No Coercion

A recent piece at the Mises Institute site by D.W. MacKenzie, Politics Cannot Be Fixed, touches on some important points about the problems with democracy.

I agree with most of what he says up until he advocates a “return” to limited government. I don’t think such a government is possible on logical grounds–even a government that claims to be limited to some piece of paper (which they wrote for themselves) is, in fact, unlimited since it has a monopoly on justice and the legal ‘right’ to initiate force. It would be a simple matter of a constitutional amendment or even an extra broad interpretation of the General Welfare clause for our current government to become a full totalitarian state (or at least try to before they remembered how many of us are packing heat).

MacKenzie also says: “Constitutional government limited to providing internal and external security can be evaluated by objective criteria.”

I think he’s right that such things could be evaluated objectively (i.e. we can see clearly whether someone is invading the territory claimed by the state or whether criminals are assaulting people and stealing property), but you still face the problem that everyone from Molinari to Rothbard have pointed out–that the government has no rational way to actually determine how to allocate resources in pursuit of such security. Do you spend more on police cars and less on judges? How much do you spend on prisons, security systems, and district attorneys? Every question government is faced with can only be answered by arbitrary political means rather than by response to consumer demand. Also, it glosses over the fundamental moral question of why one group of people (the state) has the right to impose a legal system on everyone rather than allowing voluntary legal systems to spontaneously evolve on the free market (as they already do to the limited extent allowed by the state).

But I do agree his “limited government” is a far sight better than the imperial-welfare-police-state by which we are currently ruled.

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Franz Oppenheimer famously pointed out that there are only two means of meeting one’s needs: the economic means and the political means. The economic means is based on “one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others” while the political means is based on “the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others.” In other words, you can either produce value and engage in voluntary exchange or you can steal things of value produced by others. The state operates by the political means and feeds parasitically off of everyone who operates by the economic means. The economic means is peaceful, civilized, and life-affirming. The political means is violent, primitive, and destructive.

So my question to everyone who supported the recently-passed health care bill is this: Why did you have to choose the political means when you could have chosen the economic means? You could have donated to a charity that helps the uninsured and worked to peacefully persuade others to do the same. Hell, you could have started your own charity. You could have offered to chip in on a needy person’s medical bill. But instead you chose to support violence against your fellow human beings. You asked a group of people (the state) to act in your name, going to your neighbors and threatening violence against them to get them to do certain things and not do other (peaceful) things and take more money from them.

Why did you choose primitive violence over civilized, peaceful cooperation?

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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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George Mason economist Don Boudreaux writes a brilliant letter (over at Cafe Hayek) to Obama regarding something truly bizarre the Mafioso-in-Chief said about rationing:

8 March 2010

Mr. Barack Obama
President, Executive Branch
United States Government
1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC  20500

Dear Mr. Obama:

CBS radio news this morning ran a clip of one of your recent speeches.  In it, you criticize insurance companies because they “ration coverage … according to who can pay and who can’t.”

My first thought was “not exactly; coverage is rationed according to who pays and who doesn’t.”  Ability to pay isn’t the same thing as actually paying, and what insurers care about is the latter.  Many folks – especially young adults – have the ability to pay but choose not to do so.  They get no coverage.

But further pondering of your point leads me to look beyond such nit-picking to see fascinating possibilities.  Not only insurers, but all producers who greedily refuse to supply persons who don’t pay should be set aright.  Now I’m sure that you don’t ration the supply of the books you write according to any criteria as sordid as requiring people actually to pay for them.  But our society is full of people less enlightened than you.

For example, the typical worker rations his labor services according to who pays and who doesn’t.  That must stop.  Oh, and supermarkets!  Every single one rations groceries according to who pays.  Likewise with restaurants, clothing stores, home-builders, furniture makers, even lawyers!  You name it, rationing is done according to who pays.  Indeed, my own county government has been corrupted by this greedy attitude: if I don’t pay my taxes, the sheriff takes my house – effectively booting me out of the county merely because I didn’t pay for its services.

Preposterous!

I look forward to your changing this selfish and unfair system of rationing that for too long now has kept Americans impoverished.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

And I love the non-traditional way he addresses the letter, omitting the usual tone of deference.

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David Friedman discusses the difference between Harding’s reaction to the depression of 1921 and the Hoover-Roosevelt reaction in 1929: A Tale of Two Depressions.

While well known among libertarians and Austrian School economists, 1921 depression and the immediate (and wise) reduction in government spending has been essentially wiped from the mainstream textbooks and history lessons.

Thanks to Destroy the Ring (another great market anarchist blog I’ve recently discovered) for posting the story.

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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 often hear it said by those who have not yet gotten on board with the idea of a stateless society that such a society would not be able to survive as it would be overrun by something like the Mafia on steroids. They argue that even if there existed a free market in protection services, or dispute resolution organizations (DROs), it would fairly quickly be overrun by a rogue DRO, thus returning society to statist rule but possibly without the checks and balances of our current constitutional republic.

Setting aside for now my contention that our “checks and balances” have utterly failed to restrain the state, let me explain what I think is wrong with this argument (probably poaching some ideas from Rothbard, Molyneux, and others).  Quite simply, a rogue DRO would almost certainly be unable to get away with it.

The typical DRO customer is going to demand some kind of assurance from his DRO that it will act properly and not engage in aggression. So market pressure will arrange for any even moderately successful DRO to be of the type that will almost certainly not go rogue. Furthermore, most DROs would be on the lookout for competitors who may start engaging in aggressive behavior and be ready to suppress such aggression, both to comply with the contracts they have with their customers and to prevent the reemergence of a state, which would promptly prohibit all other DROs.

But assume there was a DRO whose owner suddenly went insane and believed he could profit by aggressing against customers, potential customers, and other DROs. In order to have a chance at success, he would have to somehow build a sizable and sophisticated force in total secrecy. Perhaps this sort of thing would have been possible in a primitive world with sparse populations and a lack of advanced sensing and communications technology, but it’s thoroughly inconceivable in our world. And what about funding? To pay for it all, he would have to do one of the following: 1) dramatically raise rates, which would immediately put him out of business; 2) attract outside investors, who would quickly discover what he was up to and walk away; or 3) simply be ridiculously independently wealthy, in which case he would have no reason to engage in such an expensive and risky undertaking.

But suppose such a group did somehow materialize and move against a free society. True, it would lack the so-called “checks and balances” of a Constitution, but it would also lack the legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects that the current state enjoys, and that legitimacy is the only thing that allows the state to exist, especially in the face of a massive population of well-armed, freedom-loving people.

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People unfamiliar with market anarchism or libertarian anarchism often seem to mistakenly believe that the stateless (anarchic) society we advocate is one of chaos and lawlessness. Of course, this is incorrect. We recognize that human beings are social creatures who accomplish a great deal through cooperation and that they naturally come up with various voluntary systems of rules to facilitate that cooperation. The market anarchist’s contention is that it’s simply not justifiable for one person or group of people (a king, a ‘central committee,’ a democracy, a constitutional republic, etc.) to come along and claim they have the right to monopolize by force such systems of law and then proceed to forcibly extract payment for their services. Here’s the first of a great 10-part video series of Roderick Long discussing an anarchist legal order at a Mises Institute Seminar: An Anarchist Legal Order.

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Here’s one way to explain the rationale for libertarianism. I will call it the Subjective Happiness Rationale, and I’m no doubt borrowing some ideas from Murray Rothbard and possibly others. And I should reiterate that when I say libertarianism, I mean pure anarchist libertarianism (as distinct from the limited-government minarchist libertarianism of people like Ron Paul and Milton Friedman).

A consistent theory of human ethics should seek to maximize human happiness (or minimize suffering). But happiness is entirely subjective (just ask a masochist). Since there’s no way to determine the nature of someone else’s happiness, the only way to maximize it is to allow maximum freedom for the individual to act and thus seek his own happiness. To be consistent, the rule must apply universally to every rational being, or moral agent. The result, it seems to me, is the rule that no one may aggress against anyone else, even if it’s purportedly for a noble cause or their own good or the common good. So the state, which by definition is created and maintained by aggression against those within its claimed borders, is illegitimate. Unless I’ve made a mistake somewhere (which is possible).

Thoughts?

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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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