No Coercion

My online friend, George Donnelly, whom I blogged about previously (here, here, and here), posts an update about his situation and the efforts by the state to punish him for the heinous crime of filming his friend being assaulted by U.S. Marshals. Though his situation has improved, he’s not out of the woods yet. Spread this around so that people begin to learn the true nature of the state: it’s a criminal organization that obtains its funding and seeks its goals through initiatory violence rather than civilized, peaceful exchange and persuasion. It should be viewed not as a ‘necessary evil’ but as an unecessary and unfortunate detour on humanity’s journey toward civilized society. Stop defending it.

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Those who choose to mock anarchists by holding up Somalia as the sort of situation that comes about in the absence of the state are missing a lot of really important pieces of the story. A friend of mine (thanks, Donovan!) reminded me of one of the biggest the other day: that Western statism, in the form of foreign aid money violently expropriated from states’ subject populations and transferred to Third World state rulers, results in a violent struggle for control of Somalia. The warring factions each know that whoever comes out on top will stand to gain untold riches from the United States and other Western states. To make matters worse, the factions know that the U.S. sends even larger amounts of aid to regions plagued by al-Qaeda; so they have a serious incentive to invite al-Qaeda into their territory.

And, of course, states like the U.S. have a vested interest in ensuring that Somalia doesn’t become too peaceful prior to the establishment of a strong central state, because such a society would be highly threatening to the illusion that the state is necessary for peace and prosperity.

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Well, the usual media suspects have wasted no time in attacking Rand Paul for his opposition to the part of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits private businesses from discriminating on the basis of race (and some other stuff). They’ve implied that such a stance is racist. That’s interesting. So I guess I support the right of skinheads to hold a rally, I must be racist, too. I guess if I support the right of homophobes to write hateful blog posts about gay people, I must be homophobic, too. And if I support the right of pot heads to smoke weed, I must also be a pot head. If you’re the kind of person that equates defending someone’s rights with supporting that person’s personal beliefs, I really don’t know if I can help you. I suggest you go back to chewing on your crayons and stuffing Cheerios in your nose.

But more importantly, those on the left are out in force defending the morality of the state’s using violence to compel certain actions on the part of business owners who have not aggressed against anyone. That’s right: they’re saying that partial slavery is okay. They’re saying that, because they don’t like the way some people choose to peacefully (if unpleasantly) use their property, violence may be employed to force them to use it in a different way. They’re saying you don’t have a right to be a bigot.

Well, you do have that right as a human being. And others have the right to boycott, shun, and ostracize you.

I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said in places like these:
Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act: Was he right?
Defend the Scoundrels, Rand!
Which Institution is More Enlightened?

But let me be very clear about this. If you use violence or the threat thereof to compel someone to provide goods or services to someone else, you are an aggressor and a criminal. If you support such criminal actions, well, let’s just say you’ve got some remedial work to do in the area of ethics.

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Carlos Miller has this post today about the latest with George Donnelly’s ordeal. Organized crime is not somehow made legitimate by calling itself “the government.” This insanity must end.

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Maybe this is optimistic, but we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the state, the violent death throes of an aggressive criminal organization that senses its own impending collapse. This past Tuesday, libertarian/voluntaryist activist George Donnelly was attacked by federal agents (and subsequently kidnapped by them) while filming a confrontation between an agent and one of his fellow activists (initiated by the agent) during an outreach effort to hand out information about jury nullification and the Fully Informed Jury Association. Summaries can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

He’s out of federal captivity now, but is under house arrest and facing potentially serious charges for his terrible crime of filming a federal goon harassing another innocent person. George is now seeking legal and financial assistance in his fight against this injustice. See here and here.

It would be nice if George is able to not only get these ridiculous charges dropped but also succeed in suing these cretins for their violent actions. Unfortunately, such suits rarely work. One of the ways that a free society could deal with aggressors and other anti-social individuals who refuse to participate in voluntary arbitration and restitution procedures is through ostracism: simply refusing to associate or do business with the offenders, including not selling them groceries, not giving them loans, not providing them with utilities, etc. Given this, and knowing that George is a fan of ostracism, I think it would be great if someone was able to identify the aggressing U.S. Marshalls (some are visible in photos taken at the time) in this instance and launch a campaign to publicly shame and ostracize them. Let’s show the state that its aggression will not be tolerated by civilized society.

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Nice piece on public versus private cops over at Cop Block: Public vs Private Police; Which Would You Choose?

Summed up nicely with this line toward the end: “…it’s beyond me why anyone would allow a monopoly on something as important as protection.”

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In The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has this to say about the nature of the state and how it continues to exist:

While productive enterprises come into or go out of existence because of voluntary support or its absence, a ruling class never comes to power because there is a demand for it, nor does it abdicate when abdication is demonstrably demanded. One cannot say by any stretch of the imagination that homesteaders, producers, savers and contractors have demanded their expropriation. They must be coerced into accepting it, and this proves conclusively that the exploitation firm is not in demand at all. Nor can one say that a ruling class can be brought down by abstaining from transactions with it in the same way as one can bring down a productive enterprise. For the ruling class acquires its income through nonproductive and noncontractual transactions and thus is unaffected by boycotts. Rather, what makes the rise of an exploitation firm possible, and what alone can in turn bring it down is a specific state of public opinion or, in Marxist terminology, a specific state of class consciousness.

An exploiter creates victims, and victims are potential enemies. It is possible that this resistance can be lastingly broken down by force in the case of a group of men exploiting another group of roughly the same size. However, more than force is needed to expand exploitation over a population many times its own size. For this to happen, a firm must also have public support. A majority of the population must accept the exploitative actions as legitimate. This acceptance can range from active enthusiasm to passive resignation. But it must be acceptance in the sense that a majority must have given up the idea of actively or passively resisting any attempt to enforce nonproductive and noncontractual property acquisitions. The class consciousness must be low, undeveloped and fuzzy. Only as long as this state of affairs lasts is there still room for an exploitative firm to prosper even if no actual demand for it exists. Only if and insofar as the exploited and expropriated develop a clear idea of their own situation and are united with other members of their class through an ideological movement which gives expression to the idea of a classless society where all exploitation is abolished, can the power of the ruling class be broken. Only if, and insofar as, a majority of the exploited public becomes consciously integrated into such a movement and accordingly displays a common outrage over all nonproductive or noncontractual property acquisitions, shows a contempt for everyone who engages in such acts, and deliberately contributes nothing to help make them successful (not to mention actively trying to obstruct them), can its power be brought to crumble.

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In response to my previous post, someone on a message board replied to the primary question (”What might have been?”) with, “We would be speaking Russian.” And another commenter also indicated he believed the Soviets would or could have developed nuclear weapons first and conquered the world in the absence of the Manhattan Project. In this particular example, the blame appears to fall back on the Manhattan Project itself, since Stalin didn’t have a nuke program until he heard about the one in the U.S.

But I think a more important point for the general case is that a free society, unencumbered by destructive taxation and regulation, would be extremely wealthy and highly versatile. Such a society would have people and firms that would have total mastery over information gathering and would know about a foreign power’s weapons plans in short order. The idea that a wealthy, free, and fiercely independent people would not spontaneously organize to prevent the development or use of such a weapon is absurd. Not to mention that a society that had eliminated the state or reduced it to the point that it was not engaging in military adventures (and the resultant weapons development) would not even represent a threat meriting the creation of a civilization-endangering weapon by a foreign state.

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With all the news lately about the Large Hadron Collider and new NASA programs, I think it’s important to ask a fundamental question: Why should the state be involved in funding and conducting science? That is, why should one group of people take up arms and expropriate vast sums of money from other people in order to do science? From a moral standpoint, the answer seems obvious to me: they shouldn’t. Like all endeavors of the state, it’s an exploitative relationship and has no place in civilized society.

But, some will say, what about the Apollo Program? What about all the discoveries that happen at places like the LHC? What about the achievements of the U.S. federal labs? What about all the university science funded by the government? Aren’t these worthwhile advances? Wouldn’t many of these things be impossible without violent exploitation? Well, to these people I would simply ask: What might have been?

What might have been the course of scientific progress in the U.S. if the state had not spent the past century confiscating untold billions of dollars from private individuals and directing it in the way that it did? Well, we know that all that money (all things being equal) would have been directed toward market-demanded production. Some would have gone toward privately-conducted science. In fact, without government crowding, there would have been quite a bit more private science, and private science is responsive to what consumers actually want. State science has only a rough approximation of this in the form of the pressure of public opinion.

For all we know, market-driven scientific progress could well have far exceeded what we’ve ended up with. Maybe some scientific knowledge and technologies we have now wouldn’t exist. But other discoveries–again, more closely-aligned with consumer demand–may have been made that would have resulted in an overall higher standard of living than we currently enjoy. In fact, that’s likely. With only a pale imitation of the cost-control pressures of the market, government science will tend to be far less efficient, solving problems and developing new technologies in much more round-about and resource-intensive ways than market-driven science. So, no, we probably wouldn’t have had an Apollo Program, that expensive and embarrassing instance of international “sword fighting” (if you know what I mean). Rather, the natural pressures of the market may have resulted in private, competing firms developing advanced, low-cost methods of reaching orbit and extracting commercially valuable resources from the moon, Mars, asteroids, etc. And we probably wouldn’t have the LHC. Instead, perhaps companies in fields as diverse as transportation, computing, communications, and medical technology would have developed a variety of cheaper and more effective ways of probing the fundamental particles and forces of reality in search of new technologies for the products demanded by their customers.

And it all would have been done through peaceful interaction among free people seeking to profit by providing one another with value rather than by violence of a parasitic political class exploiting a productive population in order to score political points.

The question is not, “How could we have X,Y, and Z without the state?” The question is, “In the absence of violent, inefficient, and politically driven state science, what might have been?”

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Just wanted to pass along this bit of awesomeness from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:

Let’s Improve the Efficiency of News Reporting

Here’s a letter to the New York Times:

You argue that a government-mandated higher fuel-efficiency standard “will yield a trifecta of benefits: reduced dependence on foreign oil, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and consumer savings at the pump” (“Everybody Wins,” April 2).

By this logic, you should also support a government-mandated news-efficiency standard – that is, a requirement that you report and editorialize on any given amount of news using fewer words and less paper than you now use.  This standard would yield a trifecta of benefits: reduced dependence on foreign lumber (we import much from Canada), fewer greenhouse-gas emissions (transporting slimmed-down newspapers would burn less fuel than is burned to transport today’s bulky, news-inefficient papers), and consumer savings at the newsstand (using less ink and less paper will make news-efficient newspapers less pricey than today’s ink and wood-pulp guzzlers).

Everybody wins.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

When you look carefully, likely market failures are all around us, just begging to be corrected by the state.

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