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Doug Casey on Anarchy and Voluntaryism

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2023

by Doug Casey

Even under the worst circumstances, even if the Mafia controlled the United States, I can’t believe Tony Soprano or Al Capone would try to steal 40% of people’s income from them every year.

Remember you don’t get the best and the brightest going into government. There are two kinds of people. You’ve got people that like to control physical reality—things. And people that like to control other people. That second group, those who like to lord it over their fellows, are drawn to government and politics.

Doug Casey on Anarchy and Voluntaryism

You’re likely aware that I’m a libertarian. But I’m actually more than a libertarian. I don’t believe in the right of the State to exist. The reason is that anything that has a monopoly of force is extremely dangerous. As Mao Tse-tung, lately one of the world’s leading experts on government, said: “The power of the state comes out of a barrel of a gun.”

There are two possible ways for people to relate to each other, either voluntarily or coercively. And the State is pure institutionalized coercion. It’s not just unnecessary, but antithetical, for a civilized society. And that’s increasingly true as technology advances. It was never moral, but at least it was possible, in oxcart days, for bureaucrats to order things around. Today it’s ridiculous.

Everything that needs doing can and will be done by the market, by entrepreneurs who fill the needs of other people for a profit. The State is a dead hand that imposes itself on society. That belief makes me, of course, an anarchist.

People have a misconception about anarchists. That they’re these violent people, running around in black capes with little round bombs. This is nonsense. Of course there are violent anarchists. There are violent dentists. There are violent Christians. Violence, however, has nothing to do with anarchism. Anarchism is simply a belief that a ruler isn’t necessary, that society organizes itself, that individuals own themselves, and the State is actually counterproductive.

It’s always been a battle between the individual and the collective. I’m on the side of the individual.

I simply don’t believe anyone has a right to initiate aggression against anyone else. Is that an unreasonable belief?

Let me put it this way. Since government is institutionalized coercion—a very dangerous thing—it should do nothing but protect people in its bailiwick from physical coercion.

What does that imply? It implies a police force to protect you from coercion within its boundaries, an army to protect you from coercion from outsiders, and a court system to allow you to adjudicate disputes without resorting to coercion.

I could live happily with a government that did just those things. Unfortunately the US Government is only marginally competent in providing services in those three areas. Instead, it tries to do everything else.

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Doug Casey on the Push for Global Taxation… and What Comes Next

Posted by M. C. on June 21, 2023

There is no clause that says, “unless you’re the government, then it’s taxation and not theft anymore.” Theft is theft, even if you and a few associates set yourselves up as the government and decide to call it something else. 

There’s always been a move towards world government on the part of a certain type of person—the kind who thinks they know what’s best for everyone else. Busybodies who are willing to use force to ensure you do what they think is right. It’s a disastrous idea. These people are the enemies of individualism, liberty, free markets, and Western values in general. They’re actually antihuman.

Doug Casey on the Push for Global Taxation… and What Comes Next

International Man: Last year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and more than 130 countries agreed to set a minimum global corporate tax rate of 15%.

What’s your take on this push for global taxation?

Doug Casey: They say only two things in the world are inevitable: death and taxes. Both evils, to be avoided. With technology developing at its current pace, let’s discuss the inevitability of death another time. But, unlike death, taxes aren’t part of the cosmic firmament. They’re neither necessary nor desirable.

Let’s go back to the basics, define the word in question, and look at the moral concepts that surround the subject.

What is taxation? It’s actually theft. Why do I say that?

If you look up the dictionary definition of theft, it says, “the act of stealing, specifically the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.”

There is no clause that says, “unless you’re the government, then it’s taxation and not theft anymore.” Theft is theft, even if you and a few associates set yourselves up as the government and decide to call it something else. It’s still destructive, criminal, and immoral, even if you decide the theft is for a “good” purpose.

The ideal in a moral society is voluntarism. Coercion is kept to a minimum. It certainly isn’t institutionalized and made part of the cultural fabric. If funds are needed or wanted, no one has a right to hold a gun to someone else’s head and steal them.

How you think and feel about the subject of taxation is a reflection of your worldview, your ethical makeup, and your essential character. Do you prefer voluntary exchange or coercion? Of course, coercion is the essence of government. That’s why government should be limited to the greatest degree possible.

In that light, it’s very disturbing that 130 national governments have already endorsed the notion of a 15% minimum tax. Why aren’t they, instead, talking about a 15% maximum tax?

If this destructive idea is implemented, at best, we’re going to wind up another layer of bureaucracy to administer worldwide pork barrel spending. Those who are already rich, the politically connected, and the apparatchiks will be huge beneficiaries. Society at large will suffer a big drop in the standard of living.

This trend is evil, destructive, and unnecessary. It should be fought against, not just because it will slow, distort, or even destroy the world economy. Taxes degrade everything, as does any form of theft. But taxes shouldn’t be fought with practical or economic arguments; they should be fought primarily on an ethical and a moral basis.

International Man: So far, the US government hasn’t signed on to the OECD deal even though Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen has strongly supported the creation of a minimum global corporate tax rate.

Do you think American companies and citizens will eventually be under the yoke of a global taxation regime?

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A Genuine Check and Balance: Privatize Law and Order | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on February 6, 2023

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/a-genuine-check-and-balance-privatize-law-and-order/

by Michael Huemer

Here, I explain the anarcho-capitalist solution to the basic social problem (from fakenous): Recap from two previous posts: 

– The basic problem of human social life: People are selfish. How do we stop them causing enormous amounts of harm to others, to benefit themselves? 

– A traditional solution: Have a government to police the people. 

– The basic problem of government: Government officials are selfish. How do we stop them from causing enormous amounts of harm to others, to benefit themselves? 

Traditional solutions to the problem of government are pretty lame. They really aren’t thought through at all well, and they don’t work very well empirically. 

Here, I explain how the libertarian solution is better. I’m only going to talk about police and courts here, though; I’m not going to discuss national defense or anything else. 

– 

  1. The Private Solution 

– 

The anarcho-capitalist solution to the basic social problem is similar to the government solution, except that there are multiple, competing agencies for enforcing rights, instead of just one. In other words, anarcho-capitalists want to privatize the essential functions of governments (i.e., the functions that we actually need; other functions can be eliminated). 

So your neighborhood could have an homeowner’s association that would hire a private security company instead of government police. Many competing security companies would operate in the same area (like security guard companies in the status quo; today, there are more private security guards in America than there are government police). In case of a dispute (including disputes about whether someone committed a crime), you would go to a private arbitration company instead of government courts. Many competing arbitrators would operate in the same area. 

– 

  1. Two Differences 

– 

You might wonder whether this arrangement counts as an instance of the “government” solution — if your HOA is hiring security guards and enforcing rules, maybe it is just a small government?

That is a semantic question that doesn’t matter. But here is a substantive question that matters: Is the anarcho-capitalist solution subject to the same problems as government? Why don’t we just have the problem that, since the people running security companies and arbitration companies are selfish, they will do things that benefit themselves and harm the rest of society? 

In reply, there are two important differences that explain why an-cap is better than traditional government: 

– 

2.1. Voluntariness vs. Coercion 

– 

In the anarcho-capitalist society, individuals (or private organizations) voluntarily choose to hire a security company; in our society, everyone is forced to “hire” the government, whether they want to or not. 

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To UBI or Not to UBI, That Is the Question

Posted by M. C. on November 26, 2022

A problem yet remains, according to Hayek. Some people in a free-market society can’t provide for themselves. Even if they are paid a competitive wage, the value of what they produce may not be enough to enable them to meet their minimum needs; and even worse is the situation of the old, infirm, and disabled, who cannot work at all. In this unhappy circumstance, they depend on others who may coerce them into performing degrading tasks. Those in this class should be given a minimum basic income to remedy their plight.

https://mises.org/wire/ubi-or-not-ubi-question

In recent decades, proposals for a universal basic income (UBI) have aroused a good deal of attention, but supporters of the free market have for the most part been averse to the idea. In his article “A Hayekian Case for Free Markets and a Universal Basic Income” (in Michael Cholbi and Michael Weber, eds., The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income [Routledge, 2020], pp. 7–26), the philosopher Matt Zwolinski has made a good case that free-market supporters should endorse a UBI, but I’m not convinced.

As Zwolinski rightly says, Murray N. Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and other libertarians oppose coercion, defined as the use or threat of force against those who haven’t violated rights. Friedrich Hayek thinks that what is wrong with coercion is that it makes a person subject to the arbitrary will of another: if you coerce me, I can’t live my life by trying to achieve my own goals but must do what you tell me to do. To prevent such domination, Hayek says, society should be governed by general rules that apply to everybody. In that case, people are free to lead their own lives, in most cases doing so by peacefully supplying others with goods or services.

A problem yet remains, according to Hayek. Some people in a free-market society can’t provide for themselves. Even if they are paid a competitive wage, the value of what they produce may not be enough to enable them to meet their minimum needs; and even worse is the situation of the old, infirm, and disabled, who cannot work at all. In this unhappy circumstance, they depend on others who may coerce them into performing degrading tasks. Those in this class should be given a minimum basic income to remedy their plight.

Zwolinski agrees but thinks Hayek doesn’t go far enough, and he contends that there are Hayekian grounds in favor of the extension he suggests. Hayek wants to limit the minimum basic income to those unable to work; if you can work but don’t want to, you don’t get the minimum basic income. Zwolinski points out that implementing Hayek’s proposal would require “means testing” recipients, a consequence Hayek not only accepts but embraces. But administering such tests requires bureaucracies, and this leads to arbitrary control over people lives, just what Hayek wants to avoid, and to the growth of government power of whose dangers he has continually warned us. A universal basic income eliminates this danger, since it is no longer up to government officials to decide who gets the money.

Zwolinski also endeavors to deflect an objection to a UBI, one which I’m sure has occurred to many readers. Even if a UBI has points in its favor, it has to be financed through taxation, which violates people’s property rights. Just as supporters of the free market would shun proposals to conscript people to care for the disabled and infirm, shouldn’t they also reject a UBI? Zwolinski ingeniously replies that nonanarchists, who accept taxation for some government functions, aren’t in a good position to cry “taxation is theft!”

Zwolinski is right that there are people who can’t “make it” on their own in a free market, but he hasn’t gotten to the heart of what is bad about their situation. As he sees it, the problem is that because they cannot generate enough income to survive, they may be subject to the arbitrary will of another, a state of affairs he deems “coercive.” That is indeed bad, but isn’t the essence of the problem that these people can’t survive without resources from others rather than the bad consequences that may ensue if these unfortunates do succeed in getting resources from people? Why extend coercion to include cases in which someone faces undesirable options but isn’t threatened with force? As Zwolinski himself points out, someone who refuses aid to another is just declining to engage in an exchange; why is this coercive?

Zwolinski’s reply is obvious. He would say (and does say) that there are cases where, because all your options are bad, you “don’t really have a choice” and you are in that sense coerced. If, for example, the owner of the only oasis in a desert refuses people access to water unless they enslave themselves to him, isn’t it reasonable to view these people as coerced? But this reply ignores the point of the objection, which is that it is not the lack of resources that is coercive but, arguably, the consequence of this lack—i.e., that someone can pressure people into doing what they strongly desire not to do. Zwolinski’s argument seems to rest on the dubious premise “If a state of affairs leads to a situation in which people can coerce others, the state of affairs is itself coercive.” I hasten to add that I don’t accept the contention that the situation where someone faces pressure to do what he abhors is coercive, but am just assuming it for the purpose of the present argument. There is a difference between circumstances that give you “no good options” and situations where others either physically compel you to do something or threaten you with such compulsion.

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Doug Casey on the Push for Global Taxation… and What Comes Next

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2022

There’s always been a move towards world government on the part of a certain type of person—the kind who thinks they know what’s best for everyone else. Busybodies who are willing to use force to ensure you do what they think is right. It’s a disastrous idea. These people are the enemies of individualism, liberty, free markets, and Western values in general. They’re actually antihuman.

As I’ve often said, there are two types of people in the world: People who like to control physical reality and build things. And people who like to control other people. They’re the kind who go into government and push these ideas.

Doug Casey on the Push for Global Taxation… and What Comes Next

International Man: Last year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and more than 130 countries agreed to set a minimum global corporate tax rate of 15%.

What’s your take on this push for global taxation?

Doug Casey: They say only two things in the world are inevitable: death and taxes. Both evils, to be avoided. With technology developing at its current pace, let’s discuss the inevitability of death another time. But, unlike death, taxes aren’t part of the cosmic firmament. They’re neither necessary nor desirable.

Let’s go back to the basics, define the word in question, and look at the moral concepts that surround the subject.

What is taxation? It’s actually theft. Why do I say that?

If you look up the dictionary definition of theft, it says, “the act of stealing, specifically the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.”

There is no clause that says, “unless you’re the government, then it’s taxation and not theft anymore.” Theft is theft, even if you and a few associates set yourselves up as the government and decide to call it something else. It’s still destructive, criminal, and immoral, even if you decide the theft is for a “good” purpose.

The ideal in a moral society is voluntarism. Coercion is kept to a minimum. It certainly isn’t institutionalized and made part of the cultural fabric. If funds are needed or wanted, no one has a right to hold a gun to someone else’s head and steal them.

How you think and feel about the subject of taxation is a reflection of your worldview, your ethical makeup, and your essential character. Do you prefer voluntary exchange or coercion? Of course, coercion is the essence of government. That’s why government should be limited to the greatest degree possible.

In that light, it’s very disturbing that 130 national governments have already endorsed the notion of a 15% minimum tax. Why aren’t they, instead, talking about a 15% maximum tax?

If this destructive idea is implemented, at best, we’re going to wind up another layer of bureaucracy to administer worldwide pork barrel spending. Those who are already rich, the politically connected, and the apparatchiks will be huge beneficiaries. Society at large will suffer a big drop in the standard of living.

This trend is evil, destructive, and unnecessary. It should be fought against, not just because it will slow, distort, or even destroy the world economy. Taxes degrade everything, as does any form of theft. But taxes shouldn’t be fought with practical or economic arguments; they should be fought primarily on an ethical and a moral basis.

International Man: So far, the US government hasn’t signed on to the OECD deal even though Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen has strongly supported the creation of a minimum global corporate tax rate.

Do you think American companies and citizens will eventually be under the yoke of a global taxation regime?

Doug Casey: Yes. There’s always been a move towards world government on the part of a certain type of person—the kind who thinks they know what’s best for everyone else. Busybodies who are willing to use force to ensure you do what they think is right. It’s a disastrous idea. These people are the enemies of individualism, liberty, free markets, and Western values in general. They’re actually antihuman.

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Woke ‘Rights’ Are All Based on Coercion

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2022

The litany of woke entitlements alleged by the left infringe on existing rights, restricting the freedoms of some in order to benefit others.

Woke rights are entitlements to coercion and the restriction of others’ rights previously recognized. To protect certain people’s “right to live their true selves,” for example, the far left alleges it has the constitutional right to limit others’ free speech so that some groups are not offended or emotionally wounded. 

By Georgi Boorman
The Federalist

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/18/woke-rights-are-all-based-on-coercion/

BY: GEORGI BOORMAN

When the political left finds a meme they really think sells, they go all-in. Such is the case with “forced birth” or “forced motherhood” in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stated a Constitutional right to abortion does not exist. I wrote recently about how “forced birth” is a nonsensical description of pregnancies resulting (as is almost always the case) from consensual sex. Babies are a natural consequence of sex and procreation is the primary reason sex exists in the first place.

“Forced birth” or “forced motherhood” are projections of the left’s own brutality and reliance on force onto their political and cultural opposition. Abortion is force. Abortion kills; it is a brutal denial of this tiny, developing human’s right to life, the most fundamental of all rights. For the woman’s “right” to be exercised, another life must end.

This wretched truth differs from the left’s construction of other “rights” only in degree, not in kind. They predicate many of their “fundamental rights” on the coercion of others, and if a so-called “right” is based on coercion, it is not fundamental, merely an entitlement guaranteed by a bully state.

Of course, when we speak about coercion, abortion advocates point to exceptional cases such as pregnancy resulting from rape. As I wrote in my last piece, nonconsensual sex, especially resulting in pregnancy, is a grave loss of autonomy. Yet the innocent baby’s more essential right to life supersedes this loss of autonomy for nine months, as difficult a circumstance as it may be. One tragedy should not be compounded by another.

A baby’s right to life obviously doesn’t supersede a mother’s right to life. That may be a reason to deliver a baby early, even too early to survive, but not a reason for deliberate destruction. What opponents of abortion are referring to, and what is being debated, is not situations in which carrying a preborn baby endangers the mother. The practice we condemn is the premeditated killing of a baby in the womb because that baby is not wanted, whether because of his paternity, apparent defect, or general inconvenience to the parents.

One of the definitions of “coerce” is “to deprive of by force.” So, it is fitting we call this kind of “right” a coercive entitlement.  That classification extends far beyond abortion, though abortion is the most heinous of all.

Before further characterizing these coercive entitlements, let me address the other objection that will doubtlessly arise: that all our rights rely on at least the threat of the use of force, so what’s the difference? Force wielded by the state on those who would violate a right, which is the only way rights can be protected, is not the same as coercion or restrictions applied to people in order for a right to be exercised in the first place. If I give a public speech and someone who hates my views comes and tries to drag me off the stage to shut me up, police should intervene to protect my right and take the perpetrator into custody. If, on the other hand, the police themselves drag me off the stage because my speech violates a law against “hate speech” meant to “protect” certain demographics, or of I don’t make that speech in the first place due to the threat of being dragged off to jail, that is force necessarily applied or threatened in order to guarantee this “right” to not be a victim of “hate speech.”

The Right Not to be Offended

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Healthy Young People Now Dying En Masse Across Australia

Posted by M. C. on June 13, 2022

Corporate media still won’t dare mention vaccines

The number of reported omicron “cases” in the boosted makes one wonder what the vaccines have done to your immune systems.

https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-06-12-healthy-young-people-now-dying-en-masse-across-australia.html

By Lance D Johnson
Natural News

In 2021, the government of Australia colluded with three vaccine manufacturers to oppress the Australian people with various levels of discrimination, coercion, propaganda, unlawful detainment, segregation, digital compliance systems and broader threats to individuals’ livelihoods. These totalitarian actions were not rooted in any data or science and provided no public health benefit. These actions were designed to break people down psychologically, to subdue their body autonomy and personal beliefs and force experiments into their bodies.

Today, healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly across Australia. Even though journalists are reporting on the matter now, the corporate media still won’t dare mention the causes behind this scourge.

Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS) is taking the world by storm

Fully-vaccinated individuals who maintain a fit and healthy lifestyle are dying unexpectedly. According to the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, this new death category is dubbed “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS).” People under the age of 40 are now being urged to get their hearts checked, as a wave of young people collapse after being coerced to take part in blood-clotting vaccine experiments.

Melbourne’s Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute has developed a new national register to better record the surge in death among young, healthy populations. This registry is the first in the world to include hospital, ambulance and forensics information. A spokesperson for the Institute said “there are approximately 750 cases per year of people aged under 50 in Victoria suddenly having their heart stop.” The Institute reports that approximately nine young people are now dying without cause every month, even after a full autopsy. Of course, this autopsy does not include any investigation into the heart-damaging vaccines that these young people are needlessly getting.

In the US, a SADS organization was set up to bring awareness of Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome in young people. This foundation estimates that 4,000 children now die from SADS annually. The foundation reports that over half of the cases include a family history of a SADS diagnosis; however, the foundation does not mention what similar actions those family members engaged in, nor do they investigate the lifestyle factors and vaccine use that those family members have in common in relation to the SADS diagnosis.

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How trans identity politics imprisons us all – spiked

Posted by M. C. on January 10, 2022

In today’s trans identity politics, then, we can glimpse the grim reality of society organised around the ethic of authenticity. The freedom to be true to oneself, once it becomes a political project pursued through the state, becomes something else entirely. It becomes a justification for coercion.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/08/how-trans-identity-politics-imprisons-us-all/

Tim Black
Columnist

The ideal of authenticity – of being true to one’s self – is one of the governing ethics of modern social and political life.

Public figures, from politicians to reality-TV stars, aspire to be authentic. Producers of goods promise ‘the real thing’. And, above all, authenticity provides identity politics with its moral propulsion. It’s what justifies individuals and groups in their quest to express their true identities, hitherto suppressed, effaced or simply ignored by mainstream society.

Nowhere is this ethic more pronounced right now than in trans identity politics. For this is a cause explicitly motivated by the desire for people to be true to some inner, gendered sense of themselves – their so-called gender identity. This, as trans-activist charity Stonewall defines it, refers to individuals’ ‘innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else… which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth’. Indeed, this supposed conflict between an individual’s authentic inner feeling of gender and the inauthentic gender roles they are expected to play is at the heart of the trans cause. As one author puts it, it is a ‘collision between who we are, how we should be, how we need to express ourselves and live our lives, and the gendered straitjackets others would force us into. It is the misery, the wrongness, of being forced to live a lie. The pain of being called fakes for our authenticity.’

Critics of trans ideology tend to interpret it on its own terms. They try to understand its development and insurgence through the ideology’s own internal history. Some look at the work of clinicians John Money and Robert Stoller on intersex, gender roles and identity in the Sixties. Others wade through the verbal thickets of Judith Butler and the subversive games of queer theory. And they do so in order to explain how trans ideology came to deny biological reality.

This is certainly useful. But the resonance of trans identity politics among a significant minority has less to do with the reality-defying genius or otherwise of its proponents, than the fact it expresses, in arguably its purest form yet, this simple but pervasive cultural ideal – be true to yourself. This certainly has the ring of virtue, which is part of its appeal. But identitarians have warped this ideal, turning it from a call for individual freedom into a narcissistic demand for recognition.

The rise of authenticity

The ascendancy of authenticity as a cultural ideal has been a long time coming. In his remarkable 1970 lecture series, published in 1972 as Sincerity and Authenticity, critic Lionel Trilling noted that authenticity had become part of ‘the moral slang’ of the era. Which made sense. From the 1950s onwards, beatniks, hipsters and numerous other rebels without causes were openly signalling their rejection of the social mainstream. They railed against the social roles they were expected to play, mocked the tightly ordered, picket-fenced nightmare of the supposedly affluent society, and chafed against the prospect of becoming an Organisation Man. They damned it all as, in a word, inauthentic – a social existence that stunted and denied their very being.

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The Individual in Society | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2021

A man has freedom as far as he shapes his life according to his own plans. A man whose fate is determined by the plans of a superior authority, in which the exclusive power to plan is vested, is not free in the sense in which the term “free” was used and understood by all people until the semantic revolution of our day brought about a confusion of tongues.

https://mises.org/library/individual-society

Ludwig von Mises

The words freedom and liberty signified for the most eminent representatives of mankind one of the most precious and desirable goods. Today it is fashionable to sneer at them. They are, trumpets the modern sage, “slippery” notions and “bourgeois” prejudices.

Freedom and liberty are not to be found in nature. In nature there is no phenomenon to which these terms could be meaningfully applied. Whatever man does, he can never free himself from the restraints which nature imposes upon him. If he wants to succeed in acting, he must submit unconditionally to the laws of nature.

Freedom and liberty always refer to interhuman relations. A man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people. In the frame of society everybody depends upon his fellow citizens. Social man cannot become independent without forsaking all the advantages of social cooperation.

The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart — human cooperation.

Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and productive than isolated action of self-sufficient individuals. The natural conditions determining man’s life and effort are such that the division of labor increases output per unit of labor expended. These natural facts are:

  1. the innate inequality of men with regard to their ability to perform various kinds of labor, and
  2. the unequal distribution of the nature-given, nonhuman opportunities of production on the surface of the earth. One may as well consider these two facts as one and the same fact, namely, the manifoldness of nature which makes the universe a complex of infinite varieties.

Innate Inequality

The division of labor is the outcome of man’s conscious reaction to the multiplicity of natural conditions. On the other hand, it is itself a factor bringing about differentiation. It assigns to the various geographic areas specific functions in the complex of the processes of production. It makes some areas urban, others rural; it locates the various branches of manufacturing, mining, and agriculture in different places. Still more important, however, is the fact that it intensifies the innate inequality of men. Exercise and practice of specific tasks adjust individuals better to the requirements of their performance; men develop some of their inborn faculties and stunt the development of others. Vocational types emerge, people become specialists.

The division of labor splits the various processes of production into minute tasks, many of which can be performed by mechanical devices. It is this fact that made the use of machinery possible and brought about the amazing improvements in technical methods of production. Mechanization is the fruit of the division of labor, its most beneficial achievement, not its motive and fountain spring. Power-driven specialized machinery could be employed only in a social environment under the division of labor. Every step forward on the road toward the use of more specialized, more refined, and more productive machines requires a further specialization of tasks.

Within Society

Seen from the point of view of the individual, society is the great means for the attainment of all his ends. The preservation of society is an essential condition of any plans an individual may want to realize by any action whatever. Even the refractory delinquent who fails to adjust his conduct to the requirements of life within the societal system of cooperation does not want to miss any of the advantages derived from the division of labor. He does not consciously aim at the destruction of society. He wants to lay his hands on a greater portion of the jointly produced wealth than the social order assigns to him. He would feel miserable if antisocial behavior were to become universal and its inevitable outcome, the return to primitive indigence, resulted.

Liberty and freedom are the conditions of man within a contractual society. Social cooperation under a system of private ownership of the means of production means that within the range of the market the individual is not bound to obey and to serve an overlord. As far as he gives and serves other people, he does so of his own accord in order to be rewarded and served by the receivers. He exchanges goods and services, he does not do compulsory labor and does not pay tribute. He is certainly not independent. He depends on the other members of society. But this dependence is mutual. The buyer depends on the seller and the seller on the buyer.

Self-Interest

The main concern of many writers of the 19th and 20th centuries was to misrepresent and to distort this obvious state of affairs. The workers, they said, are at the mercy of their employers. Now, it is true that the employer has the right to fire the employee. But if he makes use of this right in order to indulge in his whims, he hurts his own interests. It is to his own disadvantage if he discharges a better man in order to hire a less efficient one. The market does not directly prevent anybody from arbitrarily inflicting harm on his fellow citizens; it only puts a penalty upon such conduct. The shopkeeper is free to be rude to his customers provided he is ready to bear the consequences. The consumers are free to boycott a purveyor provided they are ready to pay the costs.

What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow men and curbs innate tendencies toward arbitrariness and malice is, in the market, not compulsion and coercion on the part of gendarmes, hangmen, and penal courts; it is self-interest. The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity. For the rest he is free in the range of the market.

In the market economy the individual is free to act within the orbit of private property and the market. His choices are final. For his fellow men his actions are data which they must take into account in their own acting. The coordination of the autonomous actions of all individuals is accomplished by the operation of the market. Society does not tell a man what to do and what not to do. There is no need to enforce cooperation by special orders or prohibitions. Non-cooperation penalizes itself. Adjustment to the requirements of society’s productive effort and the pursuit of the individual’s own concerns are not in conflict. Consequently no agency is required to settle such conflicts. The system can work and accomplish its tasks without the interference of an authority issuing special orders and prohibitions and punishing those who do not comply.

Compulsion and Coercion

See the rest here

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Murray Rothbard versus the Public Choice School | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on November 30, 2021

What I take to be the most important disagreement between Rothbard and public choice is this: Rothbard doesn’t take a value neutral attitude toward the state: he hates it. He sees the state as predatory. As he puts it in Anatomy of the State, “The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property

https://mises.org/wire/murray-rothbard-versus-public-choice-school

David Gordon

Murray Rothbard was at one time good friends with Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of the public choice analysis of government, and he also corresponded on friendly terms with James Buchanan, another of the founders. Both Rothbard and the public choice movement look with suspicion on claims by agents of the government to be acting for the common good, and both support the free market, though Rothbard does so to a much greater degree. Despite these points of agreement, Rothbard has some fundamental criticisms of public choice, and I’d like to look at one of these in this week’s column.

What I take to be the most important disagreement between Rothbard and public choice is this: Rothbard doesn’t take a value neutral attitude toward the state: he hates it. He sees the state as predatory. As he puts it in Anatomy of the State, “The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively ‘peaceful’ the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.” By contrast, he views people outside the state, aside from criminals, as engaged in peaceful exchange. There is, then, a dichotomy between people in the state and nonstate actors.

The public choice school denies that this dichotomy exists. The key point of their analysis of government is that people in government act to promote their private interests, in the same way as private actors. That is to say, government officials aren’t more “public spirited” than private businessmen, but neither are they worse in their motives. The basic distinction, emphasized by Rothbard, that the state’s activities are coercive, in contrast to the peaceful exchanges in the free market, is glossed over.

More than this, the distinction is denied to exist, especially in the work of Buchanan. He considers the state to be a voluntary institution. You might ask, How can he possibly think this? Does he imagine that if you refuse to pay your taxes, government agents will just let you alone?

Buchanan is well aware that the government can forcibly extract resources from you while private actors cannot, but he thinks this distinction doesn’t matter because you have agreed to allow the state do this. Of course you will deny that you have made such as an agreement, but Buchanan has an argument that, despite what you might think, you have indeed.

Suppose, contrary to Rothbard, that you believe there are certain “public goods” that people will not voluntarily produce on the free market because they are nonrivalrous and nonexcludable, but you and others think it would be desirable to produce these goods. You could then make an agreement with these people to allow an agency to take money from you to pay for the public goods, so long as it does so from everyone else who signed the agreement as well. In this way, the alleged problems posed by the nonrivalrousness and nonexcludability of the public good would be overcome.

A simpler example may make voluntary acceptance of coercion clearer. Suppose people in an anarcho-capitalist society want to join a private protection agency that enforces a law code. The agency will have a list of the actions it will take in response to violations of this code. If you agree to join the agency, you have agreed that these actions can be taken against you, if you violate the law code. It is in exactly this way that Buchanan thinks that even though the state extracts resources from you, it is noncoercive: you agreed to be taxed and to be subject to the penalties for nonpayment.

The main objection to this is obvious and well brought out by Rothbard. People haven’t made an agreement of the sort Buchanan assumes. As Rothbard points out in a memo for the Volker Fund, available now in Economic Controversies, in The Calculus of Consent, Buchanan gets around this by weakening the conditions for the agreement. If the tax agents could say to you, “You, along with everyone else, agreed to be taxed and now we have come to collect,” they might have a case against you; but if it is just the case that a substantial number of people have agreed, but you haven’t, the matter is quite otherwise. As Rothbard says,

In short, despite a lot of talk about unanimity being called for, the upshot of the discussion is that (a) unanimity is weakened by numerous qualifications and circumlocutions—and that (b) much of the existing structure of government is endorsed as being “really” unanimity! This, of course, is worse than simply adhering to majority rule, and comes perilously close to the “we owe it to ourselves,” “we are the government” position of the Left. The worst example of this, including the definite tendency to rationalize the existing situation as reflecting unanimity, is the concept of “income insurance” to justify actions of government that “redistribute” income. Now it is obvious that when government takes from A and deliberately gives to B, this can hardly be called a gesture of unanimity, or people voluntarily banding together to purchase a service from government. But Buchanan and Tullock try to say this, by asserting that the wealthy really favor being taxed more than the poor, because they are taking out “income insurance,” knowing that when they will be poor, the government, like an insurance company, will help them. And, in another place, they say that people really want to be coerced so long as they are all coerced, so that, everybody is really not being coerced. Not only do I consider all this nonsense, but it is dangerous nonsense as well, because it provides new support for the idea that anything that the State does, no matter how blatantly coercive, is “really” backed by everyone.

There is a further problem with the argument. Even if we confine ourselves to the less than fully unanimous agreement discussed in The Calculus of Consent, and consider only people who would have entered into it, it doesn’t follow that the state may coerce them to pay taxes. Even if they would have found it rational to enter the agreement, they in fact haven’t. No such agreement exists, and only explicit agreements bind. Lysander Spooner long ago made this point. Buchanan ignores it, but Rothbard affirms it. Author:

Contact David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review.

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