No Coercion

Today is Blog Action Day, organized to try to use coordinated blogging on a single topic to try to affect change. It seems to be focused on statist (i.e. violent) solutions to problems such as poverty, human rights, deforestation, health care, education, etc. The topic this year was declared to be “Climate Change.” Naturally, I’ll be attacking this from a libertarian, voluntaryist, market anarchist angle.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the doomsayers are right about the warming of the planet and its degree of anthropogenicity.  My response is, “So what?” Does that give you the right to hold a gun to my head and prevent me from producing, selling, or buying certain types of vehicles, light bulbs, air conditioners, etc.? Does it give you the right to use violence to force me to spend money to modify my production facilities to meet special emissions caps you’ve set? Does it give you the right to forcibly stop me from raising cattle or the right to take money from me and give it to someone else with a spiffy electric car company? The answer to all these questions is NO. Nothing other than my invading someone’s person or property can provide moral justification for him to commit any of those acts of aggression against me. And of course the State therefore also lacks such justification.

Supporters of government action (violence) to stop or reverse global warming often talk about scenarios such as rising sea levels displacing coastal populations, melting polar ice killing off the polar bears, dramatically altered weather patterns turning productive land into desert, etc. What they never seem to consider is that all of this could happen completely independently of any human action whatsoever. If that was the case, surely they wouldn’t be calling for acts of violence against their neighbors. If it was clear that the planet’s temperature was suddenly rising due to natural causes (like volcanic eruptions, solar activity, or the spontaneous appearance of an army of Megan Fox clones), would these pro-government-action folks be clamoring for the use of force to tell their neighbors how to run their businesses or what kind of TV they can have? Of course not. They would recognize that you do not punish or control people as a reaction to natural phenomena over which they had no control.

But how much different is that than the current situation as they describe it? If they’re right about the anthropogenicity of the latest warming trend, all we can say is that billions of people have interacted in the market place in order to meet each others’ needs and earn a living, thus dramatically improving their standards of living while unintentionally altering the atmosphere to the point that temperatures start to rise. This, to me, seems to be a fairly natural process, and the warming was entirely accidental. Does this call for violent solutions, the likes of which you might employ against an evil supervillian who intentionally poured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause destruction? I don’t see how it can.

And the situation becomes even more untenable for the pro-coercion camp when we look at the fact that the climate system is so complex that we really have no idea if their plans to reduce human economic activity (an inhuman “solution” if ever there was one) will do anything at all to stop or reverse the trend. It’s not pleasant to contemplate all the needless misery and death resulting from the foregone improvement in standards of living (especially for the world’s poorest) if temperature trends are not affected by the statist schemes. Layer on top of that the fact that it’s entirely possible that a slightly warmer Earth, though possibly including higher sea levels, could easily result in vast amounts of currently frozen, unproductive land to become arable or otherwise incredibly beneficial to human utility. And regardless of how things turn out, individuals (again, especially the poorest) will be best able to mitigate the downsides and take advantage of the positives if they remain as free as possible to innovate, produce, and exchange on a voluntary basis, free from government coercion.

One final note is that as societies develop economically, they become ever more able to think beyond their daily survival and consider the costs of their actions on the environment. There is widespread pressure from consumers in the developed world for the companies they patronize to use ever more eco-friendly materials and production processes (even Walmart has begun experimenting with green-topping some of its stores). There are even investment funds that put together portfolios of only companies that meet certain standards of ‘greeness’ and energy efficiency (because consumers are demanding it). Advanced market economies naturally produce participants who are attuned to ever more diffuse effects of their actions, and companies will be forced to compete on those bases. There seems less and less need, even by the standards of the pro-government faction, to use force (a necessarily inefficient and thus eco-UNfriendly mechanism) to force companies to ‘be good.’

It seems to me an inescapable conclusion that the only moral position is to oppose the use of the organized, legal violence of the State to combat climate change and just allow the creation of wealth and happiness that flows from the unimpeded interaction of billions of free individuals spontaneously working together to improve their standards of living.

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In Practical Anarchy, Stephan Molyneux discusses how health care is provided under the current statist system and how it might be provided through the purely voluntary interactions of people in a stateless, anarchic society.

Anarchism recognizes the empirical reality of human corruption in a way that statism simply does not. Anarchists recognize that power corrupts, while statists forever believe that power is the cure for corruption. Anarchists understand that the only valid and proven way to oppose human corruption is through voluntarism and competition – statists believe that the only way to oppose human corruption is to create a monopoly of violent power.

Fundamentally, anarchists believe that virtue results from a marketplace of voluntary interactions – statists believe that virtue is a dictatorial compulsion, created and maintained at the point of a gun.

…

In statist health care systems, the doctor is paid per patient visit, not for a successful cure. Thus doctors do not make their money from curing patients, but rather from seeing patients – thus they have every economic incentive to keep consultations as short as possible, and to outsource any complicated “cures.”

Furthermore, in socialized medical systems in particular, it is actually illegal to collect and publish information about the quality and success rates of doctors. If I find out that I have prostate cancer, I cannot possibly find out which doctor has the greatest or best success rate in curing it. (More importantly, if I have a family history of prostate cancer, I cannot find out which doctor has been most successful in preventing it from occurring.)

When you sit back and really think about it, this is staggering – absolutely staggering!

It is illegal to sell a food item without publishing the nutritional information. It is illegal to run a public company without publishing your financial information. It is illegal to sell a car without publishing its fuel efficiency. Hell, it is illegal to sell an item of clothing without publishing where it was made.

Every stupid and irrelevant piece of information is required by law – but the success rates of doctors are not only not required, but you will actually go to jail for collecting and publishing this information!

…

Imagine if I suggested the following as the solution to the problem of how to deliver healthcare in a stateless society:

The way that I see it working is this: one DRO [dispute resolution organization] should amass enough weaponry to violently drive all other medical DROs out of business. This DRO should then take about twenty percent of people’s income – and kidnap or shoot them if they do not give up their money – and then provide health care as it sees fit. This same DRO should also have complete control over how many doctors there are, and how a doctor should be trained, and how a doctor should be paid. Again, if anyone attempts to become a doctor without following the detailed and lengthy rules of this DRO, they can be kidnapped and/or shot. This DRO should pay doctors per patient visit, to ensure that doctors would see as many patients as possible in any given day – and it should make sure that doctors are neither paid for successful treatments, nor penalized for any unsuccessful treatments. Doctors should not make any money whatsoever by preventing illness, but rather should get paid for treating as many illnesses as possible, as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, this DRO monopoly should be able to shoot or kidnap anyone who dares to collect and publicize any information about the success rates of its doctors.

In order to ensure that citizen feedback is available to this DRO, every couple of years, citizens should be able to appoint a representative of their choice to the Board of Directors. Whoever they choose should be paid by the existing doctors that the DRO controls, or by the pharmaceutical companies…

We could continue with this example, but I think that you can see the ridiculousness of this “solution.” If I put this forward as my answer, I would receive an unbelievable tsunami of incredulous and contemptuous e-mails, wondering just what particular drugs I had been on when I described this as the best possible solution to the problem of providing health care.

Inevitably – and again, ludicrously – these same people will also deluge me with incredulous and contemptuous e-mails when I suggest privatizing the provision of health care.

…

Ever since Blaise Pascal discovered the laws of probability, a singular human institution has arisen to help people deal with unpredictable risk – insurance.

Insurance is simply a way of playing the law of averages in order to create predictability. If one out of a hundred people is going to be randomly hit with a ten thousand dollar bill, it makes sense for everyone to have the option of paying a fixed amount of money in order to be insured against such a bill.

(Please note that in this section, I am talking about the free market insurance companies of the future, not the mercantilist semi-statist monsters of the present.)

The wonderful thing about insurance is that the interests of consumers are almost exactly aligned with the interests of providers, since both are directly motivated by the desire to decrease risk.

…

(This is an enormous topic, but I would briefly like to mention that any discussion of free-market health-care provision – and insurance companies in particular – will doubtless draw comparisons to the existing system within the United States. This “system” has very little to do with the free market, in that more than fifty cents of every health care dollar is spent by the government, which violently protects a monopolistic doctor’s union called the American Medical Association, and also hyper-regulates the medical field with literally hundreds of thousands of laws, rules, directives and requirements. The incentive of private profit, combined with the corrupt largesse of a public purse, is technically called “fascism,” rather than freedom.)

In terms of health care, then, we can be sure that your insurance company wants to keep you as healthy as possible. The farmer who sells cows is interested in their long-term health, in a way that the butcher who disassembles them is not.

Due to this motivation, private insurance companies will be reasonably proactive in attempting to prevent health problems from developing, rather than merely curing them after they have occurred. They will be sure to pay doctors first for prevention, and then for successful cures, rather than for merely cycling as many patients through their offices as humanly possible.

In any situation where lifestyle choices can ameliorate health problems, those will be chosen in preference to endless medication. It does not cost the insurance company any money if you go for a walk or do some sit-ups; it does if you have to be on insulin for the rest of your life.

Conversely, medication is in general cheaper than surgery, all other things being equal, and so effective medications will be researched, developed and prescribed more often than invasive and dangerous surgery.

…

Spending money on a pricey doctor is probably about the most cost-effective investment you will ever make. The most effective doctors are those who cure the most efficiently – and for sure, most customers of health care insurance would also purchase life insurance from the same company, so that any disastrously failed “cures” would cost the company an enormous amount of money.

In this way, returning a customer to health not only guarantees future health care payments, but it also postpones the payment of death benefits. In this way, the self-interest of the insurance company is directly aligned with the self-interest of the customer, who doubtless does not prefer to be either sick, or dead. If the doctor is also paid to prevent, cure and keep alive, then all three parties have the same goal, which is the polar opposite of any statist system.

Thus whenever anyone starts evaluating which health care insurance company to go with, each company would be tripping over themselves to provide independently verified statistics about the long-term health of their customers – the number of ailments prevented, identified and cured; the average life expectancy, successful pregnancies and births and so on. These companies would be selling health to you, rather than inflicting repetitive treatments on you, which is the case with socialized medicine.

Thus, Molyneux makes an outstanding case that, rather than increase government involvement in health care (as the Democrats and their mostly well-intentioned supporters are calling for), we should get government OUT of health care entirely, ideally (though no time soon, I’m afraid) as part of the complete dissolution of the state in favor of a free, stateless society.

Of course, many of the aforementioned well-intentioned supporters of increased statism in health care recognize the essential truth of this line of reasoning, but are overwhelmed by their desire for the poor to not be left out. Of course, a stateless society would be so much wealthier that there would be a tiny fraction of truly poor individuals, and the competitive and pro-consumer health care system that would emerge under anarchy would produce quality health care for far better prices. But nevertheless, Molyneux addresses this particular concern:

We certainly want to help the unfortunate, but we do not wish to enable and subsidize bad decisions – this is only part of the complexity involved in helping others – which a statist society cannot distinguish or deal with at all.

If society gave everything that a poor person could possibly require in order to live comfortably, that would scarcely reduce the numbers of poor people, but would rather increase them considerably. On the other hand, the children of poor people are scarcely responsible for any bad decisions their parents may have made – however, if charities give a lot of money to poor people with children, more poor people will tend to have more children, which will only increase poverty.

This balancing act is one of the enormous and complex challenges of true charity – and yet another reason why a violent monopoly will never end up helping the poor in any substantive or permanent manner.

When it comes to health care, there is no doubt whatsoever that the majority of people care about the provision of health care for those who cannot afford it. At a hospital I visited recently, I saw a placard on the wall thanking the five thousand volunteers who helped run the place.

Doctors as a whole will always treat someone who comes with an immediate injury, whether they can pay or not. If we assume that medical treatments for the genuinely deserving and needy poor would consume about ten percent of general health care spending, then we can be completely certain that this amount of money would be donated by concerned individuals, either in time or money. We can be certain of this because we know of a large number of religious organizations that require ten percent of people’s total income – twenty percent in fact, since this is pretax income – and people are quite happy to pay that.

Thus the medical needs of the poor would be entirely taken care of in a free society through charity and pro bono work. Charities would also compete to provide the most effective care for the poor, in order to gain the most donations. I would certainly prefer to give my money to an organization that was best able to create and provide sustainable health practices and medical treatments for the poor.

In this way, not only would the self-interest of doctors, insurance companies and customers be aligned – but also the self-interest of donators, charities and the poor they serve.

In a stateless society, the poor will be genuinely served by a far better system, composed of those whose self-interest is directly aligned with the health of the poor.

As has been shown over and over again, throughout history and across the world, benevolent self-interest, enhanced by free association and voluntary competition, is the only way to create sustainable compassion within society.

I am aware that I have not answered all possible objections to the question of how health care is provided in a free society. I am also aware that the possibility always exists that people can “fall through the cracks,” or that charities could conceivably make mistakes, and either fund the wrong people, or fail to fund the right people.

Once more, this possibility of corruption and/or error is often considered to be an airtight argument against anarchy, when in fact it is an airtight argument for anarchy, and against statism.

Competition and voluntarism are the only known methodologies for repairing and opposing the inevitable errors and corruptions that constantly creep into human relations. The fact that human beings can make mistakes – and are always susceptible to corruption – is exactly why they should never be given a monopoly power of violence over others.

When an entrepreneur – whether charitable or for-profit – makes a mistake by failing to provide value – others will immediately rush in to provide the missing benefit. It is this constant process of challenge and competition that allows the best solutions to be consistently discovered and reinvented in an ever-changing world.

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John Kerry claims that a failure by government to address what he believes to be a coming catastrophic climate change will lead to an increase in war that will threaten U.S. national security:

Kerry panel looks at climate change and national security

Interesting.

Here’s how I see it.

Scenario 1: Government does nothing, and individuals continue to prosper and (if they deem it prudent for themselves) prepare for changes in climate as best they can under current government controls; the feared climate changes either come to pass in the next century or so, or they don’t; and the climate changes, if they do occur, will just as likely open up new resources as destroy current ones, and those people negatively affected would at least have been able to further develop economically in the meantime, which is the best way to mitigate any negative effects.

Scenario 2: Government cracks down even more on carbon dioxide emissions, thus plunging the world into a severe economic downturn, driving billions of people into poverty, and forcing much of the world’s population to start to consider extreme measures to survive; and all this without even having a clue if those drastic and coercive government controls will have any positive effect on the climate (however one defines positive in this case).

Which scenario seems more likely to lead to massive conflict?

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New Scientist has this article about how insurance could be used to at least partially mitigate the problems that poor people around the world might face as the result of some potential future climate change (warming? cooling? Krugmaning?).

As well as providing protection from the increasingly unpredictable weather, the premiums could also be a powerful way to get poor people to adapt to climate change by encouraging them to invest in measures like drought-resistant crops. Is this profit-driven endeavour too good to be true?

What’s so sadly amusing about this is that New Scientist describes it as if it’s some brilliant new discovery, but free market economists have been making that exact argument for decades. The magazine even tries to link it to tyrannical statists like former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan (saying he’s a supporter of it), with the implication I guess being that it’s not really a free market process (because as the government schools teach us, nothing about the free market can help poor people)!

Now a different type of insurance scheme is being rolled out in Adi Ha and many other places in Africa, Latin America and Asia, backed by corporate giants such as Swiss Re and Munich Re. Instead of insuring against lost crops, “index insurance” protects farmers against the vagaries of the weather. For example, if rain gauges at local weather stations drop below a certain level, insurance companies can automatically transfer a payout to farmers without having to visit them.

The fact is, it’s long been a profitable business to insure farmers against lost crops, and insurance companies have incentives to come up with ever more creative ways to help people manage risk (i.e. this new index insurance). It should be no surprise that they’re doing it again and helping (as free markets always do) the poorest of the poor, those who are preyed on by governments.

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I all too often find myself on the receiving end of accusations of greed. Online discussions with what I’ll call the authoritarian left (meaning, for this post, those who are proponents of initiating force against others in order to redistribute wealth) many times degenerate into libertarians and fiscal/economic conservatives being called “greedy” because they object to their wealth and property being taken from them and given to someone else.

But does that really make sense? Is it greedy to not want your wealth confiscated by force? I can’t see how it could be.

Rather, it seems to me that it’s the authoritarian left who are greedy. They have some goal they want to achieve (educating children or helping the poor and homeless perhaps), and rather than spending more of their own money and time and attempting to peacefully persuade others to contribute money or time to their cause, they instead resort to the use of force to compel others to contribute to the cause against their will, by which I mean they use the power of government to collect taxes and spend the money on their cause.

The fact is we all have causes that we support. And I would venture to say that most of us agree on some of the major ones. We all want to see poverty and homelessness eliminated. We all want to eradicate cancer and disease. We all want children to receive some kind of education (though we don’t all agree that they should be herded into the government control facilities known as public schools). The difference is that some of us are willing to spend our own time and money on these causes in proportion to how much we have to give and how strongly we feel about each cause, and others would rather spend less of their own time and money while forcing others to contribute against their will. So who really are the greedy ones?

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It’s official. As reported by the government itself, gangs are responsible for as much as 80% of crime in the United States. The article reports that “criminal gangs in the USA have swelled to an estimated 1 million members” and notes that gangs thrive on illegal drug trafficking and other activities prohibited by the government. This is exactly right. Gangs gain most of their power and wealth by taking advantage of the U.S. government’s (and state governments’) wars on drugs, guns, prostitution, and gambling, just like alcohol was organized crime’s primary source of power during Prohibition. Government-created black markets are always dominated by violent thugs.

So we have a double injustice here. In the first place, the government comes along and prohibits items, substances, and activities that are not inherently bad (though perhaps frowned upon by a certain vocal portion of the population). By doing this, the government is agressing against innocent people. On top of that, the demand for such things cannot be eliminated, so enterprising individuals seeking to profit (again, something that’s not inherently wrong) act to provide consumers with what they want. Of course, since they’re forced to conduct business in secret and settle disputes outside the normal institutions, violent elements come to dominate. The move toward violence is compounded by the necessity for these individuals to defend themselves from the force initiated on them by the government because of the ‘illegal’ nature of their business.

Government prohibition of drugs, prostitution, gambling, and guns — and even disproportionate taxation of such things — has led inevitably to a flourishing of criminal gangs. These gangs, funded by a combination of artificially high prices and (often) protection payments, do battle with each other for control of lucrative territory, as well as with the government itself. The territories, usually inner cities, are devastated by the warfare. Even non-violent offenders, whose only crime is to use a substance that someone else decided was bad for them, are often thrown in jail or prison. The resulting broken families and deteriorating schools increase the attractiveness of gang life to children, and the trend continues. Increasing resources are expended by both the gangs and the government to beef up personnel and firepower until you virtually have military forces laying waste to American cities, all over our government’s decision to declare certain things illegal to appease a bunch of moralistic busy-bodies.

And even beyond all that you have the economic destruction caused by taxes the government collects to wage its war and imprison hundreds of thousands of people caught up in it (people, who might otherwise be creating vast amounts of wealth in the economy). The resulting government-induced poverty yet again enhances the power of criminal gangs and leads to calls for even more government programs to “do something.”

It’s truly difficult to contemplate how much richer and safer and more peaceful we’d be as a country if not for the actions of our government.

And if you think it’s bad now, just wait until they ban caffeine.

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Here’s a video of Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute doing a pretty good job of explaining why Keynesian economics is absurd: Keynesian Economics is Wrong: Bigger Gov’t is Not Stimulus

And here’s a good piece from a more hardcore libertarian (Austrian) perspective: “Neanderthal” Economics.

From the piece:

However, there is something government can do in the Austrian cure for a recession: radically remove itself from the economy. It can cut spending and taxes, which will encourage saving and investment. It can allow businesses and banks to fail. It could abolish the central bank. It can allow prices to fall. A removal of regulations that hamper the free market will also aid the market in recovery. As Murray Rothbard wrote,

“In sum, the proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction. For decades such a program has been labelled ‘ignorant,’ ‘reactionary,’ or ‘Neanderthal’ by conventional economists. On the contrary, it is the policy clearly dictated by economic science to those who wish to end the depression as quickly and as cleanly as possible.”

Krugman, assuming he really wants to cure the recession, would be wise to leave Bizarro World, and to follow Neanderthal economics.

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I just watched an interview of a well-known political pundit who has just written a book about how great FDR was. He talked about how the Twenties were a time of rampant free market activity that led to the Depression and about how FDR saved the middle class and saved capitalism.

Huh?

Could this be an alternative history novel in which things play out differently in an alternate universe, Star Trek style? Oh, wait…no, it’s just another purportedly ‘non-fiction’ work in a long line of works that use straw man arguments to impugn free markets and glorify statism and oppression.

Did the Roaring Twenties really happen as a result of free market capitalism? Of course not. The closest thing our country ever had to a free market system was abolished years earlier. The boom of the Twenties was artificial and the direct result of expansion by the Federal Reserve of credit far beyond the amount in which market forces would have resulted. The excess credit led to stock market and real estate speculation and malinvestment (sound familiar?). Also, commodity prices were artificially high due to the demands of WWI. So the Roaring Twenties were the result not of free markets but of government intervention.

Did FDR save capitalism? Well, yes, if by “capitalism” you mean “an economy that was somewhat more free than many others in the world at that time,” and if by “save” you mean “abolish it and replace it with an oppressive, near-omnipotent, socialist state.”

FDR, upon getting himself dictatorial powers, began a series of government interventions that turned what should have been a brief but painful correction into a decade-long debacle by preventing individuals and businesses from taking the actions necessary to reallocate capital and adjust investment. And on top of that, we ended up with a country far closer to socialism/fascism than we ever would have previously imagined possible. The moral of the story seems to be that when Hitler and Mussolini create totalitarian states it’s wrong, but when Roosevelt does so it’s a great day in American history.

We’re now reliving the nightmare that inevitably must occur every so often when government has a monopoly on the monetary system, uses central banking to artificially expand and contract money and credit, and engages in a multitude of regulatory interventions and taxation.

The moral of my story is: Franklin D. Roosevelt is not someone that should ever—ever—be held up as a hero or a good president or someone who saved capitalism or ended the Depression. The man, by virtue of his freedom-ending and economy-destroying policies, was a monster. The history books must be rewritten to expose him and his New Deal for what they were. Just as the media and intellectuals of today rightly condemn Bush, so should they play fair and condemn FDR and demand that we cease and desist the resurgence of his statist, poverty-inducing policies.

Yeah, I’m not holding my breath.

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Here is my contribution to the world wide Blog Action Day 2008. The topic this year is poverty, and the goal is to initiate global discussion about how to alleviate it (or something like that).

There are basically two kind of poverty in the world: natural and man-made.

The natural variety is the result of things like drought, disease, natural disasters, and just generally a natural lower degree of transformation of natural resources into beneficial goods. As civilizations’ technologies advance they have increasing ability to transform resources and thus improve their standards of living. A lot of this we have little control over (i.e. we can’t just protest in the street and suddenly have a futuristic civilization where everything is thousands of times cheaper and of better quality and sickness and disease are historic curiosities).

The man-made variety of poverty is much more interesting. This is what results when someone causes, through means that are not mutually voluntary, someone else to be poorer than they would have been otherwise.

So, if I go to Bill and say that he can’t operate a taxi service unless he takes some classes that I offer, passes my tests, and pays me a bunch of money for a taxi license (and that I get to take his money and lock him away somewhere if he operates the business without my approval), then I have just made Bill poorer than he otherwise would have been, either because of the time and money I force him to spend or because he opts not to go into business. In addition, I’ve made Bill’s potential customers poorer, as they now have to either spend more in the now less competitive taxi market or spend more by finding a more expensive way to get around. The same applies to anyone I want to prevent from doing business without my official license: real estate agents, doctors, nurses, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, hairdressers, or street performers.

Another form of man-made poverty is full-fledged prohibition of something. For instance, if Jack wants to start a business delivering letters and I tell him that I only want one organization to deliver letters and will forcibly lock him up if he tries it, I have just made him and his potential customers poorer than they would have been. The same forced poverty is involved if Jack wants to start his own passenger train service, crime prevention company, court system, etc.

More man-made poverty is created if I tell Mike that he can only offer insurance plans if they cover certain risks and are priced below a certain maximum level that I’ve set. The subset of Mike’s potential customers who would have bought the now illegal insurance policy but now are forced to go without insurance or pay more for a policy that is beyond what they need are now poorer, and of course Mike is poorer because he is forced to forgo a certain amount of business he would have earned absent the rule. Furthermore, with maximums on what Mike can charge, his customers as a whole are made poorer as he has to raise everyone’s rates to make up for the loss incurred on any policies whose natural market price is he not allowed to charge. Many of his customer end up paying more than what they would otherwise, and some are again forced to go without insurance because they can’t afford the new cheapest policy.

Now we come to another way for me to create poverty. Jane wants to open a business providing some valuable good or service. She knows that teenagers and other unskilled workers would do really well in her business, and that’s perfect because she can only afford to open the business if she can find employees that will work for $4 per hour. She goes around and talks to some teenagers eager to start learning some job skills and homeless and poverty-stricken people that can’t find work anywhere else, and they’re excited to come work for her and start getting work experience or working their way out of poverty. But then along comes good ol’ me, with the threat of force to back me up, and I tell Jane that I’m really sorry but I can’t allow her to pay her employees anything less than a minimum wage of $8 per hour because it would just not be right. Not wanting to be imprisoned, Jane cancels her plans to open the business. The teenagers return to whatever they were doing before, now missing out on a great chance to start developing job skills that would put them on the road to success, and the homeless and poverty-stricken are prevented from having the opportunity to starting climbing the economic ladder.

Now we come to a really interesting point in our investigation. Man-made poverty is also created when I force Sally to turn over part of her income or wealth to me so that I can provide things for the ‘common good.’ If something is really for the common good, it shouldn’t require compulsion in order to fund it. On top of that, I need to spend a big chunk of the money I took from Sally to pay for my gang of heavily armed enforcers, my army of administrative and regulatory personnel, my court system that conveniently will decide any cases in which I might be accused of doing something wrong, etc. But the real kicker is that a lot of the money I’m taking from Sally I’m using to provide welfare checks and related benefits to those people whose poverty I’m responsible for. Most of the rest of it goes to pay for the poverty-creating policies mentioned above and many more that there’s no time to go into now (i.e. the FDA, NASA, public housing, banking regulation, public schools, drug prohibition, etc.). And not to worry, if I run out of tax money to spend on my programs, I’ll just print more money! Yes, it will devalue the currency and make everyone poorer, but hey–at least I can say I’m “doing something” and get enough of you people to fall for it that you’ll vote for me again in the next election.

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Just a quick heads up about an upcoming blog post: For the second year in a row, I’m participating in Blog Action Day, an event that consists of mostly left-wing bloggers (it seems to me) all posting on a particular topic on a single day in order to catalyze a global discussion and search for solutions. I’m not about to let the left monopolize something like this, so I’m going to give my libertarian perspective. The subject this year is poverty, and the day is October 15.

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