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.
By which Mrs Powel verbally “signed” her agreement based on her faith in the conventioneers I guess because as you say “she didn't even know what the new government was” because of course she was outside, not inside with the convention, so she had to ask.
“…the founders glibly spoke of a "compact" to which Mrs. Powel was supposedly a signatory.”
Did they speak of it as a “compact” in any way other than the way we today might speak of a “contract” which isn’t truly a contract because it hasn’t been agreed to yet? As in: I have a contract for you to consider.
And did not the convention “…submit to the consideration of the United States in Congress assembled, that Constitution which has appeared to us the most adviseable”?
You know, one REALLY has to wonder about the moral validity of someone who claims to be Christian yet supports the pro-drug/pro-prostitution legalization party of the Libertarians. In addition,you claim that Jews who reject Christ can still get into Heaven.
So what drugs are you smoking these days?
"As an aside, I've remarked before that the word "social" essentially negates whatever comes next: social security isn't secure; social justice isn't just; social contracts aren't contracts; etc."
Stipulating for this that social security isn't secure, that social justice isn't just, and that social contracts aren't contracts, it does not obviously follow that this is so because the word "social" essentially negates whatever comes next.
Right: Tommy said that. Tommy was wrong. Most egregiously of all, in this paragraph he attempts to prove it by special pleading: "it is agreed by those who have seriously considered..."
If you opt out of the contract it is not stealing if your land is forfeit (if it even is, you said it not me), the forfeiture is a penalty for breaking the contract.
This observation of yours is interesting and to the point. I only fear that you will confuse it with a "social contract"! Recall that I already clearly spelled out that it's possible for a property to be encumbered with a variance, and it is possible to construct a variance that almost fits your description. The conclusion, if we pursued that subject carefully, would be to discover that "social contracts" are completely unneccessary, because honest-to-goodness contracts can produce all the desired results without the negative consequences of "social contracts".
However, that is not the situation today, for three reasons. First, my land is not encumbered with a contract stipulating that the owner must have entered into a "citizenship agreement" anything like your social contract: in fact Pakistanis can buy land in America without ever leaving Pakistan, let alone entering into such an agreement.
Second, the original colonists did not enter voluntarily into a contract in the first place. They were subjected, whether they liked it or not, to an imposition of power. Since they didn't "sign" this hypothetical contract, they could not in particular have encumbered their lands as part of such a contract, and hence they cannot have passed their lands so encumbered to their heirs.
Thirdly, US law does not regard my property as encumbered by a variance such that I forfeit it if I breach certain terms. Rather, US law consistently treats my property as mine, but also regards government as vested with the authority to seize property whenever government agrees with itself to do so--for example, by eminent domain, asset forfeiture, etc. Thus your attempt to interpret such seizure as a proper contract is inconsistent with reality.
The chain of theft was this: King George stole the land, and then gave it, via invalid patents, to various entities such as the East India Company, William Penn, etc. A subset of colonists then waged successful war on England and claimed, as spoils of war, the land that wasn't actually England's in the first place. Even before the war was over, royalists' property was unlawfully seized from them, and never subsequently returned by the new American government. The government even went on to repeat King George's crime, by claiming lands as far as the Pacific ocean--not to mention "buying" land, in an invalid transaction, from King Louis, who didn't properly own it.
Aside from all that, who besides you said the only way you can opt out is by submitting to a violation of your property rights?
The only "opt out" clause you've mentioned is to leave the country. This isn't possible without losing my property rights, since I do in fact have property in this country--and hence, cannot leave the country without sacrificing the right to live on my own land.
You mean, they can opt out of the contract they never opted into, by the trivial expedient of having a price set on their heads and spending the rest of their natural lives on the lam? Oh, silly me!
One could argue they “signed” their agreement by not fleeing, becoming outlaws or revolting.
That's precisely your (and tpaine's) argument, yes. You are saying that I can come to your house and declare myself your master, and it's a legally binding contract given that you didn't flee? Um, what gave me the right to go make such a declaration in the first place? And since fleeing is incompatible with exercising your property rights, how did I get the authority to tell you that you either (1) accept my contract, or (2) forfeit your property rights? Do you actually know the word "duress"?
Hi! Thanks for the ad hominem! Why, I even bet you can follow it up with a bit of slander! Can you? Of course you can!
...yet supports the pro-drug/pro-prostitution legalization party of the Libertarians.
Libertarian philosophical "leanings" and the libertarian party are barely related. I have nothing to do with the libertarian party--yet you slanderously say otherwise, and specifically bring prostitution and drugs into it.
But if you take a deep breath and count to ten, I'll tell you why any reply to your assault is pointless. As for what is morally right, I would condemn drug use, prostitution, and probably whatever you do for fun on Saturday night--I'm sure it ain't Parcheesi. What you did with your girlfriend would get you stoned to death. So, aren't you glad I'm inclined toward liberty? It means I'll preach to you, but I won't force you to stop all the sinnin' that we both know you're doing--let alone punish you as you so richly deserve. I leave it to God instead.
In addition,you claim that Jews who reject Christ can still get into Heaven.
The Bible I read says that no man has entered heaven at any time. But debating the finer points of my beliefs would be pointless. The nature of your attack makes it clear that you aren't a Christian in the first place, so we'd just be spinning our wheels.
But worse, your pretzel-logic attempt to convert my religion into a de facto charge of antisemitism is completely intolerable. You should be ashamed.
You're having trouble switching gears from debate mode to humor mode. I merely observe, and it is humorous, that the adjective "social" is always applied to something that (1) isn't whatever the word actually means, and (2) is dicey enough to need an air of legitimacy.
So for example, we say "social security" when we mean "a ponzi scheme in which money is stolen, most of it spent for other things, and a teeny bit returned to the original victims." Naturally, "social security" sounds much better--by virtue of the fact that "security" is a good thing. The "social" in front tells you that whatever comes next doesn't describe it; that a politician is trying to sell you something; and that you're about to take it up the tailpipe.
"Hobbes's definition was already debunked in several prior posts. "
Which has nothing to do with it.
Your words (cut and paste) were: "Thank you; you stand corrected."
I never took a position one way or the other on the statement: For Hobbes, the contract was an agreement between society and its government.
You can't correct me in regard to a position I have not taken.
"That's where thinking skills would serve you so well."
You've got a lot of gall saying that. The quickness of your response and it's quality indicate you didn't think at all.
I believe it was you who criticized my statement, much earlier, that "presumably, the other party is the government." If it was you, then you stand corrected: I was indeed quoting Hobbes faithfully. I was alluding to something much earlier in the conversation.
I wasn't debunking Hobbes definition at that time, because I'd already done so. Try to keep up.
"The chain of theft was this:"
Aside from anything else that's going on, you've hit on something that we agree on.
I'm amazed.
"The only "opt out" clause you've mentioned is to leave the country."
I allowed the option of being an outlaw as far back as post 185, second to last sentence.
Agreed. You realize that there's no important difference between living on the run forever, and leaving the country? It my choices are those or submit, then can you say "duress"?
"You mean you were always on his property? Since the beginning of time?"
I didn't say anything at all about any of that. You assumed it all.
"If you would like to clearly spell out the scenario you have in mind, I welcome you to do so. "
It's your scenario, not mine. Back in Post 311 you said "If you pondered that, you would realize that he can ban anything he wants on his property, including his parking lot."
My objection from the beginning has been that "...he can ban anything he wants on his property..." is way to broad a statement.
You keep supporting my position with your assumptions that you made and I didn't while at the same time telling me I am wrong.
Since, as I said, it's your scenario not mine, you come up with a scenario in which "...he can ban anything he wants on his property..." is not an overly broad statement.
You said nothing about how you got onto the property--EXACTLY! Unfortunately, a correct analysis of your question depends critically on how you got on his land. If you got there without permission, he can, and might, kill you--and well within his rights. If you got there with permission, then the act of giving permission means he has waived the right to kill you.
Do you get it now?
The only limitation on one's property rights are contractual. If the man lets you onto his land, then you and he have a contract. If he hasn't, you don't. In other words, the property owner himself is the only one who sets limits on his rights, and he does it by making contracts.
By contrast, you appear to believe that the right is inherently limited.
I've addressed other examples of "limited rights," such as shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or "swinging one's arm." In each case, a correct analysis shows that one's actual rights are not limited. Any imagined "limitation" turns out to be one of two things: either the "limitation" is created by a voluntary contract; or the right you think is limited isn't an actual right in the first place.
To get the analysis right, it turns out that context is almost always critical. Do you have a "right to be on my land"? No. I can grant you the privilege, though. Do you have a "right to swing your arm"? No. What you have is a right to use your arm in any way that doesn't impose non-consensual results on someone else's property. Do you have a "right of free speech"? No: you own your mouth, but you don't have the right to wake me at 3 a.m. with shouting, because you don't have any right to project your voice onto my land. IF you visit my house, you can't say anything you please, because I can make your privilege contingent on, say, not swearing. Do you have a "right not to be killed"? No: you can be killed in self defense. What you do have is a right not to have force initiated against you--i.e., not to suffer violence if you haven't initiated violence yourself.
Some of those statements appear to contradict the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, but there's a good reason for that. First, those documents use imprecise language. Do you have a right to "life"? You're guaranteed to die, so does that mean God's violating your rights? What you really have is a right not to suffer death as a result of someone else's initiation of aggression--or, still somewhat loosely, a "right not to be killed".
The second reason is that the "rights" in the Bill o' Rights aren't meant to list "human rights"; rather, they represent certain guarantees that government won't violate your human rights. So, for example, the "freedom of speech" really means that government promises not to try and muzzle your speech. (Of course it breaks that promise routinely.)
That latter point is usually not understood. I remarked to my boss once that he doesn't have "free speech" in my house; if he cussed in front of my son I'd throw his butt out. He couldn't process it at first--I had to repeat it several times. A while later he looked at me quizzically and said, "Is that true?"
"You mean, they can opt out of the contract they never opted into, by the trivial expedient of having a price set on their heads and spending the rest of their natural lives on the lam?"
No, and admittedly "outlaw" might be the wrong word.
I mean he can live outside the bounds of the law to the extent that he is able to do so. Lot's of people live outside the bounds of the law to the extent they are able to, some in small ways and others in large ways. Some are less smart about it, have a price set on their heads and spend part of their lives on the lam, but since they are among the less smart, not usually the rest of their natural lives.
"Oh, silly me!"
Agreed.
"You are saying that I can come to your house and declare myself your master, and it's a legally binding contract given that you didn't flee? "
No. You neglected become an outlaw and revolt. If you did not do any of that, if you meekly accepted the situation, then you accepted the situation.
"Um, what gave me the right to go make such a declaration in the first place?"
I don't say there is such a right. But it does happen, if not exactly the way you laid it out then in similar ways. Isn't that what happened in the chain of theft you laid out? It's a misuse of force.
If you are doing it under duress, you haven't agreed to it and you are what I have termed an outlaw because I haven't found a better term yet.
"I believe it was you who criticized my statement,..."
Correct.
If it was you, then you stand corrected: I was indeed quoting Hobbes faithfully.
So you were humorously pointing out that I disagree with Hobbes.
Admittedly "outlaw" might be the wrong word.
I mean he can live outside the bounds of the law to the extent that he is able to do so. Lot's of people live outside the bounds of the law to the extent they are able to, some in small ways and others in large ways. Some are less smart about it, have a price set on their heads and spend part of their lives on the lam, but since they are among the less smart, not usually the rest of their natural lives.
"...can you say "duress"?"
If necessary. Have you got a reason I should say another word we'd disagree over?
“Do you get it now?”
I always got it.
Remember, what I said was that when you say “…he can ban anything he wants on his property…” “It looks like you’re saying that if he wants he can ban the life and liberty of others; that if they are on his property, the owner can kill someone at will or prevent someone from leaving.”
Eventually you said “Yes, it does, because he can't issue a ban…”
To which I replied: “Agreed and that’s the point I was trying to help you think through to: That “…he can ban anything he wants on his property…” is an overbroad, incorrect statement. That there are situations in which he can not “ban anything he wants on his property,” your example of his having waived the right to do so being (ultimately the only?) one of them.”
The simple thing we both seem to agree on is that your original statement “…he can ban anything he wants on his property…” is an overbroad, incorrect statement since there are situations, which you have described, when he can’t “ban anything he wants on his property.”
The rest of your post is diversionary (which doesn’t mean its invalid) from that simplicity.
"Outlaw" implies that the ones who imposed their will on my without my consent were somehow acting legitimately. Try "freedom fighter" maybe.
You didn't say that you disagree with Hobbes. You said that my statement revealed ignorance of the subject. You stand corrected.
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