The role of politics is to decide who controls the figurative pencil or another resource at any particular time and for what ends. The same could be said of government. Two individuals might have diametrically opposed reasons for supporting a government, but they both support the existence of government. For example, Thomas Jefferson stated that government should be established to secure our individual inalienable rights. In comparison, Benito Mussolini said, “Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.”

These two ideas cannot both be true at the same time. Nevertheless, there is an ideal form of government that could conceivably achieve both Jefferson’s and Mussolini’s ends, though not at the same time, of course.

What Is Meant by ‘Government’

As the argument goes, men are not angels, so government is necessary to resolve disputes that arise. But what is a government? John Locke put much thought into this and decided that a functioning government needed to satisfy three “inconveniences” that would arise when living in a society that lacked a government. Locke believed there needed to be a known, settled law by which all disputes are ruled against. Second, he believed there must be a sufficient threat of force behind those ruling so they are followed. Third, a government would need to function as an independent judge of disputes.

Why a Worldwide Dictatorship

The only way to remotely satisfy all three “inconveniences” is to establish a world government. Governments exist now in a state of anarchy with one another as there exists no supra-government that lives up to Locke’s standards to enforce international laws and agreements. Because of their ability to offset the costs of aggression with taxes, governments pose a far graver danger to peace and security than do regular criminals, so a world government is imperative if local or national governments exist. Citizens of other countries also exist in a state of anarchy with citizens of other countries, although this seems to be less of a problem than government-on-government coercion. The United Nations is the closest thing that resembles a world government, yet it does not have the power to coercively impose taxes on citizens of its member nations. Member nations voluntarily fund the UN, and it does not possess the enforcement power to make its resolutions binding.

Even if a world government capable of enforcing its rulings were established, members of the world government would still exist in a state of anarchy because no one external to the government enforces rules upon lawmakers. The one way to reduce conflicts within the government is to reduce the number of government officials. Conceivably, the least populated government would rest power in a single person to avoid incidences of anarchic relationships. Now, admittedly, even this would not entirely end the existence of anarchy since the dictator would also exist in a state of anarchy with everyone else on the planet. Yet, a worldwide dictatorship would be the most ideal government, should one exist, to eliminate anarchic relationships.

For Jeffersonians, world government would be a nightmarish thought at first blush. Many Jeffersonians also believe that government is inevitable, that some form of government will always exist. That is certainly a theory and all the more reason to support immediately establishing a world dictatorship of limited powers before a world government of expansive powers is possibly created by a Chinese-Indian coalition.

For the Mussolini crowd, a worldwide dictatorship would soon enough make “the State as an absolute” a reality.

Why Not a Worldwide Dictatorship

I am being facetious in advocating a worldwide dictatorship. But a world government is where support for any government inevitably leads its supporters. In fact, a worldwide dictatorship of limited powers would quickly dissolve into complete tyranny. (Hint: Hierarchical power structures are not responsive to demands for accountability.)

What we see is the more that power is disproportionately divided among people, the more violence tends to erupt and corruption festers. Government is so dangerous precisely because it can externalize the costs of its violence onto captive taxpayers. The more that power is dispersed and divided, the greater that rights are respected and peace prevails. The profit and loss mechanism and competition, not the impossibility of constant vigilance, provide a natural check on the size of business enterprises and the power they can aggregate to themselves.

In truth, the ideal form of government is none at all since its purpose, from a rights-respecting perspective, is impossible. That does not mean a lack of governance or rule-making in society. A society without the ability to bring order would quickly be no society at all. The absence of monopoly government does not mean everyone will be of a pure heart and display empathy for his fellow man. Precisely because we are not angels, rules and rules enforcement should not be centrally commanded and controlled.

Common objections to profits themselves are that they are unearned, that they drive up prices for consumer goods, and that excessive profits run others out of business. I am not sure how critics measure the interest of society, but I am pretty sure that by any standard the overwhelming evidence proves just the opposite. For simplicity, I want to deal just with competitive profits, and not monopolistic profits yielded from government privilege in a “mixed economy.”

The first thing to note about profits is that there are different kinds of profit measured in relation to time. Investment profit is a simple accounting measure weighting an action’s costs and revenues. Entrepreneurial profit takes investment profits and measures those against the opportunity costs of alternative decisions, of what could have been. Psychic profits are the purely intrapersonal gains or pleasures an individual experiences from action (like reading this commentary, I hope).

Another important point about the profit mechanism is that it is a system of profits and losses. In a consensually regulated market, entrepreneurs make predictions with capital they control to predict the future behavior of consumers. The entrepreneur is the sole risk bearer for all past decisions. Of course, others will most likely be affected by those past decisions, but employees and customers only risk their capital to the extent their have chosen to become investors.

Some see this profit as exploitative, saying the entrepreneur is skimming the wages of his or her employees. This indeed does happen — when government intervention prevents or undermines collective bargaining. In other cases, the profits reaped are what remain after paying wages and other factors of production. The entrepreneur, the first laborer, has foregone another profit opportunity and is rewarded last, after paying expenses, according to how efficiently he or she put capital to use.

Often, entrepreneurship is seen as a distinct field of economics rather than an integrated economic process of economic calculation. From reading Ludwig von Mises, he thinks of entrepreneurship more generally as making decisions under a condition of uncertainty to acquire and combine resources for a higher valued use.

Profits are Information

Profits are created when someone takes resources that are in less demand by consumers and transforms them into products of higher demand. Therefore, the existence of profit is a signal of a misallocation of resources, which consumers have implicitly expressed with their own actions.

Profits provide extra incentive to continue putting resources to their higher valued use, and it helps correct a prior misallocation of resources. Without a system of profit and loss, it would be impossible for those in control of capital resources to know the demand for one product vis-à-vis another.

Collectivized markets, like government policing, are incapable of devising such an efficient system because there is no reliable or automatic feedback mechanism, like prices in a market economy, to gauge consumer demand.

Profits as Anomaly

Profits come about from a change in market conditions. In a hypothetical scenario of universal complete information, profits would tend toward zero. If all businesses knew the future price and demand for all consumer products (goods and services), businesses would compete in such a manner that the costs of production would match the prices of the end consumer goods, less the depreciation and interest accrued on capital resources. However, because of  technological advances, changes in consumer tastes, and unforeseen events taking place in the future, there is a constant hashing of new information that must be deciphered.

It is this uncertainty about the future that, in the long run, makes profits possible.

Tending Toward Zero

As I said, profits are not the norm. They come about by correctly predicting future market conditions. As the market for a product matures, profits will tend to decline. This happens for several reasons.

The method of production becomes more refined, and competitors begin cutting into one another’s profits. One method of increasing profits again is to reduce costs. This encourages competitors to emulate that success in order to improve their own profits by reducing prices, which spurs the whole cost-cutting cycle again. There is a limit to the point where costs can be reduced, and that is the price level consumers are willing to pay for a product. Below that point, businesses will tend to cease production and invest their resources into more profitable areas and seek higher returns on investment.

Cooperatives tend to exist in well-established, more ossified industries with predictable consumer demands, like farming, where the necessity for entrepreneurship is decreased. A reason why relatively few cooperatives exist is because people can possibly invest their capital into more profitable ventures. Losses also tend to disappear for much the same reason. Poor performers tend to go out of business or end production of losing products.

Counterintuitively, the criticism of high profits falls flat. Far from being unearned, an entrepreneur is in a constant flux of reading the future demand of consumers and managing the resources available to him or her. The maligned profit motive has the tendency to reduce final consumer prices, as we see in the electronics market. It is in the centrally planned markets like health care and insurance that prices continue to skyrocket. We can also see how high returns inform less-efficient business of potential profit opportunities.

It should go without saying, but a genuinely free market does not exist and never has. If one had, cooperatives and worker-owned collectives would probably be more common because technology and information would spread more quickly and barriers to entry would be diminished. Corporations exist at the pleasure of the state, meanwhile, receiving subsidies and protection from liability and competition.

Do not think for a second those privileges come without a price. Without government-financed intellectual property enforcement, a foreign policy of American hegemony, bail outs and rent seeking, and a fiat credit monopoly, were else would these corporations get the money to pay off politicians?

For me, the least impactful line of argument I would think is the constitutional argument. That so many constitutionalists nevertheless support uniform immigration restrictions demonstrates how meaningless the constitution is if its most ardent defenders conveniently pervert it so far from the original meaning.

As an Implied Power

A common line is that the Naturalization Clause, which gives the legislature the power to make a uniform process of becoming a citizen, implies the power to regulate immigration in context with the Necessary and Proper Clause.

That is an interesting idea, and it would have been worth mentioning by the Federalists since immigration had been under the domain of the states during the existing constitution. Yet, the framers who supported the constitution never so much as hinted at that idea during ratification. In fact, “Agrippa,” the Anti-Federalist who is supposed to be John Winthrop, lamented that congress would have no such power under the then-proposed constitution.

It was not until 1875, after congress had passed four separate naturalization bills, did the Supreme Court discover the new-found power to control immigration.

As a Protection from Invasion

Further in Article 1, Section 8, congress is also given the power to summon the militia to “repel Invasions.” This line of argument has been given by Ron Paul and other less distasteful politicians as a reason to resist open immigration.

For this to be true, we would need to look at the meaning of the word “invasion” at the time of ratification. The widely circulated Johnson’s Dictionary defined an invasion as “a hostile entrance, an attack.”

I have defended extending open immigration, at a minimum, to peaceful, honest people. Obviously, that would exclude violent criminals who have not offered restitution for their crimes. With that said, peaceful, honest people entering the country to better their lives should not fall within the scope of “a hostile entrance” by any means.

As a Limit on Slavery

I do not encounter this argument often, but the constitution does provide for the prohibition of “Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” after to 1808 in the 13 original states. Ironically, this was meant as a check on congressional power to control the importation of slaves.

In all other cases, immigration control should be reserved for the states, according to the constitution. However, as a practical matter, any federal immigration controls like that would break down under political pressure within a generation, so soon enough all the states would be setting their own policy. After all, it is unlikely that the other 37 states would be willing to pay for the immigration enforcement of others states.

Lessons from History

Mary Ruwart once wrote, “We reap as we sow. In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them.”

The decentralization of power is a good thing. For one, it would slow plans for this New World Order that so many constitutionalists tell me about. The expansion of immigration controls follow closely with the expansion of government power in general.

For the most part, peaceful, honest foreigners are trying to escape exploitation so they might live somewhere they do not have to get permission to create wealth. It is a false choice to have to choose between our own happiness and abundance and that of others. All interests are served by practicing non-aggression. By refusing to aggress against others, the special interest groups and politicians in government have no authority over of us.

The controversy stems from the creation of the heretofore obscure Shire Society, the several dozen signatories claiming their “commitment to peace, individual sovereignty, and independence.” The signing of the declaration took place in June at the 2010 Porcupine Freedom Festival affectionately known as Porcfest, which is hosted by the Free State Project. (Note: I am a Free State Project participant, but I do have my own reservations about the Shire Society Declaration.)

The drafting of the precise language of the Shire declaration involved about 10 people and took place over several months. The final document borrowed heavily from Smith’s “A New Covenant.” From what I understand, this fact was acknowledged early in the deliberation process, though some were not aware of this at the time of their signing.

Smith’s twofold complaint is that he has not received enough credit for inspiring the society’s declaration and that he could suffer financially if people decide to back the Shire’s document instead of paying Smith two dollars to archive their pledge to his original work. He is also critical of the revisions made by Shire members.

I cannot say this represents all the facts, but they are the most relevant facts I know of. The primary ethical defense for the action of the Shire Society members is that non-tangible objects are fundamentally different from tangible objects insofar as they can be replicated without the destroying the original object. (I agree that much is true.) Consequently, Smith has not been injured by the copying of his original thoughts. Shire defenders lose me when they say restrictions backed by force on the use of non-tangible objects constitute aggression by restricting how users may use their own tangible property in the duplication of existing works.

This last claim is dubious because it tries to state as fact that non-tangible objects cannot be property. [Edit: In the original copy, this paragraph read as if I was expressing that I believe ideas, in and of themselves, can be owned; whereas, I was trying to express that it was someone’s labor that created those ideas.) It should be a simple matter of demonstrating that labor is owned and can be negotiated on what terms a laborer thinks favorable.

All Property is Intellectual Property

Ultimately, I believe the Shire Society should prevail in this case, but the argument against non-tangible property that its defenders put forth is unconvincing.

All wealth is a product of the ideas of the mind. We may use our muscles and bones to move earth or write a play, but our physical body is just a tool of our mind, which propels the use of those tools. As Lysander Spooner said, “There is, therefore, no such thing as the physical labor of men, independently of their intellectual labor.” The motion of our bodies, our labor, is equally non-tangible, yet no one would deny we own our own labor.

The creation of property (wealth that is possessed) is primarily an intellectual exercise by integrating an individual’s abstract and perceptual knowledge of objective reality into concepts to act upon. That is how, counter-intuitively, writers such as Smith can arrange words, which are limitless and therefore valueless in and of themselves, into highly valued books that people find it worth trading their scarce time and labor to read.

The value is found, not in the printed words themselves, but in the usefulness (or entertainment) of the expression of those ideas. The same is true of tangible property. Tangible property is by its nature scarce, but it is not necessarily finite. Wealth is not finite either. It is a product one’s mind, as Ayn Rand said, and endless imagination.

Whether someone’s work is harmed by duplicating it or not is irrelevant to the question of who may use the work.

Property does not exist so much in the physical dimensions of an object as it does in identifying the decision-making interest of the object. It means acquiring “the full services that can be derived from a good,” as Ludwig von Mises said. A property right is the ability to act freely (without the threat of force) and accept the consequences of that action at the exclusion of that same right to others while simultaneously honoring the property rights in relation to other objects.

Resolving Intellectual Property Disputes

The right to free speech is the right to use his or her property to disseminate information, except in cases to coerce others of their property, and the corollary right not to disseminate information. In that respect, the Shire Society has a case for borrowing from Smith’s work.

One possible limit could exist if the information was first acquired conditionally. To illustrate, if I sell a book under a certain explicit condition, such as a restriction on duplication, then I have not sold the full ownership and still retain certain property rights to that particular copy. Of course, the onus is on the original owner to state those restrictions before the transaction. If my customer transferred or lost ownership of the book, the next owner could not morally acquire any greater ownership rights than the previous owner, because I would retain whatever conditions were originally created.

The problem with existing intellectual property law is that the conditions of ownership are set by government law, that is, by force. The involuntary intervention of government enforcement enables intellectual property owners to place far harsher conditions than they could negotiate freely. Effectively, government intellectual property conditions are made under duress and should not be enforced.

In the case before us, Smith set no such additional property conditions on the use of the work on his Web site. And if he did set forth such conditions, the burden of proof would be on him to prove that someone deliberately copied his work and that it was not mere coincidence. The principle is, not that people owns ideas, per se, but they do own the labor that contributed to those ideas. Smith could not claim ownership of a coincidental duplication since he cannot own another’s labor either.

Had Smith clearly stated on his site the terms of use, he would be in the right. Instead, he owes members of the Shire Society an apology for his caustic language. The ambiguities of intellectual property have haunted libertarians for the past 50 years, and they likely will for some time. On the bright side, this is an opportunity for a proof of concept for a dispute resolution organization to resolve.

There is good reason to believe that current government policies will not last. The direct and indirect costs of government controls have never been greater. Government debt, already at record levels, is only projected to grow at an even faster pace for the next decade. When central banks are left with no choice but to raise their lending rates to curb monetary inflation, the cost of carrying debt will balloon, putting debt-ridden governments at greater risk of insolvency. In fact, the parasitic political class now constitutes a majority of the population as early as three years ago. Accordingly, it certainly seems likely that the ship of state is going down hard.

As a result, some further fear a violent backlash will follow the collapse of the federal government, which will trigger dependent state and local governments to come crashing down too. It is all nightmarish stuff, which is why those who actually care for the poor and needy should support reducing the size of government now.

Ring Around the Rosey

This is not the first time a government is facing impending doom. All governments at one time or another will collapse or be overthrown. That is no surprise. Even a constitutionally limited government, if one existed, would still employ violence to solve complex social problems. Under political government, ruthlessness is rewarded and productiveness is preyed upon.

A Pocket Full of Posies

I will take my literary license here and say the ashes sung about are the posies, or dollars, becoming worthless. That is definitely the trend for the past 100 years. Prior to 1913, it had been that the value of the dollar gradually increased, save for times of war. But with the creation of the Federal Reserve, the progressive income tax, and later moving to a fully fiat dollar, the decline of the dollar has signaled the transfer of wealth from the productive to the political class, who receive substantial income and privileges from government power.

Governments dreads deflationary periods (meaning a reduction in the supply of money in the economy). The availability of credit becomes harder, so government tax receipts go down as people begin saving more. Incomes and prices fall, which puts even less money in the hands of government.

An inflationary policy, meanwhile, loots people’s savings and tames their judgement of government action in light of their own increasing financial anxiety. The government’s economic outlook does not look as bleak relative to taxpayers’ own conditions. More importantly though, people become compliant when they fear the backlash of openly opposing government actions.

We All Fall Down?

So I have painted a pretty grim picture. And there is really nothing that can be done about it. I mean that. But even if my predictions come to pass, do not fret. That the dollar is backed by nothing works to our advantage. If the the dollar was still on a commodity standard, there would be real assets behind those paper promises, which would give people something to cling to.

When the dollar becomes worthless, people will just stop working for the government. The existing government people with any real power will be too busy slipping away with their stolen loot. Everyone else will just walk away. There is nothing to fight over because the dollar is worthless. Government employees switching to the private sector will rapidly increase productivity in the economy. Resources will be better allocated. It will not be easy, but the invisible hand is an incredible thing. We can soften any crash by getting people more independent, which is a good thing anyway. The federal government will still exist. They might still pass a flury of laws, such as to confisgate gold as happened under Franklin Roosevelt.

It will be a time of confusion for people. I do not expect a great majority are ready to face fundamental questions such as the scope of control they seek over other peaceful people. The more fundamental question worth asking is whether a 600-year-old solution called the nation-state, which has never delivered on the promise of maintaining peace and security, is worth saving.

In my mind, the move toward complete liberty will take place another day. First, it requires a change in people’s respect for themselves, rejecting the cannibalistic view of man as a sacrificial animal for society and, instead, replacing self-effacement with a new outlook that sees each individual’s life an end in itself.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan, the White House’s solicitor general, was being questioned by Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) about natural rights.

The day before, he had unsuccessfully tried to get Kagan to concede that the constitution’s Commerce Clause does not give government the power to mandate by force (“Law is force,” Bastiat said) that Americans must consume fruits and vegetables. Kagan, by the way, never answered definitively but seems to say that non-economic activity, which presumably means eating, falls outside the scope of federal powers. Yet, in the case of marijuana, just possessing the substance was considered a commercial activity if the law were part of a larger regulatory (control) framework. So a stand-alone law mandating everyone in America eat their veggies would be unconstitutional, but if it were part of a national health care initiative, it is probably a go.

In his follow-up questions the next day, Coburn asked if self-defense was a natural right pre-existing the constitution. Kagan’s response was revealing. According to a CNN transcript, she said,”Senator Coburn, I believe that the Constitution is an extraordinary document, and I’m not saying I do not believe that there are rights pre-existing the Constitution and the laws. But my job as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws.”

I am not defending the constitution by any means, nor do I expect the government to abide by its own rules and laws. However, it should be pointed out when government people do not live up to their own rules. Kagan is directly in conflict with the ninth amendment of the Bill of Rights, which states that “the people” possess other rights not previously enumerated. Famously, the founders said that we are endowed “with certain unalienable rights …. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” For Kagan to say “I don’t have a view of what are natural rights, independent of the Constitution” means she is completely unfit by the government’s own standards to serve on the Supreme Court.

I cannot just fault Kagan. Though widespread, the idea that government should exist to defend our liberty and property is already completely contradictory. Government systematically assaults our liberty and property. From “all men are created equal” to “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes” signals a complete defiance of inalienable rights and the natural law of equal liberty. Taxation is modeled on the idea of paying royalties for the privilege of engaging in commerce, owning property or earning a living.

I am aware Kagan is all but guaranteed to be confirmed. She will be one of nine people who ultimately interpret what the constitution means. So when it comes down to it, the rule of law is still the rule of men (and three women). But through indoctrination and guilt-laden propaganda, people have come to accept and embrace the authority over them. The whole show — the law, the authority and, ultimately, the government — are just manifestations of bad ideas.

Ideas fuel fear and avarice. You cannot shoot an idea or dynamite a myth. They are invincible to violence, even self-defense. Luckily, ideas also fuel truth and beauty.

Liberty supporters are at a distinct advantage though. Lies require constant supervision and constant maintenance. Lies must be heaped upon lies. Truth and beauty stand on their own. Like scientists, philosophers and intellectuals must transmit their discoveries if their work is to have any value. In business, that is the role of the entrepreneur, to turn concepts into consumables. For truth and beauty to have any power, they too must be communicated and acted upon to be made real. They must be practiced. That is the most admirable role of the liberty activist. That is how we will get our certainty and our freedom now, by living it.

I’d want to disband the military or abolish the CIA. Maybe the government entirely? That would be ideal.

But what effect would it have? If we had some round robin presidential selection system, the odds are that the next president would be some statist. Even if I did abolish the CIA with my only decision, the following president would just re-enact the agency.

You could argue that would leave one less statist presidential decision to inflict upon everyone. I thought about that too. But if I did some radical move like that while working within the system, it would lead to calls for more centralized command and control. It would leave people confused. In turn, they would look to expanding government power to prevent such occurrence in the future.

Any change I made would just be ignored if it did not meet with the intersubjective consensus of the government bureaucrats.

There will always be political opportunists flocking to the next thing, so electoral success will come. But it is a lagging indicator of political progress. Society is currently arranged (not to say in an preconceived way) based on fear of others, which is a projection of the lack of honor people have for themselves.

That is why the government is as large as it is. Government is never responsible for reducing violence. It is constantly aggravating or inducing conflict at home and abroad. And so it aggregates power to itself. (I’m using government as a metaphor to mean the actions individuals take as representatives of the State.)

The only way it seems I can reduce government would be to change the minds of individuals, one at a time. If I want to promote individualism, I have to use the methodology of individualism. If, however, I wanted to promote collectivism, then using the collectivized abstraction of government would be ideal. Not so for liberty lovers. Put another way, if I want to abolish the authority some claim over me, I cannot do that from an inherently authoritarian position as president. Are you listening, Ron Paul?

Originally posted at I, justino.

In his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, he said, “It is only in a highly authoritarian society, where sudden, substantial, all-round changes could be decreed that a flexible wage-policy could function with success.” Astoundingly, he thought authoritarian societies were more susceptible to the market process. In an earlier comment, he said that was “because men want the moon. … There is no remedy but to persuade the public that green cheese is practically the same thing and to have a green cheese factory (i.e. a central bank) under public control.” So Keynes thought the role of government was to deceive individuals in the public into making decision they otherwise would not have made. In an authoritarian society, he swooned, there is no need for such pretenses.

Part of Keynes’ confusion was failing to distinguish between the total wage income and the hourly wage rate of an employee. In today’s market, there are all sorts of adjustments that employers can consider when wanting to cut their overall labor costs, such as reducing the number of labor hours and providing fewer health benefits. But those are best achieved in an open, dynamic market process.

Governments, as commonly conceived, are incapable of this downward flexibility because they are anything but open and dynamic. They are a violent assault on reason. Government escalates in a progressively intrusive way, making it what is sticky downward.

For the most part, conservatives, who rightly deplore their stolen tax dollars being redistributed to make welfare recipients more dependent on government handouts, hardly ever talk about reducing government welfare. Not including the automotive and financial industry bailouts, entitlement spending almost doubled under George W. Bush from 2002 to 2009. Instead, conservative politicians look to expand government power in hopes of deterring those who have moved into the country without government permission. They understand how difficult it would be politically to reduce government handouts, even to those without the ability to vote. Their best bet is to advocate for more government power, more police, more laws, more taxes.

Worse still, government is slippery upward. The reason why conservatives do not more vigorously advocate for reducing government welfare is varied. It might be because they do not want to be called racist, or it might be because it would hurt their chances of gaining control of government to impose their own social agenda. It is also not worth much of an individual’s time to lobby congressmen to reduce spending when the extra savings would probably just be spent on some other boondoggle. Violence does not produce positive overall results. It is less than a zero-sum game. In government, you are either stealing or being stolen from. The power of the state is being used immediately for your benefit, or the power of the state is being used against your benefit.

I can understand why conservatives clamor for more laws. On their own, they could not afford to kick out all the foreigners, to hire bounty hunters and deport them. That would be awfully expensive, and people might not look too kindly on using violence against peaceful people, even against those who broke an arbitrary government edict. But somehow, people acquire a different moral nature while wearing a government-issued uniform. If they can lobby for power of their own, they can use the government to achieve something, financially and culturally, not possible otherwise. The government’s monopoly on taxation means they can spend resources they did not have access to beforehand, extinguishing liberty one amber at a time.

We can see why government does not solve problems but only makes them worse. We can also see why reducing government aggression, at least through the conventional electoral process, has been so fruitless.

Originally posted at DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left

The police are only enforcing the law. If you want it changed, lobby the legislature, said the serf to the slave. After all, it is not the military’s fault they are being ordered to invade nations that pose no threat to the American government’s security, what they call “national security.” It is the commanders and the politicians who got them into this mess.

I agree somewhat. But the troops are the ones who chose to join the military — for the adventure, or for self-improvement, or for whatever lie their recruiter fed them. Soldiers are the ones who bomb wedding parties, who torture other indoctrinated men, and who massacre families. Of course, I bet a good number of troops perform a lot of heroic missions to save their comrades in the field. Most of the troops are just there to do their part to fight for a country they love. I am friends with a handful of them, so I know they are probably in the majority.

We are constantly fed guilt that we should support the troops — and by extension the politicians and bureaucrats who put them in danger. But how should I support the troops?

Should I pay taxes to buy their overpriced toys? Should I support their immoral occupation of countless countries? Or, should I support the hegemonic government of which they play an integral part? I know a more moderate position is to support the troops by insisting they be returned home. But is that much better?

Even if the troops were not abroad, they would be that much easier to deploy in our cities. Conceivably, it would become more difficult to scale down government spending once an influx of soldiers boosted depressed local economies.

With all that said, I believe we should support the troops. I support troops who stop following orders and take personal responsibility for their behavior. I support the troops who stand down and refuse to deploy.

Typically, when I argued against the state (traditionally a territorially monopolistic and individually non-consensual political organization), I stressed that the property claims of governments were not just. That would be about the extent of my criticism, implying I would support such an organization with the same powers had only its territory been justly acquired. It was a bit of toe dancing on my part. I was not nearly as opposed to the state for the way in which it had initially claimed its authority as I was to the power, per se, the state claimed for itself.

The power that was so destructive, and the one that made all of the state’s other abuses possible, was its claim to have a final monopoly power to sanction the proper use of force. That is the distinguishing mark, in my mind, from any other political organization.

To quote Ayn Rand at length:

The difference between political power and any other kind of social “power,” between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. This distinction is so important and so seldom recognized today that I must urge you to keep it in mind. Let me repeat it: a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force (emphasis in original work).

No individual or private group or private organization has the legal power to initiate the use of physical force against other individuals or groups and to compel them to act against their own voluntary choice. Only a government holds that power. The nature of governmental action is: coercive action. The nature of political power is: the power to force obedience under threat of physical injury—the threat of property expropriation, imprisonment, or death.

Now, Rand supported an individual’s right to self-defense. She just believed a government must have a legal monopoly to determine when the use of physical force is appropriate, placing coercion under objective law. Without the power to enforce those decisions, government would be impotent to defend rights, according to Rand.

Government is Aggression

With this understanding of what a government is, it is important to recognize that government necessarily goes beyond the bounds of just being coercive; its very existence is an act of initiating coercion and, consequently, committing aggression.

For the sake of argument, had a government acquired and maintained its property claim by voluntary consent and without any hint of duress, government would still be an aggressor. In effect, what the people in government are stating by claiming their unique power is that they intend to use force against anyone who defends the life or property of citizens whose agreement with the government had been broken by the government. So even if the government officials violate the terms of the constitution or any other law and other officials in the government refuse to enforce that violation, private citizens who decide to enforce that agreement themselves, after being turned away by the government, may have force used against them by the very people who violated the constitution or any other law.

A property owner too claims a monopoly on the use of his or her property, but claiming by force that his or her violation of a contract is not reviewable constitutes, at least, an imminent threat of aggression. Why else would someone find it necessary to make such a claim if they were not intent on acting upon it? It would also not be valid to give a party to a contract the ultimate decision-making power to enforce or interpret the agreement themself without an independent party to whom an appeal can be placed. That itself would be a form of voluntary slavery, again making it invalid.

Is This Altogether Unprecedented?

The idea that there are natural limits to property is not unheard of. Most people do not accept John Locke’s monolithic property claim that any infringement of property rights can be used to justify any scope of retaliation the property owner wishes. The Rothbardian view of proportionality has trumped Locke in regards to ethical theory, in general, and justice, in particular.

For the same reason that voluntary slavery is a contradiction in terms, voluntary citizenship under a political government is incompatible with the free will nature of human beings and is, thus, void on its face.

Before I had run out of excuses, as one bumper sticker chides, I was still a minarchist — whereby I believed the only purported role of the state was the defensive protection of individual rights. I was still fiercely opposed to immigration restrictions, based on my reading Ayn Rand, who was obviously sympathetic to immigrants having moved from Russia in her early adult life.

I still have the same support for open immigration today but for different reasons, of course. What I mean to say is that support for open immigration is not exclusive to anarchists, though I do believe they have a deeper understanding of why immigration should be unregulated. Support for open immigration is not universally adopted by anarchists. One example would be Hans Hermann Hoppe, who claims that open immigration is equivalent to “forced integration.” I believe Sheldon Richman has sufficiently eviscerated that argument though.

Another libertarian unfortunately caught in the current immigration scare is Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). He has called it “an invasion.” Constitutionally, congress has no expressly delegated power to regulate who may immigrate to or emigrate from the country, only how to become a citizen. The framers of the constitution had intended that states would be responsible for their own immigration policy but never envisioned such a welfare state either. In the interim, until government welfare is no longer subsidizing immigration, Paul and other constitutionalists dumbfoundingly insist that government needs additional powers to alleviate the consequences of the immigration problem it created.

Using Paul’s own premise of the necessity of political government, I believe it is self-evident that the only practical and ethical immigration policy is to open the borders. I do not happen to share Paul’s premise that government is necessary or proper, but I think I understand his stance after being a minarchist for several years myself.

Through Minarchist Glasses

Accepting for a moment that the state, as commonly understood, is necessary for the protection of individual rights, an open immigration policy would be a necessity. With that said, open immigration does not mean letting anyone into the country for any old reason whatsoever. A minarchist government could still require immigrants to register and pass a screening check to ensure they are neither perennial aggressors nor intent on committing aggression in the future. Additionally, a government could establish its own guidelines for becoming a citizen.

The argument against open immigration, as I understand it, is that government has the final say who can use its property. For this to be true, two conditions must both be true, that government property is legitimately controlled and that government can properly be assigned powers outside the scope of the defensive protection of individual rights.

First, I have said before that a stipulation on whether property is legitimately controlled is the means by which it was acquired. Government property, presently, is commonly acquired under coercion and with stolen money. Mandatory taxation is one form of theft, even to minarchists like Rand and Andrew Napolitano, who support the idea of a voluntary taxation paid in exchange for government services. Presently, no state in the history of civilization has met this fist condition, so no state in the history of civilization has the legitimate power to exclude peaceful, honest immigrants.

So far, I have made the gross assumption that government is necessary for the protection of individual rights. Simply as a thought experiment, I’m going to imagine that a government had aquired its territory by just means. The second hurdle a government would have to prove is that it can properly be assigned powers that are outside the scope of its legitimate function of defending individual rights. But this is objectively impossible. In the metaphysical sense, an individual or a group of individuals may not transfer power to a government other than those which are used expressly for the defense of individual rights. Government by its nature is coercive. That coercion may be used defensively or aggressively. Any government action that does not involve the defensive protection of individual rights must necessarily be used in aggression, even if everyone in the society agrees beforehand to grant government additional powers. To say that somone has the right to aggress is contradictory, so government can have no proper powers beyond the scope of the defensive protection of individual rights.

Rand said, “To take rights like those of property and contractual freedom that are based on a foundation of the absolute self-ownership of the will and then to use those derived rights to destroy their own foundation is philosophically invalid.”

Transferring additional rights other than those necessary for the defense of individual rights would require being able to transfer one’s free will, which is impossible, of course.

In the same way, a group of people could not form a government wherein someone becomes a voluntary slave. Free will is not transferable, in whole or in part, so a voluntary slave can never exchange his free will. The notion that property like roads and parks, neither of which are necessary for the protection of rights, can properly be granted to government would still require a transfer of free will but only to a lesser scale and in a slightly augmented way. At worst, a voluntary slave could be looked upon as a making a promise. A slave who breaks that promise could be ostracized, but it would not be legitimate to use force against him.

Basically, just as someone cannot be held liable for agreeing to voluntary slavery, one cannot properly assign rights or powers to a government other than those which make forming a government a necessary function of society. This is important because a government that goes beyond its proper function could no longer operate as an objective referee who enforces objective rules. A government is given this exception of having a legal monopoly to determine the proper use of force, according to minarchists like Rand, because free will could not function in any practical sense without the existence of a limited government to defend rights and enforce lawful agreements.

Further Implications as a Minarchist

Property that is currently under the unjust control of government does have an owner. It just so happens that proper claims are made so murky that it would practically impossible to determine who deserves restitution and to what degree, making property under unjust government control de facto unowned.

Sentimentally, I agree that someone with long-standing ties to the community or the original owner has a higher moral claim to that property than a recent mover. But when left with the alternative of leaving it in the hands of an oppressor or liberating that stolen property, the emphasis should be to reduce the harm being inflicted as soon as possible.

If government property is being used to violate individual rights, that property should revert (edit May 6, after some reconsideration) to whoever is being aggressed against. If someone were to destroy that property or liberate it, then the government responsible for violating rights would be morally responsible for providing restitution to the willing legitimate owner.

Back in Reality Mode

My thoughts are that citizenship under political government is just an embellished form of voluntary slavery, making it void and in contradiction with human nature.

The questionable land acquisition of nearly every government in existence is an obvious point in favor of anarchism. But that debate usually breaks down into how consent of the governed can be achieved. My deeper concern is whether granting final decision-making authority to a single organization could result in a just social order. Often, we can see how relationships based on power are exploitative without either party resorting to aggression. After all, the state minimizes its naked aggression because it can rely on the inertia of majority will, propaganda, or its overwhelming military presence to command obedience. Many libertarians or so-called anarcho-capitalists I read do not seem to object fundamentally to these power structures, which is disappointing, because they do overly focus on the low-hanging fruit of the state’s land acquisition process. So, I associate a pro-liberty mindset with more just anti-statism but with a more robust expression of opposition to collectivist authoritarianism in general.

It is still an on-going process in my own mind to understand, and I am open to criticism (including the ones I mentioned above). If anyone would like to discuss this off-site, let me know.

(Note: This post was compiled from an e-mail discussion.)

Monday’s Fully Informed Jury Association event for the Campaign for Liberty — Tarrant County went beyond expectation. We passed out close to 400 trifolds, had some good conversations and met a total apologist for government aggression and discrimination.

So here is the background. Tom and Rafael joined Katy and me downtown at the Tarrant County Justice Center on Monday morning. I had never seen such a large jury pool. The line stretched into the street. We were not approached by any law enforcement, and everything was going as expected. Although, one uniformed officer asked what we were doing while waiting for the signal to say walk. I asked if he would like to know about the rights of jurors. He said he already knew about them.

Well, about the time we were passing out our last few trifolds, around 7:50 a.m., another group of people walking toward the Justice Center found their way to our intersection. They appeared to be led by this woman with an official-looking placard around her neck. In the video, she identified herself to be a licenced attorney. She was instructing the group of people with her about the location of restaurants in the neighborhood.

At first, the lady said she did not want any literature. However, once people around her started reading our paperwork, she asked for a copy. Tom said something about judges not informing jurors of their rights to examine the law, and the lady butted in and said that that was illegal for jurors to do.

By that time, I got my camera and asked if she would talk about it. That is when the video started rolling.

Tom then asked her a hypothetical about the obsolete three-fifths clause in the constitution which counted blacks as just a fraction of their actual population for congressional representation. In the clip, she admits she would be willing to enforce racial discrimination laws, among other laws. Tom then turned in disgust to her answer. What you don’t see in the video is that she quickly yanked on his elbow to get his attention. It was not a rough yank, but it was something that would have gotten some fierce retaliation had we done that to a government employee.

She suggest that we try to change the law through the legislative process rather than practicing jury nullification. She did acknowledge she does not like many of the laws either.

I asked her to respond to Martin Luther King’s line that “An unjust law is no law at all.” She said, “Generall, yes, an unjust law is not law.” (So I don’t understand her reasoning about enforcing obviously discriminatory laws.)

Tom further asked, “What if I don’t agree with the law that Jews are no longer persons?” She said, “Then you don’t sit on a jury that is judging that question.” I cringed. I could not believe her response. She again insisted that we respect the rule of law and work within it to affect change. Rafael started to question her if the US PATRIOT Act was just, but she must have misunderstood him and said something about a trade law.

Tom then gave us some historical examples that we was talking about, but I had to cut him short because YouTube videos can only be so long.

As I have been informed, the Texas constitution does have some language somewhat favorable toward jury nullification. (Edit: See Chris’ comment below for a more detailed explanation.) In the Texas Bill of Rights, it states that “in all indictments for libels, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts, under the direction of the court, as in other cases.” This would seem to lend itself to support for the right of jurors to determine which laws they wish to have enforced in their communities.

What we plan to do is to prepare and practice delivering talking points about some common objections and questions we get during our outreach events. I think that may help overcome some common concerns and also encourage more people to attend the events.

In actuality, what conservatives do not understand is they are furthering the statism that he embodies.

The uproar that caused this anti-immigrant backlash was the fault of government. Whether it be the lax enforcement of property rights of farmers, the government welfare benefits given to immigrants, the terrible safety conditions on government roads, obtrusive regulations that prohibit honest competition in the labor market, or the gang violence created by the prohibition of tabu drugs, they are all the result of government intervening into peaceful people’s lives.

This new Arizona law is rewarding government failure with more government power. How can we ever expect to achieve liberty if we support expanding government every time government decision makers fail?

Instead, we could encourage immigrants to build social aid organizations, so they can reduce their dependence on government welfare. We could also support those who avoid paying the taxes that fund the government programs that immigrants allegedly exploit. We could welcome a whole new generation of families, who for the most part are escaping their own failed governments. Those are much better solutions to promoting liberty in the long term than punishing people for moving across arbitrary political lines on a map.

Government, as is true of all hierarchical violent organizations, relies on assigning blame and inflicting misery on scapegoats. If government decision makers ever had to take responsibility for the harm they do, not even the most ruthless savages would take the reigns of government. But they never have to worry about that. The purpose of political government — as it is currently understood — is to avoid responsibility. A small minority of people decide how to spend taxes on self-serving programs they could not accomplish by market means. How many would support the current foreign policy of the United States, for example, which runs approximately a trillion dollars per year? If only the people who voted for Barrack Obama and John McCain were responsible for funding the empire, it would cost each voter approximately $8200 per year. You can bet that would bring the war to a swift conclusion.

I mean, read The Road to Serdom for goodness’ sake.

Talk of liberty always spikes when Republicans are out of office. Then, it should have come as no surprise that I heard a presentation on the meaning of liberty by Marlene McMillan, “America’s expert on the principles of liberty,” at a Republican convention in Fort Worth last month. (If anyone is interested in my reasons for attending, I might write about that later.)

By far, my favorite speech of hers was at the Bedford city council meeting last year in which she spoke against the city’s daytime curfew ordinance.

McMillan offers a $377 online seminar on the concept of liberty centered around Biblical teachings, which consists of a handful of streaming videos and pre-recorded phone calls. Last month’s presentation was her second I had attended. The first came last year at an Educators of Liberty event in Fort Worth after the April 15 tax day rallies. Both presentations were about the same. The audience received a card with the trees of liberty and tyranny printed on one side and her definition of liberty on the other.

McMillan’s definition of liberty is “the opportunity to make a choice to assume responsibility and accept the consequences.” There are number of things that I like about her definition.

First, by using “opportunity,” she is seemingly implying that liberty does not guarantee success, only the pursuit of success.

Second, choices are a good thing. Choices are maximized in a decentralized decision-making process, so she seems to acknowledge a move away from authoritarian tendencies.

Third, responsibility and consequences are part of the fabric of liberty that makes it so beneficial. Allowing people to experience the reward (or failure) of their labor gives an automatic feedback for future decisions. Liberty and responsibility go hand-in-hand as each requires the other to have any true meaning.

However, as appealing as these concepts are to liberty, they are just a few of the consequences of liberty, but not liberty itself. She is applying a package deal to the concept of liberty, as Ayn Rand would say.

Defining ‘Capacity’

I think what McMillan is defining in the notion of capacity. The operative words in her definition are “the opportunity to make a choice.” For example, Merriam-Webster defines “capacity” as “the facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy.”

Let’s look at it. Under one scenario, say that a flower nursery only sold yellow flowers. That would certainly limit the opportunity for some customers who want red roses. If the flower shop was not open on Thursdays, they are limiting the liberty of customers and employees, according to McMillan’s definition. In fact, almost any act limits someone else’s “opportunity to make a choice to assume responsibility and accept the consequences.” If two parties make an exclusive contract, they have limited the opportunity for other to do business with them. In fact, every action I take comes at the exclusion of all other actions within that moment in time. Making any “choice to assume responsibility and accept the consequences” could conceivably be an act of tyranny because that choice could exclude others from making that same decision at that moment in time. So truly, liberty is tyranny, according to McMillan.

In addition, one could characterize charity as anti-liberty by this definition. Charity allows people to escape the full consequences of their actions and not assume responsibility.

Defining ‘Liberty’

So what is a clear, coherent definition of this solemn word? Dating back to John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, philosophers have called liberty the existence of being removed from the violence of others. Locke said, “For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others.”

Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) calls freedom “the absence of government coercion.” (Note: McMillan dislikes the connotation of the word “freedom,” but for this discussion I have used the words interchangeably.) Murray Rothbard said liberty is “the absence of coercion” in his book The Ethics of Liberty. F.A. Hayek agreed with Rothbard, but the two disagreed on the meaning of coercion.

French pamphleteer Frederic Bastiat asked, “In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?”

I think it is important to use “coercion” rather than “violence” because there are many substitutues for violence that people can use, such as fraud and theft. I think of coercion as “an act by an individual against the will or without the permission of another human being with respect to that which the human being has rightful control, such as his or her body or property.” This would very clearly include such decietful acts as fraud and theft.

I asked McMillan by e-mail about my interpretation of liberty. She said:

The problem with defining a word by what it does not include, rather than what it does include, is that in the end you still do not know what it is. You only know what it is not. Because we get more of what we talk about as well as more of what we focus upon, a definition that only includes the negative is flawed in premise and therefore is flawed in result.

But “the absence of coercion” is not defining liberty by what it is not. It is stating what condition must not be present for liberty to exist, namely coercion. Saying that “liberty is not coercion” would be defining liberty by what it is not. The definition of black in the color spectrum is the absence of any color. Only color has an existence of its own. A vacuum is the absence of matter. I accept that the same is true of liberty.

I think Bastiat would back me up on this. He said that justice is identified by a lack of injustice. “Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.”

McMillan appears pretty successful delivering her message and is a great orator and presenter. Ultimately, however, her message is flawed in such a way as to eschew the violence of the state, a territorially monopolistic and individually non-consensual political organization. It is great that people are talking about liberty — what it means and how they can act upon it in their lives. Yet, in an age when pro-war, pro-torture, pro-empire politicians (like Sarah Palin) call themselves pro-liberty, then it is worth examing what they mean so as to avoid being manipulated by false rhetoric.

The abiding question of government is “Who watches the watchers?” That is the question Cass Sunstein, the current regulatory czar in the Obama administration, never quite addressed in his book The Cost of Rights. In essence, the question points to an observation that if people cannot be trusted to govern themselves, they certainly cannot be trusted to govern others. And if people can be trusted to govern themselves, there is no need for a monopoly government.

Sunstein claimed that, much to the chagrin of libertarians, an expansive government is necessary for rights to function. After all, if there are no police, what good are property rights if no one is present with the power to enforce them? Furthermore, for police to function, there needs to be an effective oversight mechanism to make sure police procedures are followed. And governments have costs, which must be recouped with taxes if they are to be maintained.

I have two responses to Sunstein’s justification for the state. First, even in the absence of government, individuals do not have to be defenseless bystanders. In fact, in the absence of gun control laws, more people would be in a better position to defend themselves and their property. Second, Sunstein unknowingly is making a case that rights do not exist in practice. If police and an oversight panel are necessary for the defense of rights, then another oversight panel is necessary for the first oversight panel and so on and so on at infinitum. Again, we are left dumbfounded answering who will watch the watchers.

Furthermore, Sunstein’s leap to a justification for taxes is a non-sequitur. A drowning man who is rescued by a well-dressed businessman should, if he has the least scant of courtesy, offer to pay for his rescuer’s dry cleaning or perhaps a new suit. But would the good Samaritan be justified in holding a gun on the man who he just rescued if he was not compensated? Of course not.

Possibility of Electing Moral Representatives

For a moment, let’s grant Sunstein’s premise that government is necessary for rights to function. Who is to govern?

One remaining solution to the question is that select people are of sufficient character to govern others, including themselves. Fair enough. But is it plausible? Lousy entrepreneurs are flushed from the market all the time. It is easy to not do business with someone. You just ignore them. And those with minority opinions are free to act on their beliefs. That is the difference between the free market, an open-ended process of discovery, and one-size-fits-all monopoly government.

The important point is that you cannot keep out people of low character. Character is not a black or white, all good or all evil proposition. Character is along a gradient. And in an appeal to votes, someone closer along the lines of low character may appeal to the unrepresented immoral class. Second, those in power have no obligation to uphold their promises, so low-moral people can get into office on the promises of doing good. The institution itself can be corrupting. Power corrupts, as Lord Acton stated.

The Myth of the Vigilant Voter

So if moral representatives can elected, why are they so scarse? You will sometimes hear that voters are to blame for not keeping politicians honest. This is even less convincing since government has been in the control of the education system for the past century.

It also is hard to imagine that voters ought to be vigilant. The costs of some outrageous corporate welfare is just a few dollars per voter. How much time is it worth to research and compare competing regulatory proposals? For the beneficiary of that regulation, it could mean millions of dollars.

All the things that allow for the efficient blending of capital and management are lacking in government. Government’s “customers” have no real alternative. The best they can do is choose new management every few years. The managers can never really be certain why they were put in charge, and they can never be held liable for any broken promises. At most, they can lose their job (and keep their pensions) if enough people agree a less-worse manager is available.

The people who rise in government are those who like to exercise power, since that is what government is, an exercise of power. That individual was not randomly chosen; he or she worked deliberately to rise through the ranks to get in that position, probably toiling many years for such an opportunity. Knowing that someone has worked in obscurity for the opportunity, what is the likelihood that someone in power would use that power solely for the benefit of others?