Posted on 02/20/2006 6:24:40 AM PST by Shalom Israel
In a recent article, Carl Milsted uses Rothbard to argue it would be permissible to use force to make people pay for a service of which their benefit is at least double its cost. His conclusion is that it is reasonable, and even preferable, to establish a minimalist state if it is to people's advantage.
As has already been argued by N. Stephan Kinsella, he totally misses Rothbard's point. Furthermore, he fails to show why people would not choose to voluntarily pay for services which would benefit them double, as has been pointed out by Bob Kaercher.
Even so, I wish to offer another analysis of Milsted's reasoning. His article is a good example of why statists always seem to get it wrong — and why they always fail to understand what we're talking about. The bottom line is that they fail to realize the costs of force due to their unwillingness to see the state for what it is. I will therefore use Milsted's own example to shed light on his fundamental mistake.
Milsted takes the case of national defense, which is commonly considered an institution that would face the free rider problem if supplied on the market. Argues Milsted: "suppose the majority assesses a tax on everyone to spread the burden of supporting the new defense system. This is theft of the minority. However, suppose that the economies of scale are such that this tax is less than half of what people would have had to pay for defense on their own."
That's the argument, plain and simple. If it is morally permissible to steal when the victim is compensated double, the equation seems to fit. Well, let's look into this in more detail and see if it really does.
First, consider a situation where everybody benefits, say, $10,000 on a yearly basis from being protected by a national defense. That would mean, if the premise is correct, that it would be morally permissible to force costs of no more than $5,000 on everybody.
Were it a company supplying a service worth $10,000 to each of its customers paying only $5,000 for it, this would be easy. Anyone willing to pay the $5,000 would get the service, and the costs associated with administration and so forth would have to be covered by the $5,000 paid. But Milsted argues the $5,000 should be taxed, and that makes it much more difficult.
First of all, we know state-run businesses and authorities (especially if they are monopolies) tend to be much less efficient than private enterprises. That means people in Milstedistan would get less than they would in a free market society. But even so, there is still the cost of coercion totally neglected by Milsted in his article.
Forcing people to pay for a service means there will always be someone who tries to avoid paying or even refuses to pay. So "we" (i.e., the state) need to invest in collection services to get the money. Now, let's say Murray, who is one of the people we're trying to coerce, goes out to buy a rifle and then declares that he's "anti-government, so get the hell off my property." Perhaps he even threatens to kill the collection agents. Dealing with him would take a whole lot more out of the budget, meaning there is even less to provide for the defense (which is the reason we're in business in the first place).
But that's not all. Let's say Murray won't give us the money no matter how much we ask or threaten him. We will simply have to take it by force, so we need to invest in the necessary tools and we go out to hire a dozen brutes to do the forcing. (More money down the drain … ) It is already pretty obvious we're in a very expensive business; there will not be much defense left if there are a lot of Murrays in our society.
Now imagine our hired brutes go down the street to Murray's house and knock on his door. He sticks his rifle out the window and shouts something about having the right to his property and that he will shoot to kill. Anyway, the brutes try to open his door only to find it is locked and barred. They will have to break in to finally get their hands on Murray's cash.
Our small army goes back to their van to get their tools, then returns to break down Murray's door. Going inside, they manage to avoid all the bullets Murray is firing and they tie him up and put him in the closet. They eventually find that he does not have any valuables and that he keeps his cash in a locked safe. So they have to break it to get the money.
Now we have a problem. To make this operation morally permissible, the benefit to Murray, which we know is $10,000, must be at least double the cost forced on him. The cost is now a whole lot more than the cost of the national defense; it includes administration and collection costs, hiring the brutes and their tools, as well as the broken door and safe, and the time and suffering (and perhaps medical expenses) Murray has lost while we were stealing from him. How much do you think is left from the original $5,000 to invest in a national defense? Not much.
What if Murray suffers from paranoia and therefore had invested $1,500 in an advanced special security door and $2,000 in an extra security safe? Then the total cost of simply getting into Murray's safe would probably exceed the $5,000 we are "allowed" to steal. What then? Should we break in anyway since it is a mandatory tax, only to give him a check to cover what's above the $5,000 mark? That doesn't sound right.
But on the other hand, if we just let him be, more people would do the same as Murray only to get off, and we would have a huge problem on our hands. This is a typical state dilemma: it costs too much to force money from some people, but it would probably be much more "expensive" in the long run not to. It's a lose-lose situation.
Now, what if Murray is very poor and doesn't have the $5,000? Then we would have to take whatever he's got and make him work off the rest. We need to get the $5,000 to cover our expenses of the national defense, and we have the right to take that amount from him. It could, of course, be argued he couldn't possibly benefit $10,000 from a national defense if he has no money and no property. If we trust Austrian economics, that might very well be correct; the benefit of national defense would, like any other product or service, be valued subjectively and thus the benefit would be different for each and every individual.
If this is true, it means we have an even greater problem: the state can rightfully levy costs of a maximum of half the subjective benefit enjoyed. Well, that's a task that would keep an army of Nobel Prize winners busy for a while. If possible, I wonder how much that would cost in the end.
This is the problem statists face on an everyday basis when discussing philosophy and politics. It is easy to make nice equations and formulas, and theorize on great systems and cheap solutions neatly enforced by the state. But when consistently failing to realize the costs of coercion it makes their reasoning fundamentally flawed. Just scratching the surface reveals they really have no clue whatsoever.
Per Bylund works as a business consultant in Sweden, in preparation for PhD studies. He is the founder of Anarchism.net. Send him mail. Visit his website. Comment on the blog.
Shalom Israel wrote: “First, if such a contract of adhesion existed, there must exist an adhesing party. You (or someone in this thread) denied that the government is the "other party" to the "social contract," which leaves no adhesing party at all.”
(I believe I’m the one who denied the government is the “other party.”)
But that doesn’t leave “no adhesing party at all.” The other adhesing party or parties would be other citizens.
Shalom Israel wrote: “…the government has not ever asserted its rights per the contract: namely, it has never deported anyone for breach of the social contract. The government has never attempted to enforce the terms, "abide by the contract, or else leave the country."”
You can opt out of the contract by leaving the country per tpaine. I say you can opt out by leaving the country or become an outlaw. The government (more correctly the citizens using the government as a tool) regularly (but not always) attempts to enforce the terms of the contract. That’s why we have prisons in which we put some outlaws.
Shalom Israel wrote: “Third, constitutional rights are applied to minors as well as adults. Therefore, the privileges of alleged the "social contract" accrue to minors; but this is only possible if the obligations of the contract also accrue to minors. Therefore, it is not possible that the contract comes into force at age 18.”
I didn’t quite follow that. In any case, some of the privileges of the social contract accrue to minors because we can allow that if we choose and we have so chosen. We have also chosen not to require all the obligations of the contract from minors till they have reached a stage of maturity and understanding at which we can reasonably expect them to fulfill those obligations, which we may have arbitrarily declared to be at the age of 18. To do otherwise would not be just. And we’d have to put too many of them in prison.
tpaine wrote: Our Constiututions contract doesn't need signing.
Shalom Israel wrote: Then it isn't a contract. Thanks for admitting it
kriskrinkle writes: If our Constitutions contract doesn't need signing and therefore is not a contract for that reason, then neither an implied contract or an adhesive contract are contracts because they don't need signing.
I meant to ping you on this.
I meant to ping you on posts 360 and 362 and I screwed up my post 363.
It's too late and I'm getting tired and some of this is hard to wade through.
I beg your pardon.
"Kris, what we have here is 'bold' evidence of a very naive mind."
I observe that your style can be more direct than mine. (That's an observation not a criticism.) You sometimes (not always) post what I might think.
Primarily as an exercise in self control I try not to post such thoughts even though I sometimes fall to the temptaion--and brother, I am certainly tempted sometimes.
In any case, I absolutely see where you are coming from.
No problem on the pings.. Good to have your comments. -- Thanks & regards.
Think it through more carefully. At the beginning, you aren't on his land. If he "bans your life" on his land, it doesn't matter; you aren't on his land. Now for such a ban to matter, you must be on his land. The key question is: how did you get there? If you got there without permission, then shooting you is what we call "self defense". If you got there with permission, then no he can't shoot you: he gave you his permission, and in doing so he waived his right to shoot you as a trespasser.
If you want to negate what I said, you have to start with what I said
"Banning your life on his property" is by itself a meaningless statement, because how you got onto his property is critical. Before he can shoot you on his land, you must be on it. To be on it, he must have allowed you on it. If he allowed you on it, then by doing so he has made a contract not to shoot you (unless you attack him).
Doesn't work: you're saying that I entered into a contract, even though I didn't, with other citizens, who also didn't enter into any contract. To enter a contract, you must do something that creates the contract.
You can opt out of the contract by leaving the country per tpaine.
You don't seem to have read my answers to tpaine. You're now claiming that someone else created a contract, declared me a party to it, and now leaves me no choice but to consider myself bound by it or to leave. You didn't explain where that someone, whoever they're supposed to be, got the right to give me such an ultimatum. If you try to explain it now, you'll catch yourself reasoning in a circle: apparently they got the authority from that same "social contract"... the one I'm challenging their authority to create in the first place.
I didn’t quite follow that.
I was answering tpaine's assertion that I came under the contract when I turned 18. That can't be true, because I had rights, under that same alleged contract, before I was 18. So I must already have been under it. When did I first have those rights? At birth. So the only conclusion is that I entered into a contractual relationship the minute I was born. Which, I'm sure you'll agree, is impossible.
I do sign implied contracts. I do it by, for example, granting you permission to enter my land. Contracts of adhesion are invalid, and even US law (almost) agrees--for now. A contract of adhesion is a kind of trap: when I open the package, it grabs my ankle and won't let go. The intent behind them is to create the illusion of consent, as if I said to you, "By using the toilet anytime in March, you consent that I'm your rightful overlord." Use the toilet--I dare you! It only proves that you consent...
"Social" contracts are even less valid: someone imposes them on me even though I didn't open any package. They get the authority to do that from the "social contract". Which, of course, is binding, because I'm under this social contract. I came to be under it because someone imposed it on me. And he had the authority to impose it, because the social contract gives him that authority...
OK, this definition explicitly says a social contract is a contract. A contract, in turn, is "An agreement formed by an exchange of promises in which the promise of one party is consideration supporting the promise of the other party." This is contradictory, because the citizen does not in fact exchange any promises.
The definition is also faulty on the grounds that there's no such thing as a "hypothetical" agreement. How do two people "hypothetically" agree?
agreement among all the people in a society to give up part of their freedom to a government in exchange for protection of natural rights.
This again says that a "social contract" is an agreement. Yet it binds "all the people," even though they never actually agree to it--as tpaine said, my parents supposedly agreed for me. But no, they didn't either! My grandparents agreed for my parents and for me... So once again a social contract is an agreement that I become a party to without actually agreeing to anything.
A theory on how government and societies began. Contractarians hold that societies were formed by the consent of the populations of various areas who decided, for whatever reasons (these vary from philosopher to philosopher) that it would be to their mutual advantage to band together and cooperate.
I answered this definition already: no such decision process explains the origin of society. Rather, tribal social structure is common to all apes, and a family-based social order is common to all placental mammals. Government (e.g., by the alpha male--whether his name is "Bongo" or "Nebuchadnezzer") and society (i.e., the tribe) predated even rational thought itself, and was therefore certainly not the product of such a contractual process.
an implicit agreement among people that results in the organization of society; individual surrenders liberty in return for protection
An implicit agreement is created when I do something indicative of my consent. For example, issuing an invitation. This implicit agreement was apparently agreed to by my act of being born--but a newborn can't consent to anything. The agreement is therefore not implicit at all, but externally imposed.
All members within a society are assumed to agree to the terms of the social contract by their choice to stay within the society.
Already addressed more than once: nobody has the authority to tell me that I must accept a contract against my will or else leave the country. Some people claim they have the authority, but they claim that they got it from the social contract which I claim they don't have the authority to impose on me. They claim they can impose it on me, of course, by virtue of the social contract...
For Hobbes, the contract was an agreement between society and its government.
Thank you; you stand corrected.
For Rousseau, it was an agreement between individuals to create a society and a government.
Once again, a social contract is supposedly an agreement, but I'm bound by it whether or not I agree. If I disagree, the same people trying to force this contract upon me insist that I vacate my property and leave the country. Their authority to do so comes from the "social contract," which I never agreed to in the first place...
Like John Locke, Rousseau believed that a government should come from the consent of the governed. ...
This phrase, "the consent of the governed", is also self-contradictory: it implies that all subjects of government consent to that government. In reality, no such consent is even requested; anyone who declares himself non-consenting, and acts contrary to the orders of government, will be imprisoned. This, like an "agreement among all the people", is a fiction, because the people do not in fact all agree.
Social contract theory (or contractarianism) is a concept used in philosophy, political science and sociology to denote an implicit agreement within a state regarding the rights and responsibilities of the state and its citizens, or more generally a similar concord between a group and its members, or between individuals. All members within a society are assumed to agree to the terms of the social contract by their choice to stay within the society without violating the contract
Each of these points has been answered earlier in this post.
I told you you were going to have other things to do.
Yawn. Did you know when you posted them, that you were regurgitating multiple versions of the two definitions I'd already debunked? Or did you honestly think these were different in some way?
It does not, precisely because the mutual understanding does not carry with it any obligation. I can avoid any and all of the many implied contracts embodied in our culture. I don't have to let you ring my doorbell: I can put a sign up that says, "No visitors: violators will be shot." I can invite you to lunch by saying, "Yo, Kris, come on over for lunch--but if you tick me off, I promise I'll shoot you. Matter of fact, sign this, in case the police want some proof..."
By contrast, your "social contract" imposes obligations I can't get out of. I can't notify the IRS that I'm not paying their protection money anymore. If a police officer bashes in my door, I can't shoot him in self defense.
I see most of your PS as containing arguments in favor of the concept of the social contract, but it does not please me to address that right now.
Your little flourish on the end is kinda cute. However, "implied contracts" differ critically from "social contracts": namely, I can always refuse to enter into an implied contract by so stipulating. A "social contract" imposes terms on me that I can't escape by any means, even though I didn't agree to it.
What makes the two appear superficially similar is that people go around making presumptions: for example, the obnoxious so-and-sos will go ringing my doorbell unless I take positive steps to prevent it. But that's not because I'm trapped in a social contract which forces me to tolerate doorbell-ringing; I can in fact put a stop to it in several different ways. Rather, just as I said, it's a matter of communication. Cultural norms tell Americans that they should assume they can ring my doorbell; in Gondwanaland, cultural norms tell people that they should stand back six camel-lengths and whistle Dixie instead.
The resolution of the conundrum is to realize that these cultural norms are part of the language. They don't obligate me. It's simply that many types of agreements are so standard, that people can enter into them with few or no words. Simply crooking my finger constitutes an invitation to come closer, and a promise that when you get real, real close, I won't punch you in the eye.
But language does carry a cost: when it allows you to compress certain messages into a word, a wink or a nod, it leaves you no choice but to speak a lengthy sentence in order to communicate a different message.
Thus, in American, I can invite people to come seek my attention merely by having a doorbell and taking no other action. If I want to tell them to buzz off, which is an unusual message in American, I must use more extensive means of communication.
Deep in the backwoods of Yakutsk the situation is exactly reversed: a Yakut seeking someone's attention must stand outside the person's property and yodel. IF the property owner wants you to stand back and yodel, he need take no special action. If he wants you to march right up to his yurt and say howdy, he needs to take more complicated measures to communicate that to you.
It's important to appreciate this fully. In Japanese culture, the situation was actually different. If you insulted your host, he was rather likely to kill you. If a foreigner visited a Japanese home in those days, he needed to stipulate that he wished not to be killed, even if he should inadvertantly offer a deadly insult. Japanese culture standardized the implicit contract that you were wililng to be beheaded for violation of various mores--but you could, by agreement, refuse to enter into that implicit contract. American culture standardizes the opposite assumption.
Note: of course Japanese culture was far from libertarian. In general, persons of lower social class could not opt out of a beheading by someone of higher social class. They had social contracts too, you see.
It would depend on the circumstances. If the demographics are right, having 10-15% of a population die of old age in a 10-15 year period wouldn't be unusual. What do you think government would do about this, and why don't you answer the original question?
More like it creates the legal framework whereby you can defend your natural-law rights without having to go to "war," in the Lockean sense, each and every time your rights are trespassed. Suggesting anything man-made "creates" rights is simply dangerous in any context. What man creates, man can take away. What God creates, no man can take away.
An interesting topic . . .
I've read that one of the major reasons men like Samuel Adams etc. were so opposed to royal troops occupying Boston following the Stamp Act Crisis was that royal troops were given police duties there. Boston had no police force or constabulary of note, so regular lobster-backs were given the duty of enforcing the law. Perhaps they feared that a continental standing army would perform similar duties . . .?
They were trying to get Adams (Samuel) and Hancock, too, don't forget, who were hiding out in Lexington, and only avoided capture when they fled to a field with Gerry. So not only was it a "gun grab," but a "snatch & grab" as well.
Badly defeated? Had the Salem companies (under Pickering?) not dawdled in coming down from Essex county, and taken positions where they should have taken them, at Charleston Neck, arguably not a single British regular would've made it back to Boston alive. There wouldn't have been a single Englishman in uniform left to climb Breed's Hill that June, or leave Boston permanently shortly thereafter . . .
In the actual "stand up and point guns at each other from 10 feet" part of the battle, yes: badly defeated.
What you're describing is how the British were badly mauled by snipers on the way back home. But everybody knew that the Colonials couldn't win a revolution by sniping: they'd have to take on the British in real battles. That's where the likes of von Steuben were invaluable to us.
Excellent.
The other side of it is that to maintain a fixed standard of order, a government can be "limited" only to the extent that people are willing and able to constrain their own actions. John Adams's comment on the Constitution being intended for a "moral and religious people" reflects this realization.
Yes and no---"run and gun" tactics more than pure sniping. But this was no mere aftermath; it constituted, I'd say, the majority of the battle. The actual set-piece line battle in Lexington was over in a flash, and in Concord, the British retreated from it---at least on the bridge. The set piece portion of the battles was over long before many of the militias from outside Middlesex county could get there.
But everybody knew that the Colonials couldn't win a revolution by sniping: they'd have to take on the British in real battles. That's where the likes of von Steuben were invaluable to us.
I agree completely. To be fair, though, at Lexington and Concord, and probably at Bunker Hill as well, no one on our side was thinking about winning a revolution. Instead, we were defending our rights as "Englishmen." Hell, entire units of Connecticut militia simply cut out of the Charlestown line when their enlistments were up.
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