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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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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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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…of alcohol. Don over at Cafe Hayek reminds us that today is the 74th anniversary of the repeal of the 18th Amendment, which banned alcohol. As we all know, the end of alcohol prohibition increased the safety of booze, stopped the trend of sending otherwise law-abiding citizens to prison (and destroying their families), ended mob warfare over control of the alcohol black market, and generally left us more free from an overbearing police state than we would have been had prohibition continued.

But wait. Something’s wrong. We now have even more dangerous substances on the streets, inner cities wrecked by gang violence and families broken by prison, overcrowed prisons, nonviolent young people being sent to prison where they are converted into violent offenders, and a rapidly expanding police state that routinely beefs up its weaponry and violates our most basic rights in its fanatical crusade to fight prohibited goods. Of course I’m referring to the inane War on Drugs.

Why is it that we learned our lesson when it came to alcohol prohibition, but not when it comes to drug prohibition? What is it about the American psyche that results in a large majority of the public and virtually all elected officials at the state and federal levels favoring the continued prohibition of highly demanded chemical substances? Is it (as an old Army buddy told me) that we feel we’d be encouraging our kids to do drugs if we supported legalizing them? Are we really willing to continue to accept all the society-destroying consequences of drug prohibition in order to make ourselves feel better about the messages we’re sending our kids? I for one am more than willing to have a few more man-to-man conversations with my kids about how to take care of their bodies in exchange for the vast reduction of crime (which is a danger to my family), poverty, and government oppression that would come about from the legalization of drugs. Who’s with me?

(By the way, check out Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), and see how the guys in the trenches feel about the Drug War).

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Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek has a nice little bit about legalizing organ sales, with which I wholeheartedly agree:

Voters no doubt do feel repugnance at commerce in such things. But one question is: how much? When voters are asked to cast a ballot about such things, they do so largely free of charge — that is, they get to express their opinions on the cheap, without any obligation to reflect seriously upon the issue before them. I wonder how likely it is that any randomly chosen voter would let repugnance prevent him from buying a kidney if such commerce were necessary to save the life of his child or his wife or one of his parents?

How insane is it that our supposedly free country, because of voters’ irrational emotions, bans the sale of things that could save so many lives? Besides, what happens when you ban something that the market demands? It simply creates a dangerous black market and greatly increases the price of that particular good.

Just more evidence that democracy, to the extent that a mere 51% of voters can vote away our rights and empower a totalitarian political elite, is a truly flawed and dangerous system. Democracy is just totalitarianism in which the all-powerful dictators are ‘chosen’ by a certain portion of the population.

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Well, today is Monday, October 15, 2007–Blog Action Day. I signed up along with thousands of other bloggers to post an entry dealing with the environment today. Figured I should do my part to counter the vast majority of coercion-based posts with one based on freedom. I thought I’d do this via an environmental news roundup with my libertarian response to each item. So here goes:

1. First and foremost, let’s look at Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to terrify the world about climate change. He shared this prize with the U.N.’s totalitarian (no, that’s not too strong a word) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is absurd almost beyond description. Gore fosters a growing irrational hysteria about global warming and prefers extremely coercive government actions be implemented. Government inherently breeds conflict and misery, while voluntary, free society creates peace and prosperity. Giving Gore and the IPCC the Peace Prize is like giving a “Completely Sane” prize to Tom Cruise or a “Best Mom” award to Britney Spears. It’s a mockery of the whole idea of recognizing great achievements, and says to me that the Nobel Committee has lost its way. Interestingly, on the very day Gore was awarded his prize, the renowned Dr. William Gray criticized Gore and his scare tactics in a speech at UNC. The libertarian solution to climate change, quite simply, is to keep the government out of it. There’s no justification for using force to slow or halt economic activity (that is, violently restricting your ability to freely enter into a mutually beneficial transaction with someone else) in order to have some affect on the extremely complex and poorly understood planetary climate system based on scientific studies that have been fueled in large part by a desire on the part of unethical scientists to receive government grants and get their names in the paper–an affect, by the way, which could very well end up being worse than if no government action had been taken.

2. The government of Costa Rica is expropriating privately owned land to protect a certain type of sea turtle. Let’s put this another way: a group of people didn’t like that an endangered turtle was disappearing from their neighbors’ land, so they banded together and coercively took the land from their neighbors. That they did so under the cover of the Costa Rican government is immaterial. What they did was wrong. Initiation of violence and force is never the way to get what you want. If so many people felt so strongly about protecting this turtle, why didn’t they simply pool their resources and offer to buy their neighbors land? That would be the libertarian way to do it.

3. Well, it seems tuna fishing is causing destruction of sharks, turtles, and endangered sea birds. Environmentalists want governments to initiate force against the offending tuna fishers. Again, let’s look at the libertarian solution. Overfishing and accidental catching of non-targeted species is a result of a lack of property rights. When governments prohibit the natural development of property rights, we end up with overuse and misuse (i.e. pollution) of resources. Private entities should be allowed to stake claims to ocean resources, whether that be the water itself, a resource like oil or magnesium, or various ocean creatures. If someone owns, for instance, the rights to all the wildlife in a particular sector of the ocean, they’ll have incentive to maintain and even increase that life. Maybe they profit by selling the tuna and shark they catch there, so they come up with ways to make sure those two species remain there and multiply, both for current profit and resale value of that piece of ocean (or bundle of rights). They might receive payments from a private wildlife charity to protect species not necessarily valuable to consumers, like the aforementioned sea birds. There are all kinds of possible arrangements that people could come up with that would protect ocean quality and life in the absence of government restrictions. We’ve just got to unleash the power of the market.

4. An oil driller admitted to dumping waste in the Gulf of Mexico. The government proceeded to fine the company millions of dollars and forced it to take other actions like adding an environmental division to its corporate structure. This is another case of the tragedy of the commons that results when property rights are absent. If someone had had an economic interest in the water quality in the area where the dumping occurred, the oil driller would have been liable for damages just as if they came and dumped that waste in your back yard. The solution is for governments to immediately get rid of any and all restrictions on owning any resource–oceans, lakes, rivers, forests, fish, birds, the sea floor, air, etc. When these things can be privately owned and traded, their quality will skyrocket.

Well, that’s enough government-bashing for the moment. Okay, you can never have enough government-bashing, but I really need to go mow my lawn (you know, it being my private property that I like to take care of and all).

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Well, the drought here in North Carolina continues, as do the increasing municipal water restrictions and calls by the emotion-driven masses for a halt to new development. Water systems in cities and towns are considered ‘public’ resources and are owned by the local governments. The problem is that, when the government owns and controls a resource, the allocation of that resource is based on politics, power, influence, and bureaucracy–not justice and efficiency. Most people would not disagree with that. However, many people will then go on to assert that there’s something special about water than necessitates its being owned and distributed by the government.

Their reasoning often follows one or both of the following themes (not necessarily in this order):

1) They will say that water is necessary for life, so the government MUST control it and make sure it’s delivered at artificially low prices. There’s usually some appeal to sympathy for the extremely poor thrown in there, too. I see a problem with that line of reasoning right off the bat. Food is also essential for life, but we don’t go around demanding that the government take over all the farm land and distribute food at artificially low prices. Shelter is considered essential, too (especially during inclement weather)–but we don’t demand that the government confiscate all housing and sell it or rent it out in order to make sure everyone has a place to live. A corollary of this “water is necessary for life” argument is the assertion by these people that everyone has a right to water. No, you don’t. Nor do you have a right to health care, a certain wage, certain working conditions, certain living conditions, etc (but those are subjects for future posts). Very simply, it’s not possible to have a right to something that requires forcibly taking from someone else. A positive right to water for you means the use of force to take water from someone else. That is why a system of positive rights is internally inconsistent. You do, of course, have the negative right not to be prevented from using water that you own or acquiring unowned water by homesteading it. But you don’t have the natural right to have water provided to you at the expense of someone else.

2) In the second line of reasoning, they will say that water, because it tends to flow freely across property boundaries, must be kept out of the private property sphere and owned by the government. This is also the reason many people (even economists and others who should know better) believe the government should use coercion to enforce water pollution laws. I don’t buy this argument, either. There’s no inherent reason something that crosses property lines can’t be privately owned. Do we know exactly how water rights would evolve if freely allowed? No, we don’t. But that’s no reason not to do it. Assuming everyone has property rights in their land, wouldn’t it stand to reason that they would come up with ways to assign rights to water running through or adjacent to their land so that the value of their land is maintained? I could envision a system in which those living along a river each have rights to a certain volume, level, and quality of water in the part of the river running through their property. Markets would evolve to effectively and efficiently determine if an upstream neighbor had done something to change any of those characteristics for the worse (as opposed to acts of nature), and a downstream neighbor that was negatively affected could seek damages. Insurance companies would be great at this sort of investigatory and claims process. That’s just one possibility. Similar arrangements might evolve with regard to other bodies of water like lakes and oceans.

To sum up, I don’t think we’d have nearly the water shortage we’re experiencing right now if water was all privately owned and traded. Market prices for water would rise as supply declined and fall as supply rose. Higher prices would result in people using water much more efficiently and thus conserving it in times of drought. And the People’s Republic of Durham wouldn’t be threatening me with violence should I decide to water my lawn beyond what their restrictions allow.

Well, those are my thoughts on water, dear readers. I’d be interested in hearing yours!

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