refuses to provide the monopolized service for which it has extracted payment. These three are the minimum requirements for interventionist non-intervention. Additionally, intensifying elements may be added, which include prohibition of self-help alternatives, the maintenance of the coercive framework, and legal immunity from consequences of non-delivery.

Interventionist non-interventionism combines these elements to create something qualitatively different from other forms of government failure or intervention. This is not deregulation, in which all regulatory and coercive elements are removed; it is not privatization, since the state maintains its monopoly; it is not austerity, since the revenue extraction continues; and it is not anarchy, since the state actively prevents voluntary order. In this way, non-delivery—the state doing “nothing”—also becomes a coercive intervention. The specific combination of extraction, monopolization, and non-delivery creates systematic harm while preventing solutions.

While there is overlap with the concept of “anarcho-tyranny,” there is an important distinction between anarcho-tyranny and interventionist non-intervention. The concept of anarcho-tyranny implies in the first part of the term—anarchy—a total absence of government involvement, however, that is often not the case. It is not that there is pure anarchy—absence of government—allowed in selective cases and tyranny in other cases, but rather that the “anarchy” (disorder) described by anarcho-tyranny is state-imposed disorder. This chaos and disorder (termed “anarcy”) happens within, and largely because of, the state system, not independent of it.

Anarcho-tyranny implies that what citizens often experience are merely two polar and problematic extremes—total absence of the state and the repressive, over-active presence of the state. The problem with this analysis—while useful colloquially—is that it presents “anarchy” and tyranny as two opposite and problematic problems on a spectrum, as if the lack of the state and the tyranny of the state are qualitatively equal problems. In actuality, the modern states are involved in both of these elements. Francis does seem to make this point, perhaps demonstrating that “anarchy” may not be the most precise term for what he describes:

You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things—corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation—but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them. Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state [or other criminals the state ignores]. The result is what seems to be the first........

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