Po napotkaniu twierdzenia, że pewne stanowisko nieetatystyczne (np. anarchokapitalizm) jest praktycznie niebezpieczne z uwagi na swój radykalny charakter, warto wskazać na rażący radykalizm każdej formy etatyzmu. Następnie, po zasugerowaniu, że to nie radykalizm danej teorii stanowi jej problem, jeszcze bardziej warto wskazać, że etatyzm jest teorią nie tylko radykalną, ale też radykalną w swej niespójności. Wydaje się to odpowiednim opisaniem stanowiska, które twierdzi, między innymi, że:
1. Jedynym pewnym sposobem obrony przed agresją, przemocą i przymusem jest podporządkowanie się ogromnemu, monopolistycznemu aparatowi agresji, przemocy i przymusu.
2. Jedynym pewnym sposobem obrony swoich praw własności jest podporządkowanie się przymusowemu podmiotowi którego reprezentanci nie posiadają żadnego z aktywów składających się na ten podmiot, a mimo to przypisują sobie prawo wywłaszczenia dowolnego prywatnego właściciela dla celów, których wartość i użyteczność wyceniają wyłącznie oni sami.
3. Gospodarka wolnorynkowa, której uczestnicy – chcąc prosperować – muszą zaopatrywać się wzajemnie w produktywne dobra i usługi, a także ponosić pełną odpowiedzialność za swoje potencjalne niepowodzenia, może przetrwać wyłącznie wtedy, gdy podda się ją regulacji monopolistycznej grupy osób bezproduktywnych, które zawsze mogą obciążyć osoby produktywne kosztami swoich błędów i porażek.
4. Państwowy przymus jest niezbędny do egzekwowania umów, a mimo to rzekoma „umowa społeczna”, mająca ustanawiać państwo, może zostać wyegzekwowana bez udziału jakiegokolwiek meta-państwa, tym samym stając się samoegzekwującą się anomalią.
5. Zarządcy dowolnego monopolistycznego aparatu przemocy i przymusu używają go z pobudek dobroczynnych, ale jeśli mieliby zaprzestać używania metod opartych na przemocy (tzn. działalności politycznej) i zwrócić się w kierunku metod opartych na dobrowolności (tzn. działalności rynkowej), to ich altruizm natychmiast zamieniłby się w nikczemny, powodowany chciwością egoizm.
6. Państwa, instytucje odpowiedzialne za 200 milionów okrutnych śmierci w samym tylko wieku XX-tym, mają zapewniać ochronę przed “prywatną przestępczością”, która nawet w swej najbardziej zorganizowanej formie międzynarodowych sieci mafijnych nie zdołała zebrać nawet najmniejszego promila etatystycznego żniwa śmierci.
7. Stan anarchii pomiędzy jednostkami, z których każda może finansować swoje działania zasadniczo wyłącznie z własnej kieszeni, doprowadziłby do niedopuszczalnej eskalacji przemocy i rozlewu krwi, ale stan anarchii pomiędzy państwami, z których każde może obciążyć kosztami swoich działań (również działań wojennych) prywatne jednostki, jest znośnym i stosunkowo bezpiecznym układem.
8. Brak zewnętrznego, monopolistycznego podmiotu egzekwującego umowy pomiędzy prywatnymi jednostkami doprowadziłby do niekończącej się serii konfliktów, ale brak zewnętrznego, monopolistycznego podmiotu egzekwującego umowy pomiędzy poszczególnymi organami państwa nie uniemożliwia im współpracowania w sposób skuteczny, a nawet dobroczynny.
9. Scedowanie zadania podtrzymywania sprawiedliwości na podmiot, który jest działającym w oparciu o przemoc monopolem, nie doprowadzi do regularnego wypaczania sprawiedliwości tak, aby służyła ona sprawie rzeczonego podmiotu.
10. Pojęcie równowagi sił, zgodnie z którym rządzący kontrolują rządzonych, a rządzeni rządzących, nie stoi w sprzeczności z zasadą brzytwy Ockhama, sugerującą, że rzeczoną równowagę mogłaby z powodzeniem zachowywać pojedyncza grupa jednostek samorządnych.
11. Rządzeni są wystarczająco kompetentni, by wybierać swoje władze, ale nie dość kompetentni, by wybierać sposób wydatkowania swoich pieniędzy.
12. Para podróżników, którzy natknęliby się na siebie w środku odludnego lasu, nie skoczyłaby sobie natychmiast do gardeł tylko z powodu strachu przed państwowymi sankcjami.
13. Instytucja, która siłowo narzuca swoje usługi ochronne innym, jednostronnie ustala ich cenę i delegalizuje wszelką potencjalną konkurencję w tej dziedzinie, nie będzie starała się czerpać zysków z wzniecania konfliktów i umożliwiania ich rozwoju, nie zaś z ich rozwiązywania lub niedopuszczania do ich zaistnienia.
14. Przymusowa konfiskata nieruchomości prywatnego właściciela nie musi być koniecznie uznana za naruszenie czyjegokolwiek prawa (pod warunkiem, że wywłaszczonemu przekazana zostanie “adekwatna rekompensata pieniężna”), ale niezgoda na odebranie sobie części samodzielnie wytworzonego lub zdobytego na mocy dobrowolnej umowy dobytku jest jednoznacznym przestępstwem.
15. Prawa polityczne poprzedzają prawa własności, co przypuszczalnie oznacza, że osoby zawierające rzekomą “umowę społeczną” spisały ją na ścianie jaskini przy świetle ogniska, chyba że warunki świata sprzed zawarcia wspomnianej umowy umożliwiały (przynajmniej) wytworzenie kapitału niezbędnego do zakwaterowania uczestniczących stron oraz zaopatrzenia ich w papier i atrament w jakiś tajemniczy, bezwłasnościowy sposób.
16. Fakt posiadania wystarczająco dużej klienteli przekształca coś, co zwyczajowo uznaje się za rabunek, w coś, co przyjmuje się jako część niezbędnej służby społecznej.
17. Stosunkowo mała grupa ludzi jest w stanie posiąść więcej wiedzy i podejmować bardziej kompetentne decyzje w kwestii kierowania czynnościami danego społeczeństwa, niż cała reszta rzeczonego społeczeństwa.
18. Pojęcie równości wobec prawa dopuszcza istnienie funkcjonalnych przywilejów.
19. Bezwarunkowy szacunek dla zasady nieagresji jest ‘absolutystyczny’, ale bezwarunkowy szacunek dla państwowego ustawodawstwa taki nie jest.
20. Powszechne występowanie etatyzmu świadczy o pożyteczności etatyzmu, tak jakby tego samego nie można było kiedyś powiedzieć o astrologii, niewolnictwie czy usankcjonowanej prawnie dyskryminacji rasowej.
21. Każde z powyższych twierdzeń jest rzetelnie uzasadnione, zarówno teoretycznie jak i empirycznie, podczas gdy zaprzeczenie któregokolwiek z nich leży zasadniczo poza granicami rozsądnej dyskusji.
Po wymienieniu powyższych (lub innych) powodów, warto skonfrontować etatystę z zadaniem obrony rzekomo umiarkowanego charakteru doktryny, którą wspiera. I nawet jeśli przełknie on podaną mu gorzką pigułkę i uzna radykalizm etatyzmu, warto wówczas natychmiast skonfrontować go z kolejnym, równie trudnym zadaniem – z zadaniem udowodnienia domniemanej spójności etatyzmu. Jeśli nasz rozmówca przyzna się do porażki również na tym polu, nie powinniśmy być intelektualnie zaskoczeni, ale możemy być przynajmniej taktycznie usatysfakcjonowani.
29 kwietnia 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Ten Briefly Described Problems of Egalitarianism
I tend to agree with Isaiah Berlin and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn that liberty and equality do not naturally go hand in hand. In fact, more often than not the choice between them is an either/or one. Let us make no mistake here – I am not referring to the kind of equality than no libertarian would hesitate to endorse, that is, the equality of possessing the natural rights to life, property and the pursuit of one’s conception of happiness within the bounds drawn by the principle of non-initiation of force. I am referring to coercive, redistributive equality of wealth, whose promotion forms the backbone of the doctrines grouped under the name of egalitarianism. In the following text, I would like to offer a brief description of what I take to be the ten most flagrant problems with the doctrines under consideration.
But before I move on to their enumeration, let me deal first with the question of whether a libertarian society could not voluntarily implement the goals of wealth egalitarianism. It appears that on a conceptual level there is no necessary incompatibility between the two – it is possible to conceive of a community in which people endowed with superior profit-making skills retain for themselves only that portion of their income which suffices for living a modest life, while committing the rest to various charitable endeavors. However, since there is also no guarantee that entrepreneurially skilled people in a free society would act in such a manner, egalitarians take it upon themselves to ensure that they do by making society sufficiently and relevantly unfree. Furthermore, even in the society of the good Samaritan businessmen, the people in question would still have to wield a substantial amount of capital if they were to be capable of generating huge streams of wealth ready for charitable distribution. In other words, even such a society would have to remain distinctly inegalitarian. Thus, the traditional opposition between liberty and (wealth) equality is, as far as I can see it, real and substantive.
Having commented on the above attempt at reconciling the two values under consideration, let us now proceed to the gist of the text, namely, to a concise list of what I take to be some of the main weaknesses of egalitarianism, and hence, by implication, some of the major strong points of libertarianism:
1. Simple egalitarianism, i.e., the doctrine that one should strive to make everyone’s resources unqualifiedly equal, can easily lead to straightforwardly disastrous consequences. Imagine the following scenario: there are five mortally ill people and 20 vials of medicine ready for distribution (let us assume that they belong to a charitable institution committed to fighting mortal diseases). In order to be cured, one needs to drink five vials. Now, if the distribution of vials were to be left to a follower of simple egalitarianism, he would give four vials to each of the ill, thus saving none of them. In light of the above, it might be argued that the egalitarian exhibited the virtue of impartiality, leaving all the persons involved to an equally bad fate, but it would be absurd to argue that his brand of egalitarianism is in any sense geared towards helping the needy or expanding the range of social opportunities.
2. What about a more sophisticated and at the same time more mitigated form of egalitarianism, claiming that what matters is not equalizing people’s resources simpliciter, but lifting everyone to a position of sufficient financial security? Although in my opinion clearly more reasonable than the previous proposal, this particular approach remains highly problematic. First of all, it still involves a forcible imposition on the whole society of a single vision of how to solve the problem of poverty. As a result, it undermines the efficiency of a variety of voluntary, cooperative methods aimed at achieving the same goal, as well as discourages people from utilizing such methods in the first place. More specifically, it undermines the spontaneously emergent institutions of family, neighborly kindness and general human charity, while encouraging dependence, inaction and even parasitism.
3. Furthermore, it involves a forcible imposition on the society of a single vision of what constitutes a (sufficiently) good life, an act which I deem as incapable of escaping the objection of moral arbitrariness. After all, one does not have to be an egalitarian (or even a sufficientarian) to care for the plight of those who are dying of hunger (predominantly due to being subject to the rule of political regimes with equality of wealth on its banners), but I presume that no self-conscious non-egalitarian would be willing to make a pronouncement that, say, homelessness is a phenomenon to be unconditionally fought with by means of compulsory wealth transfers. In other words, I presume that every self-conscious non-egalitarian would be capable of comprehending that for some people homelessness may be a distinct and valuable way of life (which, incidentally, has a distinguished religious tradition known under the name of itinerant asceticism), and therefore refrain from exploiting the homeless as a source of excuses for one’s coercive meddling with the lives of others.
4. In connection with the previous point, it has to be noticed that as soon as it becomes clear that there is no non-arbitrary (or, equivalently in this context, no non-subjective) standard of what constitutes a sufficiently good life, sufficientarianism turns out to be a dog-in-the-manger doctrine, based on the coercive demand that one should unconditionally get for free what someone else acquired through his socially useful work or through a third party’s voluntary display of good will. Unhampered transactions between consenting agents hardly need moral justification (provided they do not involve aggression towards third parties), since they are mutually accepted as utility-increasing. Consequently, meritocracy is a natural, morally justifiable arrangement of social relations, in which those who manage to engage in the greatest number of the abovementioned transactions are, unsurprisingly, those who acquire the greatest number of their socially valuable fruits. Egalitarianism, on the other hand, turns the order in question on its head by demanding that the stream of goods and valuables flow specifically into the hands of those who did nothing to deserve their acquisition. If the sole reason for enacting such a flow were to be thought of as an attempt to increase the psychological satisfaction of the undeserving, then it is difficult to conceive of this process as anything else than a symptom of institutionalized envy.
5. But what if the “deserving” mentioned in the previous point do not really deserve their success? If, pace Rawls, free-market deserts and entitlements result from “the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance”, then is it obviously morally justifiable for the most effective market participants to keep all the fruits of their labor to themselves? There are two issues to be remarked upon here. First of all, even if we were to accept the doctrine of absolute genetic determinism and conclude that the notion of desert is therefore devoid of substance, it would not imply that the market distribution of wealth is in any sense unjust. After all, nature does not use anybody as a means for the attainment of its own (or anyone else’s) ends, while the same cannot be said about egalitarian-minded politicians and bureaucrats. Thus, at the very least, even given absolute genetic determinism, the consequences of everybody’s using their natural endowments in a society based on voluntary interactions are just in the Kantian sense (which is not a totally unimportant point in the context at hand, since Rawlsianism is considered to derive its inspiration from Kantianism). Secondly, if the notion of desert is to lose its force (since all achievements are ultimately traceable to unearned genetic advantage), then the poor no more deserve their position of welfare beneficiaries than the rich deserve their position of the social elite. If the poor do not deserve their poverty, then why should they deserve welfare payments forcibly extracted from the equally undeserving rich? In sum, as soon as we buy into Rawlsian genetic determinism, every argument for coercive compensatory redistribution of wealth fails by default.
6. At this point, one might suggest that the fundamental Rawlsian insight does not refer to how things are in the actual world, but to how they would be like in the hypothetical world in which any deliberation as to what constitutes just rules of social organization would involve placing its participants behind the “veil of ignorance” (i.e., in the situation in which they are unaware of their natural endowments, inherited wealth, etc.). The decisive problem with this suggestion is that the whole concept of deliberating behind the veil of ignorance appears to be straightforwardly self-contradictory. After all, how could people in such a scenario start to deliberate in the first place if they were to be unaware of the extent of their reasoning skills and the shape of their psychological dispositions? Claiming, as Rawls does, that under such hypothetical conditions people would decide to create a coercively egalitarian social safety set requires assuming that they would be equally and highly risk-averse, as well as equally prone to statist rather than voluntary solutions, which is both a flagrant petitio principii and a violation of his own theoretical premises. Furthermore, to the degree that the actual world resembles the Rawlsian “original position”, his assumptions concerning people’s risk-aversion, intellectual courage and active self-reliance are falsified – after all, every entrepreneurial decision is made from behind a partial veil of ignorance, and it is certainly not the case that people (entrepreneurs and wage earners alike) do not often embark on highly risky (and sometimes highly successful) ventures.
7. By advocating the creation of a monopolistic, redistributive apparatus of coercion (it has to be remembered that egalitarianism, in almost all of its varieties, is an essentially statist doctrine), egalitarians support the establishment of a fundamentally inegalitarian order – i.e., an order in which a select group of people hold the socially legitimized power to use initiatory violence against others, while the latter have very little practical possibility of defending themselves, let alone effectively abolishing the legitimacy of the former group’s control over their lives. What egalitarians routinely seem to overlook is the fact that monopolized coercion, far from equalizing wealth or any other value, is uniquely suited for undermining and ultimately destroying every value apart from its own lust for control. Hence, even if the endorsement of full-blown redistributive statism were to carry any hope for genuine equalization of wealth, the accompanying danger of opening the door to practically unlimited use of initiatory violence should give pause to even the most ardent supporters of compulsory transfers of income.
8. Even if egalitarians were to succeed in imposing their project on society and effecting massive, regular redistributions of wealth from the supposed haves to the supposed have-nots, they would still have to reckon with the very likely possibility that the latter group will upset their preferred pattern of wealth distribution simply on account of its representatives still being individuals with different and fundamentally unequal needs, preferences, hopes, ambitions, etc. This, coupled with the fact that the haves possess superior skills with regard to satisfying those needs, preferences, etc., would very probably initiate the process of reverse redistribution, which could be stopped only by equalizing (read: forcibly narrowing down) the set of spending opportunities that the have-nots would be free to pursue.
9. It is often claimed that one of the most persuasive rationales for egalitarianism stems from the law of diminishing marginal utility, i.e., from the fact that a marginal dollar is worth much less to a millionaire than to a pauper. However, even though the law in question is indisputably true, it does not justify egalitarian policy prescriptions. Three points should be made here. Firstly, utility is a purely subjective, psychological magnitude, measurable only on an ordinal scale and only from the first-personal point of view. As a result, utility cannot be aggregated interpersonally and translated into any social welfare function. Secondly, no external observer can determine whether a marginal dollar accruing to a given person does not make her cross a utility threshold, meaning that this marginal dollar, qua being the final element of a unit belonging to a new class of goods, is worth more to this person than the previous one (as an illustration, think about the difference between the 99th and the 100th element of a collection comprising 100 elements). And thirdly, even if it were possible to perform interpersonal comparisons of utility and forcibly redistribute wealth to the greater benefit of society as a whole, it seems more than likely that repeated use of such a procedure would drain the entrepreneurial energy of the market, while at the same time encouraging dependence, flippancy and laziness, thus eventually decreasing social utility in the long run.
10. Finally, it has to be realized that a society organized around the libertarian principle of unrestricted freedom of association can contain all sorts of voluntary, egalitarian enclaves (communes, cooperatives, neighborly networks, monasteries, etc.), but not the other way around. In other words – libertarianism is compatible with voluntary egalitarianism, but coercive egalitarianism is incompatible with libertarianism. And since nearly every currently fashionable form of egalitarianism is essentially coercive, while there is by definition no coercive version of libertarianism, we can get quite a clear picture of the motivating forces behind these respective doctrines. It is no good claiming that a free society would not voluntarily endeavor towards achieving valuable egalitarian goals and therefore needs to be forced to do so. After all, given such a view of human nature, why should the coercers be thought of as any more egalitarian-minded than the coerced? Furthermore, why not morally require of egalitarians that they finance the implementation of their goals out of their own, rather than someone else’s income? Again, if, in contrast to everyone else, they are supposed to be exempt from the requirement of financing one’s activities out of one’s own, contractually acquired money, then such an exemption would have to be part of a flagrantly inegalitarian order.
This concludes my list of the ten most conspicuous flaws in the doctrine of egalitarianism. If they can be remedied, then I am open to reconsider my skeptical assessment of its feasibility and desirability. But until then, I will continue to regard libertarianism as the only game in town.
[Reprinted from Strike-The-Root.com]
But before I move on to their enumeration, let me deal first with the question of whether a libertarian society could not voluntarily implement the goals of wealth egalitarianism. It appears that on a conceptual level there is no necessary incompatibility between the two – it is possible to conceive of a community in which people endowed with superior profit-making skills retain for themselves only that portion of their income which suffices for living a modest life, while committing the rest to various charitable endeavors. However, since there is also no guarantee that entrepreneurially skilled people in a free society would act in such a manner, egalitarians take it upon themselves to ensure that they do by making society sufficiently and relevantly unfree. Furthermore, even in the society of the good Samaritan businessmen, the people in question would still have to wield a substantial amount of capital if they were to be capable of generating huge streams of wealth ready for charitable distribution. In other words, even such a society would have to remain distinctly inegalitarian. Thus, the traditional opposition between liberty and (wealth) equality is, as far as I can see it, real and substantive.
Having commented on the above attempt at reconciling the two values under consideration, let us now proceed to the gist of the text, namely, to a concise list of what I take to be some of the main weaknesses of egalitarianism, and hence, by implication, some of the major strong points of libertarianism:
1. Simple egalitarianism, i.e., the doctrine that one should strive to make everyone’s resources unqualifiedly equal, can easily lead to straightforwardly disastrous consequences. Imagine the following scenario: there are five mortally ill people and 20 vials of medicine ready for distribution (let us assume that they belong to a charitable institution committed to fighting mortal diseases). In order to be cured, one needs to drink five vials. Now, if the distribution of vials were to be left to a follower of simple egalitarianism, he would give four vials to each of the ill, thus saving none of them. In light of the above, it might be argued that the egalitarian exhibited the virtue of impartiality, leaving all the persons involved to an equally bad fate, but it would be absurd to argue that his brand of egalitarianism is in any sense geared towards helping the needy or expanding the range of social opportunities.
2. What about a more sophisticated and at the same time more mitigated form of egalitarianism, claiming that what matters is not equalizing people’s resources simpliciter, but lifting everyone to a position of sufficient financial security? Although in my opinion clearly more reasonable than the previous proposal, this particular approach remains highly problematic. First of all, it still involves a forcible imposition on the whole society of a single vision of how to solve the problem of poverty. As a result, it undermines the efficiency of a variety of voluntary, cooperative methods aimed at achieving the same goal, as well as discourages people from utilizing such methods in the first place. More specifically, it undermines the spontaneously emergent institutions of family, neighborly kindness and general human charity, while encouraging dependence, inaction and even parasitism.
3. Furthermore, it involves a forcible imposition on the society of a single vision of what constitutes a (sufficiently) good life, an act which I deem as incapable of escaping the objection of moral arbitrariness. After all, one does not have to be an egalitarian (or even a sufficientarian) to care for the plight of those who are dying of hunger (predominantly due to being subject to the rule of political regimes with equality of wealth on its banners), but I presume that no self-conscious non-egalitarian would be willing to make a pronouncement that, say, homelessness is a phenomenon to be unconditionally fought with by means of compulsory wealth transfers. In other words, I presume that every self-conscious non-egalitarian would be capable of comprehending that for some people homelessness may be a distinct and valuable way of life (which, incidentally, has a distinguished religious tradition known under the name of itinerant asceticism), and therefore refrain from exploiting the homeless as a source of excuses for one’s coercive meddling with the lives of others.
4. In connection with the previous point, it has to be noticed that as soon as it becomes clear that there is no non-arbitrary (or, equivalently in this context, no non-subjective) standard of what constitutes a sufficiently good life, sufficientarianism turns out to be a dog-in-the-manger doctrine, based on the coercive demand that one should unconditionally get for free what someone else acquired through his socially useful work or through a third party’s voluntary display of good will. Unhampered transactions between consenting agents hardly need moral justification (provided they do not involve aggression towards third parties), since they are mutually accepted as utility-increasing. Consequently, meritocracy is a natural, morally justifiable arrangement of social relations, in which those who manage to engage in the greatest number of the abovementioned transactions are, unsurprisingly, those who acquire the greatest number of their socially valuable fruits. Egalitarianism, on the other hand, turns the order in question on its head by demanding that the stream of goods and valuables flow specifically into the hands of those who did nothing to deserve their acquisition. If the sole reason for enacting such a flow were to be thought of as an attempt to increase the psychological satisfaction of the undeserving, then it is difficult to conceive of this process as anything else than a symptom of institutionalized envy.
5. But what if the “deserving” mentioned in the previous point do not really deserve their success? If, pace Rawls, free-market deserts and entitlements result from “the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance”, then is it obviously morally justifiable for the most effective market participants to keep all the fruits of their labor to themselves? There are two issues to be remarked upon here. First of all, even if we were to accept the doctrine of absolute genetic determinism and conclude that the notion of desert is therefore devoid of substance, it would not imply that the market distribution of wealth is in any sense unjust. After all, nature does not use anybody as a means for the attainment of its own (or anyone else’s) ends, while the same cannot be said about egalitarian-minded politicians and bureaucrats. Thus, at the very least, even given absolute genetic determinism, the consequences of everybody’s using their natural endowments in a society based on voluntary interactions are just in the Kantian sense (which is not a totally unimportant point in the context at hand, since Rawlsianism is considered to derive its inspiration from Kantianism). Secondly, if the notion of desert is to lose its force (since all achievements are ultimately traceable to unearned genetic advantage), then the poor no more deserve their position of welfare beneficiaries than the rich deserve their position of the social elite. If the poor do not deserve their poverty, then why should they deserve welfare payments forcibly extracted from the equally undeserving rich? In sum, as soon as we buy into Rawlsian genetic determinism, every argument for coercive compensatory redistribution of wealth fails by default.
6. At this point, one might suggest that the fundamental Rawlsian insight does not refer to how things are in the actual world, but to how they would be like in the hypothetical world in which any deliberation as to what constitutes just rules of social organization would involve placing its participants behind the “veil of ignorance” (i.e., in the situation in which they are unaware of their natural endowments, inherited wealth, etc.). The decisive problem with this suggestion is that the whole concept of deliberating behind the veil of ignorance appears to be straightforwardly self-contradictory. After all, how could people in such a scenario start to deliberate in the first place if they were to be unaware of the extent of their reasoning skills and the shape of their psychological dispositions? Claiming, as Rawls does, that under such hypothetical conditions people would decide to create a coercively egalitarian social safety set requires assuming that they would be equally and highly risk-averse, as well as equally prone to statist rather than voluntary solutions, which is both a flagrant petitio principii and a violation of his own theoretical premises. Furthermore, to the degree that the actual world resembles the Rawlsian “original position”, his assumptions concerning people’s risk-aversion, intellectual courage and active self-reliance are falsified – after all, every entrepreneurial decision is made from behind a partial veil of ignorance, and it is certainly not the case that people (entrepreneurs and wage earners alike) do not often embark on highly risky (and sometimes highly successful) ventures.
7. By advocating the creation of a monopolistic, redistributive apparatus of coercion (it has to be remembered that egalitarianism, in almost all of its varieties, is an essentially statist doctrine), egalitarians support the establishment of a fundamentally inegalitarian order – i.e., an order in which a select group of people hold the socially legitimized power to use initiatory violence against others, while the latter have very little practical possibility of defending themselves, let alone effectively abolishing the legitimacy of the former group’s control over their lives. What egalitarians routinely seem to overlook is the fact that monopolized coercion, far from equalizing wealth or any other value, is uniquely suited for undermining and ultimately destroying every value apart from its own lust for control. Hence, even if the endorsement of full-blown redistributive statism were to carry any hope for genuine equalization of wealth, the accompanying danger of opening the door to practically unlimited use of initiatory violence should give pause to even the most ardent supporters of compulsory transfers of income.
8. Even if egalitarians were to succeed in imposing their project on society and effecting massive, regular redistributions of wealth from the supposed haves to the supposed have-nots, they would still have to reckon with the very likely possibility that the latter group will upset their preferred pattern of wealth distribution simply on account of its representatives still being individuals with different and fundamentally unequal needs, preferences, hopes, ambitions, etc. This, coupled with the fact that the haves possess superior skills with regard to satisfying those needs, preferences, etc., would very probably initiate the process of reverse redistribution, which could be stopped only by equalizing (read: forcibly narrowing down) the set of spending opportunities that the have-nots would be free to pursue.
9. It is often claimed that one of the most persuasive rationales for egalitarianism stems from the law of diminishing marginal utility, i.e., from the fact that a marginal dollar is worth much less to a millionaire than to a pauper. However, even though the law in question is indisputably true, it does not justify egalitarian policy prescriptions. Three points should be made here. Firstly, utility is a purely subjective, psychological magnitude, measurable only on an ordinal scale and only from the first-personal point of view. As a result, utility cannot be aggregated interpersonally and translated into any social welfare function. Secondly, no external observer can determine whether a marginal dollar accruing to a given person does not make her cross a utility threshold, meaning that this marginal dollar, qua being the final element of a unit belonging to a new class of goods, is worth more to this person than the previous one (as an illustration, think about the difference between the 99th and the 100th element of a collection comprising 100 elements). And thirdly, even if it were possible to perform interpersonal comparisons of utility and forcibly redistribute wealth to the greater benefit of society as a whole, it seems more than likely that repeated use of such a procedure would drain the entrepreneurial energy of the market, while at the same time encouraging dependence, flippancy and laziness, thus eventually decreasing social utility in the long run.
10. Finally, it has to be realized that a society organized around the libertarian principle of unrestricted freedom of association can contain all sorts of voluntary, egalitarian enclaves (communes, cooperatives, neighborly networks, monasteries, etc.), but not the other way around. In other words – libertarianism is compatible with voluntary egalitarianism, but coercive egalitarianism is incompatible with libertarianism. And since nearly every currently fashionable form of egalitarianism is essentially coercive, while there is by definition no coercive version of libertarianism, we can get quite a clear picture of the motivating forces behind these respective doctrines. It is no good claiming that a free society would not voluntarily endeavor towards achieving valuable egalitarian goals and therefore needs to be forced to do so. After all, given such a view of human nature, why should the coercers be thought of as any more egalitarian-minded than the coerced? Furthermore, why not morally require of egalitarians that they finance the implementation of their goals out of their own, rather than someone else’s income? Again, if, in contrast to everyone else, they are supposed to be exempt from the requirement of financing one’s activities out of one’s own, contractually acquired money, then such an exemption would have to be part of a flagrantly inegalitarian order.
This concludes my list of the ten most conspicuous flaws in the doctrine of egalitarianism. If they can be remedied, then I am open to reconsider my skeptical assessment of its feasibility and desirability. But until then, I will continue to regard libertarianism as the only game in town.
[Reprinted from Strike-The-Root.com]
Saturday, May 29, 2010
A Critique of Block on Abortion and Child Abandonment
The present paper offers a critique of Block on the issues of abortion and child abandonment. Block regards aborting a fetus or abandoning a child as an instance of exercising one’s libertarian right of expelling trespassers from one’s private property. I argue that the above reasoning is flawed due to the lack of the appreciation of the fact that if one voluntarily initiates the causal chain which leads to someone else ending up on his property, the latter person cannot be considered a trespasser. Furthermore, in the light of the above observation, any direct effects resulting from that person’s eviction should be considered the responsibility of the property’s owner. All of this follows from the simple logical fact that in all links of the causal chain under consideration the owner is the ultimate causal agent.
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Monday, May 10, 2010
Jaka piękna katastrofa
Gdyby nie to, że przewidzenie trwającej obecnie recesji i określenie kierunku jej rozwoju nie wymagało zdolności wieszczych, ostatnie wydarzenia w Grecji można by uznać za spełnienie się kolejnego kasandrycznego proroctwa ekonomistów Szkoły Austriackiej. Mieszanka bankowości centralnej, odgórnie narzuconego pieniądza fiducjarnego i keynesistowskiej recepty na pobudzanie rozwoju gospodarczego poprzez deficytowe wydatki ponownie okazała się wybuchową.
Wypadki greckie zdają się znamionować nadejście drugiego etapu recesji – po kryzysie instytucji finansowych przyszła pora na kryzys długu publicznego. W istocie są one przedsmakiem tego, co może przydarzyć się i Stanom Zjednoczonym, jeśli tamtejsza administracja kontynuować będzie działania oparte na przeświadczeniu, iż z zapaści gospodarczej można wydobyć się metodami politycznymi, bądź – by użyć dosadniejszego synonimu – nakazowo-rozdzielczymi. Jeśli natomiast feralnym skutkom tych ostatnich spróbuje się ona przeciwstawić poprzez monetyzację zaciągniętego długu, wówczas kryzys wejdzie w swą trzecią i zarazem ostatnią fazę – fazę załamania walutowego.
Bardzo podobny scenariusz grozi też strefie euro. Poza funkcjonowaniem parytetu kruszcowego (lub szerzej – towarowego), jednym z głównych ograniczników inflacyjnej samowoli dowolnego banku centralnego jest możliwość osłabienia się emitowanej przez niego waluty względem innych walut narodowych. Kluczowym ogranicznikiem budżetowej nieodpowiedzialności dowolnego rządu jest z kolei groźba, że to na jego kadencję przypadnie konieczność ogłoszenia niewypłacalności bądź programu oszczędnościowego niezbędnego do jej uniknięcia. Projekt polityczny, jakim jest wspólna waluta europejska, usuwa oba te ograniczniki – skutkuje on zjawiskiem „tragedii wspólnoty”, a więc pojawieniem się wśród krajów członkowskich strefy euro pobudki do tego, by zadłużać się kosztem swoich co zapobiegliwszych partnerów. Pobudka ta, co nietrudno było przewidzieć, bardzo szybko udzieliła się wszystkim członkom wspólnoty, niemal całkowicie pozbawiając ją cnoty zapobiegliwości. Dość wspomnieć, że co prawda nie wszystkie kraje eurostrefy znajdują się obecnie w sytuacji Grecji (czy powoli zmierzających w jej ślady Hiszpanii czy Portugalii), ale żaden z nich nie spełnia uzgodnionych wspólnie kryteriów dyscypliny budżetowej (włączając będące ich głównym orędownikiem Niemcy).
Rzecz nie tylko w czysto ekonomicznej, oczywistej obserwacji, że nie jest w stanie przetrwać jakakolwiek wspólnota gospodarcza, której wszyscy członkowie są względem siebie dłużnikami. Rzecz również w spostrzeżeniu natury moralnej, że we wspólnocie wyposażonej w pojedynczą walutę i mogący mnożyć ją na zawołanie biurokratyczny lapis philosophorum, każdy jej uczestnik zostaje poddany pokusie ukradkowego redystrybuowania tytułów własności od ogółu posiadaczy w kierunku siebie i swojej bezpośredniej klienteli; co więcej, każdy jego sukces na tym polu tym mocniej skłania pozostałych do podjęcia podobnych, w dłuższej perspektywie destruktywnych dla całości działań. Tak było w przypadku amerykańskiego kartelu polityczno-bankowego i tak jest w przypadku „kartelu” złożonego z krajów eurostrefy, w ramach którego Europejski Bank Centralny już w tej chwili udziela bankom komercyjnym świeżo wytworzonych, niskooprocentowanych pożyczek, akceptując jako porękę wyżej oprocentowane obligacje greckiego rządu.
W świetle powyższych uwag coraz prawdopodobniej brzmi prognoza Jima Rogersa, wedle której eurowalucie pozostało jeszcze najwyżej 20 lat życia. Warto jednak w tym kontekście dodać, że słabością euro nie jest jego „wyłączność” ani „pojedynczość”, lecz to, że jest ono jedynie kolejnym pieniądzem fiducjarnym. Aby takim być przestało, konieczne byłoby zlikwidowanie szeregu biurokratycznych przeszkód, począwszy od zniesienia wobec euro (oraz fiducjarnych walut narodowych) statusu wyłącznego środka płatniczego oraz zniesienia podatku od obrotu złotem (bądź jakimkolwiek innym kruszcem lub towarem mającym szansę na stanie się powszechnie akceptowanym, twardym zabezpieczeniem tytułów własności wykorzystywanych w transakcjach rynkowych).
Rezultatem wyżej wymienionych zmian byłaby prywatyzacja (lub rozumiana po hayekowsku „denacjonalizacja”) pieniądza, która z kolei wymusiłaby prywatyzację strat nieodpowiedzialnych rządów oraz ich klienteli w sektorze bankowym. Podobny rozwój wydarzeń nie tylko zabezpieczyłby własność prywatną politycznie nieustosunkowanych jednostek, ale też wyeliminowałby pokusę nadużycia wśród tych dobrze ukorzenionych w świecie polityki.
Czy wypadki greckie stwarzają jakiekolwiek szanse na pójście spraw w tym kierunku? Wydaje się, że faza kryzysu długu publicznego jest tu znacznie bardziej obiecująca niż poprzedzająca ją faza kryzysu instytucji finansowych. O ile punktem zapalnym tej pierwszej były kłopoty podmiotów powszechnie uznawanych za wolnorynkowe, podczas gdy ich etatystyczne fundamenty zdołały skutecznie ukryć się w tle, o tyle niewypłacalność rządową i deficyty budżetowe trudno w jakikolwiek sensowny sposób powiązać z domniemanymi słabościami gospodarczego liberalizmu. Trudno też będzie w związku z tym pozostać dłużej w ukryciu rzeczywistym winowajcom – i nawet jeśli społeczna reakcja na aktualne wydarzenia przybierze formę apelu o zastąpienie złego etatyzmu etatyzmem dobrym, będzie to musiał być etatyzm dużo potulniejszy, oszczędniejszy i mniej uciążliwy dla wolnego rynku niż ten obecny. A to oznacza, że w obliczu rozgrywającej się na naszych oczach „pięknej katastrofy” pozostaje miejsce na ostrożny, ale optymistyczny uśmiech.
Wypadki greckie zdają się znamionować nadejście drugiego etapu recesji – po kryzysie instytucji finansowych przyszła pora na kryzys długu publicznego. W istocie są one przedsmakiem tego, co może przydarzyć się i Stanom Zjednoczonym, jeśli tamtejsza administracja kontynuować będzie działania oparte na przeświadczeniu, iż z zapaści gospodarczej można wydobyć się metodami politycznymi, bądź – by użyć dosadniejszego synonimu – nakazowo-rozdzielczymi. Jeśli natomiast feralnym skutkom tych ostatnich spróbuje się ona przeciwstawić poprzez monetyzację zaciągniętego długu, wówczas kryzys wejdzie w swą trzecią i zarazem ostatnią fazę – fazę załamania walutowego.
Bardzo podobny scenariusz grozi też strefie euro. Poza funkcjonowaniem parytetu kruszcowego (lub szerzej – towarowego), jednym z głównych ograniczników inflacyjnej samowoli dowolnego banku centralnego jest możliwość osłabienia się emitowanej przez niego waluty względem innych walut narodowych. Kluczowym ogranicznikiem budżetowej nieodpowiedzialności dowolnego rządu jest z kolei groźba, że to na jego kadencję przypadnie konieczność ogłoszenia niewypłacalności bądź programu oszczędnościowego niezbędnego do jej uniknięcia. Projekt polityczny, jakim jest wspólna waluta europejska, usuwa oba te ograniczniki – skutkuje on zjawiskiem „tragedii wspólnoty”, a więc pojawieniem się wśród krajów członkowskich strefy euro pobudki do tego, by zadłużać się kosztem swoich co zapobiegliwszych partnerów. Pobudka ta, co nietrudno było przewidzieć, bardzo szybko udzieliła się wszystkim członkom wspólnoty, niemal całkowicie pozbawiając ją cnoty zapobiegliwości. Dość wspomnieć, że co prawda nie wszystkie kraje eurostrefy znajdują się obecnie w sytuacji Grecji (czy powoli zmierzających w jej ślady Hiszpanii czy Portugalii), ale żaden z nich nie spełnia uzgodnionych wspólnie kryteriów dyscypliny budżetowej (włączając będące ich głównym orędownikiem Niemcy).
Rzecz nie tylko w czysto ekonomicznej, oczywistej obserwacji, że nie jest w stanie przetrwać jakakolwiek wspólnota gospodarcza, której wszyscy członkowie są względem siebie dłużnikami. Rzecz również w spostrzeżeniu natury moralnej, że we wspólnocie wyposażonej w pojedynczą walutę i mogący mnożyć ją na zawołanie biurokratyczny lapis philosophorum, każdy jej uczestnik zostaje poddany pokusie ukradkowego redystrybuowania tytułów własności od ogółu posiadaczy w kierunku siebie i swojej bezpośredniej klienteli; co więcej, każdy jego sukces na tym polu tym mocniej skłania pozostałych do podjęcia podobnych, w dłuższej perspektywie destruktywnych dla całości działań. Tak było w przypadku amerykańskiego kartelu polityczno-bankowego i tak jest w przypadku „kartelu” złożonego z krajów eurostrefy, w ramach którego Europejski Bank Centralny już w tej chwili udziela bankom komercyjnym świeżo wytworzonych, niskooprocentowanych pożyczek, akceptując jako porękę wyżej oprocentowane obligacje greckiego rządu.
W świetle powyższych uwag coraz prawdopodobniej brzmi prognoza Jima Rogersa, wedle której eurowalucie pozostało jeszcze najwyżej 20 lat życia. Warto jednak w tym kontekście dodać, że słabością euro nie jest jego „wyłączność” ani „pojedynczość”, lecz to, że jest ono jedynie kolejnym pieniądzem fiducjarnym. Aby takim być przestało, konieczne byłoby zlikwidowanie szeregu biurokratycznych przeszkód, począwszy od zniesienia wobec euro (oraz fiducjarnych walut narodowych) statusu wyłącznego środka płatniczego oraz zniesienia podatku od obrotu złotem (bądź jakimkolwiek innym kruszcem lub towarem mającym szansę na stanie się powszechnie akceptowanym, twardym zabezpieczeniem tytułów własności wykorzystywanych w transakcjach rynkowych).
Rezultatem wyżej wymienionych zmian byłaby prywatyzacja (lub rozumiana po hayekowsku „denacjonalizacja”) pieniądza, która z kolei wymusiłaby prywatyzację strat nieodpowiedzialnych rządów oraz ich klienteli w sektorze bankowym. Podobny rozwój wydarzeń nie tylko zabezpieczyłby własność prywatną politycznie nieustosunkowanych jednostek, ale też wyeliminowałby pokusę nadużycia wśród tych dobrze ukorzenionych w świecie polityki.
Czy wypadki greckie stwarzają jakiekolwiek szanse na pójście spraw w tym kierunku? Wydaje się, że faza kryzysu długu publicznego jest tu znacznie bardziej obiecująca niż poprzedzająca ją faza kryzysu instytucji finansowych. O ile punktem zapalnym tej pierwszej były kłopoty podmiotów powszechnie uznawanych za wolnorynkowe, podczas gdy ich etatystyczne fundamenty zdołały skutecznie ukryć się w tle, o tyle niewypłacalność rządową i deficyty budżetowe trudno w jakikolwiek sensowny sposób powiązać z domniemanymi słabościami gospodarczego liberalizmu. Trudno też będzie w związku z tym pozostać dłużej w ukryciu rzeczywistym winowajcom – i nawet jeśli społeczna reakcja na aktualne wydarzenia przybierze formę apelu o zastąpienie złego etatyzmu etatyzmem dobrym, będzie to musiał być etatyzm dużo potulniejszy, oszczędniejszy i mniej uciążliwy dla wolnego rynku niż ten obecny. A to oznacza, że w obliczu rozgrywającej się na naszych oczach „pięknej katastrofy” pozostaje miejsce na ostrożny, ale optymistyczny uśmiech.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Libertarianism and "National Tragedies"
I suppose that the issue I am raising falls into the category of libertarian ethics. Its background is this: little more than a week ago a substantial number of high-ranking Polish politicians, including the president, perished in a plane crash. Being a Polish national myself and currently staying with my family in Poland, I have since been witnessing an unprecedented outpouring of collective grief, lamentation and exultation of the deceased (most of whom were politically divisive figures, by no means universally popular). In other words, I have been observing a gigantic and almost religiously fervent consolidation of the local statist instincts. As many commentators put it: we have to forget about our political differences for the moment; after all, it was the president of all of us and the representatives of our state. This they take to be the final, indubitable statement on the matter. The question of whether there are some individuals who refuse to think in such categories in the first place is beyond the pale of public discussion.
I tend to agree with my like-minded friends that it is in such moments that libertarians (especially those of the completely non-statist variety) are expected by the mainstream to realize how hopelessly outnumbered they are. I would hope that it is also in such moments that libertarians come to realize how profoundly important is the intellectual shift that we are aiming for and how volatile and largely illogical (in a purely descriptive sense of the term) are the attitudes we oppose.
I regard such moments as the touchstones of our intellectual and moral strength. It is not easy to resist the immense psychological pressure of mass movements and crowd emotions. It is even more difficult when one has to disentangle genuine, humane pity for tragically killed human beings from the cool, logical realization that there is no reason to pity those people more than any group of strangers wiped out in a large-scale disaster. In fact, in such cases as the one I am mentioning there seems to be a reason to be particularly restrained in one’s grief, since the victims belonged to a profession that the libertarian worldview univocally condemns as parasitical and destructive.
However, being surrounded by ubiquitous images of what appears to be authentic and sincere compassion, one can be tempted to share in the emotions of the moment – not in order to prostrate before the idol of the state, but in order to console one’s fellow human beings. This temptation has to be resisted if one is to avoid falling into an emotional trap set by the statists. In fact, I believe that given enough determination, it is even possible to turn the danger in question into an advantage. The point is to rationalize away some part of the grief of those whom one regards as at least minimally open to logical argumentation. More specifically, it is to make them realize that no matter how personally nice, warm and charming the deceased could have been (and on such occasions the state apparatus of propaganda will do everything it can to bombard everyone with endless testimonies to that effect), all their professional activities were ultimately based on a barbarous method of violent coercion.
And yet, I also believe that in such contexts the message in question should be delivered in a manner that is as subtle as it is intransigent. It needs to be noticed that the historical evidence seemingly points to the uncomfortable conclusion that on the whole the majority of people do not normally care about being free. As astonishing as it might appear to sound, contented half-slavery seems – historically and globally speaking – easier to accept than the struggle for full-blooded freedom. Furthermore, the rejection of the notion of individual responsibility breeds support for collective father figures with coercive powers – those who proclaim themselves capable of solving one’s problems by foisting them upon someone else. In other words, support for statism appears to me to be a combination of emotional factors and a certain twisted logic of intellectual laziness. Bearing that in mind, it might be the case that in the context of "national tragedies", where the emotional part of statism is the overwhelmingly dominant one, it becomes possible to tap into these emotions with the message of liberty, which, if done subtly and inoffensively enough, can substantially weaken the accompanying half-reasoned justifications for submitting to the Leviathan.
In sum, I suppose that my final, optimistic take on the matter would be this: even those events that appear to exemplify the triumph of coercive collectivism can, on closer inspection, reveal the contours of its fundamental weaknesses. Statism may yet turn out to be a colossus on clay legs – and it may so turn out at the most unexpected moment.
[Reprinted from LewRockwell.com]
I tend to agree with my like-minded friends that it is in such moments that libertarians (especially those of the completely non-statist variety) are expected by the mainstream to realize how hopelessly outnumbered they are. I would hope that it is also in such moments that libertarians come to realize how profoundly important is the intellectual shift that we are aiming for and how volatile and largely illogical (in a purely descriptive sense of the term) are the attitudes we oppose.
I regard such moments as the touchstones of our intellectual and moral strength. It is not easy to resist the immense psychological pressure of mass movements and crowd emotions. It is even more difficult when one has to disentangle genuine, humane pity for tragically killed human beings from the cool, logical realization that there is no reason to pity those people more than any group of strangers wiped out in a large-scale disaster. In fact, in such cases as the one I am mentioning there seems to be a reason to be particularly restrained in one’s grief, since the victims belonged to a profession that the libertarian worldview univocally condemns as parasitical and destructive.
However, being surrounded by ubiquitous images of what appears to be authentic and sincere compassion, one can be tempted to share in the emotions of the moment – not in order to prostrate before the idol of the state, but in order to console one’s fellow human beings. This temptation has to be resisted if one is to avoid falling into an emotional trap set by the statists. In fact, I believe that given enough determination, it is even possible to turn the danger in question into an advantage. The point is to rationalize away some part of the grief of those whom one regards as at least minimally open to logical argumentation. More specifically, it is to make them realize that no matter how personally nice, warm and charming the deceased could have been (and on such occasions the state apparatus of propaganda will do everything it can to bombard everyone with endless testimonies to that effect), all their professional activities were ultimately based on a barbarous method of violent coercion.
And yet, I also believe that in such contexts the message in question should be delivered in a manner that is as subtle as it is intransigent. It needs to be noticed that the historical evidence seemingly points to the uncomfortable conclusion that on the whole the majority of people do not normally care about being free. As astonishing as it might appear to sound, contented half-slavery seems – historically and globally speaking – easier to accept than the struggle for full-blooded freedom. Furthermore, the rejection of the notion of individual responsibility breeds support for collective father figures with coercive powers – those who proclaim themselves capable of solving one’s problems by foisting them upon someone else. In other words, support for statism appears to me to be a combination of emotional factors and a certain twisted logic of intellectual laziness. Bearing that in mind, it might be the case that in the context of "national tragedies", where the emotional part of statism is the overwhelmingly dominant one, it becomes possible to tap into these emotions with the message of liberty, which, if done subtly and inoffensively enough, can substantially weaken the accompanying half-reasoned justifications for submitting to the Leviathan.
In sum, I suppose that my final, optimistic take on the matter would be this: even those events that appear to exemplify the triumph of coercive collectivism can, on closer inspection, reveal the contours of its fundamental weaknesses. Statism may yet turn out to be a colossus on clay legs – and it may so turn out at the most unexpected moment.
[Reprinted from LewRockwell.com]
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Twenty-one Reasons Why Statism Is a Radical and Radically Incoherent Theory
Upon encountering the claim that some non-statist doctrine (e.g., anarcho-capitalism) is practically unsafe due to its radical character, it is worthwhile to point to the glaring radicalism of every form of statism. Having thus suggested, however, that it is not radicalism per se that is a problem with any given socio-economic doctrine, it is even more worthwhile to underscore that statism is not simply radical, but radical in its incoherence. It seems a very fitting description for the theory that claims, among others:
1. That the only sure way of protecting oneself against violence, aggression and coercion is to help institute and continually support a vast, monopolistic apparatus of institutionalized violence, aggression and coercion.
2. That the only sure way of protecting one’s private property rights is to help institute and continually support a coercive entity whose representatives do not own any of the said entity’s assets, and yet arrogate to themselves the right to expropriate any private property owner for the purposes whose utility it is up to them to appraise.
3. That the free market economy, whose participants – in order to prosper – have to supply one another with productive goods and services, as well as bear the full financial responsibility for the potential failures of their actions, can survive only when subjected to the regulation of a monopolistic group of non-producers, who can always shift the costs of their failures onto the shoulders of producers.
4. That statist coercion is necessary to enforce contracts, and yet the alleged “social contract” that is supposed to establish the state needs no meta-state to enforce it, thus effectively becoming a self-enforcing anomaly.
5. That the wielders of any given monopolistic apparatus of compulsion and aggression use it out of altruistic motives, but if they were to stop using coercive methods (political activity) and instead turn to voluntary methods (market activity), their altruism would be immediately supplanted by base, greed-driven egoism.
6. That states, institutions responsible for some 200 million cruel deaths in the 20th Century alone, are supposed to offer protection from “private criminals,” who even in their most organized form of international mafia networks never managed to take even the tiniest fraction of the statist death toll.
7. That the state of anarchy among individuals, each of which can generally finance his activities out of his private pocket only, would lead to an intolerable escalation of violence and bloodshed, but the state of anarchy among states, each of which can impose the costs of its activities (including warfare) on private individuals, is at least a tolerable and relatively peaceful arrangement.
8. That the lack of an external, monopolistic enforcer of agreements among individuals would lead to endless conflict, but the lack of an external, monopolistic enforcer of agreements among various organs of the state does not prevent them from cooperating effectively and even benevolently.
9. That ceding the task of maintaining justice onto an entity that is both monopolistic and coercive will not lead to it continually perverting justice in its favor.
10. That the notion of checks and balances whereby the rulers control the ruled and the ruled control the rulers does not violate the principle of Occam’s razor, suggestive of the vision in which a single group of self-ruling individuals keeps itself in peaceful balance just fine.
11. That the ruled are wise enough to choose their rulers, but not wise enough to choose the way to use their own money.
12. That a pair of travelers bumping into each other in the middle of a desolate forest do not immediately get at each other’s throats only because they fear being punished by the state.
13. That an institution which forcibly imposes its protective services on others, unilaterally determines their price and excludes all competition in this area will not attempt to benefit from initiating conflicts or letting them develop rather them resolving them or preventing their occurrence.
14. That compulsory expropriation of an individual’s private property need not be considered as a violation of anyone’s rights (given unilaterally determined “due monetary compensation”), but refusing to give up a portion of one’s independently created or contractually acquired belongings is a straightforward violation.
15. That political rights precede property rights, which presumably means that the supposed original social contract was concluded by a bonfire in a cave and written down on the cave wall, or else the conditions of the pre-contract world allowed for creating the capital necessary to (at least) house the social contractors and provide them with ink and paper in some mysterious, propertyless way.
16. That having a sufficiently large clientele turns what is normally considered a robbery into what is commonly accepted as part of a necessary social service.
17. That a relatively small group of people is capable of possessing more knowledge and making more informed decisions with regard to directing the activities of any given society than the whole rest of the society in question.
18. That the notion of equality before the law leaves place for functional privileges.
19. That unconditional respect for the principle of non-aggression is “absolutist,” but unconditional respect for state-legislated law is not.
20. That the prevalence of statism indicates the advantageousness of statism, as if the same could not be once said about astrology, witch-hunting, slavery and legal racial discrimination.
21. That each of the above assertions is solidly justified, both theoretically and empirically, while the negation of any of them lies essentially beyond the pale of reasonable discussion.
Having enumerated these (or other) reasons, it is worthwhile to confront the statist with the task of defending the allegedly moderate character of the doctrine he espouses. And even if he bites the bullet on this one and acknowledges statism’s radicalism, one should unhesitatingly confront him with another, equally difficult task – that of defending statism’s putative coherence. If he admits failure on this score as well, we should not be intellectually surprised, but we might at least feel tactically satisfied.
[Reprinted from Strike-The-Root.com]
1. That the only sure way of protecting oneself against violence, aggression and coercion is to help institute and continually support a vast, monopolistic apparatus of institutionalized violence, aggression and coercion.
2. That the only sure way of protecting one’s private property rights is to help institute and continually support a coercive entity whose representatives do not own any of the said entity’s assets, and yet arrogate to themselves the right to expropriate any private property owner for the purposes whose utility it is up to them to appraise.
3. That the free market economy, whose participants – in order to prosper – have to supply one another with productive goods and services, as well as bear the full financial responsibility for the potential failures of their actions, can survive only when subjected to the regulation of a monopolistic group of non-producers, who can always shift the costs of their failures onto the shoulders of producers.
4. That statist coercion is necessary to enforce contracts, and yet the alleged “social contract” that is supposed to establish the state needs no meta-state to enforce it, thus effectively becoming a self-enforcing anomaly.
5. That the wielders of any given monopolistic apparatus of compulsion and aggression use it out of altruistic motives, but if they were to stop using coercive methods (political activity) and instead turn to voluntary methods (market activity), their altruism would be immediately supplanted by base, greed-driven egoism.
6. That states, institutions responsible for some 200 million cruel deaths in the 20th Century alone, are supposed to offer protection from “private criminals,” who even in their most organized form of international mafia networks never managed to take even the tiniest fraction of the statist death toll.
7. That the state of anarchy among individuals, each of which can generally finance his activities out of his private pocket only, would lead to an intolerable escalation of violence and bloodshed, but the state of anarchy among states, each of which can impose the costs of its activities (including warfare) on private individuals, is at least a tolerable and relatively peaceful arrangement.
8. That the lack of an external, monopolistic enforcer of agreements among individuals would lead to endless conflict, but the lack of an external, monopolistic enforcer of agreements among various organs of the state does not prevent them from cooperating effectively and even benevolently.
9. That ceding the task of maintaining justice onto an entity that is both monopolistic and coercive will not lead to it continually perverting justice in its favor.
10. That the notion of checks and balances whereby the rulers control the ruled and the ruled control the rulers does not violate the principle of Occam’s razor, suggestive of the vision in which a single group of self-ruling individuals keeps itself in peaceful balance just fine.
11. That the ruled are wise enough to choose their rulers, but not wise enough to choose the way to use their own money.
12. That a pair of travelers bumping into each other in the middle of a desolate forest do not immediately get at each other’s throats only because they fear being punished by the state.
13. That an institution which forcibly imposes its protective services on others, unilaterally determines their price and excludes all competition in this area will not attempt to benefit from initiating conflicts or letting them develop rather them resolving them or preventing their occurrence.
14. That compulsory expropriation of an individual’s private property need not be considered as a violation of anyone’s rights (given unilaterally determined “due monetary compensation”), but refusing to give up a portion of one’s independently created or contractually acquired belongings is a straightforward violation.
15. That political rights precede property rights, which presumably means that the supposed original social contract was concluded by a bonfire in a cave and written down on the cave wall, or else the conditions of the pre-contract world allowed for creating the capital necessary to (at least) house the social contractors and provide them with ink and paper in some mysterious, propertyless way.
16. That having a sufficiently large clientele turns what is normally considered a robbery into what is commonly accepted as part of a necessary social service.
17. That a relatively small group of people is capable of possessing more knowledge and making more informed decisions with regard to directing the activities of any given society than the whole rest of the society in question.
18. That the notion of equality before the law leaves place for functional privileges.
19. That unconditional respect for the principle of non-aggression is “absolutist,” but unconditional respect for state-legislated law is not.
20. That the prevalence of statism indicates the advantageousness of statism, as if the same could not be once said about astrology, witch-hunting, slavery and legal racial discrimination.
21. That each of the above assertions is solidly justified, both theoretically and empirically, while the negation of any of them lies essentially beyond the pale of reasonable discussion.
Having enumerated these (or other) reasons, it is worthwhile to confront the statist with the task of defending the allegedly moderate character of the doctrine he espouses. And even if he bites the bullet on this one and acknowledges statism’s radicalism, one should unhesitatingly confront him with another, equally difficult task – that of defending statism’s putative coherence. If he admits failure on this score as well, we should not be intellectually surprised, but we might at least feel tactically satisfied.
[Reprinted from Strike-The-Root.com]
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Well-Informedness and rationality: a philosophical overview
There is a strong tendency in modern moral philosophy to impose restrictions on the range of desires that are to count as genuinely contributive to the desirer’s welfare. Perhaps the most frequent among such proposals is that only appropriately “informed” or “rational” desires are to count. I shall argue that the philosophical assumptions that underlie such suggestions suffer from the influence of equilibrium methodology and thus fall prey to the same shortcomings as it does. I shall also point to the similarities between the Austrian approach to rationality and the concept of “satisficing” (under a particular interpretation), which entered moral philosophy from the rational choice literature. Finally, I shall note that one crucial aspect of rationality that is ordinarily taken by the Austrians to be implicit in human action (i.e., the ability to grasp the logical relationship between the concepts that comprise the content of one’s aims and desires) should not be considered as such.
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