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.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Are stateless societies bound to fail?
I often hear it said by those who have not yet gotten on board with the idea of a stateless society that such a society would not be able to survive as it would be overrun by something like the Mafia on steroids. They argue that even if there existed a free market in protection services, or dispute resolution organizations (DROs), it would fairly quickly be overrun by a rogue DRO, thus returning society to statist rule but possibly without the checks and balances of our current constitutional republic.
Setting aside for now my contention that our "checks and balances" have utterly failed to restrain the state, let me explain what I think is wrong with this argument (probably poaching some ideas from Rothbard, Molyneux, and others). Quite simply, a rogue DRO would almost certainly be unable to get away with it.
The typical DRO customer is going to demand some kind of assurance from his DRO that it will act properly and not engage in aggression. So market pressure will arrange for any even moderately successful DRO to be of the type that will almost certainly not go rogue. Furthermore, most DROs would be on the lookout for competitors who may start engaging in aggressive behavior and be ready to suppress such aggression, both to comply with the contracts they have with their customers and to prevent the reemergence of a state, which would promptly prohibit all other DROs.
But assume there was a DRO whose owner suddenly went insane and believed he could profit by aggressing against customers, potential customers, and other DROs. In order to have a chance at success, he would have to somehow build a sizable and sophisticated force in total secrecy. Perhaps this sort of thing would have been possible in a primitive world with sparse populations and a lack of advanced sensing and communications technology, but it's thoroughly inconceivable in our world. And what about funding? To pay for it all, he would have to do one of the following: 1) dramatically raise rates, which would immediately put him out of business; 2) attract outside investors, who would quickly discover what he was up to and walk away; or 3) simply be ridiculously independently wealthy, in which case he would have no reason to engage in such an expensive and risky undertaking.
But suppose such a group did somehow materialize and move against a free society. True, it would lack the so-called "checks and balances" of a Constitution, but it would also lack the legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects that the current state enjoys, and that legitimacy is the only thing that allows the state to exist, especially in the face of a massive population of well-armed, freedom-loving people.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Anarchic Law
People unfamiliar with market anarchism or libertarian anarchism often seem to mistakenly believe that the stateless (anarchic) society we advocate is one of chaos and lawlessness. Of course, this is incorrect. We recognize that human beings are social creatures who accomplish a great deal through cooperation and that they naturally come up with various voluntary systems of rules to facilitate that cooperation. The market anarchist's contention is that it's simply not justifiable for one person or group of people (a king, a 'central committee,' a democracy, a constitutional republic, etc.) to come along and claim they have the right to monopolize by force such systems of law and then proceed to forcibly extract payment for their services. Here's the first of a great 10-part video series of Roderick Long discussing an anarchist legal order at a Mises Institute Seminar: An Anarchist Legal Order.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
The Subjective Happiness Rationale for libertarianism
Here's one way to explain the rationale for libertarianism. I will call it the Subjective Happiness Rationale, and I'm no doubt borrowing some ideas from Murray Rothbard and possibly others. And I should reiterate that when I say libertarianism, I mean pure anarchist libertarianism (as distinct from the limited-government minarchist libertarianism of people like Ron Paul and Milton Friedman).
A consistent theory of human ethics should seek to maximize human happiness (or minimize suffering). But happiness is entirely subjective (just ask a masochist). Since there's no way to determine the nature of someone else's happiness, the only way to maximize it is to allow maximum freedom for the individual to act and thus seek his own happiness. To be consistent, the rule must apply universally to every rational being, or moral agent. The result, it seems to me, is the rule that no one may aggress against anyone else, even if it's purportedly for a noble cause or their own good or the common good. So the state, which by definition is created and maintained by aggression against those within its claimed borders, is illegitimate. Unless I've made a mistake somewhere (which is possible).
Thoughts?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Are government troops heroic?
I recently discovered a facebook group called Soldiers Are Not Heroes. I ran across it a few days ago when a friend joined it, and, glancing at it briefly I figured I probably pretty much agreed with it. But I didn't bother joining it until I saw people start joining a petition to demand that facebook remove the group. Upon closer inspection, it seems to have a bit of a pacifist bent to it (which I reject), but I stand 100% behind its mission "to question the perpetrated illusion that a man becomes a hero by wearing a uniform."
Soldiers (by which they clearly mean not just soldiers but troops from all branches of the military) don't get a free pass to hero-land just because they happen to think they're doing something good and noble. Psychopaths and cult leaders often sincerely believe they're doing something good by murdering or subjugating people, but we don't call them heroes. Maybe not a perfect analogy, but you get the point.
There are several reasons to reject the blind honoring of military personnel:
1. Troops are paid out of funds taken by force from the people they claim to be protecting (same as the Mafia).
2. The military is a part of compulsory nation-state governments, which violently suppress competing defense agencies (same as the Mafia).
3. Unless troops are literally defending a country's borders (or the territory inside those borders) from a current or impending attack, they are not engaging in legitimate defense but rather illegitimate aggression.
4. Troops engaging in aggression in other countries under the justification that they're protecting our rights are terribly mistaken since military engagement is always one of the chief rationales for the expansion of government at home and infringement of rights.
5. Troops claiming that it's necessary to fight overseas in order to keep us safe are again sorely mistaken since their actions are well known to actually increase anger against their country and create more extremists intent on killing the troops and the troops' fellow countrymen.
To be clear, I sympathize with the troops and their families since I fully understand that most of them have the absolute best of intentions and have never really thought through the implications of what they're doing, and they may indeed act heroically in specific instances and in other areas of their lives, but there is nothing heroic about giving yourself over to do the State's bidding in military matters.
And the fact that there's a huge movement on facebook to ban "Soldiers Are Not Heroes" betrays a sad epidemic of unthinking rally-round-the-flag nationalism (which these same people rightly ridicule when they see it happening in other countries). As Murray Rothbard says in For a New Liberty,
War is the great excuse for mobilizing all the energies and resources of the nation, in the name of patriotic rhetoric, under the aegis and dictation of the State apparatus. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morals—as the libertarian Albert Jay Nock once phrased it—of an “army on the march.”
It is particularly ironic that war always enables the State to rally the energies of its citizens under the slogan of helping it to defend the country against some bestial outside menace. For the root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects. The facts, however, are precisely the reverse. For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only “die” by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes its subjects to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting to defend them.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Isolationist or noninterventionist?
I can kind of understand when I run across some goofball on the interwebs who accuses libertarians of being isolationist due to our opposition to meddling in other countries' affairs, but it's at least a little surprising and disheartening to see the Pew Research Center and someone whose title is "AP Diplomatic Writer" using the same bad definition: Poll: Isolationism Soars Among Americans
What he clearly meant by "isolationism" was "noninterventionism." An isolationist is someone who literally wants to see his country isolated from the global community--he wants a ceasing or reduction of not only official intervention but also things such as trade and travel. A noninterventionist is someone who simply opposes his national government intervening in the affairs of other countries. Libertarians are noninterventionist because we oppose intervention but are NOT isolationist since we advocate maximum freedom of movement and trade. I would expect that very few people are truly isolationist except for maybe a handful of hardcore authoritarian populists.
Pew appears to have based its claim of increasing isolationism on the respondents' answer to the statements, "The U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,”and, "We should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home.” At the same time, the poll shows a marked increase in support for free trade agreements, which are a pretty good proxy for gauging support for actual free trade since so many people perceive these agreements as free trade.
So what Pew's own poll shows is a strong trend not toward isolationism but toward the libertarian principle of nonintervention.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Complaining, solutions, and agorism
As a follow up to yesterday's post, I want to say a few words about the old "complaining vs. solutions" thing. After reading my description of how government exists and acts by means of aggressing against people, a friend of mine said that I was pointing out problems but wasn't discussing any solutions. I think it's important to recognize the fact that having any sort of solution to a problem is in no way a prerequisite to pointing the problem out to people. Sure, we constantly hear things like, "stop complaining if you don't have any solutions," but that's said by Democrats and Republicans to each other as a lazy way of attacking the other side. It's been said so often and for so long that many of us have come to feel it's a legitimate argument; but it's not. If someone has no clue how to go about preventing rape and murder, should he refrain from pointing out that they're wrong? Of course not. It's the same for any other situation. Whether I have any solutions for the problem of the state has zero bearing on the importance of continually bringing the problem to my readers' attention. Getting a critical mass of people to agree on the existence of a problem is a big step toward solving it.
Of course, I talk about my solution all the time, either directly or indirectly: abolition of the state. But what my friend wanted to know was exactly how I propose getting from state to stateless. The answer, I believe, is agorism.
From the web site,
Agorism is revolutionary market anarchism.
In a market anarchist society, law and security would be provided by market actors instead of political institutions. Agorists recognize that situation can not develop through political reform. Instead, it will arise as a result of market processes.
As the state is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of the criminal state by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and thus can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy – black and grey markets.
The state will never willingly cease to exist unless it becomes so small and weak compared to the free market that its case is hopeless (and even then it may resist violently at the end). The prospect for abolishing the state by "electing the right people" is beyond nil. Therefore, agorism proposes to steadily expand the domain of voluntary market forces and shrink the domain of the coercive, compulsory state. Crucial to this progression is helping more and more people to "take the red pill" and understand that the state is inherently unjust and that supporting it means that one is supporting the unjust initiation of force against his fellow man.
I'm doing my bit to create a culture of freedom and nonaggression.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Government is aggression
Government is aggression, plain and simple. It is force, it is violence. I've recently had discussions with several different people who take issue with this assertion. They claim it's absurd to suggest the wonderfully benevolent and representative government of the U.S. is based on violence. They often compare it to some place like Iran or North Korea. Sure, those states are more repressive and totalitarian than ours, but it's only a difference in degree. There's literally nothing to stop the U.S. government from becoming another North Korea (well, except maybe the as yet not totally disarmed American people, but that obstacle is getting more tenuous by the day). A totalitarian regime imposed by a "representative" or "democratic" government is no better than one imposed by a military dictator.
The fact is that even the smallest and most limited state is still an institution predicated on the initiation of force. Everything the state does, from taxation and forced monopolies to truancy laws and mandatory food labels, is made possible by the very real threat of violence. It's odd that anyone would deny this because it's wholly indisputable. If you do not pay your taxes, the government can steal the money right out of your paycheck. If that is not possible, they can come to your home and violently abduct you (usually called arresting). Should you resist the abduction, they will physically assault you. Should you resist strongly enough, they may kill you.
Or suppose you want to start a business providing the full spectrum of protective services that government police currently provide (with an important difference being that you would be paid by voluntary payments from customers instead of by forcibly taking others' property). Well, the government would inform you that you were breaking the law and tell you to close up shop. If you instead chose to continue operation, engaging in voluntary, mutually beneficial interactions with your customers, the government would move against you with heavily armed enforcers (cops, troops, etc.).
What if you decided not to send your child to school (or jump through the state's rules for homeschooling)? As soon as the state found out, its 'social workers' would show up to give you your ultimatum. If you refuse to bow to their threats, you would be visited by the state's enforcers and probably abducted (or your children would be abducted). Again, resist and more violence ensues.
Want to start a business making drugs to provide to sick people in consensual transactions? Boom, state violence.
Want to start an insurance company without adhering to state licensing and regulations? Boom, state violence.
The list of perfectly consensual, productive, and non-violent interactions you can engage in with others only to find yourself on the receiving end of state violence or threats of violence is virtually endless.
Rational, civilized people do not coerce people into doing what they want; they vote with their purchasing decisions or use peaceful, voluntary persuasion. The state is a primitive, violent institution that has become all the more dangerous in the modern world. It is not the facilitator of civilization as so many argue--it is the antithesis of civilization. And, with the vast array of weapons of mass destruction that only states have a motivation to develop, the state may yet spell the end of civilization altogether.
So, however you rationalize your defense of the state, even in its most limited form, please don't try to insist that its actions and very existence are somehow not based on aggression.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Grateful Slave
A nice take on the true nature of the State by J. Craig Green:
Grateful SlaveI am a grateful slave.
My master is a good man.
He gives me food, shelter, work and other things.
All he requires in return is that I obey him.
I am told he has the power to control my life.
I look up to him,
and wish that I were so powerful.My master must understand the world better than I,
because he was chosen by many others
for his respected position.
I sometimes complain,
but fear I cannot live without his help.
He is a good man.My master protects my money from theft,
before and after he takes half of it.
Before taking his half,
he says only he can protect my money.
After taking it, he says it is still mine.
When he spends my money,
he says I own the things he has bought.
I don't understand this, but I believe him.
He is a good man.I need my master for protection,
because others would hurt me.
Or they would take my money
and use it for themselves.
My master is better than them:
When he takes my money, I still own it.
The things he buys are mine.
I cannot sell them,
or decide how they are used,
but they are mine.
My master tells me so,
and I believe him.
He is a good man.My master provides free education for my children.
He teaches them to respect and obey him
and all future masters they will have.
He says they are being taught well;
learning things they will need to know in the future.
I believe him.
He is a good man.My master cares about other masters,
who don't have good slaves.
He makes me contribute to their support.
I don't understand why slaves must work
for more than one master,
but my master says it is necessary.
I believe him.
He is a good man.Other slaves ask my master for some of my money.
Since he is good to them as he is to me, he agrees.
This means he must take more of my money;
but he says this is good for me.
I ask my master why it would not be better
to let each of us keep our own money.
He says it is because he knows
what is best for each of us.
We believe him.
He is a good man.My master tells me:
Evil masters in other places are not as good as he;
they threaten our comfortable lifestyle and peace.
So, he sends my children
to fight the slaves of evil masters.
I mourn their deaths,
but my master says it is necessary.
He gives me medals for their sacrifice,
and I believe him.
He is a good man.Good masters sometimes have to kill evil masters,
and their slaves.
This is necessary to preserve our way of life;
to show others that our version of slavery is best.
I asked my master:
"Why do the evil masters' slaves have to be killed;
along with their evil master?"
He said: "Because they carry out his evil deeds."
"Besides, they could never learn our system;
they have been indoctrinated to believe
that only their master is good."
My master knows what is best.
He protects me and my children.
He is a good man.My master lets me vote for a new master,
every few years.
I cannot vote to have no master,
but he generously lets me choose
between two candidates he has selected.
I eagerly wait until election day,
since voting allows me to forget that I am a slave.
Until then, my current master tells me what to do.
I accept this.
It has always been so,
and I would not change tradition.
My master is a good man.At the last election,
about half the slaves were allowed to vote.
The other half either broke rules set by the master,
or were not thought by him to be fit.
Those who break the rules
should know better than to disobey!
Those not considered fit should gratefully accept
the master chosen for them by others.
It is right, because we have always done it this way.
My master is a good man.There were two candidates.
One received a majority of the vote -
about one-fourth of the slave population.
I asked why the new master
can rule over all the slaves,
if he only received votes from one-fourth of them?
My master said:
"Because some wise masters long ago
did it that way."
"Besides, you are the slaves;
and we are the masters."
I did not understand his answer, but I believed him.
My master knows what is best for me.
He is a good man.Some slaves have evil masters.
They take more than half of their slaves' money
and are chosen by only one-tenth,
rather than one-fourth, of their slaves.
My master says they are different from him.
I believe him.
He is a good man.I asked if I could ever become a master,
instead of a slave.
My master said, "Yes, anything is possible."
"But first you must pledge allegiance
to your present master,
and promise not to abandon the system
that made you a slave."
I am encouraged by this possibility.
My master is a good man.He tells me slaves are the real masters,
because they can vote for their masters.
I do not understand this, but I believe him.
He is a good man;
who lives for no other purpose
than to make his slaves happy.I asked if I could be neither a master nor a slave.
My master said, "No, you must be one or the other."
"There are no other choices."
I believe him.
He knows best.
He is a good man.I asked my master how our system is different,
from those with evil masters.
He said:
"In our system, masters work for the slaves."
No longer confused, I am beginning to accept his logic.
Now I see it!
Slaves are in control of their masters,
because they can choose new masters every few years.
When the masters appear to control the slaves
in between elections,
it is all a grand delusion!
In reality, they are carrying out the slaves' desires.
For if this were not so,
they would not have been chosen in the last election.
How clear it is to me now!
I shall never doubt the system again.
My master is a good man.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Put down the gun, and step away from the climate fixes
Today is Blog Action Day, organized to try to use coordinated blogging on a single topic to try to affect change. It seems to be focused on statist (i.e. violent) solutions to problems such as poverty, human rights, deforestation, health care, education, etc. The topic this year was declared to be "Climate Change." Naturally, I'll be attacking this from a libertarian, voluntaryist, market anarchist angle.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the doomsayers are right about the warming of the planet and its degree of anthropogenicity. My response is, "So what?" Does that give you the right to hold a gun to my head and prevent me from producing, selling, or buying certain types of vehicles, light bulbs, air conditioners, etc.? Does it give you the right to use violence to force me to spend money to modify my production facilities to meet special emissions caps you've set? Does it give you the right to forcibly stop me from raising cattle or the right to take money from me and give it to someone else with a spiffy electric car company? The answer to all these questions is NO. Nothing other than my invading someone's person or property can provide moral justification for him to commit any of those acts of aggression against me. And of course the State therefore also lacks such justification.
Supporters of government action (violence) to stop or reverse global warming often talk about scenarios such as rising sea levels displacing coastal populations, melting polar ice killing off the polar bears, dramatically altered weather patterns turning productive land into desert, etc. What they never seem to consider is that all of this could happen completely independently of any human action whatsoever. If that was the case, surely they wouldn't be calling for acts of violence against their neighbors. If it was clear that the planet's temperature was suddenly rising due to natural causes (like volcanic eruptions, solar activity, or the spontaneous appearance of an army of Megan Fox clones), would these pro-government-action folks be clamoring for the use of force to tell their neighbors how to run their businesses or what kind of TV they can have? Of course not. They would recognize that you do not punish or control people as a reaction to natural phenomena over which they had no control.
But how much different is that than the current situation as they describe it? If they're right about the anthropogenicity of the latest warming trend, all we can say is that billions of people have interacted in the market place in order to meet each others' needs and earn a living, thus dramatically improving their standards of living while unintentionally altering the atmosphere to the point that temperatures start to rise. This, to me, seems to be a fairly natural process, and the warming was entirely accidental. Does this call for violent solutions, the likes of which you might employ against an evil supervillian who intentionally poured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause destruction? I don't see how it can.
And the situation becomes even more untenable for the pro-coercion camp when we look at the fact that the climate system is so complex that we really have no idea if their plans to reduce human economic activity (an inhuman "solution" if ever there was one) will do anything at all to stop or reverse the trend. It's not pleasant to contemplate all the needless misery and death resulting from the foregone improvement in standards of living (especially for the world's poorest) if temperature trends are not affected by the statist schemes. Layer on top of that the fact that it's entirely possible that a slightly warmer Earth, though possibly including higher sea levels, could easily result in vast amounts of currently frozen, unproductive land to become arable or otherwise incredibly beneficial to human utility. And regardless of how things turn out, individuals (again, especially the poorest) will be best able to mitigate the downsides and take advantage of the positives if they remain as free as possible to innovate, produce, and exchange on a voluntary basis, free from government coercion.
One final note is that as societies develop economically, they become ever more able to think beyond their daily survival and consider the costs of their actions on the environment. There is widespread pressure from consumers in the developed world for the companies they patronize to use ever more eco-friendly materials and production processes (even Walmart has begun experimenting with green-topping some of its stores). There are even investment funds that put together portfolios of only companies that meet certain standards of 'greeness' and energy efficiency (because consumers are demanding it). Advanced market economies naturally produce participants who are attuned to ever more diffuse effects of their actions, and companies will be forced to compete on those bases. There seems less and less need, even by the standards of the pro-government faction, to use force (a necessarily inefficient and thus eco-UNfriendly mechanism) to force companies to 'be good.'
It seems to me an inescapable conclusion that the only moral position is to oppose the use of the organized, legal violence of the State to combat climate change and just allow the creation of wealth and happiness that flows from the unimpeded interaction of billions of free individuals spontaneously working together to improve their standards of living.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!