No Coercion

I live in Durham County (NC), right next door to Wake County, which is in the midst of a heated debate over its notorious forced busing program that the new school board just declared its intention to end (they’ve been assigning children still trapped in the government school system to schools very far from their homes in order to achieve a “diversity” goal of no school having more than 40% of the children in the free or reduced lunch program–the result is lots of parents who otherwise would have had their kids in the local neighborhood school and who now have a much greater difficulty staying involved in their children’s education while the kids spend hours each day on the bus, sometimes force to go out to the bus stop before sunrise). I’ve been having a tough time, in a particular discussion forum, trying to explain the injustice of such a program to some statists, who already don’t understand the injustice of the government education system in the first place. My latest attempt is to compare the State to the Mafia, along the lines of thinkers like Spooner and Rothbard. After I typed it up I decided it would make a good blog post, so here’s what I posted in the forum (for clarification, my use of the phrase “propaganda language” is a reference to the use of that phrase by one of the statists in response to another libertarian’s referring to taxation as theft):

Here’s maybe a different way of looking at this busing issue (and really any issue involving compulsory government). Imagine it’s not the government that comes around to take some of your money to fund schools, but rather a Mafia enforcer. Imagine it’s not the government that threatens to lock you up if you don’t send your kids to school, but rather the Mafia enforcer. Imagine it’s not the government that then makes it harder for you to be involved in your children’s education by sending them to a school across town that you otherwise wouldn’t have chosen, but rather your friendly Mafia enforcer. Now, what we call theft (or armed robbery if you refuse to send in the money on your own), kidnapping, and general aggression when the Mafia does it, we call ‘democracy at work for the public good’ or some other such *ahem* propaganda language when the state does it.

Ah, you say, but it’s okay when the state engages in this kind of violence because “we’re a democracy” and “we can vote for our leaders.” Okay, then–let’s say the Mafia comes along and says, “You can vote for which Mafiosi you want to do the hiring of the enforcers! Woohoo! We won’t let you out of the violence we’re initiating, but YOU get to tell us who you want holding the gun! Aren’t we nice?”

Ah, you say, but it’s not really like that with the state because we’re all part of the “social contract” that allows the state its monopoly on justice and the legal initiation of violence. Well, alrighty–so the Mafia comes back and says, “Hey, whatcha fussin’ for, guy? Don’t you know what we’re doing is okay because of this special “social contract” we just came up with that we say you’re agreeing to?”

So here’s the deal. The difference–the SOLE difference–between the Mafia and the state is that the state has managed, through nonsense logic and “propaganda language,” to convince enough of you terrified children of its legitimacy that you allow it to go about its business of aggression without too much resistance.

Ending the busing program is a reduction in the level of aggression involved in education, a smaller reduction for some and a greater reduction for others.

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Those who argue that there is a “right” to health care or health insurance coverage are caught in a very serious problem. The implications of such a “right” are abhorrent. If I have a right to health care, what do I do if it will cost my doctor or my insurance company so much to treat me that it’s actually better for them to close their businesses? The implication is that I have the right to use violence to force them to operate at a loss, possibly endangering their ability to care for themselves and their families. What if all the insurance company owners and doctors could make more money in other lines of work and chose to close up shop? It would seem I then have the right to use violence to force them back into their previous lines of work and to handle my treatment. What if people just stopped going into the insurance and health care fields altogether? It seems that anyone who ‘needed’ treatment would then have the right to start rounding people up by force and ordering them to become doctors and insurance providers at the point of a gun so that the “rights” of the sick wouldn’t be violated.

I think perhaps those advocates of a “right” to health care are a tad bit guilty of not having reasoned their belief through to its logical conclusion.

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I recently discovered a facebook group called Soldiers Are Not Heroes. I ran across it a few days ago when a friend joined it, and, glancing at it briefly I figured I probably pretty much agreed with it. But I didn’t bother joining it until I saw people start joining a petition to demand that facebook remove the group. Upon closer inspection, it seems to have a bit of a pacifist bent to it (which I reject), but I stand 100% behind its mission “to question the perpetrated illusion that a man becomes a hero by wearing a uniform.”

Soldiers (by which they clearly mean not just soldiers but troops from all branches of the military) don’t get a free pass to hero-land just because they happen to think they’re doing something good and noble. Psychopaths and cult leaders often sincerely believe they’re doing something good by murdering or subjugating people, but we don’t call them heroes. Maybe not a perfect analogy, but you get the point.

There are several reasons to reject the blind honoring of military personnel:

1. Troops are paid out of funds taken by force from the people they claim to be protecting (same as the Mafia).

2. The military is a part of compulsory nation-state governments, which violently suppress competing defense agencies (same as the Mafia).

3. Unless troops are literally defending a country’s borders (or the territory inside those borders) from a current or impending attack, they are not engaging in legitimate defense but rather illegitimate aggression.

4. Troops engaging in aggression in other countries under the justification that they’re protecting our rights are terribly mistaken since military engagement is always one of the chief rationales for the expansion of government at home and infringement of rights.

5. Troops claiming that it’s necessary to fight overseas in order to keep us safe are again sorely mistaken since their actions are well known to actually increase anger against their country and create more extremists intent on killing the troops and the troops’ fellow countrymen.

To be clear, I sympathize with the troops and their families since I fully understand that most of them have the absolute best of intentions and have never really thought through the implications of what they’re doing, and they may indeed act heroically in specific instances and in other areas of their lives, but there is nothing heroic about giving yourself over to do the State’s bidding in military matters.

And the fact that there’s a huge movement on facebook to ban “Soldiers Are Not Heroes” betrays a sad epidemic of unthinking rally-round-the-flag nationalism (which these same people rightly ridicule when they see it happening in other countries). As Murray Rothbard says in For a New Liberty,

 War is the great excuse for mobilizing all the energies and resources of the nation, in the name of patriotic rhetoric, under the aegis and dictation of the State apparatus. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morals—as the libertarian Albert Jay Nock once phrased it—of an “army on the march.”

     It is particularly ironic that war always enables the State to rally the energies of its citizens under the slogan of helping it to defend the country against some bestial outside menace. For the root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects. The facts, however, are precisely the reverse. For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only “die” by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes its subjects to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting to defend them.

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A fellow market anarchist blogger, George Donnelly, just had a very nasty run-in with some state enforcers (cops) for having the audacity to legally carry his handgun in plain view on his hip while taking his son for a walk.

He writes about it here: Plymouth, PA Cops Assault Me and Terrorize My Toddler Son Right Outside My Home

Pass this around to everyone you know, especially anyone involved in doing the state’s enforcing business. I realize not all cops are like this, but widespread instances of this kind of thing are now being caught on camera and are simply unavoidable in a system that maintains a coercive monopoly on ‘protection’ and pays for it by forcibly confiscating people’s property. The truth is there is a very fine line between the State and the protection racket of something like the Mafia, a line distinguished mainly by the fact that a large number of people currently view the State’s actions as legitimate (which in no way actually makes them legitimate).

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I often converse with people who are not anarchists (yes, I’m quite cultured). They are often conservatives or liberals who claim to sympathize with the idea of a limited government. Sometimes they are even my fellow libertarians (but of the minarchist variety). They say things like, “I understand where you’re coming from, but I’m relatively happy with how things are right now with government providing roads, water, sewers, national defense, etc., and I don’t want to end up in a Mad Max movie just to see how things would work out absent the state.”

To such statements, I have to ask (as Stefan Molyneux does), “How badly do you really like your government roads and sewers? Are you willing to hold the gun to your neighbor’s head if he refuses to pay taxes to fund those things?”Because that’s how government works. A group of people get together and claim a monopoly on law-making and law enforcement and say that they’re going to “protect you” and “do things for you,” and then they come around with guns and ask everyone to “pay their fair share.” If you don’t pay, they attempt to abduct you (they use the word “arrest”). If you resist their abduction, they will kill you. Of course, they usually do end up providing some things and performing a certain degree of protection, but only enough so that they are not violently opposed en masse.

So if you support the legitimacy of the actions of this group of people, you must believe that their actions are just. So you must believe that you have a moral right to that government road such that it is legitimate to kill your neighbor for refusing to help pay for it. So would you be willing to hold the gun to your neighbor’s head, ask him to pay his fair share, and shoot him if he refuses?

And if you’re reluctant to embrace the stateless society as a goal because you’re making out pretty well under the current system and you’re having trouble imagining how we could all live together on a voluntary basis and enjoy all our modern conveniences, I would ask how you think that’s different from slavery supporters in the 19th century who made the same arguments against ending slavery. In both situations, the defender of the current system is benefiting at others’ expense through the organized, legal violence of the state.

Just something to think about.

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People across the U.S. today are celebrating Constitution Day (including many of my fellow libertarians). Personally, I’m not sure what there is to celebrate. I understand the argument that it was a document that, on its face, set up a somewhat limited government (especially by today’s standards), but that limited government was orders of magnitude more powerful (even on paper) than the previous one set up under the Articles of Confederation. And I understand that Madison and those guys came up with some seemingly very clever checks and balances that probably seemed really cool to people that were used to powerful monarchs, but all those checks and balances were functions of one single government. If the government wants to, there’s nothing to theoretically prevent it from doing whatever it wants. Even allowing voters the occasional choice of rulers is a largely meaningless check since nothing can be done between elections, and the majority of voters almost always vote for the candidate who promises them the biggest chunk of their neighbors’ money or the biggest expansion of government’s ability to make their neighbors behave the way they want.

The U.S. Constitution specifically gives the federal government 18 enumerated powers. To make matters worse, it contains vague language, like the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause, and the Necessary and Proper Clause, which have made it frighteningly easy for the government to continually interpret new powers into existence for itself. In fact, the only way the Federalists were even able to get the Constitution ratified was by including the Bill of Rights, which placed specific limits on government power. But even these, as we have seen over and over in our history, can be ignored with great impunity by Presidents and Congresses with a mind to do so.

Ah, you say, but we have the Supreme Court to check the other branches and make sure they don’t violate the Constitution. That’s a nice theory, but that’s not what usually happens. Who appoints the Supreme Court justices? The Executive, with Senate confirmation. There’s no inherent reason for one branch to fear (as Madison hoped) a growth in power by another branch and thus act to stop it. In fact, each branch has the most to gain if it can help the other branches gain more power. And this is exactly what we have seen in reality as each branch has grown ever more powerful and placed ever more severe limits on the ability of individuals to act and interact freely. And the propaganda that has been built up around the Constitution has most Americans mindlessly repeating quaint platitudes about “a blueprint for limited government” and “the Articles of Confederation just didn’t create a strong enough central government to hold the union together” (as if that should ever have been considered a legitimate end in the first place).

So the reality appears to be that the Constitution has had the perverse effect of advancing and legitimizing a perpetually expanding government while convincing the majority of people that it’s supposed to do the opposite.

No, I don’t believe I’ll be celebrating Constitution Day. But I certainly will tip my hat to the Anti-Federalists and supporters of the Bill of Rights, since they saw the Constitution for what it was.

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Stephan Kinsella’s description of libertarianism: What Libertarianism Is

A few excerpts:

…libertarians maintain that the only way to violate rights is by initiating force — that is, by committing aggression. (Libertarianism also holds that, while the initiation of force against another person’s body is impermissible, force used in response to aggression — such as defensive, restitutive, or retaliatory/punitive force — is justified.)

…each person is, at least prima facie, the owner of his own body.

Nonlibertarian political philosophies have a different view. Each person has some limited rights in his own body, but not complete or exclusive rights. Society — or the state, purporting to be society’s agent — has certain rights in each citizen’s body, too. This partial slavery is implicit in state actions and laws such as taxation, conscription, and drug prohibitions.

Libertarians believe in self-ownership. Nonlibertarians — statists — of all stripes advocate some form of slavery.

The libertarian seeks property assignment rules because he values or accepts various grundnorms such as justice, peace, prosperity, cooperation, conflict-avoidance, and civilization. The libertarian view is that self-ownership is the only property assignment rule compatible with these grundorms; it is implied by them.

…the libertarian position on property rights is that, in order to permit conflict-free, productive use of scarce resources, property titles to particular resources are assigned to particular owners. As noted above, however, the title assignment must not be random, arbitrary, or particularistic; instead, it has to be assigned based on “the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner” and the resource claimed. As can be seen from the considerations presented above, the link is the physical transformation or embordering of the original homesteader, or a chain of title traceable by contract back to him.

Civilized man feels uneasy at the prospect of violent struggles with others. On the one hand, he wants, for some practical reason, to control a given scarce resource and to use violence against another person, if necessary, to achieve this control. On the other hand, he also wants to avoid a wrongful use of force.

…because of this uneasiness, when there is the potential for violent conflict, the civilized man seeks justification for the forceful control of a scarce resource that he desires but which some other person opposes. Empathy — or whatever spurs man to adopt the libertarian grundnorms — gives rise to a certain form of uneasiness, which gives rise to ethical action.Civilized man may be defined as he who seeks justification for the use of interpersonal violence. When the inevitable need to engage in violence arises — for defense of life or property — civilized man seeks justification. Naturally, since this justification-seeking is done by people who are inclined to reason and peace (justification is after all a peaceful activity that necessarily takes place during discourse), what they seek are rules that are fair, potentially acceptable to all, grounded in the nature of things, and universalizable, and which permit conflict-free use of resources.

Libertarian property rights principles emerge as the only candidate that satisfies these criteria.

…libertarianism may be said to be the political philosophy that consistently favors social rules aimed at promoting peace, prosperity, and cooperation.

And he ends with a statement that might help people see that the term “anarchist” has been perverted among the general public and even among many people who identify themselves as libertarians:

And as I have argued elsewhere, because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.

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The following is a passage from George H. Smith’s Why Atheism?

Suppose that a person who believes in the existence of invisible elves (let us call him an “elfist”) does not have the sole burden of proof, and that a person who does not believe in their existence (an “aelfist”) has an equal responsibility to prove that invisible elves do not exist. “Granted,” says the elfist, “I cannot offer even a scintilla of evidence to support my claim, so I do not expect the aelfist to believe as I do. Nevertheless, the aelfist cannot prove me wrong: He cannot prove that invisible elves do not exist. If the aelfist cannot see what I do, this is because he does not have the faith that is necessary if one is to perceive invisible elves. For these elves, sensitive critters that they are, will not reveal themselves to skeptics and disbelievers. You must have faith, you must first believe that they exist, before you can see them as I do. If the aelfist does not wish to make this commitment of faith, then that is his right, but it is not his right to dismiss my belief as unjustified merely because I cannot prove what I say. On the contrary, since the aelfist cannot prove that my elves do not exist, his disbelief is no more justified than my belief.

It of course is meant to show that the theist has the burden of proof when claiming the existence of a god, but I tend to think it equally shows that those who believe in the legitimacy of government (talking compulsory government here, not some sort of voluntary organization) also have the burden of proof because they’re demanding the acceptance of an entity that necessarily violates certain natural rights (at a minimum, it uses compulsory taxation and forcible prevention of competing defense organizations and legal systems). It seems like those who advocate such a coercive entity have a lot of splainin’ to do.

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John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, had a great column in the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago:

The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

Mackey lists eight things government should do to reform health care that don’t involve increasing government control, power, and spending (including a couple I’ve mentioned before).

The only one I might take issue with is his recommendation to “make costs transparent.” I’m not sure what he means by that. It gives the impression of some kind of government regulatory agency imposing transparency as is done in some other sectors. That, of course, I would argue strongly against as government aggression. Of course, he may simply mean that government should halt particular actions it currently takes that actually prevent cost transparency, in which case I heartily support the idea.

Also (and this may just be an issue of imprecise wording), he mentions that the “right” to health care “has never existed in America.” This is true, of course, but logically speaking, there can be no such thing as a “right” to a certain level of health care, regardless of your particular country. As I point out regularly, a right to a certain level of health care (or housing, or wage rate) would imply the necessity of Peter robbing Paul to pay for it, and that violates the fundamental right of all sentient beings–the right not to have force initiated against your person or property. And when that fundamental right is not recognized, we’re no better than animals fighting over scarce resources under a regime of “might makes right.”

At any rate, a generally outstanding piece by the wise Mr. Mackey.

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Obama and the more leftist Democrats in Congress are bound and determined to “fix” American health care with some form of massive federal involvement in health insurance coverage. As with the financial crisis, the government is purporting to fix a problem that stems from too much government interference in the market…by imposing even more government interference in the market.

In industries burdened far less by government tampering consumers get products of ever-increasing quality at ever-decreasing prices. In a free market we would especially expect to see such a pattern in health care, but we don’t. And the reason has nothing to do with “greedy” doctors or drug companies or insurance companies–unless of course you think that greed (that is, the natural human desire to improve one’s circumstances) is limited to the health care industry and that all those cell phone, computer, and coffee maker companies are giving you better and cheaper products out of a sense of charity. No, the reason has everything to do with government actions hindering a free market.

Here are just a few of the ways, in no particular order, that government (often in the name of “protecting the consumer”) keeps you from enjoying the benefits of a free market in health care:

1) Professional licensing. Every state government requires health care providers (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, chiropractors, etc.) to be licensed by the state. This is simply a barrier to entry that existing providers tend to favor because it reduces competition and allows them to charge higher fees. Rather than protect consumers, it leaves them with fewer (and more expensive) choices.

2) Pharmaceutical and medical device regulation. The FDA regulates drugs and devices and imposes massive costs on their development. The result is that many drugs and devices that could help people never make it to the market, and those that do are delayed by many years, are much more expensive, and usually are restricted even further by being prescription-only.

3) Tax code. The federal tax code creates an incentive for employers-provided health coverage (a practice that originated as a result of totalitarian WWII-era wage controls), thus encouraging extensive third-party medical payments. When consumers pay less for something, they use more of it. Medical providers know that individual consumers are not shopping around, so there’s less incentive for them to be competitive on price.

4) Medicare and Medicaid. Just as with government subsidies for college tuition, the subsidizing of health care through Medicare and Medicaid cause demand to be artificially increased, thus causing prices for everyone else to rise well beyond natural market levels. And of course the increasing prices drain individuals’ income and thus create additional “need” for Medicaid and other government welfare. In addition, when you subsidize health care, you incentivize poor health, increasing demand yet again. Finally, the large number of Americans now on Medicare, combined with the rules governing reimbursements for each procedure or medication, means that medical pricing in America is now grossly distorted by the federal government. On a related point, the government requires hospitals to admit and treat anyone who comes in, thus further increasing demand on these facilities and raising prices for everyone.

5) Insurance regulation. Insurance companies are regulated by state governments, which restrict insurers’ and consumers’ freedom to contract with one another as they see fit. Insurers are forced by law to insure uninsurable risks, thus driving up prices. They are prevented from effectively discriminating between various risk levels among consumers, driving up prices even more.

6) Perpetuating the “right to health care” myth. Government at all levels tends to make pronouncements and take actions that perpetuate the erroneous belief that there is a right to health care. Any regular readers of my blog know where I stand on that–it is logically impossible to have a right to something when the provision of that right requires the forcible confiscation of another person’s property (thus, there can be no such thing as a right to a certain level of health care, housing, wages, etc). But government creates a feedback loop with its health-care-is-a-right propaganda that boosts support for additional socialist measures to control health care.

These are just a few of the government actions that have caused our health care costs to rise so dramatically. And Obama’s solution is more government control of the industry? I can only hope there are enough Americans still possessing enough critical reasoning aptitude and desire for freedom and prosperity that this latest attempt to expand government oppression will fail.

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