No Coercion

Government is aggression, plain and simple. It is force, it is violence. I’ve recently had discussions with several different people who take issue with this assertion. They claim it’s absurd to suggest the wonderfully benevolent and representative government of the U.S. is based on violence. They often compare it to some place like Iran or North Korea. Sure, those states are more repressive and totalitarian than ours, but it’s only a difference in degree. There’s literally nothing to stop the U.S. government from becoming another North Korea (well, except maybe the as yet not totally disarmed American people, but that obstacle is getting more tenuous by the day). A totalitarian regime imposed by a “representative” or “democratic” government is no better than one imposed by a military dictator.

The fact is that even the smallest and most limited state is still an institution predicated on the initiation of force. Everything the state does, from taxation and forced monopolies to truancy laws and mandatory food labels, is made possible by the very real threat of violence. It’s odd that anyone would deny this because it’s wholly indisputable. If you do not pay your taxes, the government can steal the money right out of your paycheck. If that is not possible, they can come to your home and violently abduct you (usually called arresting). Should you resist the abduction, they will physically assault you. Should you resist strongly enough, they may kill you.

Or suppose you want to start a business providing the full spectrum of protective services that government police currently provide (with an important difference being that you would be paid by voluntary payments from customers instead of by forcibly taking others’ property). Well, the government would inform you that you were breaking the law and tell you to close up shop. If you instead chose to continue operation, engaging in voluntary, mutually beneficial interactions with your customers, the government would move against you with heavily armed enforcers (cops, troops, etc.).

What if you decided not to send your child to school (or jump through the state’s rules for homeschooling)? As soon as the state found out, its ’social workers’ would show up to give you your ultimatum. If you refuse to bow to their threats, you would be visited by the state’s enforcers and probably abducted (or your children would be abducted). Again, resist and more violence ensues.

Want to start a business making drugs to provide to sick people in consensual transactions? Boom, state violence.

Want to start an insurance company without adhering to state licensing and regulations? Boom, state violence.

The list of perfectly consensual, productive, and non-violent interactions you can engage in with others only to find yourself on the receiving end of state violence or threats of violence is virtually endless.

Rational, civilized people do not coerce people into doing what they want; they vote with their purchasing decisions or use peaceful, voluntary persuasion. The state is a primitive, violent institution that has become all the more dangerous in the modern world. It is not the facilitator of civilization as so many argue–it is the antithesis of civilization. And, with the vast array of weapons of mass destruction that only states have a motivation to develop, the state may yet spell the end of civilization altogether.

So, however you rationalize your defense of the state, even in its most limited form, please don’t try to insist that its actions and very existence are somehow not based on aggression.

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A friend of mine recently commented on one of my libertarian-themed facebook posts, saying that he believed purely free markets only help “businessmen” and harm “labor or the middle and working class.” He wanted to know what examples existed of free market success stories. While there are several issues that could be addressed here, I was a little short on time and limited myself to this response:

As for successes of the free market, pretty much every good or service you make use of in your life is a success story of the free market. The things that make our lives easier, healthier, more enjoyable–these things are the results of a multitude of individuals interacting voluntarily to produce things that people want. These accomplishments are DESPITE government control and regulations, not BECAUSE of them. Think about it on a micro scale. You want to have a yard sale to get rid of a bunch of things you no longer want. You’ll sell them for dirt cheap to people who do want them who would otherwise have to pay a lot more or go without. But imagine if, in order to “protect the consumer,” the government required you to get a state license (costing several hundred dollars and many months of licensing school) before you could hold your yard sale. This would likely prevent you from ever holding your yard sale. Those people who are really hurting for money would have far fewer options for obtaining the things they want, and there would emerge a small group of state-licensed yard sale specialists who would be able to charge much higher prices, thus making use of state violence to obtain a higher-than-market profit at the expense of the financially strapped yard sale customers. This is how government regulation works in EVERY area of the economy. Wealth creation between two parties is maximized when interference with their transaction is minimized. The amount of wealth that government violently destroys or prevents from ever even being created is truly staggering.

Of course, there’s also the fundamental point (made implicitly above) that every transaction, by definition, benefits both parties—otherwise, the transaction simply would not occur. Wealth is created on both sides, because both sides are made better off by the exchange. What every form of government action (taxes, regulations, subsidies, prohibitions, licensing, etc.) does is either outright prevent transactions or distort the decision-making process, resulting either in transactions that would not have occurred in the absence of force (and are thus unproductive) or in the prevention of productive transactions that would have taken place. Either way, there is a destruction of wealth, and society is worse off. Usually, this is compounded by the fact that most government policies actually serve to transfer any wealth that is produced (again, a smaller amount than would be created in the absence of government) to politically favored constituencies, which is both massively unjust and serves to motivate those groups to continue and expand those government policies while everyone from whom that wealth is being transferred fail to launch an effective opposition since each individual policy only transfers a small amount from them.

And just to head off the “OMG we’ll all die if the state doesn’t license doctors and plumbers” contingent out there: relax, we’ll be just fine. State licensing does not “protect” consumers as much as it prevents competition and raises the prices we have to pay for those licensed services. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t hire a service provider of any sort without the knowledge that the quality of their work is sufficient for my liking. And I don’t get that information from the fact that these people have government licenses. I get it from places like Angie’s List, brand identification, references, and general reputation. Just imagine all the ways a truly free market would devise to help us pick out the good doctors and plumbers and home builders. And even if such information is not totally free, think how much more money we’d have without the stifling taxes and wealth destruction of the state.

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The latest in a recent spate of temporary government shutdowns, the Rhode Island government will shut down most of its operations for 12 days.

This warms my heart! I’ve been glad, of course, when government shutdowns have occurred in the past due to the two state-sponsored parties being unable to come to agreement on how much money to confiscate from people and what to spend it on (i.e. budget debate impasses). But for governments to be shutting down from lack of tax income–this is a whole new ball game (at least in recent memory). It shows, I think, that it is potentially possible to “starve the beast” and force government to waste away, particularly as envisioned in agorism. We should all try to do our part by engaging in as much black and gray market economic activity as reasonably feasible (like when you pay a babysitter or buy produce from an acquaintance). What the government can’t see, it can’t tax!

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Covering the nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, a CNN anchor today was attempting to enlighten her viewers regarding Sotomayor’s judicial decisions regarding business issues. The anchor said that we could determine if the judge is “pro-business” by looking at how often she’s ruled in favor of “huge corporations” (or something along those lines). Apparently, this anchor (and probably CNN in general) fails to grasp an extremely basic truth of reality: that government policies and rulings that favor large, powerful corporations are very often detrimental to business overall. The extensive taxation and regulatory powers of our government result in larger companies expending great resources to persuade politicians to write laws that favor established players (and sometimes even specific companies) and hinder smaller companies or newcomers to the market. That’s why so many “safety” and “quality” rules for consumer goods are pushed by the big players in a given industry–they want to use the government to crush their competitors. And, ironically, the ‘pro-consumer’ Ralph Nader’s of the world come out in force in support of these anti-competitive and anti-consumer regulations.

Since CNN seems to have trouble with such concepts, maybe they’d be less confused (and confusing) if they used more appropriate terminology. They should ask whether a judge’s rulings are pro-free-market or pro-government-control.

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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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One of the things President Obama has been touting is his idea of a “culture of service” in which we all do something to “give back” and help the country.

What? Seriously?

Last I checked, most of us spend the first several months of the year serving our local, state, and federal governments. The average person doesn’t start earning more than his annual combined tax bill until March or April (for the country as a whole, it’s known as Tax Freedom Day, and the date was April 23rd last year).

So in addition to the involuntary service government extracts from us under threat of violence, the Prez has the gall to ask us to give up even more of our life to serve the country? Talk about adding insult to injury. And on top of that he wants to use the money his agents confiscate from us to fund national service programs! Is there a better definition of insanity?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for volunteer work to do those things in our communities that just wouldn’t get done by for-profit entities. But the best way to facilitate more of that would be to reduce our taxes and end the inefficient and malincented government programs that purport to do those same things (like welfare, Medicare, Social Security, the various service programs, etc).

When many Americans are struggling just to feed their kids and keep their water and power on, they don’t need the government’s Enforcer-in-Chief telling them to sacrifice even more. They need that 20-30% of their paychecks that is stolen from them.

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