This is fun (despite the pelvic thrusts dance moves).

I had an OK time, and I only recall one objectionable thing about the process. Before some of us were given a court assignment, potential jurors were shown a video by the Young Lawyers of Texas to dispel some myths about jury service. Toward the end of the video, a former juror reassure us by stating that “You don’t have to make a decision about the law, just the facts.”

While I suppose it is true that a juror does not have to make a decision about the law, that is sneaky way of skirting any discussion of jury nullification.

From my understanding of the conflicts within the party, certain factions are interested in pursuing more modest attempts at scaling back government, since the perceived lack of general election support for more devout pro-liberty policies put Republican seats in jeopardy. I think those politically moderate Republicans have a valid concern that their party could run the risk of prompting a backlash from voters.

After all, the dominant source of information that voters make contact with are from traditional media sources, narrowing the window of policies that are portrayed as politically practical. I don’t think that any electoral backlash would necessarily be an indictment of the principles of liberty as much as it would be of the policy reforms that liberty-oriented candidates are pursuing.

If we want to make liberty popular, we need to understand the way that political questions are framed by the electorate. With every proposed act of political privilege or government intervention, some interest group stands to lose if the privilege or intervention is not present. Seemingly, the question under debate is whether the needs of the people who would benefit from the government action take priority over the needs of others that would stand to lose. I do not think those are the proper terms of a political debate, but it is the way things seem to be. That win-lose mindset is modeled after the destructive politics of coercion, not liberty. When they do so in kind, people honoring the choices of others is not a sacrifice. When people are free, they interact with others for their mutual benefit.

Given that terms of debate are where they are, though, a means of gaining more popular support for liberty, as I see it, is to pursue principled reforms explicitly for the purpose of bettering the lives of ordinary people who are the least advantaged economically and socially, since it is allegedly for their sake that the rights of others are often restrained. If I am right that there are no irreconcilable conflicts of interest among people within a rational social system, genuine pro-liberty policies better the lives of all those willing to honor the choices of others. In that respect, everyone — from the most advantaged to the least advantaged — has an interest in defending the principles of liberty.

Because of the intricate consequences of overreaching government action, it is one thing to want to advance liberty, but it is another to know which kind of reforms will do so. For that reason we have to consider not only the nature of a particular government policy but how that policy is embedded within the larger system of government intervention itself. If we are determining the effect that a government regulation has on people’s liberty, it would help to know if the regulation in someway restrains previous grants of government privilege or intervention. For example, federal banks are required by law to maintain a 10 percent reserve requirement for the funds they have on deposit. Were it not for government privileges like taxpayer-backed deposit insurance, customers would likely demand that their banks hold a greater proportion of deposits in reserve. In that case, removing the reserve requirement would increase the magnitude of existing government intervention. If housing prices are made artificially high by government policies, I would think a similar lesson about the need to think contextually would be informative, for example, when evaluating proposals to cut housing relief for the poor.

This is not just a discussion over the practical consequences of political policies. There are profound moral implications that tug at people’s sense of decency. That is why advocates of liberty need to think strategically to appreciate how alleged pro-liberty reforms could injure the most vulnerable in society, making genuine reforms to advance liberty seem callous and lacking in empathy. I think popular actions would be to target those prior acts of intervention that make the secondary regulations appear necessary. Rather than hacking at the branches, which have unintended consequences of their own, of government intervention, we can spend our resources striking at the root in principled and still politically popular ways.

I was disappointed with this video from Adam Kokesh. It was plainly obvious to me that the Occupy protesters were identifying capitalism (or hyper-capitalism, as one person called it) as an economic system whereby social relations are dominated by the owners of capital. Rather than discussing why that is the case or at least why they believe it is increasingly so, Kokesh — armed with the foggy recollection of a few Mises Daily articles — continues his reign as the presumptive prince of vulgar libertarians. Maybe I am being too harsh though.

Free Talk Live‘s recent interview with Sam Seder of the Majority Report is somewhat frustrating but still enjoyable entertainment. It was frustrating because the FTL hosts were not able to strongly challenge many of Seder’s rebuttals to the non-aggression principle.

At around the 30-minute mark, for example, I would agree with the point Seder (I think) is getting at that only a single code of social conduct can be enforced within a single territory (because of the monopolistic nature of force). However, I would disagree with Seder that we necessarily give up liberty by joining civil society. The purpose of a proper civil society is to better secure people’s liberty in extending social cooperation.

The hosts of Free Talk Live made the mistake of proposing to organize society around the “simple rule” to bar the initiation of force. Seder then questioned why that rule should stand. He played on the idea that other societies do not bar the initiation of force. It is not a universal rule, contrary to what one of the hosts had said, so Seder concluded that it is a subjective opinion that aggression should be prohibited. If the rules that are enforced have no objective basis and only a single code of social conduct can be enforced within a political territory, by Seder’s logic, the aggregated opinion of the members of that political territory should be responsible making those rules. Seder’s false dichotomy, that the proper use of force is either universal or it is subjective, went unchallenged. If anything, Seder’s point that some societies approve of aggression gives us reason to be cautious of conceding to whatever kinds of rules that democratic majorities enact.

A better approach for the FTL hosts would have been to explain that individuals do not have the right to initiate force, so they cannot individually or collectively delegate a non-existent right to a government or anybody else. Has anyone else had success using a different approach?

Fundamentally, Seder is a statist, believing that the proper standard for judging the merit of a policy is its aggregated effect on the members within the given political body, regardless of the consequences on the lives and freedoms of the individuals within that aggregate. At one point, he calls it regrettable but necessary that tax protesters would have to jailed for not providing financial support for war-making. While I guess that makes his “liberal totalitarianism” more amenable than a brute authoritarianism, his standard does not appreciate that it still has to be decided what information is relevant to include in the political calculation and what the algorithm for making trade-offs between competing values should consist of. The people making those decisions will be the masterminds of the political class, and you can guess in whose interest their decisions will be made.

Left-conflationism — the criticism of corporate power and plutocracy and other grants of government privilege as if they were the consequences of a genuine free market

Right-conflationism — the praise of the virtues of a free market as though they constituted a justification for past and continued government-enforced privilege

The lesson about the heterogeneous nature capital accumulation is important too. Just as the increase in the labor force allows for a specialization of labor, an increased stock of capital goods allows for their specialization and division into a more unique and complex arrangement of individual capital goods.

Rarely would an increase in capital mean duplicating the individual goods of capital that currently exist. Because consumers have unmet demands, profit-seeking entrepreneurs recognize that an increased availability in capital renders some forms of capital less important and makes other uses of capital economically viable. This complex specialization of capital makes it possible to increase the marginal value of capital from what it otherwise would have been if it were just a homogenous stock. The lesson is that it would be a mistake to think that increasing the availability of capital would necessarily reduce the marginal efficiency of capital.

Another conclusion to draw is that increased capital accumulation, which makes it more feasible to increase the complexity of the composition of capital goods, typically requires an increase in the stages of process to form those capital goods. The knowledge required to construct, operate, and coordinate ever remote stages of production becomes increasingly lost on central planners. An expanding economy continues its progress in spite of central planners, not because of them.

Frédéric Bastiat (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A common premise of communitarianism is that liberty is one of many competing political values worth pursuing. According to this thinking, there are circumstances where it might be preferable to sacrifice liberty, at least to some degree, in favor of other values. That is the often unstated premise in the communitarian critique that libertarians care about liberty “to the exclusion of all other values.” As a libertarian, my take is that complete liberty is worth achieving, not only because liberty is itself valuable, but precisely because liberty is the most suitable means of pursuing other worthwhile political ends.

As a preliminary point, I think some communitarians are engaging in a false dichotomy to think that liberty and other values must be mutually exclusive.

The more general communitarian premise about the benefit of offsetting liberty for other values is restated in the notion that the needs of society may sometimes take priority over the rights of individuals. The fundamental problem with this notion is that a society does not think or act apart from the thinking and acting of individuals. Likewise, society has no needs apart from the needs of individuals, one of which would include being free from interpersonal coercion to think and to act on one’s best judgement (while honoring the mutual freedom of others to do the same).

I think Frederic Bastiat, writing in 1850, said it best:

To destroy freedom of action is to destroy the possibility, and consequently the power, of choosing, of judging, of comparing; it amounts to destroying reason, to destroying thought, to destroying man himself. Whatever their starting point, this is the ultimate conclusion our modern reformers always reach; for the sake of improving society they begin by destroying the individual, on the pretext that all evils come from him, as if all good things did not likewise come from him.

If the needs of society and the individual go hand-in-hand, it would be logically inconsistent to argue that the needs of society would include undermining the needs of individuals.

In a free society, there is no irreconcilable conflict with the needs of society and those of individuals. People are able to contribute to way that they believe best advance the needs of their community and others do what they think is best. A free society thus achieves both consensus (as everyone agrees to his or her plan) and diversity (as most everyone’s plan is different). To paraphrase Ludwig von Mises, people’s fundamental interest is in preserving social cooperation, as opposed to the passing and relatively insignificant benefits of hegemonic intervention.

This inner, indestructible, universal motive force that resides in every individual and makes of him an active being, this tendency of every man to seek happiness and to shun misery, this product, this effect, this necessary complement of sensibility, without which the latter would be merely a meaningless burden, this primordial phenomenon which is the origin of all human action, this attracting and repelling force which we have called the mainspring of the social machine, has been disparaged by most social philosophers and political theorists; and this is certainly one of the strangest aberrations to be found in the annals of science.

It is true that self-interest is the cause of all the evils, as well as all the benefits, that can fall to the lot of man. This cannot fail to be the case, since self-interest determines all our actions. Certain political theorists, seeing this, have conceived of no better way to cut off evil at its roots than to stifle self-interest. But, since by this act they would also destroy the very motive force of our activity, they thought it best to endow us with a different motive force: devotion and self-sacrifice. They hoped that henceforth all social transactions and arrangements would be carried out, at their bidding, on the principle of self-abnegation. People are no longer to seek their own good but others’; the admonitions of pain and pleasure are no longer to count for anything, any more than the punishments and rewards of responsibility. All the laws of nature are to be overturned; the spirit of self-sacrifice is to take the place of the instinct of self-preservation; in a word, no one is ever to consider his own personality except to hasten to sacrifice it to the common good. It is from this complete transformation of the human heart that certain political theorists, who believe themselves to be very religious, expect the coming of perfect social harmony. They forget to tell us how they propose to carry out the indispensable preliminary, the transformation of the human heart.

If they are mad enough to undertake it, they will certainly not be strong enough to achieve it. Do they desire the proof? Let them try the experiment on themselves; let them try to stifle self-interest in their own hearts so that it is no longer evidenced in the most ordinary acts of their lives. They will not be long in admitting their own inability to do so. How, then, do they presume to impose upon all men, without exception, a doctrine to which they themselves cannot submit?

— Frederic Bastiat, “The Motive Force of Society“

While I disagree that people naturally pursue what they believe to be their self-interest, the lesson I get from this Bastiat quote is that rather than suppressing people’s motivations, a more reliable and productive means of promoting community well-being is to harness that self-interest, even if I may not agree with the desired proximate motivations. If this self-interest is turned to satisfying the needs of others, which is what takes place under the conditions of free association, the benefit of one brings a corresponding benefit to the other. If that is the case, then contrary to being a condition of every Man for himself, therefore, a genuine market economy’s more appropriate slogan would be “All for one, and one for all.”

I say that because when the economy begins to dip into a second recession, which it surely will when the Federal Reserve tightens its monetary policy on fears of price inflation (or even worse acquiesce to soaring price inflation), whoever is elected president will face the scorn of the voting public. That was the weakness the Tea Party-energized Republicans leveraged in 2010, when independents were skeptical of Obama’s performance at restoring the economy. When the economy does falter and were Mitt Romney — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — in the Oval Office, would he likely do much better at delivering a credible case for reducing government involvement into the economy? Based on his performance in the Republican presidential primary, I would not think so.

If even there were a good reason to think that Romney were personally supportive of free market principles, there is a more fundamental reason that Romney would make a poor advocate for those principles. He is not capable of defending them or, at least, has not given much indication he would be able to up until now.

Someone might object that an economic downturn is less likely to happen if Romney is in office to enact his policies, and then it would be less important that Romney is incapable of credibly advocating for reducing the scope of government in the economy. Yet, as examination of Romney’s economic advisers reveals that they share the same conventional big government orthodoxy, RomneyCare is just further proof that the former governor’s policies would not substantially differ from Obama’s. Now if anyone would know, it would be the prominent Keynesian intellectual Paul Krugman.

Krugman’s criticism is that Romney is not more sincere with voters, who are properly skeptical of the motivations behind Romney’s economic platform. After one of Romney’s campaign stops, Krugman argued, “Given his advisers, then, it seems safe to assume that what Mr. Romney blurted out Tuesday [that reducing government spending hampers economic recovery] reflected his real economic beliefs.”

Romney would represent the worst of both worlds. He supports big government, economy-stifling policies but promotes them under the superficial guise of free market rhetoric. Repeating the same mistakes as faux-fiscal hawk Herbert Hoover, Romney’s rhetoric will have made a fool-proof argument for the economic interventionists that increased government action is needed to temper the downturn, just as what followed Hoover’s defeat was the greatest expansion of the federal government’s power in the 20th century when Franklin Roosevelt springboarded his predecessor’s policies to spawn the New Deal. Because of that, I think there is reason to dread that a Mitt Romney presidency could spell the same result.

Once the downturn begins, will voters favor free market policies or more central planning? With Romney in office, the answer is fairly certain who and what will get the blame. If any of the prominent presidential candidates could reverse the present course, it would be Ron Paul. He is uniquely qualified to articulate what is happening to the economy and how to mitigate the harm caused by prior policies. The other candidates from either major party have no plan to change fundamentally the government’s course from impending bankruptcy and slow-motion default, but Paul has made a career of challenging conventional wisdom and offering a guiding light through economic uncertainty.

• Charles Murray has good evidence that government charity does displace private charity. For what it is worth, a person I know who lived in Sweden was rebuked by natives for giving money to a homeless person. “The government takes care of that,” he was told.
• The reason I would think that private charity would not promote dependency to the same extent is because private charities have an incentive to only help those who truly need it (since the charity’s resources are more limited). And since its resources are solicited voluntarily, it would seemingly be accountable to its constituents more so than politicians would (since as many as 49 percent may not get their way in a given election, even in a politician amazingly upheld his or her campaign promises).
• Also, I would differentiate charity (public or private), both of which can promote dependency, from mutual aid.
• I was just pointing out that the benefits of liberty are realized to the extent that liberty prevails. We may not reach complete liberty, but that is all the more reason to think that a government even under ideal conditions would have a difficult enough job just upholding the rights of others.
• Lots of people have obligations and responsibilities they acquire willingly. There may even exist other moral obligations to help others, but the only enforceable obligation that one has for merely living in society is a negative one: to abstain from violating the rights of others.

Iran Elections (Photo credit: bioxid)

A common idea among interventionists of all stripes is the notion that there exists a challenge or potential challenge, and by that fact alone government intervention — action to redirect by legal compulsion and coercion the exercise of individual rights — is warranted.

Among economic interventionists, they might look to purportedly unfavorable terms of trade among nations and conclude that trade restrictions of some sort will improve economic conditions. For the social interventionists, the problem might be that the growth rate of unwed mothers is increasing, and it is believed that government intervention to promote marriage will improve society in some fashion. To foreign interventionists, the most pressing problem seems to be the militaristic threat posed by the Iranian government.

In each of these cases, I can agree that the given circumstances are not optimal and that I would prefer that they improve. For example, I can recognize that the radical Islamists who subjugate the people of Iran may well be hostile to the interests of Americans and other members of secular nations. But I can make that observation of a particular problem independent of any commitment to a particular government action, or any government action at all, to solve the problem.

With trade, for example, it is lamentable that government controls in the United States makes the cost of doing business and hiring workers more expensive than would otherwise be the case, so the fallout of prior government intervention is that jobs are displaced to other countries. However, that fact does not justify increasing government trade controls on imports from foreign countries. A significant reason for thinking that is because prohibiting a person’s choices — like those of a consumer — especially those choices the person may very well have chosen, does not improve a person’s circumstances. One example would be how price controls, which are meant to make goods easier to purchase, reduce the supply of those goods and thus the number of people who can purchase those goods. The most likely scenario is that intervention exacerbates the underlying concern most people who supported the intervention were intending to address. The least harmful consequence would be that the intervention just shifts resources to more favored political interests from less favored political interests. Even that incentivizes more unproductive activity be spent to acquire those shifting resources, with a good portion of those resources being retained by the entity responsible for deciding who lives at the expense of others. When these interventions are scaled on a nationwide basis, the distorting effects of these prohibitory controls on the individual level are magnified a million-fold or more.

With foreign relations, the problem with government intervention is a bit more obscured, but the lesson is the same. Economic sanctions and other military actions against Iran exacerbate the threat posed to Americans by the Iranian government and anyone acting in concert with that regime. Extremists within the Muslim culture have had the most prominent voices, as the Muslims who advocate secular values and pro-liberty policies like peace and free markets get labeled by the extremists as sympathizers of the brutal Middles Eastern regimes supported by Western governments.

For anyone wanting to reduce conflict and religious strife, the solutions then is a fortunate one: liberty. Some goods steps in support of stability and peaceful coexistence would be to set a good example for pro-liberty forces in other countries by preserving liberty here at home, by ending foreign aid (which is primarily spent on corrupt big government programs in other countries), and by opening trade relations to bond in people’s minds even more firmly the spiritual and material benefits of social cooperation.

There are two ways to “deal” with Iran then. By power or market, by force or trade. To the extent that the American people continue accepting the former rather than the latter, our prospects for liberty decline and the state’s power swells from aggression.

This video from Learn Liberty addresses one of the points I made in one of my more recent posts about the self-limiting nature of democracy. Pavel Yakovlev also explodes the idea that politicians in the role as the agents of voters are uniquely more accountable than other agents in society.

For example, liberals are keen to say that politicians, who have to be elected every number of years at least, can be flawed but are often more desirable than a rule by corporate oligarchs. I think the libertarians have the better argument that those corporate oligarchs are in power primarily because of politicians, which is all the more reason to strip government of the power to grant privileges to businesses and artificial restrictions on everyone else.

Leaving that point aside, I think there is a second point to be made about why the government’s direction of the economy and social affairs — central planning — is detrimental to the democratic process. Granted, having a say in who takes elected office and which statutes are enacted is preferable to not having a say at all. But what merit there is for having a genuinely democratic process is more often negated by the substance that process generates.

I think I have good reason for thinking why that might be. Having a unified plan of action is made more difficult in a legislative body. That is because the agenda has to be molded and interconnected in just the right way for it to function properly. However, planning a society requires making trade-offs among mutually exclusive ends using an unquantifiable number of means, each with a multiplicity of uses. And unlike coordinating fixed parts for an engineering design, there are over 300 million self-molding parts in the United States alone with their own motives and ideas. That kind of coordination would be difficult enough within a small committee of like-minded and trained experts, particularly as the committee process itself is not bent toward engineered action, but delay and compromise. Those inefficiencies are magnified again and again within a legislative body made of conflicting agendas.

As it becomes more apparent that central planning itself is inimical to a legislature’s piecemeal approach, policy making has to be entrusted to even more remote planners like the NCTCOG, TXDPS, NTTA, RCT, TRA, and any number of other alphabet state commissions and agencies just in my part of Texas. There are calls to “get it out of politics” or something similar, which really amounts to “do as we say.” Considering, it is understandable why people would favor giving power to planners who can escape political influence.

For a practical matter, unless the scope of the government’s powers are severely limited, the legislative and executive functions of government are likely to be tainted by corruption. To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, because politicians have so much sway over what businesses can buy and sell, the first thing businesses are going to buy and sell are politicians. Yet even in the unlikelihood that only incorruptible and uncapturable politicians and central planners were in power, the “iron law of oligarchy” teaches that their effort to direct people’s lives would increasingly become cartelized and cemented. If for no other reason, politicians and planners will have to rely on the economic data provided by big businesses for shaping their policies and determining how those policies impact the economy. Intentional or not, big government reforms will serve the interests of big business.

Some might say that democracy still functions as intended since these “independent” planners still face the scrutiny of legislatures, who are voted into office by the people. That is beside the point since there is no general consensus on the substance, only on the means for enacting what, the planning should consist of. Planning boards present their proposals as effectively a “take it or leave it” proposition. Some tweaks can be made, usually for it gain wider appeal, but the political pressures for approval will be coming from voters demanding that something — anything — be done to avert greater turmoil. That is hardly what democracy should look like. As Friedrich Hayek has pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, the legislature

will at best be reduced to choosing the persons who are to have practically absolute power. …

…; it will often be necessary for the will of a small minority be imposed upon people, because this minority will be the largest group able to agree among themselves on the question at issue.”

Whatever merit democracy might have, that surely is not it.

I regard democracy as a critical social value, but not as the primary social value — liberty — a value that individuals overwhelmingly share simultaneously with others in society. At its best, the democratic process is limited in scope and serves to maintain accountability to shifting popular opinion, but democracy does not in and of itself restrain the government (or restrain others at the behest of the government) from exercising arbitrary power. Unfortunately, the power of statism corrupts, and statism corrupts and distorts democracy just as it does the market economy and other beneficial practices.

I have my own concerns that charity, particularly government charity, acts more as a snare than a genuine safety net; that concern aside, I think libertarians can agree with left-liberals that positive liberty (or autonomy) is valuable and something to cherish. And liberals are right that negative liberty is not a sufficient condition for leading a meaningful life, but they are mistaken in not recognizing that both negative and positive liberty — complete liberty — are necessary conditions for human flourishing.

As a matter of practice in promoting liberty, someone who sees little benefit from their negative liberty in overcoming their struggles is going to have less regard for that liberty and be more willing to surrender it or interfere with the liberty of others. Again as a matter of practice, to someone who comprehends the nature of coercion, it does not follow that the state’s coercive tools are the least bit adequate in building positive liberty. That understanding comes from the fact that coercion is a tool of destruction.

Granted, when used properly, coercion can be used to destroy coercion and thus defend negative liberty. Defensive coercion acts as a counter-interventionist measure that indirectly aids progress by ensuring that voluntary exchange can take place. But any progress is still contingent on people being free to think and to act on their best judgements, an objective requirement of which would be to bar coercion from social interaction. That is the essence of negative liberty, a precondition for positive liberty to exist.

With that said, it is possible for the state to provide a semblance of a social safety net, but only by confiscating greater amounts of resources to overcome its own destructive nature in such a way that undermines its continued prospects. So along with an ever-shrinking source for revenues, government charity is inhospitable to autonomy, since welfare recipients shift their reliance to the good nature (or long-term parasitism) of program administrators, who are the primary beneficiaries of the welfare state.

A social safety net respecting negative liberty and which provides genuine autonomy is mutual aid, not charity and particularly not charity tied to career bureaucrats or the election results of politicians and their political appointees.

What does it mean to coerce someone if not to exercise ultimate decision-making authority? Inherently, coercion is monopolizing — incompatible with dissent. By retaliating, the victim of aggression too is attempting to impose his or her own monopoly, with respect to his or her attacker, on the provision of coercion. Simply put, someone using force — whether justly or unjustly — is not seeking to coexist, but to destroy. Victims are seeking to destroy the coercion taking place against them. Of course, coercion can be used justly or unjustly (based on the context in which it was used). So just as the only proper function of coercion would be to defend individual rights, it would follow that the defense of individual rights is the only proper function of ultimate decision-making authority.

Ethical Implications for the State

To my understanding, the principle of rights is applicable in a social context (i.e., interacting with others), which would seem to support the idea that individuals would have the right to the retaliatory use of coercion (ultimate decision-making authority) throughout society, not just wherever they have ownership rights. As I noted, force is inherently a monopolizing act. Within any given territory, large or small, only one legal system can prevail at a given time. After all, what is at stake is rule-making. If individuals have the right to the defense of their rights, they are acting within the bounds of morality by seeing to it that a legal system that genuinely defends rights prevails. If individuals organized an institution, the legal system, to exercise ultimate decision-making authority in defense of their rights within a given territory, in fact they would be forming a state, an institutional that cannot be challenged with impunity and which enforces rules of conduct within a given territory. So long as they were genuinely acting to defend individual rights, those individuals would be acting justly, as far as I can tell, in forming a state.

If it is any relief, the upshot of this rationale for the legitimacy of the state would be that its only justification would be to defend individual rights. I do not think this is necessarily at odds with market anarchism, as far as I understand, if the idea is that constituent functions of government should be open to the private sector to perform.

Just as people have the right to self-defense, they can decide that it might not be in their interest to act fully on that right. So while people have the right to form a proper state, at least as far as I can tell, there is no moral imperative that they must. In a scenario where the likelihood of conflict is diminished, implementing a government might be prohibitive for practical reasons, such as its possibility of being corrupted or even that its administrative costs would be too great. It goes without saying that just because a state exists, that does not necessarily mean it is proper or should be supported.

The most striking portion of the post highlighted why unequal power relations are the natural breading grounds for injustice. To name the most obvious that come to mind to me, power comes in many forms: economic, psychological, political, social and physical. As the state demonstrates, it is pretty apparent that centralized power becomes self-serving and oppressive. I think libertarians are reluctant to criticize certain forms of power, like economic power, because the commonplace response is to mobilize big government as the countervailing power to big business.

From an outsider’s perspective, that reluctance on behalf of libertarians to criticize corrupt non-political power looks like an endorsement though. For some, they may indeed support libertarianism out of a belief that non-political forms of power may gain strength in the absence of the heavy hand of government. I think they are wrong. Big business is heavily dependent on big government’s privileged subsidies and protections from competition to stay upright. Big government acts less as a restraint to cut big business down to size than it does as a crutch to keep big business from falling under the weight of its own diseconomies of scale.

Seeing that being able to make reasoned judgements is what distinguishes Mankind from other animals, libertarians oppose aggression because an aggressor thwarts the victim’s judgements for how to live his or her life. Notwithstanding, maintaining significantly greater degrees of power over another is bound to play a part shaping the less powerful person’s decisions. Equally important, opposing subordination does not necessarily endorse any particular means of discharging of that power. Subordination comes in different degrees and different kinds through different forms of power. As Gary Chartier said, “Acknowledging the reality of subordination as morally objectionable need not involve erasing moral differences among kinds of subordination or responses to them.”

A memorable lines from Frederic Bastiat’s The Law really elaborates on this point when he criticizes state socialists for not recognizing the difference between society and the state, so that “every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. … We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” His point was that because someone has a worthy goal, that does not mean state coercion, or any coercion at all, is the most proper means of achieving that goal.

An Opportunity to Clarify

Another good thing about the post is that some really cogent challenges are made of libertarianism. I think those points can be resolved with some added clarity, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll address what I think are the two most fundamental points. I can’t speak for all libertarians, so I’ll try to speak as broadly as possible.

One of the first challenges made against libertarianism is that there is not currently, nor ever can be, a free market. The point is made that any economic system is going to have some sort of framework or rules that prohibit or sanction certain activities. If challenged, conservatives would probably even concede that the financial success of behemoth corporations like Walmart and Northrop Grumman are not a reflection their performance on a free market. It is also a fair point that no economic system is going to be truly unregulated, which is also something libertarians rightly acknowledge. However, libertarians are not using “free” to connote unrestrained or costless. After all, it would be just as easy (and empty) a criticism to point out that nothing is free (of opportunity costs at least) on the free market. Libertarians are using the word “free” in a particular political context. To be free means to exercise one’s own will (within the context of honoring the will of others to exercise their rights). Prohibitions on theft, fraud, murder and slavery (all means of negating another’s will) is evidence of that libertarians understand the conditions necessary for a free market to exist. Regulations on (direct and indirect) aggression are not interventions into a free market since an economic system that condoned aggression would not be a free market in the first place. So when libertarians object to regulations, the implicit understanding is that they are addressing government regulatory controls that interpose on a free(d) market.

To intercept a possible objection, the so-called freedom to violate another’s freedom is a logical contradiction since it denies the very basis of freedom, our equality. So prohibitions on the initiation of force do not restrain freedom since the so-called freedom to initiate force does not exists. Ayn Rand reiterated, “Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.” As Jim May wrote recently,

It is not society that sets that boundary — it is the moral principle itself which does this, by its internal logic. Individual rights are thusly logically self-limiting, and self-constraining. Society’s role, properly constituted, is simply to recognize and enforce these logical, moral boundaries between men — not to author them.

A second criticism is that “The concept of ownership is a form of coercion.” I don’t think the author literally meant the concept of ownership, but perhaps the practice of ownership. In any case, the statement is conveying a common composition fallacy. Because the characteristic of a component of ownership, the right to defend one’s property, involves coercion, then the entire whole of ownership is coercive. A simple analogy reveals the logical error. An atom is invisible to the naked eye; cats are made of atoms, so cats are invisible to the naked eye.

In regards to ownership, a person’s action is voluntary or coercive based on that person’s relationship with the property being owned. In that case, the ownership (e.g., the right to the possession, use, disposal, and defense) of property is voluntary from beginning to end. The owner of a property is perfectly free to possess his or her property, to use it, and to dispose of the property. To note, it is not even incumbent upon an owner to use coercion to defend the property. Pacifists libertarians (like the late Robert LeFevre) are steadfast proponents of the ownership of property, and there is nothing internally inconsistent with supporting the ownership of property and renouncing retaliatory coercion. In fact, a mature free market society would likely recognize the destructive nature of punitive punishments like execution, imprisonment and fines and instead favor restitution practices that made victims whole again to the greatest extent possible and put offenders on a path to living independently and not off the enterprise of others.

Now with respect to that which is his or her own property, a person is not acting against the will or without the permission of anyone by defending it. Thus with respect to that which is his or her property, a property owner is acting voluntarily by choosing or not to defend the property from coercion.

Consider the actions of a non-owner. With respect to that which is not his or her own property, a non-owner exercising the rights of ownership is acting against the will or without the permission of the property owner. Thus a non-owner’s action, with respect to that which is not his or her property, would be coercive if the owner disapproved of it. Moreover, an aggressor has by his or her own will created a debt owned to his or her victim, who is entitled to exercise rights over that debt, including collecting it. If the aggressor continues to put up roadblocks to prevent the collection of debt by the rightful owner, the aggressor is doing so voluntarily and only has to end his continued acts of coercion against the owner (or owner’s agent) of the debt for coercion against the aggressor to halt.

It also occurs to me that the idea that ownership is a form of coercion could also be committing the fallacy of the stolen concept. In order to grasp and accept as proper the concept of ownership, a person first has to grasp that a person can use property voluntarily (according to his or her own will) to even make the distinction between voluntary and (involuntary) coercive use of a property. I am not so sure though, and I could definitely be stood corrected.

In Conclusion

Genuinely leftist ends are perfectly compatible with a libertarian theory of justice that responds in proportion and in kind to undesirable exercises of power. I would also grant that in a mixed economy like ours, the distinction between economic and political power is not always so clear. That is the danger of superficially dismissing criticisms (or worse rationalizing justifications) of the wretched treatment of employees by an employer, for example.

Another lesson libertarians might take away is that it is worthwhile to elaborate why and how the state undermines genuinely positive practices like democracy, social safety nets and property ownership for nefarious ends.

Ultimately, a libertarian movement will never get off the ground if cultural attitudes continue to condone general practices of social hierarchy, of which the state is probably the most visible figure. In that light, the legitimacy of the state is diminished when people regain decision-making power over their own lives. If nothing else, breaking up oppressive power (through economic and social means like mutual aid) is how libertarians can take the lead to enjoy immediately the benefits of the new world, in the shell of the old.

But what sense does that make? First of all, maxing out your credit limit is not the same as defaulting on payments. Second, you would think that a borrower’s hiatus (however temporary) from going further into debt would have a positive impact on a credit score.

On a related note, Robert Murphy has a breakdown of Ron Paul’s proposal of wiping out treasury notes held by the Federal Reserve.

OK, I am not condemning all liberals, but anti-authoritarian liberals should call out this blatant power grab for what it is.

It even includes a reference to Hayek’s “Who, Whom?” question. Bernanke’s double is great too.