Hoppe on the state as exploitation firm
In The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has this to say about the nature of the state and how it continues to exist:
While productive enterprises come into or go out of existence because of voluntary support or its absence, a ruling class never comes to power because there is a demand for it, nor does it abdicate when abdication is demonstrably demanded. One cannot say by any stretch of the imagination that homesteaders, producers, savers and contractors have demanded their expropriation. They must be coerced into accepting it, and this proves conclusively that the exploitation firm is not in demand at all. Nor can one say that a ruling class can be brought down by abstaining from transactions with it in the same way as one can bring down a productive enterprise. For the ruling class acquires its income through nonproductive and noncontractual transactions and thus is unaffected by boycotts. Rather, what makes the rise of an exploitation firm possible, and what alone can in turn bring it down is a specific state of public opinion or, in Marxist terminology, a specific state of class consciousness.
An exploiter creates victims, and victims are potential enemies. It is possible that this resistance can be lastingly broken down by force in the case of a group of men exploiting another group of roughly the same size. However, more than force is needed to expand exploitation over a population many times its own size. For this to happen, a firm must also have public support. A majority of the population must accept the exploitative actions as legitimate. This acceptance can range from active enthusiasm to passive resignation. But it must be acceptance in the sense that a majority must have given up the idea of actively or passively resisting any attempt to enforce nonproductive and noncontractual property acquisitions. The class consciousness must be low, undeveloped and fuzzy. Only as long as this state of affairs lasts is there still room for an exploitative firm to prosper even if no actual demand for it exists. Only if and insofar as the exploited and expropriated develop a clear idea of their own situation and are united with other members of their class through an ideological movement which gives expression to the idea of a classless society where all exploitation is abolished, can the power of the ruling class be broken. Only if, and insofar as, a majority of the exploited public becomes consciously integrated into such a movement and accordingly displays a common outrage over all nonproductive or noncontractual property acquisitions, shows a contempt for everyone who engages in such acts, and deliberately contributes nothing to help make them successful (not to mention actively trying to obstruct them), can its power be brought to crumble.
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On nukes and speaking Russian
In response to my previous post, someone on a message board replied to the primary question ("What might have been?") with, "We would be speaking Russian." And another commenter also indicated he believed the Soviets would or could have developed nuclear weapons first and conquered the world in the absence of the Manhattan Project. In this particular example, the blame appears to fall back on the Manhattan Project itself, since Stalin didn't have a nuke program until he heard about the one in the U.S.
But I think a more important point for the general case is that a free society, unencumbered by destructive taxation and regulation, would be extremely wealthy and highly versatile. Such a society would have people and firms that would have total mastery over information gathering and would know about a foreign power's weapons plans in short order. The idea that a wealthy, free, and fiercely independent people would not spontaneously organize to prevent the development or use of such a weapon is absurd. Not to mention that a society that had eliminated the state or reduced it to the point that it was not engaging in military adventures (and the resultant weapons development) would not even represent a threat meriting the creation of a civilization-endangering weapon by a foreign state.
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State science and what might have been
With all the news lately about the Large Hadron Collider and new NASA programs, I think it's important to ask a fundamental question: Why should the state be involved in funding and conducting science? That is, why should one group of people take up arms and expropriate vast sums of money from other people in order to do science? From a moral standpoint, the answer seems obvious to me: they shouldn't. Like all endeavors of the state, it's an exploitative relationship and has no place in civilized society.
But, some will say, what about the Apollo Program? What about all the discoveries that happen at places like the LHC? What about the achievements of the U.S. federal labs? What about all the university science funded by the government? Aren't these worthwhile advances? Wouldn't many of these things be impossible without violent exploitation? Well, to these people I would simply ask: What might have been?
What might have been the course of scientific progress in the U.S. if the state had not spent the past century confiscating untold billions of dollars from private individuals and directing it in the way that it did? Well, we know that all that money (all things being equal) would have been directed toward market-demanded production. Some would have gone toward privately-conducted science. In fact, without government crowding, there would have been quite a bit more private science, and private science is responsive to what consumers actually want. State science has only a rough approximation of this in the form of the pressure of public opinion.
For all we know, market-driven scientific progress could well have far exceeded what we've ended up with. Maybe some scientific knowledge and technologies we have now wouldn't exist. But other discoveries--again, more closely-aligned with consumer demand--may have been made that would have resulted in an overall higher standard of living than we currently enjoy. In fact, that's likely. With only a pale imitation of the cost-control pressures of the market, government science will tend to be far less efficient, solving problems and developing new technologies in much more round-about and resource-intensive ways than market-driven science. So, no, we probably wouldn't have had an Apollo Program, that expensive and embarrassing instance of international "sword fighting" (if you know what I mean). Rather, the natural pressures of the market may have resulted in private, competing firms developing advanced, low-cost methods of reaching orbit and extracting commercially valuable resources from the moon, Mars, asteroids, etc. And we probably wouldn't have the LHC. Instead, perhaps companies in fields as diverse as transportation, computing, communications, and medical technology would have developed a variety of cheaper and more effective ways of probing the fundamental particles and forces of reality in search of new technologies for the products demanded by their customers.
And it all would have been done through peaceful interaction among free people seeking to profit by providing one another with value rather than by violence of a parasitic political class exploiting a productive population in order to score political points.
The question is not, "How could we have X,Y, and Z without the state?" The question is, "In the absence of violent, inefficient, and politically driven state science, what might have been?"
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News efficiency mandates
Just wanted to pass along this bit of awesomeness from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:
Let’s Improve the Efficiency of News Reporting
Here’s a letter to the New York Times:
You argue that a government-mandated higher fuel-efficiency standard “will yield a trifecta of benefits: reduced dependence on foreign oil, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and consumer savings at the pump” (“Everybody Wins,” April 2).
By this logic, you should also support a government-mandated news-efficiency standard – that is, a requirement that you report and editorialize on any given amount of news using fewer words and less paper than you now use. This standard would yield a trifecta of benefits: reduced dependence on foreign lumber (we import much from Canada), fewer greenhouse-gas emissions (transporting slimmed-down newspapers would burn less fuel than is burned to transport today’s bulky, news-inefficient papers), and consumer savings at the newsstand (using less ink and less paper will make news-efficient newspapers less pricey than today’s ink and wood-pulp guzzlers).
Everybody wins.
Sincerely,
Donald J. BoudreauxWhen you look carefully, likely market failures are all around us, just begging to be corrected by the state.
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No such thing as limited government
A recent piece at the Mises Institute site by D.W. MacKenzie, Politics Cannot Be Fixed, touches on some important points about the problems with democracy.
I agree with most of what he says up until he advocates a "return" to limited government. I don't think such a government is possible on logical grounds--even a government that claims to be limited to some piece of paper (which they wrote for themselves) is, in fact, unlimited since it has a monopoly on justice and the legal 'right' to initiate force. It would be a simple matter of a constitutional amendment or even an extra broad interpretation of the General Welfare clause for our current government to become a full totalitarian state (or at least try to before they remembered how many of us are packing heat).
MacKenzie also says: "Constitutional government limited to providing internal and external security can be evaluated by objective criteria."
I think he's right that such things could be evaluated objectively (i.e. we can see clearly whether someone is invading the territory claimed by the state or whether criminals are assaulting people and stealing property), but you still face the problem that everyone from Molinari to Rothbard have pointed out--that the government has no rational way to actually determine how to allocate resources in pursuit of such security. Do you spend more on police cars and less on judges? How much do you spend on prisons, security systems, and district attorneys? Every question government is faced with can only be answered by arbitrary political means rather than by response to consumer demand. Also, it glosses over the fundamental moral question of why one group of people (the state) has the right to impose a legal system on everyone rather than allowing voluntary legal systems to spontaneously evolve on the free market (as they already do to the limited extent allowed by the state).
But I do agree his "limited government" is a far sight better than the imperial-welfare-police-st
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The uncivilized health care bill
Franz Oppenheimer famously pointed out that there are only two means of meeting one's needs: the economic means and the political means. The economic means is based on "one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others" while the political means is based on "the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others." In other words, you can either produce value and engage in voluntary exchange or you can steal things of value produced by others. The state operates by the political means and feeds parasitically off of everyone who operates by the economic means. The economic means is peaceful, civilized, and life-affirming. The political means is violent, primitive, and destructive.
So my question to everyone who supported the recently-passed health care bill is this: Why did you have to choose the political means when you could have chosen the economic means? You could have donated to a charity that helps the uninsured and worked to peacefully persuade others to do the same. Hell, you could have started your own charity. You could have offered to chip in on a needy person's medical bill. But instead you chose to support violence against your fellow human beings. You asked a group of people (the state) to act in your name, going to your neighbors and threatening violence against them to get them to do certain things and not do other (peaceful) things and take more money from them.
Why did you choose primitive violence over civilized, peaceful cooperation?
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The State and the Mafia
I live in Durham County (NC), right next door to Wake County, which is in the midst of a heated debate over its notorious forced busing program that the new school board just declared its intention to end (they've been assigning children still trapped in the government school system to schools very far from their homes in order to achieve a "diversity" goal of no school having more than 40% of the children in the free or reduced lunch program--the result is lots of parents who otherwise would have had their kids in the local neighborhood school and who now have a much greater difficulty staying involved in their children's education while the kids spend hours each day on the bus, sometimes force to go out to the bus stop before sunrise). I've been having a tough time, in a particular discussion forum, trying to explain the injustice of such a program to some statists, who already don't understand the injustice of the government education system in the first place. My latest attempt is to compare the State to the Mafia, along the lines of thinkers like Spooner and Rothbard. After I typed it up I decided it would make a good blog post, so here's what I posted in the forum (for clarification, my use of the phrase "propaganda language" is a reference to the use of that phrase by one of the statists in response to another libertarian's referring to taxation as theft):
Here's maybe a different way of looking at this busing issue (and really any issue involving compulsory government). Imagine it's not the government that comes around to take some of your money to fund schools, but rather a Mafia enforcer. Imagine it's not the government that threatens to lock you up if you don't send your kids to school, but rather the Mafia enforcer. Imagine it's not the government that then makes it harder for you to be involved in your children's education by sending them to a school across town that you otherwise wouldn't have chosen, but rather your friendly Mafia enforcer. Now, what we call theft (or armed robbery if you refuse to send in the money on your own), kidnapping, and general aggression when the Mafia does it, we call 'democracy at work for the public good' or some other such *ahem* propaganda language when the state does it.
Ah, you say, but it's okay when the state engages in this kind of violence because "we're a democracy" and "we can vote for our leaders." Okay, then--let's say the Mafia comes along and says, "You can vote for which Mafiosi you want to do the hiring of the enforcers! Woohoo! We won't let you out of the violence we're initiating, but YOU get to tell us who you want holding the gun! Aren't we nice?"
Ah, you say, but it's not really like that with the state because we're all part of the "social contract" that allows the state its monopoly on justice and the legal initiation of violence. Well, alrighty--so the Mafia comes back and says, "Hey, whatcha fussin' for, guy? Don't you know what we're doing is okay because of this special "social contract" we just came up with that we say you're agreeing to?"
So here's the deal. The difference--the SOLE difference--between the Mafia and the state is that the state has managed, through nonsense logic and "propaganda language," to convince enough of you terrified children of its legitimacy that you allow it to go about its business of aggression without too much resistance.
Ending the busing program is a reduction in the level of aggression involved in education, a smaller reduction for some and a greater reduction for others.
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Obama’s strange definition of rationing
George Mason economist Don Boudreaux writes a brilliant letter (over at Cafe Hayek) to Obama regarding something truly bizarre the Mafioso-in-Chief said about rationing:
8 March 2010
Mr. Barack Obama
President, Executive Branch
United States Government
1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20500Dear Mr. Obama:
CBS radio news this morning ran a clip of one of your recent speeches. In it, you criticize insurance companies because they “ration coverage … according to who can pay and who can’t.”
My first thought was “not exactly; coverage is rationed according to who pays and who doesn’t.” Ability to pay isn’t the same thing as actually paying, and what insurers care about is the latter. Many folks – especially young adults – have the ability to pay but choose not to do so. They get no coverage.
But further pondering of your point leads me to look beyond such nit-picking to see fascinating possibilities. Not only insurers, but all producers who greedily refuse to supply persons who don’t pay should be set aright. Now I’m sure that you don’t ration the supply of the books you write according to any criteria as sordid as requiring people actually to pay for them. But our society is full of people less enlightened than you.
For example, the typical worker rations his labor services according to who pays and who doesn’t. That must stop. Oh, and supermarkets! Every single one rations groceries according to who pays. Likewise with restaurants, clothing stores, home-builders, furniture makers, even lawyers! You name it, rationing is done according to who pays. Indeed, my own county government has been corrupted by this greedy attitude: if I don’t pay my taxes, the sheriff takes my house – effectively booting me out of the county merely because I didn’t pay for its services.
Preposterous!
I look forward to your changing this selfish and unfair system of rationing that for too long now has kept Americans impoverished.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
And I love the non-traditional way he addresses the letter, omitting the usual tone of deference.
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The almost Great Depression of 1921
David Friedman discusses the difference between Harding's reaction to the depression of 1921 and the Hoover-Roosevelt reaction in 1929: A Tale of Two Depressions.
While well known among libertarians and Austrian School economists, 1921 depression and the immediate (and wise) reduction in government spending has been essentially wiped from the mainstream textbooks and history lessons.
Thanks to Destroy the Ring (another great market anarchist blog I've recently discovered) for posting the story.
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The absurdity of a right to health care
Those who argue that there is a "right" to health care or health insurance coverage are caught in a very serious problem. The implications of such a "right" are abhorrent. If I have a right to health care, what do I do if it will cost my doctor or my insurance company so much to treat me that it's actually better for them to close their businesses? The implication is that I have the right to use violence to force them to operate at a loss, possibly endangering their ability to care for themselves and their families. What if all the insurance company owners and doctors could make more money in other lines of work and chose to close up shop? It would seem I then have the right to use violence to force them back into their previous lines of work and to handle my treatment. What if people just stopped going into the insurance and health care fields altogether? It seems that anyone who 'needed' treatment would then have the right to start rounding people up by force and ordering them to become doctors and insurance providers at the point of a gun so that the "rights" of the sick wouldn't be violated.
I think perhaps those advocates of a "right" to health care are a tad bit guilty of not having reasoned their belief through to its logical conclusion.
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