No Coercion

So as I sit here sipping my Bicardi and cola, I have to wonder at the absurdity and–not to put too fine a point on it–wholesale injustice of the fact that the “great” state of North Carolina controls my natural human right to purchase liquor and does so with an iron fist one would expect to be reserved for the most heinous of inhuman acts. How, in the 21st century, do we stand idly by and allow ourselves to be strong-armed by the state in our enjoyment of our spirituous refreshments?

Under the regime of the state of North Carolina, I could be thrown in jail (or killed, if I resist) just for distilling my own special brand of whiskey and attempting to sell it to my neighbors, who are willing buyers. Why do we permit a group of people lacking natural authority over our actions (but claiming for themselves some arbitrary authority granted by nonsensical democracy and social contract theory) to tell us what beverages we can or cannot buy and sell? And why do we (now speaking for the polity as represented by the organized crime cartel known as the government) insist on initiating force against our neighbors for their choice of livelihood? What right have we to assault and kill our fellow man for creating and selling a particular kind of drink that is in demand by others?

I say enough is enough. It’s time we learned to grow up and behave in a civilized fashion. All state alcohol control authorities, including my own state’s despicable Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, must be fought and ultimately abolished without delay. Write letters to the editor of your local paper, call and write your state elected officials, be creative! Above all, don’t ever–ever–accept the notion that the state has legitimate authority over you. Your only authority is you. Now, in the spirit of my Irish heritage, let’s drink and fight!

[Update: I have submitted concatenated versions of this post as letters to the editor of both the Herald Sun of Durham and the News & Observer of Raleigh. Both papers are already familiar with my work. He he he. ]

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On a forum somewhere in the far reaches of cyberspace, someone commented to me that in a “purely capitalist society,” there would be greed, exploitation, and few in control of the many.

I have an irrepressible need to correct such disturbing misunderstandings. I know that the vast majority of people who hold such views are closed off to conflicting information, but I also know that occasionally someone is open to new ways of looking at things, and some of them might stumble upon my lowly blog.

So while I’m mostly preaching to the choir, here’s my response to that all-too-common assertion that capitalism results in greed, exploitation, and the few controlling the many:

Actually, there is greed in every possible system because that’s part of human nature. Furthermore, I would submit that greed is not bad–it’s the aspect of our nature that involves striving for ever greater happiness, and that can only be good. Can people do horrible things because of their greed? Certainly. And we see this most clearly in places like North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and the former Soviet Union–those greedless eutopias where an elite group has gained control of the means of production as communism demands. We see the greed of those in power, who kill and enslave any who dare challenge them. We see neighbor turning on neighbor in the hopes of gaining favor with the ruling class and getting an extra share of the artificially restricted production of the economy. Of course, all this happens in the United States but to a lesser degree (so far). In a free society greed leads to ever increasing economic production and ever higher standards of living–that is, it increases happiness.

As for exploitation, that is what the government and other coercive entities do. In a “purely capitalist society,” human interaction is based on voluntary choices, not government decrees. Oddly, in today’s world what many people think of as exploitation (i.e. children and poor people working for $2/day in facilities of questionable structural integrity) is actually an example of a willing buyer (employer) and willing seller (employee) coming together in a mutually beneficial transaction (after all, if it didn’t make both parties better off, it wouldn’t happen). And what most people see as the government “sticking up for the poor exploited worker” (i.e. minimum wage laws, workplace safety rules, etc) are actually examples of true exploitation, because a group of people are using violence to get a better deal for themselves than peaceful voluntary action would provide–just because they use the government to enact their violence doesn’t make it any less wrong. So from a moral standpoint, it’s employers who are being exploited by workers through the anonymous vehicle of government. Not to mention the fact that artificial restrictions on wages and labor conditions, while giving a small number of workers a better deal, result in a loss of wealth-creating opportunity for the employers and a great number of potential workers who now will not be employed, to the point that society as a whole is made worse off.

And the few in charge of the many? That’s what you have in socialist and communist countries–not capitalist ones. In a truly free, capitalist society, there’s no government to lock entire classes of people into poverty and submission like we have today (even in the US). As an example, governments in so-called ‘civilized’ societies employ a vast array of professional license requirements for everything from doctors, nurses, and lawyers to plumbers, cab drivers, and hairdressers. The government actually uses physical violence (police power) to prevent someone who’s only marketable skill may be ferrying people around by car or doing someone’s hair from opening up their own business working out of their garage. And by the same token, it prevents lower-income people from patronizing those potential businesses and thus saving money and working their way out of poverty. This is not civilized–it’s barbaric. Capitalism actually facilitates the rapid movement of people up (and down) the economic ladder according to how well they provide value to others. Power only really comes into play when a coercive entity (the government) is involved. Outside of the very uncapitalist concept of coercion, power has no meaning.

So those are my very brief thoughts on a subject I could go on about forever. Now let me hear yours.

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It’s mostly coincidence, really, that I’m getting back to my blog on Independence Day weekend–but somehow appropriate nonetheless. This blog is dedicated to furthering the cause of human freedom, the same cause that so many people associate with America and with the 4th of July. We tell ourselves we’re celebrating our independence from the oppressive rule of the British crown. We say that we’re celebrating freedom. How quaint. Some even make the odd, but increasingly common, mistake of claiming that July 4th is a celebration of democracy–as if it was somehow nobler to be a slave to a master of your choosing rather than to one imposed from outside.

But why do we feel such pride in the founding of our republic when it long ago ceased to be the free land that the Founding Fathers envisioned? My best guess is that most of us came up through the government school system, which was designed from the beginning to engender simple, conforming, unquestioning, nationalistic group-think among all members of the population. The thought of a mass of individuals demanding to know where their freedom went was too much to bear for those in control of things at the beginning of the 20th century. Behind the veneer of patriotic pride, what we’ve really been taught is that the way to solve our problems is to use the faceless leviathan of government to initiate force against our neighbor and call it “the public good.”

Democrats blame Republicans for taking away our freedom. Republicans blame Democrats. As I ponder the current state of our country, I can’t help but think that we’ve got only ourselves to blame.

If you use the government to confiscate your neighbors’ money at gunpoint to give to those who did not earn it, then don’t be surprised when that government, at your neighbors’ behest, uses force to prevent you from marrying your significant other.

If you use the government to prevent your neighbor from possessing or using a particular plant or chemical substance, then don’t be surprised when that government forces you to register or turn in your gun.

If you use the government to prevent your neighbor from hiring a willing worker from another country, don’t be surprised when that government destroys your business through environmental, safety, labor, and wage regulations.

If you ask the government to send your neighbors’ children to die on the beaches of Normandy, then don’t be surprised when it sends your grandchildren to die in the sands of the Middle East.

If you’ve chosen to solve your problems through coercion rather than through the voluntary cooperation and mutually beneficial economic transactions that set us apart from lower life forms, then you need only look in the mirror when you ponder where your freedoms have gone.

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A reader has asked me about the libertarian answer to insider trading. This is indeed a tough one at first glance. How exactly can a society without a monopoly public government prevent the ‘dangers’ people associate with insider trading?

First, it’s necessary to point out that insider trading does not involve the initiation of force against someone, so it shouldn’t be illegal even under a minimal state. Insider trading laws are designed to prevent corporate insiders from profiting from non-public information obtained in the performance of their fiduciary duties to the corporation. At worst, this could result in a civil suit (if the insider violated an agreement with the corporation), but not a criminal charge levied by government prosecutors. If profiting from non-public information should be illegal in one instance, why not in all? Shouldn’t everyone who’s ever gotten a job because they knew the right person be prosecuted? Should someone be thrown in jail because they work in the kitchen of a less than sanitary restaurant and wisely avoid eating the food there?

And even if insider trading in some instance resulted in the loss of stock value for other shareholders, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. There is no such thing as the right to the value of something. You don’t have the right to a particular value of your home, and you likewise don’t have the right to a particular value of stocks you own. Value is determined by the interaction of a multitude of individuals and their economic decisions. To claim a right to the value of something is to claim the right to control the decisions of all those other people. This simple reductio ad absurdum shows that there is no right to value, only to actual property.

Insider trading prohibitions have to do with information and its use. Information is not inherently owed to anyone. Information has value. It takes effort to acquire information. Some people and firms specialize in acquiring information. They can charge others for access to that information, either on a case by case basis, or by monthly subscription, or some other arrangement. Some information requires more effort to acquire and would thus command a higher price in an open market. In a completely free society, it’s likely that businesses and organizations would emerge to collect and disseminate information about insider trading. Today we already have things like Consumer Reports–people pay money to get the scoop on various goods and services. The Wall Street Journal already publishes insider trading information on a weekly basis.

More to the point, as Milton Friedman and other economists have argued, insider trading is actually a good thing. Corporate executives unloading the stock of their own company sends a signal to anyone paying attention that all is not well with that company, and it does so much faster and more completely than any process resulting from government mandates and restrictions.

There is no rational basis for the prohibition of insider trading. It stems, as many have observed, from envy–from a deep socialistic impulse in many people to prevent others from being wealthier than themselves. I give great strategic credit to the socialists that they’ve succeeded over the past century in their propaganda efforts to convince so many Americans that there’s actually something bad and ‘un-American’ about insider trading. If only the defenders of freedom and prosperity were so strategically adept in this ‘battle for the hearts and minds’ of America!

As always, I welcome any reader comments or suggestions for future blog posts. I want to write about the issues you’re interested in–so send me your thoughts!

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If I see one more vapid fluff piece about how Barack Obama is the candidate best suited to “unify America,” I’m honestly going to start looking around to see if Rod Serling is standing off to the side addressing the audience.

Why on Earth should unifying America even be a minor goal of a presidential candidate, let alone a primary goal? Unity, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad–and it certainly has the potential to be extremely bad. After all, Hitler unified Germany. Mao unified mainland China. Lenin and later Stalin unified the Soviet Union. (The only kind of unity that could possibly be good would be a completely voluntary spontaneous unity in which everyone was unified in the belief that it is unacceptable to initiate force against someone else–a sort of anarchic unity. But of course such a spontaneous unity would be one that didn’t involve any politicians, whose jobs are premised on initiation of force.)

One of the redeeming qualities of America is that we tend to have a healthy debate on most issues, resulting in a constantly evolving marketplace of ideas and perpetual shifting of ’sides.’ Hell, I used to be an authoritarian, jingoistic, socially intolerant, right-wing conservative. Wanna get all ‘unified’ under the former me?

What about Obama? He may be pro-liberty on some social issues and have half decent foreign policy instincts (but only half decent), but he’s an absolute authoritarian on economic issues. He advocates violence and coercion in the form of redistributive taxation, telling people who they can and can’t hire and how to set employee wages, business regulations (which, by definition, are unwanted obstacles government places between willing buyers and sellers attempting to engage in a voluntary transaction), government control of education, restrictions on voluntary international trade, and myriad other government actions that coerce people, reduce competition, destroy wealth (or prevent it from being created), eliminate potential choices available to consumers, prevent people from earning a living, and generally violate individual rights and reduce our overall standard of living. Do you really want this guy to “unite” America?

Personally, I really like the divided and contentious nature of our society. It keeps us sharp and keeps things interesting. It would be horrible if we all thought the same way and just mindlessly followed someone who was designated the ‘leader’ of the nation. Even if everyone in America suddenly became an anarchist or radical libertarian and succeeded in completely eliminating government, there still would be (and should be) huge disagreements about all sorts of things–it’s just that in a voluntary society free from government, a true, honest debate could take place. You could debate someone all day long about the merits of using technology to radically extend the human life span, but at the end of the day both sides would know that there’s no group of people with a legal monopoly on initiation of force standing outside with guns waiting to force either one to abide by the choice of the other.

And even though I enjoy when people e-mail me or comment on my blog in agreement with something I’ve said, I like it even more when someone disagrees with me. It challenges me to think more deeply about my position and formulate clearer arguments–or, as has happened in the past, actually realize that my argument was invalid or that I was entirely wrong.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but the last thing I want to see is a “unified America.”

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 I just stumbled across this great piece (15 years old but more relevant than ever) by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (a senior fellow at the Mises Institute) on how the problems with American health care can be solved not by increasing government involvement in health care but by getting government out of health care entirely:

A Four-Step Health-Care Solution 

Here’s the meat of the piece:

1. Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health care services would appear on the market.

Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing–if health care providers believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it.

Because consumers would no longer be duped into believing that there is such a thing as a “national standard” of health care, they will increase their search costs and make more discriminating health care choices.

2. Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs.

Costs and prices would fall, and a wider variety of better products would reach the market sooner. The market would force consumers to act in accordance with their own–rather than the government’s–risk assessment. And competing drug and device manufacturers and sellers, to safeguard against product liability suits as much as to attract customers, would provide increasingly better product descriptions and guarantees.

3. Deregulate the health insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example, because it is in one’s own hands to bring these events about.

Because a person’s health, or lack of it, lies increasingly within his own control, many, if not most health risks, are actually uninsurable. “Insurance” against risks whose likelihood an individual can systematically influence falls within that person’s own responsibility.

All insurance, moreover, involves the pooling of individual risks. It implies that insurers pay more to some and less to others. But no one knows in advance, and with certainty, who the “winners” and “losers” will be. “Winners” and “losers” are distributed randomly, and the resulting income redistribution is unsystematic. If “winners” or “losers” could be systematically predicted, “losers” would not want to pool their risk with “winners,” but with other “losers,” because this would lower their insurance costs. I would not want to pool my personal accident risks with those of professional football players, for instance, but exclusively with those of people in circumstances similar to my own, at lower costs.

Because of legal restrictions on the health insurers’ right of refusal–to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable–the present health-insurance system is only partly concerned with insurance. The industry cannot discriminate freely among different groups’ risks.

As a result, health insurers cover a multitude of uninnsurable risks, alongside, and pooled with, genuine insurance risks. They do not discriminate among various groups of people which pose significantly different insurance risks. The industry thus runs a system of income redistribution–benefiting irresponsible actors and high-risk groups at the expense of responsible individuals and low risk groups. Accordingly the industry’s prices are high and ballooning.

To deregulate the industry means to restore it to unrestricted freedom of contract: to allow a health insurer to offer any contract whatsoever, to include or exclude any risk, and to discriminate among any groups of individuals. Uninsurable risks would lose coverage, the variety of insurance policies for the remaining coverage would increase, and price differentials would reflect genuine insurance risks. On average, prices would drastically fall. And the reform would restore individual responsibility in health care.

4. Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased breed illness and disease, and promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate them, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.

Only these four steps, although drastic, will restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers.

Couldn’t have said it better myself (although I made an attempt with Legalize Health Care).

Hoppe for President of the Galaxy! (Hey, Zaphod had his chance.)

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Not fully on board with my non-coercive, libertarian, anarchist point of view? Interested in seeing if my idea of coercive meshes with yours? Just feel like killing a few minutes?

Then step right up and take my coerciveness quiz:
How Coercive Are You?

A great eye-opener to forward to those not-so-libertarian friends and relatives!

Enjoy!

Update: I have discovered (too late) that gotoquiz.com cuts off answer options after a certain number of characters, so some of the longer answer options are cut off mid-sentence. But hopefully it’s clear where each option is going.

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This story turns my stomach:

Immigration crackdown hits fence builder

Long article, quick summary:

A guy (Mel Kay) owned a very successful fence company (Golden State Fence) in California. About a third of his employees were illegal immigrants, some of whom he actually rehired after they had been arrested on immigration charges. He says he preferred Mexican immigrants (often friends and family referred by current employees) to the typical American citizen blue collar workers in the area, the Mexicans being more trustworthy and likely to stay long term. He paid his employees incredibly well and provided benefits. So, here we have a man and some other men entering into peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial agreements in order to engage in a business providing goods and services to others in peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial agreements.

Enter the federal government.

The Feds find out that -gasp- this guy was employing people that the government said were ‘illegal.’ Nevermind that every individual has the natural right to enter into voluntary agreements with any other individual–the government (and a great many voters) has decided that particular right can be violated if one party happens to have been born on the wrong side of an imaginary line drawn by politicians and hasn’t gone through the unjust, coercive, expensive and time-consuming ‘official’ channels to become ‘legal.’

Here’s a telling quote regarding the massive operation the government launched to take down this horrible man and his ‘illegal’ fence company:

Shortly after Kay arrived at work at 5 a.m. on Nov. 30, 2005, federal agents stormed his 14-acre headquarters in an industrial part of Riverside, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. In 14 hours, they would fill a 16-foot truck with boxes of documents and computer hard drives.

Simultaneously, a helicopter with a loudspeaker circled over nearly 200 agents who raided the largest of Kay’s 10 branches, in Oceanside, north of San Diego. In all, agents arrested 17 employees at their homes or as they came to load their trucks at 6 a.m.

So basically, this old guy and his son-in-law would have gone to prison if the judge at the sentencing hearing hadn’t looked at the overall picture and had a momentary lapse into the mindset of an almost free human being. Still, the guy ended up with 6 months home confinement and a $5M fine–for daring to enter into peaceful, voluntary transactions with other human beings.

This is your government, people. The government of the so-called freest country on Earth. Yes, that has disturbing implications for the future of human civilization, but what’s most disturbing to me is how many of our fellow Americans (perhaps even some of my readers) not only approve of this kind of coercion and violation of natural rights, but actually protest loudly in favor of such policies and the politicians who support them. For a great many Americans from both of the state-sponsored parties (Democrats and Republicans), support for these kinds of anti-human, wealth-destroying, totalitarian policies is actually the key factor in their decision to support a given candidate.

And to hear it coming from those who consider themselves supporters of limited government is especially confusing and disheartening. To the anti-immigration conservatives and libertarians out there, why is it wrong for the government to ban certain light bulbs and shower heads, but it’s okay for it to launch commando-style assaults on peaceful businesses for the crime of employing hard-working men in voluntary arrangements providing great value to their fellow man–all because they were born on the wrong side of an imaginary line? Somebody please attempt to justify that. I dare you.

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This, my friends, is how basic science could be funded in a free society where government doesn’t confiscate money from Bill to pay for Bob’s research:

Public donates to UW scientist to fund backward-in-time research

I don’t care how important you think your research is–it’s not important enough to steal from me.

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As the Supreme Court considers “the meaning of the Second Amendment for the first time in nearly 70 years,” I’d like to make a quick observation about the amendment’s wording, one which I’m sure others have made before (including, I think, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals).

Here’s the exact text: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Those who would like, for whatever reason, to use government coercion to restrict the natural individual right to bear arms (which is really just a specific case of the general primary natural right to be left alone) often claim that “the people” in this amendment refers to some collective group like the National Guard or other government ‘militia.’

But why do they not make that same argument for the meaning of “the people” in the 1st, 4th, 9th, or 10th Amendments? By their logic, the 1st Amendment, which reads, “…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” only in fact protects the right of the government itself to peaceably assemble and petition itself for a redress of grievances! Why the double standard here?

Or what about the 4th Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” I guess that actually only protects the government from unreasonable search and seizure?

Look, it’s not hard. “The people” in all of those amendments refers to private individuals. The 2nd Amendment spells out the duty of the government to not infringe on the private individual right to own firearms.

And I haven’t even mentioned the oddity that anti-gun folks seem to think that the dependent clause (the part about the militia) has some limiting affect on the independent clause (the part about not infringing the right to bear arms). The framers could have written just about anything for the dependent clause, and the nature of the specified right would not be affected. They could have said, “Pancakes, being necessary for a delicious breakfast, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It seems they forget basic grammar when those big scary guns are involved.

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