I need to get this post out of the way and in preparation for my next post.
Our schools teach us legislative theory (how laws are passed) not political theory (whether or not passed laws are moral). The country couples this boring issue with nationalism and lies about our "freedoms". The result is a contradictory and incoherent populace in matters of politics. If you want to see how Orwellian our society has become just tell someone that roads should be privatized and the department of education abolished; "Freedom is Slavery!" perfectly sums up the responses I've heard. Anyway, it's difficult to have a discussion on political theory for more than 30 seconds before losing someone in simple vocabulary.
Natural Rights - I do not mean "absolute rights". We are born into this world with nothing but our bodies and therefore our first right is to self. Our parents homestead the right to raise us by giving us food and shelter, and when we are ready to homestead or buy our own property (which includes food and shelter) then we become adults and have rights to those things we have acquired in voluntary exchanges (e.g. land, food, money).
Anyone who uses our property or our bodies without permission is aggressing against us and is violating our natural rights. In other words, to check to see if I have the natural right to murder or steal (as absurd as this sounds, it's the most common response I get when talking about rights) I have to see if I am violating anyone else's natural rights. Obviously, if someone has homesteaded property and by default homesteaded their own body, murder and theft are a violation of someone else's natural rights and therefore not persimissible by the theory of natural rights.
Other non-trivial examples are helpful including pollution, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, loud neighbors, slavery (voluntary vs coercive). I won't elaborate on each one of those because I'd just be repeating Rothbard and Block. Maybe I'll do that in another post.
Voluntary - This does not mean donation (I know, does this really need to be clarified? Sadly, yes). If I'm selling strawberries, someone might come by and want a half-flat (the unit by which strawberries are sold). In a voluntary society he would just take his strawberries and then decide if he is willing to voluntarily give me some money, right? That would be stealing, violating my property rights that I obtained from homesteading the strawberry field or buying them from a farmer. Voluntary means that we can agree to exchange money for strawberries, or barter, or I can gift them to him. If he does not want to pay the price I'm charging (say $100) then we agree that the exchange is not mutually beneficial. If I coerce him into buying them (e.g. "buy my strawberries or I'll plug you") then the trade no longer is voluntary and I'm guilty of stealing his money.
Aggression - This is a very important term to get right. It's the term I've had to clarify more than any others. It is not a synonym for coercion; I can coerce someone without aggressing against them. Aggression is violating someone's rights, an act of unprovoked violence or the initiation of violence. If someone breaks into my house and I point a gun in his face then who's aggressing against whom? The one breaking into my house is violating my property rights and I am now coercing him out of my house. The intruder is the aggressor and my coercion is justified under the political theory of natural rights.
Homesteading - taking previously unowned property, mixing it with my labor, and producing something of utility. This is difficult to understand in a densely populated world, but the "origination of property rights" is fundamental to libertarian theory and so homesteading is an important if somewhat abstract concept.
If I tend to a garden - water it, fertilize it, cover it during a freeze, etc - then I obviously have the right to what the garden bears, right? Well, not necessarily. I might have violated someone's property rights in order to raise this garden. I might have known my neighbors were going to be on vacation for 4 months and so I tore down their house and planted my garden. When they came back and locked me up I might say "Can't you see? I homesteaded this garden, it's mine!" Why do they have the right to get restitution from me? The home owners negotiated some deal to buy their house, the area developers negotiated a deal to buy some land prior to that, and some family of farmers homesteaded that land for 200 years before that and this is how we get to home ownership as a natural consequence of homesteading and voluntary exchanges.
Well, that's good for now. Let me know what other terms I should add.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Jesus was not a liberal
Maybe if liberals stuck to the theocratic tyrant portrayed in the old testament they'd have a shot at claiming some legitimacy. But since Jesus is exclusively a new testament character there's no way they're claim passes muster.
Jesus helped the poor, the sick, even the dead or so the Bible says. He broke bread with prostitutes and tax collectors. He told us to be generous and humble and moral. I see where liberals might think he aligns with them but they must be blinded by self righteousness to see they are grossly out of sync with the morality taught by Jesus.
There's a huge difference between "go and do likewise" and "go and use state coercion to make everyone follow my edicts". Jesus' message is extremely personal. He describes how to behave, how to treat one another, what ideals to shoot for. He does not say, "Go! Give to the poor, and if you find anyone that does not give as much as you think he should, lock him up. Demonize the greedy and gang up on them and threaten violence so they may know my love."
One of the topics I'm trying to address in my blog is the assumption that anarchy is not pragmatic, that reality dictates a state. When I started attending youth group in the 10th grade I was given the same lecture from my dad about Christianity: impractical, unrealistic. Christian liberals, because of their ignorance about libertarianism, seem to wholeheartedly agree and condone state violence. However, my dad was honest with himself and left the church thinking he couldn't live up to the ideals that were being preached. Liberals have just applied a twisted theology so they can continue using praising the state and God (in that order?). Liberty is the only political philosophy consistent with Christianity.
Don't think I'm giving Republicans a free pass here. If we mix old testament wars with new testament evangelism then we get all the religious atrocities (e.g. crusades) along with modern neo-concervatism (e.g. American exceptionalism) and modern liberalism (e.g. the welfare state). The right, not being quite as economically illiterate as the left, don't harp on financial issues as much as they do social issues or the seven deadly sins. When Jesus tells the prostitute to "not sin again", republicans say "because if you do, we'll throw you in jail consequently making your 'profession' extremely dangerous and violent. If you are beaten by a client or boss, don't look for justice because going to the cops will just lead to your arrest".
How much better would society be if we put aside the "crimes against God" conservatives worry about and the hoarding crimes of the left, and just focus on real criminals? Violence and fraud should not be tolerated in a civilized society, but because we're so worried about non-violent drug offenders and tax evaders that the state has created more real crime and there are even fewer resources available to deal with it.
Jesus helped the poor, the sick, even the dead or so the Bible says. He broke bread with prostitutes and tax collectors. He told us to be generous and humble and moral. I see where liberals might think he aligns with them but they must be blinded by self righteousness to see they are grossly out of sync with the morality taught by Jesus.
There's a huge difference between "go and do likewise" and "go and use state coercion to make everyone follow my edicts". Jesus' message is extremely personal. He describes how to behave, how to treat one another, what ideals to shoot for. He does not say, "Go! Give to the poor, and if you find anyone that does not give as much as you think he should, lock him up. Demonize the greedy and gang up on them and threaten violence so they may know my love."
One of the topics I'm trying to address in my blog is the assumption that anarchy is not pragmatic, that reality dictates a state. When I started attending youth group in the 10th grade I was given the same lecture from my dad about Christianity: impractical, unrealistic. Christian liberals, because of their ignorance about libertarianism, seem to wholeheartedly agree and condone state violence. However, my dad was honest with himself and left the church thinking he couldn't live up to the ideals that were being preached. Liberals have just applied a twisted theology so they can continue using praising the state and God (in that order?). Liberty is the only political philosophy consistent with Christianity.
Don't think I'm giving Republicans a free pass here. If we mix old testament wars with new testament evangelism then we get all the religious atrocities (e.g. crusades) along with modern neo-concervatism (e.g. American exceptionalism) and modern liberalism (e.g. the welfare state). The right, not being quite as economically illiterate as the left, don't harp on financial issues as much as they do social issues or the seven deadly sins. When Jesus tells the prostitute to "not sin again", republicans say "because if you do, we'll throw you in jail consequently making your 'profession' extremely dangerous and violent. If you are beaten by a client or boss, don't look for justice because going to the cops will just lead to your arrest".
How much better would society be if we put aside the "crimes against God" conservatives worry about and the hoarding crimes of the left, and just focus on real criminals? Violence and fraud should not be tolerated in a civilized society, but because we're so worried about non-violent drug offenders and tax evaders that the state has created more real crime and there are even fewer resources available to deal with it.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Serving others and our inadequate human brains
I have a few blog topics lined up, but Rob's comment yesterday made me put those aside and address the structure of human society as a result of evolution. Have we evolved to be socialists or have we evolved to be capitalists? To be contentious and boastful, which I am allowed to do on my own blog, my opinion is that the more sophisticated of us are able to see what the market is and transcend our ape-like methods of dealing with each other.
I despise the word "progressive" because the thinking is so backwards. As Bastiat said of Rousseau and his followers, "while they claim themselves as progressive, I find their ideas 20 centuries behind" -The Law, (paraphrased). There's nothing wrong with helping others, but how do you do so without being taken advantage of and how do you gauge whether your efforts are the optimal way of helping them?
Rob wondered if we evolved to embrace socialism because those who survived were tribal and lived communally. My argument, which is Walter Block's argument, is that we evolved to understand the importance of working together, but the sophistication of the market alludes many of us.
In a small tribe, the implicit understanding of me taking care of you when you're sick is that you will take care of me when I am sick. If the tribe were very large you might be able to get out of your obligation of taking care of me when I get sick. And humans, being the self serving beings that we evolved to be, would find many reasons to skirt our "scout's honor". The Amish are probably the nearest and largest example of communes that work. Part of their success is that they limit themselves to a small set of tasks and so these jobs are easy to parse out and keep track of. What happens with a very large and very complex society tries to live as a commune? Chaos or tyranny.
Money, not government, enables civilization. Having a fungible, divisible, and durable good is beautiful. The demand for services, the number of providers, and the scarcity of goods can now be measured. Calculation is possible. If I am sick then I give the doctor money as a promise to take care of him when he is sick. Money solves the problem of simultaneous wants that plagues barter systems (and craigslist) and it solves our evolutionary need to work together -- if we can recognize it as such.
In a free society, the greatest humanitarians would be those with the most money, the largest houses, the fanciest cars. Their wealth is a reflection of how much they've helped others, and since market exchanges are a net benefit to both parties, the wealth is only a fraction of the good they've done. Perhaps the so-called "douchebags" of this world are trying to prove they're humanitarians by wearing $300 ray-bans or $200 jeans. Perhaps they evolved faster than the rest of us to recognize the meaning of the market but still haven't developed any skills or talents other than being DBs. Back on topic, I have to add the caveat "in a free society" because of how grotesquely government has skewed the market. So much of wealth accumulated today is by political means, either as direct payments from the government or through government privileges such as limited corporate liability, IP, protectionism, competition killing regulation, or other favorable legislation.
Here's how I've carried out the belief above in my own friendships. My socialist friend let me borrow his paint sprayer (mutual friends immediately know who I'm talking about when I say socialist and paint sprayer in the same sentence). Getting ready to move I knew I wouldn't be able to return the favor. I had used his property, the sprayer will not last as long as if I had not used it, parts will have to be replaced (eventually), and there was a time when he or anyone else was denied use of it because it was in my possession. Neither was this the first time he helped me and saved me a bunch of money. Because I am unable to return a similar service (both because I don't own any tools he'd find useful or have any talents related to manual labor), and because I knew the rental rates of paint sprayers, money was the most obvious way of fulfilling my promise to help him the next time he was in need. Of course, he being an unselfish friend, said the money was unnecessary and he would have let me use it anyway, but he accepted the money. Taken to the extreme, say I wanted to borrow the sprayer every other day, even the most sacrificial of us will require some compensation or put an end to the generosity. In a large and complex society, money is the necessary measure of what we're willing to give and what we can get from others.
Did we evolve to be socialists? Absolutely not. Socialism employs violence or the threat of violence to achieve certain ends. Did we evolve to be market anarchists? No, because we lived communally and it's hard to grasp the concept of money and how it relates to our tribal communes. So now what? We don't have to become a "new man" as Marx requires, we simply have to learn how to use the tool of money as primates learned to use rocks and sticks. Libertarianism is the only philosophy compatible with the world and human nature. It takes into account our strengths as well as our faults.
I despise the word "progressive" because the thinking is so backwards. As Bastiat said of Rousseau and his followers, "while they claim themselves as progressive, I find their ideas 20 centuries behind" -The Law, (paraphrased). There's nothing wrong with helping others, but how do you do so without being taken advantage of and how do you gauge whether your efforts are the optimal way of helping them?
Rob wondered if we evolved to embrace socialism because those who survived were tribal and lived communally. My argument, which is Walter Block's argument, is that we evolved to understand the importance of working together, but the sophistication of the market alludes many of us.
In a small tribe, the implicit understanding of me taking care of you when you're sick is that you will take care of me when I am sick. If the tribe were very large you might be able to get out of your obligation of taking care of me when I get sick. And humans, being the self serving beings that we evolved to be, would find many reasons to skirt our "scout's honor". The Amish are probably the nearest and largest example of communes that work. Part of their success is that they limit themselves to a small set of tasks and so these jobs are easy to parse out and keep track of. What happens with a very large and very complex society tries to live as a commune? Chaos or tyranny.
Money, not government, enables civilization. Having a fungible, divisible, and durable good is beautiful. The demand for services, the number of providers, and the scarcity of goods can now be measured. Calculation is possible. If I am sick then I give the doctor money as a promise to take care of him when he is sick. Money solves the problem of simultaneous wants that plagues barter systems (and craigslist) and it solves our evolutionary need to work together -- if we can recognize it as such.
In a free society, the greatest humanitarians would be those with the most money, the largest houses, the fanciest cars. Their wealth is a reflection of how much they've helped others, and since market exchanges are a net benefit to both parties, the wealth is only a fraction of the good they've done. Perhaps the so-called "douchebags" of this world are trying to prove they're humanitarians by wearing $300 ray-bans or $200 jeans. Perhaps they evolved faster than the rest of us to recognize the meaning of the market but still haven't developed any skills or talents other than being DBs. Back on topic, I have to add the caveat "in a free society" because of how grotesquely government has skewed the market. So much of wealth accumulated today is by political means, either as direct payments from the government or through government privileges such as limited corporate liability, IP, protectionism, competition killing regulation, or other favorable legislation.
Here's how I've carried out the belief above in my own friendships. My socialist friend let me borrow his paint sprayer (mutual friends immediately know who I'm talking about when I say socialist and paint sprayer in the same sentence). Getting ready to move I knew I wouldn't be able to return the favor. I had used his property, the sprayer will not last as long as if I had not used it, parts will have to be replaced (eventually), and there was a time when he or anyone else was denied use of it because it was in my possession. Neither was this the first time he helped me and saved me a bunch of money. Because I am unable to return a similar service (both because I don't own any tools he'd find useful or have any talents related to manual labor), and because I knew the rental rates of paint sprayers, money was the most obvious way of fulfilling my promise to help him the next time he was in need. Of course, he being an unselfish friend, said the money was unnecessary and he would have let me use it anyway, but he accepted the money. Taken to the extreme, say I wanted to borrow the sprayer every other day, even the most sacrificial of us will require some compensation or put an end to the generosity. In a large and complex society, money is the necessary measure of what we're willing to give and what we can get from others.
Did we evolve to be socialists? Absolutely not. Socialism employs violence or the threat of violence to achieve certain ends. Did we evolve to be market anarchists? No, because we lived communally and it's hard to grasp the concept of money and how it relates to our tribal communes. So now what? We don't have to become a "new man" as Marx requires, we simply have to learn how to use the tool of money as primates learned to use rocks and sticks. Libertarianism is the only philosophy compatible with the world and human nature. It takes into account our strengths as well as our faults.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Subjective Utility
The most common rebuttal I've heard against the notion that taxation is theft is "it's not theft, you get something from your taxes, and if you don't like it you can vote people out of office." The latter part of that statement I'll hold off on even though any libertarian balks at the idea of the people being the government.
The crux of the utility matter is that utility is subjective. I might use a road, I may want to pay a portion of my income to that road, if it were privately owned, my amount of usage would be proportional to the utility it brings me and the price I'm willing to pay. I might want to help the less fortunate and I might give some of my money to satisfy that desire, which gives me utility. What is unknown by anyone else is the fraction of my pay I'd commit to these causes, or -- now in danger of becoming repetative -- know the utility anything brings to anyone. Buying gifts is not satisfying the utility of the recipient (though it will to some degree) but it brings utility to the giver who gets the satisfaction or relief of having a gift to give. The government, if it understood economics, would be claiming that it knows the utility each one of its programs brings to every individual in society. If it does not claim this then it is admitting to theft since consent cannot be given for something I would not pay for voluntarily.
Taxes proportional to consumption (gas, sales, water, property, etc.) curb the consumer's demand for these products. If there were a 100% sales tax, people would be buying less items they want and more government programs they may or may not want. Now, all prices contain a level of overhead (brick and mortar, sales persons, accounting, marketing, private regulation, etc.) but these are all related to getting the product to the consumer in the most efficient and safest manner. Taxes usually go to some unrelated cause (e.g. schools paid for by property taxes). It takes a very round about way to connect these fees to the products, and what it never allows for is competition. If schools are essential parts of property ownership then there should be a choice of who builds and maintains the schools. Private and home schools exist but only on top of the tax burden. Private security exists but only on top of tax used for police.
Utility is subjective, which is why all taxes, useful or not, constitute theft. The highway robber who claims that we'll get back our money in the form of a well fed homeless man, or a new rest stop along the road is no more justified in holding us up than the government because both -- neither being omniscient -- have denied us the full utility of our property.
The crux of the utility matter is that utility is subjective. I might use a road, I may want to pay a portion of my income to that road, if it were privately owned, my amount of usage would be proportional to the utility it brings me and the price I'm willing to pay. I might want to help the less fortunate and I might give some of my money to satisfy that desire, which gives me utility. What is unknown by anyone else is the fraction of my pay I'd commit to these causes, or -- now in danger of becoming repetative -- know the utility anything brings to anyone. Buying gifts is not satisfying the utility of the recipient (though it will to some degree) but it brings utility to the giver who gets the satisfaction or relief of having a gift to give. The government, if it understood economics, would be claiming that it knows the utility each one of its programs brings to every individual in society. If it does not claim this then it is admitting to theft since consent cannot be given for something I would not pay for voluntarily.
Taxes proportional to consumption (gas, sales, water, property, etc.) curb the consumer's demand for these products. If there were a 100% sales tax, people would be buying less items they want and more government programs they may or may not want. Now, all prices contain a level of overhead (brick and mortar, sales persons, accounting, marketing, private regulation, etc.) but these are all related to getting the product to the consumer in the most efficient and safest manner. Taxes usually go to some unrelated cause (e.g. schools paid for by property taxes). It takes a very round about way to connect these fees to the products, and what it never allows for is competition. If schools are essential parts of property ownership then there should be a choice of who builds and maintains the schools. Private and home schools exist but only on top of the tax burden. Private security exists but only on top of tax used for police.
Utility is subjective, which is why all taxes, useful or not, constitute theft. The highway robber who claims that we'll get back our money in the form of a well fed homeless man, or a new rest stop along the road is no more justified in holding us up than the government because both -- neither being omniscient -- have denied us the full utility of our property.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Blog Title
There could be no better example of mistaking correlation for causation than Oliver Holmes' grotesque phrase "taxes are the price we pay for civilization". Sure, people are capable of unthinkable evils, but violence and oppression reach an unimaginable level when supposedly legitimized through elections, constitutions, religion, or tradition.
Taxes pay for those acts associated with uncivilized people. Civilized people deal peacefully with one another, participating in voluntary exchanges and interacting with others through free association. Coercion of peaceful people is barbaric. The rise of civilization has occurred despite the state, not because of it.
Taxes pay for those acts associated with uncivilized people. Civilized people deal peacefully with one another, participating in voluntary exchanges and interacting with others through free association. Coercion of peaceful people is barbaric. The rise of civilization has occurred despite the state, not because of it.
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