How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'
Thomas Hobbes is the name that is most often invoked, at least in the context of political philosophy, in conversations focused on justifications of government. The story Hobbes tells should be familiar. In the absence of government, the ‘state of nature’ obtains, in which each individual, endowed with roughly equal faculties as everyone else, is engaged in perpetual war with every other individual. We kill each other for resources (competition), we kill each other pre-emptively (diffidence), and we kill each other for egoistic superiority (glory). What is Hobbes’s solution to this miserable state of affairs? For everyone to hand over to a government absolute power and authority (presumably, only over a limited territory; otherwise, there would only be one government in the world). This government, or State (I make no distinction here, although one might), protects persons from one another, and it does so by holding a monopoly on force.
Clearly, such a solution – supposing it could work otherwise – would not work if everybody were as well-armed as the government itself is. That would defeat the whole purpose. The State is an absolute ruler, and this means that it may use force in ways, and to degrees, that no other person or non-governmental agency may. So, there are three features of the Hobbesian State: force, monopoly, and territory. This lines up neatly with Max Weber’s famous definition of the State, which is the most frequently cited: the State is a human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Even if this definition proves slightly inadequate in some particulars, it captures well enough the essence of what it means to be a State.
One understandable concern which one may have is as follows: what if the State itself, monopolistic wielder of coercion that it is, is corrupt and seeks to use its coercive power for ill rather than for the social good? What if, in other words, the State is functionally a gang which plunders and dominates us, much as an aggressor would do in a state of nature? It is by no means obvious that a State would not do so; and it is therefore not obvious that a Statist society would be an improvement upon one that is Stateless.
Hobbes insists that such is not particularly problematic. He provides a number of reasons for this, but the most compelling reason is that, in order to hold such a State in check, there would have to be another, even more powerful State, which would only serve to create the same problem anew.
So, Hobbes is making two claims here, both of which may be understood (anachronistically) in game-theoretic terms.
1. In the state of nature, where power is divided roughly equally among all persons, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being violently rather than peacefully.
2. Where power is distributed unequally, with enormous coercive power concentrated around a single person or agency, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being peacefully rather than violently (this includes the persons comprising the State as well).
Unfortunately for Hobbes, both of these theses are false. I wish to spend the most time discussing the second thesis, although I would like to devote some attention to the first claim too, since this is one on which many seem to agree with Hobbes. Thesis 1 is essentially a description of market failure, in which each individual acts correctly in her own narrow self-interest, and yet the net result is to make virtually everybody worse off than if they had all acted otherwise (for a fuller exploration of this, see my discussion ‘Anarchy, State, and Market Failure’). Specifically, everybody would be better off if we all engaged with one another peacefully rather than violently; our lives would not be as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ as they are in the state of nature. But, any individual who takes it upon herself to be peaceful rather than violent is making herself worse off: she will have fewer resources (because she does not kill for ‘competition’), she will be in greater danger from others (because she does not kill for ‘diffidence’), and she will have less glory too, although this strikes me as less urgent.
Typically, cases of ‘market failure’, where individually rational decisions add up to sub-optimal outcomes for everyone, are expressed in game-theory by means of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ game. However, the best scholarship on the prisoner’s dilemma suggests that there is far more to the ‘game’ of violence than Hobbes’s analysis allows. Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, published in 1984 and still a subject of discussion in recent literature, explores the ‘iterated prisoner’s dilemma’, which is simply a repetition, indefinitely many times, of the basic prisoner’s dilemma game. Interestingly, the correct strategy for approaching the game alters fundamentally given iteration. Although there is still some dispute about precisely which strategy is superior, there is no question about the fact that the kinds of strategies that perform best are those which are ‘cooperative’; i.e. those which work well with other strategies, and allow them to do well too. Axelrod leverages this insight as a means of explaining the evolution of peaceful interaction between persons, making use of historical examples. His work has proved influential in game theory, economics, political science and evolutionary biology.
Axelrod’s book: http://www.eleutera.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The-Evolution-of-Cooperation.pdf
A recent article, indicating the present state of scholarship on the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and offering some constructive developments: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html
So, the best contemporary treatments of Hobbes’s (unintentionally) game-theoretic claims indicate that he is very probably wrong. In fact, peaceful cooperation can, does and did occur, even in the absence of a centralised government, because, when repeat dealings are taken into account, the strategies which work best are those which allow others to benefit as well, which implies a tendency towards peaceful cooperation rather than opportunistic predation (Hobbes’s mistake was to consider the prisoner’s dilemma only as a one-off game, but the logic of the game alters entirely once iteration is accounted for).
So much for Hobbes’s first thesis. What of the second? Thesis 2 is also false, but much less controversially. Thesis 2 is a defence of totalitarianism, which few reasonable people would defend. An ‘absolute ruler’ is not a particularly attractive notion, and it is doubtful that it would make the world a better place, relative to its alternatives. What alternatives, exactly? One alternative would be anarchy. My own view is that Axelrod’s game-theoretic insights vindicate libertarian anarchy, although arguing for this directly is not something I shall be doing here (for more reflections on how we might bargain our way up to civilisation out of a Hobbesian state of nature without a government, see David Friedman, ‘A Positive Account of Property Rights’: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html).
Another alternative is the view which is most prevalent today among social democrats, conservatives, classical liberals, and practically everyone who is not an anarchist: a limited government. In answer to the question, ‘What is preventing a State from acting as it pleases, dominating and exploiting us endlessly?’, the answer is that there are certain ‘controls’ which act as ‘checks and balances’ on the State’s power (note that, when I speak of the State ‘acting’, I refer to the actions of those persons who comprise it, for collectives do not of themselves have the capacity to act).
So, the success of a defence of the State must provide a satisfactory account of these checks and balances. It must explain convincingly how it is that the State’s power is restrained, so as to prevent a tendency towards totalitarianism. What I plan to do is to examine the three most commonly-cited checks and balances – separation of powers, written constitution, democratic process – and to provide some reasons for thinking that none of them serves effectively to restrain the power of the State. My claim is not that all States are totalitarian, but that there is a tendency towards totalitarianism, such that the checks and balances, to which such confident appeal is typically made, are shown to be unfit for purpose. To put it another way, both the anarchist and the non-totalitarian Statist agree that Hobbes’s thesis 2 is false, but for different reasons. I want to show that the latter’s reasons are inadequate.
The Separation of Powers
First, we look to the separation of powers. Simply, this is the idea that the State is divided into distinct, co-equal branches, each of which has a substantial measure of regulatory influence over the others, such that no single branch may exceed its constitutional mandate and abuse its power. Ideally, it is impossible for any given branch of government to become totalitarian, because the other two branches will not allow it to do so. If the executive becomes ‘too big for its boots’, then the legislature and the judiciary responsibly ‘step in’ and exercise their regulatory influence over it, so as to keep it in check. But is this, in fact, the way that it works? To address this question, we must not ask, ‘What are the three co-equal branches of government notionally intended to do?’ Rather, we must ask, ‘What do the three co-equal branches of government have a realistic incentive to do?’ Do the three co-equal branches of government have a realistic incentive to hold one another in check, and to prevent each other from growing in power?
The correct answer is ‘For the most part, no’. It is not inconceivable that one branch of government exercise its influence responsibly and nobly over another, but this is untypical. In general, there is little or no incentive for this to happen, and in some cases there is an incentive for it not to happen. In order to explain why, let us consider a market illustration. Suppose there are two firms which sell a similar product, and are therefore market competitors. Let us say that they are both vendors of tea. Let us also imagine that each of these firms has some kind of regulatory influence over the other: perhaps they each own land that crosses the other’s import route, so that they can each disrupt the other’s supply of tea leaves. The two firms have a long-standing agreement that they will not exercise their disruptive influence, provided that their opponent’s market share not increase past a certain point (say, 50% of the market). Now, it is possible that one’s market share increase in such a way that does not threaten the other; perhaps the demand for tea increases, and both firms enjoy more sales. But, assuming that the demand for tea remain constant, it seems that any increase in the market share of one firm results in a decrease in the market share of their competitor. So, if one firm starts to increase in ‘power’ (market share), the competitor assuredly does have an incentive to make good on its threats and implement whatever regulatory controls it has at its disposal to hold it ‘in check’.
But what if the two firms are not competitors at all, but sell complementary products? Suppose that one firm is a tea vendor and the other is a vendor of chocolate biscuits. Tea and chocolate biscuits are complements: ceteris paribus, as sales of one increase so do the sales of the other. If, therefore, one firm in this scenario attempts to boost its sales and increase its market share, this is actually to the benefit of the other firm. Each does well when the other does well.
What does this tell us? It suggests that, when two or more agencies are in a position to exercise regulatory influence over the other(s), they have a realistic incentive to do so if the agencies are competitive, and they do not have a realistic incentive to do so if they are complementary. Are the executive, legislative and judicial branches competitive or complementary? The answer is implied in the question itself: they are each providing a different and complementary service. The legislature passes laws, the judiciary interprets laws, and the executive enforces laws. The more laws are passed, the more laws there are to interpret and enforce. What is more, all three branches of government benefit from perpetuating the following (untrue) commitment in the minds of their citizens: that the services which each branch provides can only be provided effectively by them. Quite simply, it is in the interests of the State in toto to maintain and grow the power of the State in toto; it is plausible that the growth of the power and influence of the State involves the growth of all three branches of government. In this sense, they have a ‘common cause’. Suppose that the majority of people could be persuaded that the State is not necessary in order to have a system of rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution. All three branches would be equally threatened by such a phenomenon.
This would imply that, typically, the three co-equal branches of government do not have a realistic incentive to exercise regulatory control over the others. What, then, would a true ‘separation of powers’ look like? We have already seen the beginnings of an answer in the analysis we have given. Competition separates powers. Suppose that, instead of power being separated between three different and complementary service-providers (i.e. law-producers, law-interpreters, law-enforcers), power was separated across n many competitors. One may suggest that this already obtains, since, if one does not like one’s own State, one may simply leave and go to another. But this, I believe, is to miss the point. States are territorial sovereigns. When we speak of checks and balances, we are looking for controls on the State’s power over the territory it governs. If the ‘You can always leave’ argument is taken seriously, then there really is no reason why the government should not be totalitarian after all. What we are looking for, then, is a separation of powers within the territory, and not between territories. And, as we have seen, it is markets, and not monopolies, which separate powers.
It is beyond my purpose here to provide an account of rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution in a Stateless society, but for explorations of these issues, see David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism.
The Written Constitution
Next, let us consider the limits established by a written constitution. This provides a set of formal boundaries, beyond which, notionally, the government may not act. Clearly, the mere existence of a written constitution serves as no protection in itself. Minimally, three further things are required. First, it must be created in a way that is fair (consider, for instance, if a constitution did exist, but it afforded the State totally unacceptable powers). Second, it must be interpreted in a manner that is fair and competent. Written constitutions are produced in specific historical contexts, and cannot possibly anticipate the myriad ways in which the world may change, let alone the ways in which its own language may change. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it must be enforced. At the risk of glibness, a piece of paper does not stop the bullet from a gun. It must be accompanied by the commitment, on behalf of those who are equipped to do so, to enforce its stipulations.
A written constitution, then, must be accompanied by certain services: law-production, law-interpretation, and law-enforcement (a constitution, after all, is essentially a kind of law). These services are familiar: they are the services provided by the State itself. But this raises a problem, that the State is, in effect, made the judge in its own case. Since the State is responsible for establishing its own limits, interpreting the sense of these limits as time moves on, and seeing them enforced, there is a clear conflict of interests. It is not at all difficult to appreciate the nature of this conflict. Suppose that the State consisted of precisely one supreme ruler, who is responsible for establishing, interpreting and enforcing the limits on his own power. Clearly, he cannot be trusted to do so. If he could, it would only be because we have judged him to be a trustworthy ruler, in which case the constitution would be unnecessary in any case. Suppose, instead, that the State consisted of a group of rulers, all of whom were equally responsible for establishing, interpreting and enforcing their own limits. Would this be an improvement? Hardly; if they are all co-rulers, then they all share a common interest, that of growing the power of the State, and interpreting its constitutional limits as liberally and permissively as possible.
It is at this point that the State’s apologist will draw attention to the fact that, while the State is indeed responsible for the production, interpretation and enforcement of its own limits, these services are provided by different branches of government, and therefore it is not a straightforward case of a group of individuals serving as their own judges. Appeal is being made, in other words, to the separation of powers. For this reason, I suggest that the ‘checks and balances’ provided by a written constitution do not serve as an extra defence, over and above the separation of powers. Rather, the defence against totalitarian tyranny which the constitution is intended to provide can only be trusted if we already have some independent reason for trusting the separation of powers. However, I have already provided reasons for thinking that the way in which power is separated in the States of our acquaintance is not adequate to protect against totalitarianism. This, in turn, would seem to render ‘constitutional limits’ largely impotent.
As John C. Calhoun observed, scathingly yet lucidly, in his A Disquisition on Government, it will always be in the interests of the larger and more influential political party to exercise the powers granted by the constitution, and to ignore its limitations as far as is possible. Meanwhile, the weaker and less influential party will have the opposite incentives, to hold the larger party to obey its restrictions, and to resist and question every exercise of power, whether legitimate or not. The larger party will seek to ignore and flout its restrictions, and the weaker party will seek to uphold them. What will the outcome be? ‘In a contest so unequal,’ says Calhoun, ‘the result would not be doubtful.’ The larger and more powerful party will tend to be successful in enforcing its own interpretation of the limits placed upon it, and so, over time, there is an inevitable tendency towards a ‘liberalising’ (in a pejorative sense) of the constitution’s interpretation, and thence to totalitarianism.
Democracy
We look, finally, at the democratic process itself. The common-sense or ‘naïve’ model of democracy is that, if those in power start to exceed their constitutionally defined mandate, we, the people, simply vote them out. A minimal requirement for such an arrangement to succeed is that voters be, in general, politically well-informed. Unfortunately, from an individual perspective, there is very little reason to become well-informed. Suppose you live in a society, virtually all the members of which are politically well-informed already. If such is the case, there is little reason for you to take it upon yourself to become well-informed as well, for the rest of society can probably already be relied upon to reach the ‘right result’. Suppose instead that you live in a society, virtually nobody in which is well-informed. Here, again, it profits you little to become suitably well-informed, as here, too, your vote is highly unlikely to impact the outcome of any decision-making process. This, sadly, is an unavoidable ingredient in any collective decision-making process (except on an extremely small scale): because the individual’s contribution has mathematically negligible odds of swaying the final decision, it simply does not pay the individual to take it upon herself to become well-informed, given the significant costs in time and intellectual power that is required in order to do so.
The proof is in the pudding. From experience, we know that the average voter is woefully ignorant. Countless studies have shown that a majority of voters cannot even name their constituency’s representative, let alone enumerate their representative’s voting decisions on recent bills. Even the rudiments of a country’s political system are unknown to an astonishing number of people. We can therefore understand the voter’s incentive structure as giving rise to a kind of market-failure: sure enough, if every voter becomes politically well-informed, then this will probably yield the best result possible, but any individual who takes it upon herself to do so is taking a course of action which costs her more than it benefits her.
But, even supposing that a substantial number of voters were suitably well-informed, this of itself is not sufficient to keep a State from exceeding its constitutional limits. Voters, understandably, will tend to vote in their own immediate interests and in favour of the politicians who appear to represent their own values. If the predominant party happens to be the one which suits a given voter, that voter has little reason to vote against it. Let us remind ourselves that the State is an agency of coercion, and it is in the nature of coercion that it tends to be predatory in nature, benefitting one party at another’s expense. It follows that a State can only ever be a weapon to be wielded by some (to their benefit) against others (at their expense). In a representative democracy, the majority are positioned to benefit at the expense of those who are outvoted, regardless of whether or not the State exceeds its prescribed mandate.
Let us lay these considerations aside. Let us assume, counterfactually, that a substantial majority of voters are both well-informed and care suitably about the State acting appropriately. What kind of effect will this have on the actions of the State? A private firm must continually satisfy its consumers in order to survive; the profit-and-loss system encourages the firm to be hyper-sensitive to the degree to which it effectively satisfies consumer preferences. If a large firm has a commercially poor week or month, it must ask itself what it must do immediately so as to reclaim its customers, who are at liberty to shop elsewhere upon the turn of a dime. The State, on the other hand, hardly faces such constraints. Elections are typically held once every four or five years, and so a voter whose preference alters must wait as long as this before they can select a new political preference. Even then, unless the voter can persuade suitably many of her neighbours, she may continue to be governed by a person or party whom she does not endorse. Contrast this with the freedom she has as a consumer: she may decide, as she lies in bed at night, to patronise a new supermarket in the morning, effective immediately, and her changed preferences are not dependent upon her successfully persuading her neighbours to shop where she shops.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the representatives for whom we vote do not have an enforceable contract with us. If your elected representative violates every promise he makes on the campaign trail, you have no legal recourse. All you may do is wait for however many years it takes, cross your fingers, and hope in vain that your next choice has more integrity.
How Optimistic Should We Be?
In the above treatment, I have tried to show that there are good reasons for seriously doubting the effectiveness of the ‘checks and balances’ which are notionally intended to restrain State power. Recognising the inadequacy of these mechanisms should be cause for serious thought. The question with which we began was: 'Given that the State holds a monopoly on force, what is preventing it from acting as an aggressor in a state of nature would act?' Nothing less than the philosophical justification of the State may hang on this question. If, it transpires, there is little reason for thinking that the State is going to obey the limits placed upon it, then it may be little improvement at all. For clarity’s sake, I am doubtful that Hobbes’s analysis of the state of nature is the correct one, so what I am not arguing is that the ‘war of all against all’ is preferable to the present Statist situation. As Axelrod, Friedman and others have shown, there are good game-theoretic reasons for thinking that a State is not a necessary precondition for the emergence of peaceful cooperation; though, admittedly, this is a thesis to which I have not done justice in this piece. But if, as I argue, we have good reason for thinking, not only that Hobbes’s totalitarianism is mistaken, but also that the defences that are set in place to protect us from totalitarianism are not fit for purpose, we might have reason to look again at anarchy as the least-bad alternative. A positive defence of anarchy will, however, have to wait for another occasion.
I will finish with this thought. It is often assumed that the anarchist must be terribly optimistic about human nature; she must take the view that human beings are essentially peaceful and selfless creatures who can be trusted to do the right thing, in the absence of a restraining influence. Meanwhile, those who are suitably pessimistic (or perhaps simply 'realistic') about human nature ought to want a State, so as to protect people from each other. Statism, so it goes, is the more grounded, sober, realistic position, which takes human nature as it is, and which takes human incentives seriously. I hope to have given pause to someone who might take such a view uncritically.
Clearly, such a solution – supposing it could work otherwise – would not work if everybody were as well-armed as the government itself is. That would defeat the whole purpose. The State is an absolute ruler, and this means that it may use force in ways, and to degrees, that no other person or non-governmental agency may. So, there are three features of the Hobbesian State: force, monopoly, and territory. This lines up neatly with Max Weber’s famous definition of the State, which is the most frequently cited: the State is a human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Even if this definition proves slightly inadequate in some particulars, it captures well enough the essence of what it means to be a State.
One understandable concern which one may have is as follows: what if the State itself, monopolistic wielder of coercion that it is, is corrupt and seeks to use its coercive power for ill rather than for the social good? What if, in other words, the State is functionally a gang which plunders and dominates us, much as an aggressor would do in a state of nature? It is by no means obvious that a State would not do so; and it is therefore not obvious that a Statist society would be an improvement upon one that is Stateless.
Hobbes insists that such is not particularly problematic. He provides a number of reasons for this, but the most compelling reason is that, in order to hold such a State in check, there would have to be another, even more powerful State, which would only serve to create the same problem anew.
So, Hobbes is making two claims here, both of which may be understood (anachronistically) in game-theoretic terms.
1. In the state of nature, where power is divided roughly equally among all persons, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being violently rather than peacefully.
2. Where power is distributed unequally, with enormous coercive power concentrated around a single person or agency, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being peacefully rather than violently (this includes the persons comprising the State as well).
Unfortunately for Hobbes, both of these theses are false. I wish to spend the most time discussing the second thesis, although I would like to devote some attention to the first claim too, since this is one on which many seem to agree with Hobbes. Thesis 1 is essentially a description of market failure, in which each individual acts correctly in her own narrow self-interest, and yet the net result is to make virtually everybody worse off than if they had all acted otherwise (for a fuller exploration of this, see my discussion ‘Anarchy, State, and Market Failure’). Specifically, everybody would be better off if we all engaged with one another peacefully rather than violently; our lives would not be as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ as they are in the state of nature. But, any individual who takes it upon herself to be peaceful rather than violent is making herself worse off: she will have fewer resources (because she does not kill for ‘competition’), she will be in greater danger from others (because she does not kill for ‘diffidence’), and she will have less glory too, although this strikes me as less urgent.
Typically, cases of ‘market failure’, where individually rational decisions add up to sub-optimal outcomes for everyone, are expressed in game-theory by means of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ game. However, the best scholarship on the prisoner’s dilemma suggests that there is far more to the ‘game’ of violence than Hobbes’s analysis allows. Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, published in 1984 and still a subject of discussion in recent literature, explores the ‘iterated prisoner’s dilemma’, which is simply a repetition, indefinitely many times, of the basic prisoner’s dilemma game. Interestingly, the correct strategy for approaching the game alters fundamentally given iteration. Although there is still some dispute about precisely which strategy is superior, there is no question about the fact that the kinds of strategies that perform best are those which are ‘cooperative’; i.e. those which work well with other strategies, and allow them to do well too. Axelrod leverages this insight as a means of explaining the evolution of peaceful interaction between persons, making use of historical examples. His work has proved influential in game theory, economics, political science and evolutionary biology.
Axelrod’s book: http://www.eleutera.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The-Evolution-of-Cooperation.pdf
A recent article, indicating the present state of scholarship on the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and offering some constructive developments: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html
So, the best contemporary treatments of Hobbes’s (unintentionally) game-theoretic claims indicate that he is very probably wrong. In fact, peaceful cooperation can, does and did occur, even in the absence of a centralised government, because, when repeat dealings are taken into account, the strategies which work best are those which allow others to benefit as well, which implies a tendency towards peaceful cooperation rather than opportunistic predation (Hobbes’s mistake was to consider the prisoner’s dilemma only as a one-off game, but the logic of the game alters entirely once iteration is accounted for).
So much for Hobbes’s first thesis. What of the second? Thesis 2 is also false, but much less controversially. Thesis 2 is a defence of totalitarianism, which few reasonable people would defend. An ‘absolute ruler’ is not a particularly attractive notion, and it is doubtful that it would make the world a better place, relative to its alternatives. What alternatives, exactly? One alternative would be anarchy. My own view is that Axelrod’s game-theoretic insights vindicate libertarian anarchy, although arguing for this directly is not something I shall be doing here (for more reflections on how we might bargain our way up to civilisation out of a Hobbesian state of nature without a government, see David Friedman, ‘A Positive Account of Property Rights’: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html).
Another alternative is the view which is most prevalent today among social democrats, conservatives, classical liberals, and practically everyone who is not an anarchist: a limited government. In answer to the question, ‘What is preventing a State from acting as it pleases, dominating and exploiting us endlessly?’, the answer is that there are certain ‘controls’ which act as ‘checks and balances’ on the State’s power (note that, when I speak of the State ‘acting’, I refer to the actions of those persons who comprise it, for collectives do not of themselves have the capacity to act).
So, the success of a defence of the State must provide a satisfactory account of these checks and balances. It must explain convincingly how it is that the State’s power is restrained, so as to prevent a tendency towards totalitarianism. What I plan to do is to examine the three most commonly-cited checks and balances – separation of powers, written constitution, democratic process – and to provide some reasons for thinking that none of them serves effectively to restrain the power of the State. My claim is not that all States are totalitarian, but that there is a tendency towards totalitarianism, such that the checks and balances, to which such confident appeal is typically made, are shown to be unfit for purpose. To put it another way, both the anarchist and the non-totalitarian Statist agree that Hobbes’s thesis 2 is false, but for different reasons. I want to show that the latter’s reasons are inadequate.
The Separation of Powers
First, we look to the separation of powers. Simply, this is the idea that the State is divided into distinct, co-equal branches, each of which has a substantial measure of regulatory influence over the others, such that no single branch may exceed its constitutional mandate and abuse its power. Ideally, it is impossible for any given branch of government to become totalitarian, because the other two branches will not allow it to do so. If the executive becomes ‘too big for its boots’, then the legislature and the judiciary responsibly ‘step in’ and exercise their regulatory influence over it, so as to keep it in check. But is this, in fact, the way that it works? To address this question, we must not ask, ‘What are the three co-equal branches of government notionally intended to do?’ Rather, we must ask, ‘What do the three co-equal branches of government have a realistic incentive to do?’ Do the three co-equal branches of government have a realistic incentive to hold one another in check, and to prevent each other from growing in power?
The correct answer is ‘For the most part, no’. It is not inconceivable that one branch of government exercise its influence responsibly and nobly over another, but this is untypical. In general, there is little or no incentive for this to happen, and in some cases there is an incentive for it not to happen. In order to explain why, let us consider a market illustration. Suppose there are two firms which sell a similar product, and are therefore market competitors. Let us say that they are both vendors of tea. Let us also imagine that each of these firms has some kind of regulatory influence over the other: perhaps they each own land that crosses the other’s import route, so that they can each disrupt the other’s supply of tea leaves. The two firms have a long-standing agreement that they will not exercise their disruptive influence, provided that their opponent’s market share not increase past a certain point (say, 50% of the market). Now, it is possible that one’s market share increase in such a way that does not threaten the other; perhaps the demand for tea increases, and both firms enjoy more sales. But, assuming that the demand for tea remain constant, it seems that any increase in the market share of one firm results in a decrease in the market share of their competitor. So, if one firm starts to increase in ‘power’ (market share), the competitor assuredly does have an incentive to make good on its threats and implement whatever regulatory controls it has at its disposal to hold it ‘in check’.
But what if the two firms are not competitors at all, but sell complementary products? Suppose that one firm is a tea vendor and the other is a vendor of chocolate biscuits. Tea and chocolate biscuits are complements: ceteris paribus, as sales of one increase so do the sales of the other. If, therefore, one firm in this scenario attempts to boost its sales and increase its market share, this is actually to the benefit of the other firm. Each does well when the other does well.
What does this tell us? It suggests that, when two or more agencies are in a position to exercise regulatory influence over the other(s), they have a realistic incentive to do so if the agencies are competitive, and they do not have a realistic incentive to do so if they are complementary. Are the executive, legislative and judicial branches competitive or complementary? The answer is implied in the question itself: they are each providing a different and complementary service. The legislature passes laws, the judiciary interprets laws, and the executive enforces laws. The more laws are passed, the more laws there are to interpret and enforce. What is more, all three branches of government benefit from perpetuating the following (untrue) commitment in the minds of their citizens: that the services which each branch provides can only be provided effectively by them. Quite simply, it is in the interests of the State in toto to maintain and grow the power of the State in toto; it is plausible that the growth of the power and influence of the State involves the growth of all three branches of government. In this sense, they have a ‘common cause’. Suppose that the majority of people could be persuaded that the State is not necessary in order to have a system of rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution. All three branches would be equally threatened by such a phenomenon.
This would imply that, typically, the three co-equal branches of government do not have a realistic incentive to exercise regulatory control over the others. What, then, would a true ‘separation of powers’ look like? We have already seen the beginnings of an answer in the analysis we have given. Competition separates powers. Suppose that, instead of power being separated between three different and complementary service-providers (i.e. law-producers, law-interpreters, law-enforcers), power was separated across n many competitors. One may suggest that this already obtains, since, if one does not like one’s own State, one may simply leave and go to another. But this, I believe, is to miss the point. States are territorial sovereigns. When we speak of checks and balances, we are looking for controls on the State’s power over the territory it governs. If the ‘You can always leave’ argument is taken seriously, then there really is no reason why the government should not be totalitarian after all. What we are looking for, then, is a separation of powers within the territory, and not between territories. And, as we have seen, it is markets, and not monopolies, which separate powers.
It is beyond my purpose here to provide an account of rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution in a Stateless society, but for explorations of these issues, see David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism.
The Written Constitution
Next, let us consider the limits established by a written constitution. This provides a set of formal boundaries, beyond which, notionally, the government may not act. Clearly, the mere existence of a written constitution serves as no protection in itself. Minimally, three further things are required. First, it must be created in a way that is fair (consider, for instance, if a constitution did exist, but it afforded the State totally unacceptable powers). Second, it must be interpreted in a manner that is fair and competent. Written constitutions are produced in specific historical contexts, and cannot possibly anticipate the myriad ways in which the world may change, let alone the ways in which its own language may change. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it must be enforced. At the risk of glibness, a piece of paper does not stop the bullet from a gun. It must be accompanied by the commitment, on behalf of those who are equipped to do so, to enforce its stipulations.
A written constitution, then, must be accompanied by certain services: law-production, law-interpretation, and law-enforcement (a constitution, after all, is essentially a kind of law). These services are familiar: they are the services provided by the State itself. But this raises a problem, that the State is, in effect, made the judge in its own case. Since the State is responsible for establishing its own limits, interpreting the sense of these limits as time moves on, and seeing them enforced, there is a clear conflict of interests. It is not at all difficult to appreciate the nature of this conflict. Suppose that the State consisted of precisely one supreme ruler, who is responsible for establishing, interpreting and enforcing the limits on his own power. Clearly, he cannot be trusted to do so. If he could, it would only be because we have judged him to be a trustworthy ruler, in which case the constitution would be unnecessary in any case. Suppose, instead, that the State consisted of a group of rulers, all of whom were equally responsible for establishing, interpreting and enforcing their own limits. Would this be an improvement? Hardly; if they are all co-rulers, then they all share a common interest, that of growing the power of the State, and interpreting its constitutional limits as liberally and permissively as possible.
It is at this point that the State’s apologist will draw attention to the fact that, while the State is indeed responsible for the production, interpretation and enforcement of its own limits, these services are provided by different branches of government, and therefore it is not a straightforward case of a group of individuals serving as their own judges. Appeal is being made, in other words, to the separation of powers. For this reason, I suggest that the ‘checks and balances’ provided by a written constitution do not serve as an extra defence, over and above the separation of powers. Rather, the defence against totalitarian tyranny which the constitution is intended to provide can only be trusted if we already have some independent reason for trusting the separation of powers. However, I have already provided reasons for thinking that the way in which power is separated in the States of our acquaintance is not adequate to protect against totalitarianism. This, in turn, would seem to render ‘constitutional limits’ largely impotent.
As John C. Calhoun observed, scathingly yet lucidly, in his A Disquisition on Government, it will always be in the interests of the larger and more influential political party to exercise the powers granted by the constitution, and to ignore its limitations as far as is possible. Meanwhile, the weaker and less influential party will have the opposite incentives, to hold the larger party to obey its restrictions, and to resist and question every exercise of power, whether legitimate or not. The larger party will seek to ignore and flout its restrictions, and the weaker party will seek to uphold them. What will the outcome be? ‘In a contest so unequal,’ says Calhoun, ‘the result would not be doubtful.’ The larger and more powerful party will tend to be successful in enforcing its own interpretation of the limits placed upon it, and so, over time, there is an inevitable tendency towards a ‘liberalising’ (in a pejorative sense) of the constitution’s interpretation, and thence to totalitarianism.
Democracy
We look, finally, at the democratic process itself. The common-sense or ‘naïve’ model of democracy is that, if those in power start to exceed their constitutionally defined mandate, we, the people, simply vote them out. A minimal requirement for such an arrangement to succeed is that voters be, in general, politically well-informed. Unfortunately, from an individual perspective, there is very little reason to become well-informed. Suppose you live in a society, virtually all the members of which are politically well-informed already. If such is the case, there is little reason for you to take it upon yourself to become well-informed as well, for the rest of society can probably already be relied upon to reach the ‘right result’. Suppose instead that you live in a society, virtually nobody in which is well-informed. Here, again, it profits you little to become suitably well-informed, as here, too, your vote is highly unlikely to impact the outcome of any decision-making process. This, sadly, is an unavoidable ingredient in any collective decision-making process (except on an extremely small scale): because the individual’s contribution has mathematically negligible odds of swaying the final decision, it simply does not pay the individual to take it upon herself to become well-informed, given the significant costs in time and intellectual power that is required in order to do so.
The proof is in the pudding. From experience, we know that the average voter is woefully ignorant. Countless studies have shown that a majority of voters cannot even name their constituency’s representative, let alone enumerate their representative’s voting decisions on recent bills. Even the rudiments of a country’s political system are unknown to an astonishing number of people. We can therefore understand the voter’s incentive structure as giving rise to a kind of market-failure: sure enough, if every voter becomes politically well-informed, then this will probably yield the best result possible, but any individual who takes it upon herself to do so is taking a course of action which costs her more than it benefits her.
But, even supposing that a substantial number of voters were suitably well-informed, this of itself is not sufficient to keep a State from exceeding its constitutional limits. Voters, understandably, will tend to vote in their own immediate interests and in favour of the politicians who appear to represent their own values. If the predominant party happens to be the one which suits a given voter, that voter has little reason to vote against it. Let us remind ourselves that the State is an agency of coercion, and it is in the nature of coercion that it tends to be predatory in nature, benefitting one party at another’s expense. It follows that a State can only ever be a weapon to be wielded by some (to their benefit) against others (at their expense). In a representative democracy, the majority are positioned to benefit at the expense of those who are outvoted, regardless of whether or not the State exceeds its prescribed mandate.
Let us lay these considerations aside. Let us assume, counterfactually, that a substantial majority of voters are both well-informed and care suitably about the State acting appropriately. What kind of effect will this have on the actions of the State? A private firm must continually satisfy its consumers in order to survive; the profit-and-loss system encourages the firm to be hyper-sensitive to the degree to which it effectively satisfies consumer preferences. If a large firm has a commercially poor week or month, it must ask itself what it must do immediately so as to reclaim its customers, who are at liberty to shop elsewhere upon the turn of a dime. The State, on the other hand, hardly faces such constraints. Elections are typically held once every four or five years, and so a voter whose preference alters must wait as long as this before they can select a new political preference. Even then, unless the voter can persuade suitably many of her neighbours, she may continue to be governed by a person or party whom she does not endorse. Contrast this with the freedom she has as a consumer: she may decide, as she lies in bed at night, to patronise a new supermarket in the morning, effective immediately, and her changed preferences are not dependent upon her successfully persuading her neighbours to shop where she shops.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the representatives for whom we vote do not have an enforceable contract with us. If your elected representative violates every promise he makes on the campaign trail, you have no legal recourse. All you may do is wait for however many years it takes, cross your fingers, and hope in vain that your next choice has more integrity.
How Optimistic Should We Be?
In the above treatment, I have tried to show that there are good reasons for seriously doubting the effectiveness of the ‘checks and balances’ which are notionally intended to restrain State power. Recognising the inadequacy of these mechanisms should be cause for serious thought. The question with which we began was: 'Given that the State holds a monopoly on force, what is preventing it from acting as an aggressor in a state of nature would act?' Nothing less than the philosophical justification of the State may hang on this question. If, it transpires, there is little reason for thinking that the State is going to obey the limits placed upon it, then it may be little improvement at all. For clarity’s sake, I am doubtful that Hobbes’s analysis of the state of nature is the correct one, so what I am not arguing is that the ‘war of all against all’ is preferable to the present Statist situation. As Axelrod, Friedman and others have shown, there are good game-theoretic reasons for thinking that a State is not a necessary precondition for the emergence of peaceful cooperation; though, admittedly, this is a thesis to which I have not done justice in this piece. But if, as I argue, we have good reason for thinking, not only that Hobbes’s totalitarianism is mistaken, but also that the defences that are set in place to protect us from totalitarianism are not fit for purpose, we might have reason to look again at anarchy as the least-bad alternative. A positive defence of anarchy will, however, have to wait for another occasion.
I will finish with this thought. It is often assumed that the anarchist must be terribly optimistic about human nature; she must take the view that human beings are essentially peaceful and selfless creatures who can be trusted to do the right thing, in the absence of a restraining influence. Meanwhile, those who are suitably pessimistic (or perhaps simply 'realistic') about human nature ought to want a State, so as to protect people from each other. Statism, so it goes, is the more grounded, sober, realistic position, which takes human nature as it is, and which takes human incentives seriously. I hope to have given pause to someone who might take such a view uncritically.
Comments (105)
Right. That is one of the reasons why I say that political theory has to be underwritten by Christianity, or something like it. I mean, if you wanted to underwrite it with evolutionary biology - well, perish the thought. Even Dawkins knows that 'survival of the fittest' is a dreadful social theory. There has to be some rationale for treating others as one would treat oneself, if it is not to be something other than a wishful platitude - a real philosophical rationale, with some sense of binding power. It's hard to demonstrate in nature, although even if it were not, it would still not necessarily apply to h. sapiens, who is now many steps removed from nature.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Given that physical well-being is the only ultimate end. If, say, one imagined that some greater good, greater even than survival, awaited those who chose not to exercise brute physical power, then there might indeed be a rationale for peacefulness.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The next few weeks will be highly instructive in this regard.
Overall, I'm in agreement with Churchill's gloomy prognostication - that democracy has many dreadful shortcomings, but that it's the least evil of the possible alternatives. But, as you observe, that does depend on an educated populace capable of rational political decisions, something which certainly does seem lacking in the world's largest political economy at this time.
Excellent essay, overall.
Quoting Wayfarer
One problem with this, if we are taking incentives seriously, is: How do you make it such that everybody lives their life in such a way that is underwritten by a particular set of values? If everybody lived their life meek and mild, a government would not be necessary. But this only throws us back upon the question from which I begin: How do you guarantee that the government itself is going to adhere to such values? How people should behave is, of course, an important question, and I have my own views on this. But my emphasis has been focused more on incentives, how people realistically will behave.
As I pointed out when I brought in Axelrod et al., there is a tendency towards peaceful cooperation which is not dependent upon the existence of an institution of monopolised coercion. What is more, this tendency is not dependent upon cultivating or instilling a particular set of values in oneself or one's children. What is remarkable (but true nonetheless) is that this peaceful cooperation occurs spontaneously in an environment of rational egoists (as game theory assumes people to be). If some people are not rational egoists, but meek Christian saints, this only serves to improve matters, but this is not necessary in order to achieve stable peace.
So you are right to say:
Quoting Wayfarer
But the rationale need not consist in an adherence to a particular set of values, however noble. The rationale is the one which is illustrated by the iterated prisoner's dilemma: successful strategies are those which can work well with other strategies, and this is why rational egoists will tend, counter-intuitively, towards peaceful cooperation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Given the argument I have presented - that democracy, in the long run, does not serve as an effective defence against totalitarianism - I see no reason why Statism in any form is preferable to anarchy, both on moral and pragmatic grounds. As I pointed out, the State is a monopolistic agency. Part of what this means is that the State may engage in activities which others are prohibited (by the State) from engaging in. This implies that certain human beings are subject to a different set of restrictions from everyone else. I, for one, see no non-arbitrary justification for this.
Thanks for writing that. It was a really good read. It deserves more views.
But you’re still talking about managing others, about control strategies. Unless the culture has a sense of values which the citizenry can freely adopt, then it’s not a free society, by definition.
You’re obviously highly educated and well-read, have you by any chance encountered the dialectics of the Enlightenment?
I know of a book by that name, but I have not read it.
Have you read Robert Axelrod's book which I mentioned, The Evolution of Cooperation?
But anarchy can’t possibly be a solution to anything. Would every person be required to construct their own road? Would there be no public property? It seems to me that anarchy is simply the social manifestation of chaos, so it would be ripe for being taken over by anyone offering order. In other words, it would most likely result in authoritarianism.
The democratic state is not a monopolistic agency, but a contract between free individuals to manage their affairs in the most mutually beneficial manner.
Basically I think your argument tends towards authoritarianism.
Roads, just as with all other goods and services (including rights-enforcement, dispute-resolution, military defence and money) would be produced privately by competing agencies.
Quoting Wayfarer
It depends on what you mean by 'public property'. If you simply mean 'property owned and controlled by the government', then no, there would be no such thing. If you mean 'a patch of land that is owned jointly by more than one person', then there is no reason, in principle, why such could not come about under anarchy. But if you mean 'property that is non-private' - i.e. property from which nobody in the world was excluded - then I doubt it, because scarce resources are such that everybody may not use them at once. So at least some exclusion must take place (I take 'exclusion' to be the defining hallmark of private ownership).
Quoting Wayfarer
With respect, this is precisely wrong. The absence of a human association which holds a monopoly on physical force is not chaos. Nor is the existence of such an association 'order'. My very argument is that it is the State which tends towards totalitarianism, regardless of what controls are set in place to prevent this from happening (including the democratic process itself). You are essentially in agreement with Hobbes in what I have identified as his 'thesis 1':
'In the state of nature, where power is divided roughly equally among all persons, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being violently rather than peacefully.'
But, as I pointed out, game-theoretic reconstructions of this state of affairs shows that rational egoists tend towards peaceful order spontaneously. Not because they suddenly become good and benevolent people or because they develop a conscience, but because it is a winning strategy.
Quoting Wayfarer
States are monopolistic agencies, by nature. They claim prerogatives which they forcibly prevent other persons from engaging in. If I were to 'tax' someone, or raise an army, or place paternalistic bans on other people's recreational behaviour, I would be forcibly subdued and incarcerated. If you acted like a government, you would be in jail. States are criminal organisation on a vast scale. They are essentially tax-farms, which perdure by continually aggressing against peaceful, productive people.
Moreover, there is no contract such as you speak of. It does not exist. Certainly, no one has signed such a contract explicitly, but even if you were to claim that citizens consent to being governed implicitly by residing within an arbitrary territory, this would only hold true if you have some system for determining who owns the territory. Certainly, it cannot be said that the State owns the territory (that would be circular, since the social contract is being invoked so as to justify the existence of the State). So perhaps the territory is owned jointly by all the citizens. But why? Why these persons in particular, and only these persons? The only reason we recognise the 'citizens' to be who they are is because of (a) their legal status as such and (b) the arbitrary lines of a governed territory. But, we derive both of these things from the State itself, which is, once again, circular.
I have never encountered a social contract theory that is not formally question-begging, in that it must take the legitimacy of the State for granted as a premise, in order to go on and try to prove that very thing. For this reason, it is not surprising that ordinary social contract theories have been largely replaced by 'hypothetical' social contract theories; i.e. arguments to the effect that, even though there really is no social contract, it would still be rational for everyone to sign a social contract, and this is where the State derives its legitimacy (note that Hobbes was a hypothetical social contract theorist; he did not believe in the factual reality of a literal social contract). But such arguments are just as ineffectual. I cannot reasonably hold you to contractual obligations if you have not formally consented, regardless of how rational I think you would be to do so.
Finally, it is simply beyond the power of the State to provide 'mutual benefit'. It is not in the State's gift to do so. Only voluntary trade can achieve this. The State exists by continually initiating force and invading the property of its 'citizens'. This, as I mentioned, is a purely predatory activity, which benefits one party at another's expense. Confiscationary levies, wars, paternalistic bans on recreational or life-saving drugs, the prison- and military-industrial complexes, the poverty industry (Welfare State), tariffs and embargos are not mutually beneficial. They benefit special interest groups at the expense of most other people.
The OP seems to conflate authority and authoritarianism.
The basis of political power may be either coercion or authority (the right which arises from a moral claim of legitimacy to control, command, or otherwise influence, the behaviour of others), regardless of political structure (egalitarian or stratified). The possibility that any human institution can become corrupt is not disputed.
An odd observation. I don't believe I ever use the word 'authoritarianism'. In the phrase you quote, I am attempting to reconstruct Hobbes's position. In the story Hobbes tells, the people do hand over authority to the State. Remember, Hobbes does believe that the State is legitimate, precisely for this reason. So this would be in line with how you would define 'authority'. Whether Hobbes's story is convincing is obviously another issue.
Granting authority doesn't necessarily entail the exercise of "absolute power" (authoritarianism).
That's fine. But Hobbes does speak of the authority that is granted to the State as being absolute (which is why I have described Hobbes as a totalitarian). As I mentioned, I am re-constructing Hobbes's own position.
And using the (agreed, but for different reasons) falsity of Hobbes' (supposed) two theses to justify anarchism or limited government as alternatives to totalitarianism.
Then dispensing with the limited government ("non-totalitarian Statist") alternative, because its proponents' reasons for rejecting Hobbes' second thesis are inadequate.
My point remains unaddressed.
Yes, that is what I have done. I have argued that the protections which the non-totalitarian Statist believes constrain the State's power are unfit for purpose.
Quoting Galuchat
Perhaps you can formulate more clearly what your objection is, in relation to the arguments I have presented.
Anarchy is all about public property. Anarchy is socialism without the state.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Feigning ignorance doesn't become you.
No, you must do your own hard work. Formulate your objections clearly and thoroughly, if you want them responded to (which I am happy to do). At least do me that respect - my piece was 4,000 words, and you have taken issue with part of a sentence from its introduction, which is, as I pointed out, a reconstruction of Hobbes. You have suggested that my argument confuses 'authority' with 'authoritarianism', but you have not substantiated this claim. In fact, what I have said is:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
If you have an objection to this thesis, by all means make it. Maybe I really am ignorant, but it is not yet clear what objection you are trying to make. Please hold your own writing to the same standard that you are holding mine, as is right.
He lived through the bloodiest time of English history, and was influenced by exciled royalists when writing Leviathan. And was also a teacher to the Prince of Wales, later king Charles II.
The fact is that events in the real World have an effect in philosophers and their philosophy.
I see reason to speak of the position occupied by any manner of society as tending toward certain extrema, in the absence of any governmental entity of the abstract, that one may refer to as the 'state', of sufficient influence, to lay claim to the exercise of force, as being permissible, and a right vested thereby, within its own sphere of authority. That is to say, I find merit in the case of your previous assertion, that the whole of a society, needn't collapse unto itself, in the event that those traditional forces which restrict its most instinctive, and primal motivations, come to fade from view. Those residing within its boundaries, may likely recognize the need, and be confronted in the midst of their plight with little else, to adapt, and seek out some means, regardless of nature, or form, to achieve the reestablishment of order, amongst the chaos. Thus, it can be inferred readily, that as man is a subject of the rational, and strives to accord with those decisions which reflect this sentiment, by way of action, when any great disorder within his system of dwelling arises, it is necessary, and represents the most sensible course, to rectify such irregularities, and hopefully, address the heart of the matter, prior to such time as the loss of function becomes irreparable. For which, the medium of exacting such a need as that described, whereby its resolve can be brought to the fore, is cooperation. As it is a trait of our kind to inflict undue hardship, upon others, even our own brethren, it is true also, that the conditions which guide us, retain a purity, in counterbalance to those proclivities which we often entertain, that evince only malice, and entail only greater conflict than before, in their respective outcome(s). When none can hear any longer the cries of the helpless, nor can bear sight to the losses of one's nation, without succumbing themselves to the same agony of which each is an exemplar, all shall grow inclined, to reverse what pattern of social and moral decay has emerged, for the betterment of all. One's lifetime consists of an endless shifting between these states of living; though, perhaps not with the weight in imagery, comparable in magnitude to that which my chosen portrayal thereof, might indicate.
Why are you writing like you're 400 years old? Are you trying to sound like Thomas Hobbes?
I stand as an aged man before my time.
In all earnestness my choice of prose serves only as an established preference, in relation to both form, and style. Beyond which, there can be found no other reason to account for that same decision of mine. This is truest when it is acknowledged that to express oneself in such a fashion, seldom lends itself to clarity, as perceived by another. One even has the ground to argue that its effect, is to that end, not merely an hindrance, but wholly detrimental, also.
Verily!
Indeed!
Let us hope, that all those in observance of this exchange of ours can appreciate the great irony which underlies it.
Hold not thy breath.
Nor yet speak of thy deceit as truth.
Seeing as I have since grown fatigued((5:31 am)), and would rather not be forced to produce work that fails to concur with a certain idealized standard that I myself strongly feel to be necessary, I must now rest. Though, I will have for some time, the desire to maintain our prevailing dialogue, with respect to those general notions for which it was given, at the outset((however much my favor lies with the ironic, as well)).
((The latter likely being a truth to which you can attest, without fault.))
Good-night((or, perhaps afternoon?)). Und danke frau.
P.S To clarify the meaning of my previous line of phrase; I am an asthmatic you see, and consequently cannot at all hold my breath, without encountering great discomfort. When I then remarked "Nor yet speak of thy truth as deceit", the implication was that no such deceit can be found, as it is an element that seems almost foreign to your own character ((just as the former feat is to mine)). In either event, I at last recognize how it may have been needed, to provide a depth of context for that sake, beforehand. Oh, irony, what contorted webs of wonder hath thou woven for we!
General question: what kind of markets do you think can exist without governments, and why?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The same analysis would hold for firms. As does this apt (though repurposed) description of firms attempting to obtain and keep market control:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And the latter description of the state also applies to a firm which already has disproportionate influence:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The war you so aptly characterise between the people and the state is actually fought between the people and state + firms. Money and power go hand in hand; money can transform into political influence, having a very successful firm incentivises exercising what influence you have to get more money; and thereby more power. In that regard, regulatory capture is a shadowy compromise firms make with (market) states through collective action (lobbying, bribery, propaganda, owning school curricula, etc). That is, they do this so that they do not suffer the effects of regulations, and make political action that puts more regulations in place, or allows the regulations which are in place to be more readily enforced, less likely. The ideal situation for the megacorp's profits is no regulation at all. Unfortunately, the regulations are there to protect people (albeit minimally) from firms' behaviour; if your bottom line is profit as a firm, your bottom line isn't the prosperity of those who work for you or buy your products - at least, you can't go from one to another logically without an explanatory circumstance.
I think a lot of the things you've written are insightful, but going for a misconceived target. You wanna criticise undemocratic centralisation of influence, power and wealth? You also have to take your aim at the market and the self interested behaviour of firms.
Quoting fdrake
I'm not entirely certain what you mean by 'kinds' of markets. I understand a 'market' to be a process, in which the participants are buyers and sellers of goods and services. I understand markets to be 'free' just in case the exchanges take place by way of peaceful voluntarism rather than by threat or use of force (as in the case of theft, extortion, and so on). If the initiation of force and the invasion of private property are objectionable - and I believe that they are - then the non-existence of the State is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of a free market. So the only way I can think to answer your question is that the kind of market which would exist in the State's absence is, I hope, a free one, in the sense that voluntary exchanges are not interrupted and invaded by an aggressor, however benevolent.
Quoting fdrake
First - and I do not offer this as a rebuttal, but merely as a principle to bear in mind - we must never fall into the trap of thinking that 'States', 'firms', 'corporations' or 'markets' subsist. These are aggregations of individual persons, and it is only these persons who are the real actors, the conscious agents. Neither States nor firms have their own inherent agency. So, ultimately, there are only individuals in act, and these individuals may act with and against one another in two ways: either they may treat with one another peacefully, or else they may initiate force against one another and invade the other's property. Franz Oppenheimer distinguishes these as the two different ways of acquiring resources: the former is the 'economic means' and the latter is the 'political means'. What distinguishes them is that the former leads to mutual benefit, and can, in principle, be multiplied endlessly, whereas the latter is predatory, and benefits the aggressor only at the expense of the aggressed-against.
Do firms, like States, have an incentive to increase their own power and influence? And, if so, does this mean that firms are fundamentally like States in an important sense? Yes and yes, but only in the sense that firms, like States, are composed of persons, and it is natural for persons to want to increase their own power and influence. It is not as though there is some thing called a State, and some other thing called a firm, and it turns out that these two things are somehow related, like one genus is to another. In the world of purposeful action and incentives, there are only persons, and the similar incentives of the State and of the firm are a function of their being composed of persons.
So what is the difference between a State and a firm? A State is an agency of monopolised coercion, and a firm is not. To be a Statist is to believe that there is a certain class of persons who may engage in activities which are impermissible for non-governmental agents, and which non-governmental agents ought to be punished for engaging in. Governmental activity has most in common with the activities of those whom we recognise as criminals and criminal organisations. As Murray Rothbard has it, there really are no 'governments'; there are only certain associations of persons who act in a manner that we recognise at 'governmental'. And if we judged their actions as non-governmental, we would see them as criminal.
Firms, on the other hand, are composed of persons who are subject to the same rules as the rest of us (barring governmental privilege). The firm (the persons comprising it) are making an offer of goods and services, and the consumer may choose whether or not to enter into an exchange with a given firm. To allow the existence of a firm is not to allow that there is a class of persons who may aggress against other persons with impunity. Firms exist (in whatever sense they may be said to exist) on the same continuum of peaceful voluntarism as other behaviours which people ought to have the right to engage in. This is what Robert Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain thought-experiment is intended to illustrate.
Quoting fdrake
Firms (some of them) certainly have undue influence in a Statist society. But a firm's 'power' may derive from only two sources: the consumer, and the State. In the absence of the State, the firm must continually serve the wants of consumers in order to survive. There is no question - and this is a point on which Marxists and right-libertarians ought to agree - that there is an unholy and totally corrupting alliance between private industry and the State. The market leaders in a given industry benefit far more from the regulatory power of the State than they would from its absence; the net effect of government regulation is to preserve and entrench the position of the market leaders, by imposing costs which the market leader's competitors are much less equipped to bear. States are the monopolists and bestowers of monopoly privilege par excellence. As I pointed out in my analysis, it is only competition which separates powers.
Quoting fdrake
So, there is some truth in the above statement, in that those who are in a position to benefit from illicit government privileges have every reason to do so. But I cannot see how firms in general are at war with me. I benefit from the goods and services which they sell me, and they benefit from my patronage. Unless I believe that the goods and services which I purchase are such that I should be furnished with them unconditionally - and I see no reason why that should be the case - there is no war to speak of, here.
Well, your characterisation of a market is quite limited there. You stipulate under what conditions a market is free, without considering what a market is!
Markets can have lots of characteristics. They can function through direct barter between producers without currency, they can function almost entirely through currency and so on. The social organisation of the market says a lot about the social organisation of the society. You can reverse this; the social organisation of the society constrains what kind of markets make sense in it. In ours, with a division of labour and few primary producers, you need a general currency. In an economy that runs on infrastructure investment or there are purchases required or promoted that exceed the available funds of economic agents, there needs to be a credit system (as ahistorical as that description is). When you have more monetary value flowing around than all redeemable physical representatives, you need to move away from things like the gold standard to fiat and digital currencies etc etc.
If you're going to treat markets as independent of states, this is a bit bizarre if states are required for certain market organisations - especially the one we have now globally, no? Markets like ours need banks and laws governing the banks. Markets like ours need trade laws to interface with social institutions. State and market entwine, and have a revolving door staffing policy (at least in the UK and US), firms form alliances with dictators. More on this later...
I wonder why you leave access control to goods out of the definition of a free market? It's possible, and occurs often, that one simply does not have a choice over where you buy your stuff or get your services from; in the case of large corporate aggregates, or firms that control access to goods like broadband over large areas... This is a soft power of coercion (access control) that a large firms can and do often have now. Such firms get power by the market consolidating money in the hands of those who are successful and shining out competitors when there are access controls in place (EG, a company owns an IP on a necessary invention or has exclusive extraction rights on a natural resource). They need a lot of money to own the IP or the infrastructure required, which makes wealth concentrate more. A person can't just start a new competitor company; "Yes, gas is too expensive, I'll start my own oil rig!".
It's extremely likely that there would be companies with such power without enforceable regulatory principles; there are already regulations in place and companies skirt them as much as possible.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is extremely strange, as corporations and states have their own independent agency. A politician can sign a treaty for a country which effects all citizens, a state can limit the workday hours for all workers. Picking up the thread of markets being social forms that emerge from aggregates of people; more generally, aggregates of economic agents have both emergent effects and create institutions which act on the aggregate level; legal systems, healthcare rights, tax breaks, citizenship rights, immigration controls...
The individual agents that make up institutions can exercise the powers those institutions are endowed with. Like, say, the global tobacco lobby, establishing the UK foreign territories as a global tax haven, starting wars, doing... everything people do together. Social institutions play a vital role in the analysis of anything economic; markets are social institutions, aggregates of people make institutions like lobbying groups and firms, which can have powers (and interests!) different from the interests of those in the social institutions!
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is just wrong; real companies can and do have institutional powers not reducible to the individual powers of their agents (only an aggregate can have laws). Real companies have both a legal existence separate from their individuals (see that giant building in the Cayman Islands which is the site of >90 international companies' home bases), resource access that empowers them beyond the level of their individuals, and vectors of power that allow them to leverage the resources they have to their ends (lobbying, bribery, trade deals, ownership rights on IP etc).
Also in the real world, people must work otherwise we don't eat. In general, this involves selling one's labour to a company in exchange for a wage. Obeying the dictates of the company becomes a necessity for getting food in your mouth and a roof over your head. Anyone who's ever had a performance review has felt the sheer power that firms have over their lives; they are not innocent, and cannot be understood as just a group of individuals; the manager who has to enforce an enforced redundancy decision is also just doing their job. The upper management are just doing their thing to increase the profits of the company and keep it going. Companies have a real existence and interests separate from their workers, separate from their shareholders and especially different from their stakeholders and staff (global oil, petrochemical and industrial agriculture vs climate change anyone? Tobacco companies vs the terrible impacts of smoking on health?)
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You might think differently if you were on another end of the supply chain; maybe if your workplace had installed suicide nets and window bars to make sure that anyone thinking of throwing themselves out of the window to escape the terror of their day to day factory experience you would see that malevolence towards your staff is fully consistent with the bottom line of your target demographic. The government interferes and demands the company installs the nets, truly a humanitarian intervention.
Well, it’s not true that I have not considered what a market is; I just wasn’t certain exactly what you intended by your question. One reason for this is that I do not offer, and should not be thought as offering, a structural vision, or a set of principles for ‘social organisation’. I may make predications about what a market might look like in the absence of the State (I strongly suspect that there would be currency, for example), but it is not my place to dictate what the aggregation of peaceful activity between persons ought to look like. That would be quite illiberal of me, and therefore contrary to my own principles.
Quoting fdrake
If there is some way that a market might work, such that it is dependent upon the existence of the State in order to work that way, then obviously it would not work in that way in the absence of the State. But I don’t see this as particularly problematic. It’s true that the markets of our acquaintance are intimitely involved with the State, but that does not imply that a market is eo ipso dependent upon the existence of a State – which it is not.
Quoting fdrake
I do, mainly because the ingredients of a market – private property, exchange, prices, and so on – are, in part, rationing mechanisms, and the reason why such mechanisms are necessary is because we live in a world of scarce resources. It is precisely this fact of scarcity which means that there cannot be an unqualified right of ‘access’ to such a resource. ‘Freedom’, like so many of the foundational concepts in political philosophy, is rather nebulous and can potentially mean almost anything. What would ‘free access’ to a scarce resource even look like? If the resource is scarce, then it is literally impossible for everyone to have unbounded access to it. Not that you are suggesting such a thing. But this does mean that the ‘freedom’ of a ‘free’ market must be tied to something rather more definitive; namely, private property rights. Hence why the ‘freedom’ of the market consists in the non-invasion of property.
Quoting fdrake
Does IP mean intellectual property? If so, I would point out that ideas – the stuff of intellectual property – are non-scarce resources, and treating them as though they need to be rationed is a Statist phenomenon. Patents are, in effect, government-granted monopoly licences, not free-market phenomena. Also, exclusive extraction rights – rights bestowed by whom? Again, this sounds like we are talking about a State franchise. As I mentioned, the State is the pre-eminent bestower of monopoly privilege.
If I understand you, you are arguing that a service-provider is (softly) coercive, if it is practically difficult to patronise a competitor. I suppose the problematic issue is the vagueness of ‘soft coercion’. Either the firm is invading your property, or it isn’t. If you believe that you have an unconditional claim to, e.g., oil, then the firm is violating your property rights by neglecting to furnish you with it. If, more plausibly, you do not have an unconditional claim to the oil, then your having to pay the price they want for it is not coercive. Since one cannot have an unconditional right to a scarce resource (for this would imply that everyone be able to exploit endlessly a resource which literally cannot be exploited endlessly), private firms, I suggest, are straightforwardly non-coercive.
Quoting fdrake
Our sticking point seems to be an ontological one: whether collectives of persons have their own inherent agency, above and beyond the agency of the individual persons which comprise them. Quite simply, individuals are persons; groups are not. Sometimes, we might speak of groups as though they were an organism with their own inherent capacity to act, but this is non-literal. The Greeks called this linguistic phenomenon synecdoche, the improper predication of a property of a part to the whole. We do this in sport, when we say ‘Portugal has scored a goal’ when in fact it is not true that a country has kicked a ball into a net. Or we might say of a woman that she is ‘blonde’, when in fact it is only a principal part, her hair, that is blonde (her entire body is not simply and unqualifiedly blonde). And we do this with human collectives, too: ‘Germany is in talks with Spain’ (this might be two people talking in a room), ‘The country is mourning the death of its monarch’ (persons mourn, countries do not).
The examples you provide are not counter-instances to this ontological insight. Certainly, multiple persons might act jointly, and their actions might affect lots of other persons. But this does not imply that a collective is a subsistent entity in its own right. To illustrate, my scrabble club has 4 members (one day we will take over the world), but every Wednesday we engage in collective, collaborate activity with one another (playing scrabble). So we may say, ‘That scrabble club is playing scrabble’. And this is true, in a sense. But the thing we designate as a ‘scrabble club’ is not some fifth thing, subsisting, acting, desiring, intending, over and above the four members.
So, this, which is true . . .
Quoting fdrake
. . . does not logically imply this, which is not . . .
Quoting fdrake
Quoting fdrake
Perhaps I would; but, then again, this is not really an argument.
In the complete absence of a state, I don't think currency would function as it does. The social construction of legal tender requires an institution to enforce; there are probably better ways of doing this than with what you imagine as a state, but without there being a social institution with lots of power to enforce the norms in which currency operates, I don't see a way of preserving currency (and thus integrated networks of producers and economies).
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The historical record weighs quite heavily against this; economies that rely on currencies have (always to my knowledge) regulative bodies (states/governments/social institutions) that deal with the currency and the legal structure surrounding production, property rights and individual rights. While this doesn't make it impossible that a market cannot operate without a state, it makes it implausible that such coincidences of markets will not occur.
What you imagine as a market, how you characterise it, is laying very free and unspecified in the background, without logical guarantee that its necessary social properties do not entail the presence of regulative bodies.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Aye, IP being intellectual property. It's an extension of property law to ideas. Companies aggressively pursue patents and use them to enforce exclusive rights. This is much less often done for the products of state backed (through grants and levies) institutions like universities and research groups; consider the iPhone, whose components and technology, besides the interface, were all produced through public funding (that is, through social institutions involved with a state), were public access, and all Apple did was write an interface and integrate the components, but they have plenty of intellectual property associated with their phone. This is a clear case, as is common, of a company exploiting material in the commons for private gain.
When you envision extraction rights as bestowed by the state, and that extraction rights in your stateless imaginings do not have exclusive ownership, what do you imagine actually happens? Two oil companies have equal designs on an oil field, the oil field is public property; the transition from public property to making private property on it (granting access rights) ultimately is consistent with the laws of the state (in ideal circumstances), but without that transition; it could only be private property. The two oil companies both really want it, what happens?
Another thing you are eliding is a market's natural tendency towards the concentration of wealth and power. If a business succeeds, it gets more money, if it gets more money, it gets easier to make more money; to employ workers and buy infrastructure to capitalise on investments, to use its money as leverage in lobbying, bribery and lawmaking. You place too much emphasis on the centralisation of power achieved by the state as a (albeit shoddy) democratic social institution, and far too little on the concentration of power that occurs in the usual anti-democratic hierarchical structure of firms (as ensured by who owns (the majority share in) the company).
In the real world, the people at the top of these hierarchies influence culture and politics much more than their fellow people. They have so much power apportioned to them by the behaviour of markets alone! Moreover, when there were less restrictions in place (placed by states) on what firms could do with their workers, 5 year olds were working 14 hour days breathing in smoke. There are places where this kind of thing still happens.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You artificially limit the operation of power by constraining it to violating a property right! Hierarchical structures like firms have all kinds of internal power relations, and large ones have both huge power over their workers (obey or starve, mitigated by workers' rights law, from the state) and huge political and cultural clout. We recognise the arches of MacDonalds more readily than flags, babies form brand preferences from TV exposure before they can talk.
An aside: in terms of basic necessities, most resources are not scarce now. Global production is sufficient to feed, clothe and shelter literally everyone on the planet - way more than that even. The problem is currently one of access; getting people to the resources. Markets in this regard create a global situation of artificial scarcity. As a particularly striking example; if one has insufficient income, one cannot afford rent or a mortgage. This despite (in the UK and US at least) there being more empty homes than homeless people. Monetary access thresholds for goods always create scarcity when there are sufficient resources to satisfy needs.
In addition, your characterisation of power is tautological. Private firms can't be coercive if they only act upon things they have purchased the right for; whose powers flow from their private property. This is because it is impossible in this model of power to leverage anything except for a property right.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Take the example of a law. Establishing a law of a country is not a predication of the aggregate on the basis of its individuals, it is an intervention which may only ever be applied to an aggregate of people; citizens, immigrants, business owners etc. IE with a logical gloss, is a relation of an aggregate to another aggregate, and can only be thought in those terms. Most of our "rights and freedoms", even constitutional ones, apply to denizens of a country in the aggregate. Person of type X has status Y (citizen has this rights, Schengen zone passport member can do this... Firm must do this...).
When someone changes or introduces a law, it affects the aggregate. If someone changes the corporate tax rate in a country, it effects firms, then it effects people. The causal arrows go law change -> firm change -> individual change. You simply can't interpret this kind of thing without appealing to emergent properties of aggregates, and the ability of aggregates to act on aggregates.
When the EU introduced sweeping changes on tax transparency, it effected all firms that trade within the EU. The causal arrows are (EU political change) -> (EU firm changes) -> (Firm member changes). Also (EU political change) -> (Stock value change). Complex systems, and socio-economic ones are among the most rich, always have these aggregation properties and emergent phenomena; the law is produced by a negotiating aggregate and effects an aggregate. Political policies do the same. Economic policies do the same.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Check this paper out for a thorough demonstration that aggregate properties (macro behaviour/macroeconomic properties) are relatively insensitive to broad classes of individual behaviour (read: microeconomics underdetermines macroeconomics). Emergence in general is a thing.
In similar vocabulary to what you used, interacting parts can have wholes which have properties (and activities) which those parts don't have. Gas molecules don't have pressure. Only aggregates of gas molecules do. Gas molecules don't have temperatures; only aggregates of gas molecules do.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I think you parsed the example I gave as an emotional appeal, which it was in part, but it shows that the interests of the company can greatly diverge from the interests of their workers. Their workers would prefer not to toil until injury, or in the past (in the UK) have children the age of 5 work 14 hour shifts and get black lung. Replace black lung for bleeding hands and perpetual pain and you go to the sweatshops.
A coffee company does an opportunity cost calculation, closes and sells a shop that was actually profitable because it wasn't profitable enough, and it was predicted that the reinvestment of capital into another new branch would make more money. These workers were immediately out of a job, even if their interests were aligned with the success of their coffee shop, it's clear that the interests of the company conflicted with the interests of the workers' continuing to work there in a job they were happy with.
This is before you start to consider so called "externalities" like climate change and tobacco's influence on health. Stakeholders often care very much about things like having breathable air (choking smogs in industrial London or the current ones in Beijing), knowing whether their purchases are slowly killing them and a living wage, ability to spend a lot of time with their families. Firms don't always (read: usually have to be forced tooth and nail to) care about these things, and sometimes benefit from the immiseration of their workers. If there's no social safety net, firing creates destitution, which makes the uh... labour market very liquid, eh? In these circumstances, it doesn't matter so much how you treat your workers because you'll find someone who will do the work because they need to.
"Work here in terrible conditions or have your family starve" is not in any worker's interests. A rational utility maximiser (being tongue in cheek; we don't behave like that at all) would organise with their co workers and make a union, funny that these get beaten down and undermined as much as possible. "Have a global climate and production policy that non-negligibly risks ecological and humanitarian catastrophes" is in no one's best interests; no stakeholder's. But for the firms who profit from such replaceable labour or by maximising their short term profit rates? Yeah, works for them.
That's one of the best relevant summaries I've recently read concerning the conflicts of interests between corporate/business entities and the labour force. Coupled with the intimate relations between corporate interests and elected political figures, and you get one of the biggest current problems underwriting the wealth gap and the actual issues leading up to the all too common American view that elected officials and politicians cannot be trusted to act in the best interest of the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Very nice.
I feel that the way you use the term the "state" is very unhelpful for the topic being discussed here. Just look at the US, if use your terminology, wouldn't it be fair to say that the "state" is trying to impeach the "state" right now? You say that the "state" wants to become more totalitarian but in fact - in democracies - most of the state is terrified of the state becoming more totalitarian.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This kind of thinking is a symptom of the problem of talking about the "state" as a single political entity. When I say political, I mean domestically and not geopolitically. Branches of the government are not co-equal, they are neither competitive nor collaborative. They are also - just as the state isn't - single-minded political entities.
What motivates those who hold power isn't primarily acquiring more power but rather the preservation of their power, status, wellbeing, wealth and so on. Their power is not the power of the state or the component of the state but the preservation of an individual's role within the state. Transparent acts of corrupt behaviour is a risk, you could lose your job or go to jail and the pay off for corrupt behaviour is usually going to be in the form of a reward for the individual being corrupt - not advancing the political power of the government agency you belong to.
As a democracy, we're relying on the motivations of those in government to be more complicated and varied than acquiring power for the government body or political party that they belong to.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The difficulty in establishing any objective basis upon which to found one's chosen analysis of the subject at hand, in this case, is that none may conceive of how a market, in its general operation, might appear in the absence of any extraneous structure, that otherwise holds sway over the particularities of its course, and to some extent, dictates thusly the outcome of each exchange of value, and product, which as a whole embodies the purpose for which all forms of market likely stand. This bears truth on account of the universality of our kind's proneness to seek out order, whether by means that are forceful in nature, or even passive, when confronted with what lies contrary thereto((disorder)), in those affairs of life with which we occupy ourselves. Furthermore, the urgency which is demanded by the need for such forces of mediation to remain present, at all times, is greatest when the resources of one's livelihood, that which allows one to subsist, are compromised, or at all without the assurance of being regarded as sacrosanct((and might therefore be infringed upon with greater frequency than is the case when set procedures of conduct are in place, and enforced without exception)); that is to implicate their exploitation for the sake of the gain of another, as though its finding were certain, and eventual, without those entities((the state, government; any party whose function is applicable to the generality, and mediative in effect)) which, provide to the machinations of society, a firmness in position, and sense of stability by which to proceed forth, in a way that reflects due confidence in what benefits have since been garnered in relation to any other, remaining within the field of one's ownership, unless voluntarily relinquished, by oneself.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I would argue that the conditions of the market's dependency upon the state, are broadly found, yet to some degree, are isolated; in the sense that only when the latter is disconsidered, is the fullest weight of its necessity made known to one. Which is to say, without cause for equivocation, that we have become accustomed to the state's presence in our lives, and to that end, cannot imagine even the vague, in portrayal of a world, nor any fundamental aspect thereof, for which the state, and the influence which it exerts, are truly concealed from view. Without being able to entrench oneself in the experience of such forces of tradition being deprived of their power, one can only gaze upon instances of past, within which developments arose, of comparative similarity to that which we hold as worthy of deliberation in the same respect. Yet, herein, we find much variance as to the result of each such instance, that adheres to the constraints, and parameters of our inquiry. This, is attributable to the fact of the initial stages of development exhibited by any society under consideration, often deviating from those which characterize our own((the central point of reference, in our judgement(s) as to what constitutes a society, and how it ought to manifest)), and that of any other beyond itself, in addition to demonstrating amongst themselves, an individual distinctiveness of equal magnitude to that manner of variance which was mentioned, previously.
One might speak of the following as illustrative of such decline, and regression; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/world/americas/Venezuela-collapse-Maduro.html
I can recall of no other nation, that in our time has assumed what one may rightfully describe as a functional collapse, in the case of its own government; wherefore the burden of responsibility for its people, assigned to the state, is relegated on a vast and near-systemic scale to other parties; lest their needs all persist unfulfilled, except for those of the most privileged few.
My reading of Hobbes differs from your breakdown in two respects.
Any condition where people cooperate instead of fighting each other is a "state" of a kind. How this condition is brought about is not a product of "roughly equal" participants. There is no equality in the state of nature. Inequality and equality only make sense in the context of some kind of social contract.
The observation made above is separate from Hobbes's argument that Monarchy is the best possible state. Every other kind of social organization is a state but is inferior to monarchy because it introduces multiple agents. Hobbes argues that one agent is the best solution to the problem of conflicting interests. His argument stops there. That's it. The whole enchilada.
Currency certainly would not function as it does now, in the world of central banks, fiat currencies and periodic financial crises. But this does not imply that it would not work simpliciter. Legal tender laws exist for the purpose of extracting taxation, and are totally unnecessary beyond this. Good monies are good monies precisely because they exemplify properties which make them marketable as monies (divisibility, portability, and so on); there does not need to be (and should not be) a law which compels people to settle debts in any kind of currency in particular.
In these kinds of discussions, there always seems to be the assumption that the way goods and services are provided under Statism is the ‘correct’ way, and the burden is on the free-marketeer (who, I believe, ought also to be an anti-Statist, as I am) to answer the challenge of how they would hope to ‘match’ the State’s performance. But why think this way? In fact, the State is truly miserable in all that it does. There is just no reason to think that an association of persons who have a monopoly on force are going to provide any service remotely competently.
Quoting fdrake
With respect, I don’t think this argument amounts to much. The mere fact that currency-based markets have (always or nearly) always been Statist societies does not imply that a currency-based market is dependent upon a State. In fact, the history of money is a history of depreciation, as governments have involved themselves more and more in monetary systems. See Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? https://cdn.mises.org/What%20Has%20Government%20Done%20to%20Our%20Money_3.pdf
Quoting fdrake
What happens is ultimately determined by whose property the oil field is. If the oil field belongs to one of the oil companies, then that company may extract oil from it, and sell it, without anyone’s permission. If the field is owned by someone else, then they may choose to grant the oil company permission to extract oil, for a price, or it may choose not to. If the field is owned by a community of persons, then the field’s fate is determined collectively by the co-owners. None of this requires the instrumentality of the State.
Quoting fdrake
It is true that a successful company (that is, one which has satisfied consumer preferences successfully) now has more money than its competitors. This money then allows it to make still more money, but only by continually satisfying consumers. To invade this process, however benevolently, is ultimately a paternalistic act, for the effect is to deny consumers goods and services which they would otherwise have voluntarily purchased. You are correct that this accrued capital may then be used for corrupt ends, which serve to entrench its privileged position through lobbying and law-making. But it seems to me that it is precisely the State which presents these opportunities, and which makes them profitable.
Just as with patents and franchises, these are government-granted privileges. If the problem is that these firms have excessive political influence, then the surest antidote is surely the abolition of the very institution which they use as their instrument for such! In the minds of many, the answer to corporate corruption is to afford even more power to the State, but this is a movement in precisely the wrong direction. The reason why private firms and the State have the kind of corrupt relationship they do – and this relationship is one of which you are clearly aware – is because it is so profitable for both of them. Affording more power to the State is not going to change the incentive structure. As long as the State exists, those who are most able to benefit from it are going to continue to do so.
Quoting fdrake
There is a rationale for this, though it takes us rather far afield, as it leads into a positive defence of libertarian anarchism, which is not what I intended to do here. Fundamentally, all rights are really just property rights; to engage in any activity in particular is just to make use of certain scarce resources in such a way that deprives others of their full use. A full philosophical justification for this commitment would take excessive space, but the best defence of this idea may be found in Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights, or his shorter article, ‘The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights’. A less rigorous but more accessible defence may be found in Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, ch. 15: https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Ethics%20of%20Liberty%2020191108.pdf
This thesis is one which I consider to be very much in keeping with old liberalism, which saw a close connection between the exercise of individual liberty and private property rights. If I am right about this, and I believe it is right, then the power structures we see in firms are entirely justified, because they are the product of peaceful, consensual relations between persons, exercising their right of ownership over their resources and over their own selves. The obligations which are placed on employees are voluntarily assumed; they undertake obligations in return for their wage, to which they are not entitled otherwise, and they are better off having entered into the arrangement than not. The power structures are justified, in other words, because firms are not essentially coercive institutions.
Quoting fdrake
I am using ‘scarce’ in the sense in which economists use the term. ‘Scarce’ does not mean ‘short’ or ‘not plentiful’. They are merely rationing phenomena. Rather, ‘scarcity’ is concerned with the capacity of a good to satisfy human wants. Suppose there is a resource, which is such that it may be exploited endlessly by as many people as you care to stipulate, without exhausting it. This would be a non-scarce resource. ‘Ideas’ would be an example of such. Unfortunately, the vast majority of goods are scarce. Everything (as far as I can think of) that occupies a physical location is scarce. There may well be enough productive power to feed the world twice over, but this does not render food non-scarce; the resource ‘food’ is not such that everybody may consume as much of it as they like, without depriving anybody else, or their future selves, from doing the same. The reason is that food is the result of production, and the production process itself involves the use of scarce resources, including time and labour. A resource does not become non-scarce merely because there is enough going around.
Quoting fdrake
‘Artificial scarcity’ also has a precise technical definition, and I don’t believe you are using it accurately. A resource is ‘artificially scarce’ if it is non-rivalrous and excludable. This means that my exploiting the resource does not deprive anybody else from exploiting it, and yet it is still possible to prevent people from having access to it. Examples would be pay-for-view television, cosmetic ‘skins’ for video game characters, software updates, etc. Once the technology is in place to make it available to one person, it can be made available to all people boundlessly, with no additional investment. Food and housing, however, do not satisfy the definition of artificial scarcity. They are just scarce in the ordinary sense (which, as I mentioned, does not mean that there is not enough going around).
Quoting fdrake
Laws are essentially threats, threats of incarceration or worse, issued by human associations. Rights and freedoms are proper to persons, for persons are the agents of action. There’s no doubt about the fact that events can occur which affect many people, and it may affect them in virtue of a common, unifying characteristic, like being citizens of a country or members of a corporation. But that does not mean that there is a kind of emergent entity which hovers over the world of persons, with a mind and purposes and an agency of its own. There is no such thing as that.
Quoting fdrake
I am not taking issue with the fact that it might sometimes be appropriate to engage in macro-level analysis. But I am not talking about methodology here, I am talking about ontology. Collective action designates the reality that individuals may act in concert with one another, towards some common end. It does not mean that there is a subsistent entity, such as you and I are, called a ‘collective’, which acts by the power of its own agency. That is poetry only.
Quoting fdrake
That’s fine. To be sure, there are things that are proper to a part that are not proper to the whole, and vice versa. My heart pumps blood around my body, I do not. I stand in a field, my heart does not. The problem is that the kinds of things that are predicated of a human collective are not proper to it, but are really proper to individuals. Any kind of purposeful action, desire, intent, any kind of activity or psychological state at all, are predicated of a collective improperly, because they are proper to persons, and collectives are not persons. ‘The country is in mourning’, etc.
Quoting fdrake
But the interests coincided with the interests of consumers. Who decides what makes money, and what doesn’t? Consumers decide. If a less profitable business closes and is replaced with one that is more profitable, this is only because the latter more effectively satisfies a consumer’s wants. The firm exists to make money, and it does this most effectively when it is most effective at satisfying consumers. Why should the interests of the workers be paramount? Why should that trump all other considerations? A worker may feel dissatisfied with his job, but he is certainly better off for bread and milk being as cheap as they are. As a consumer, he wants things to be as cheap as possible. But we cannot have it both ways. The fact that they are cheap is owing the very same market processes which have seen him hired, and which have placed him in the conditions in which he works. There is nothing stopping 'ethical' businesses from cropping up organically, which pay their workers a living wage, see to it that they are placed in adequate working conditions, etc.; nothing, that is, except the consumer. If only the consumer were prepared to pay more, such that 'ethical' businesses were profitable, then there would be no impediment to their existing. But that is not what the consumer wants (I would be delighted to be proved wrong about this).
Quoting fdrake
Forgive me, I’m still struggling to tease an argument out of all this. There is so much packed in here. Governments produce their own externality problems, some of which I talk about in my other discussion, and which David Friedman discusses here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpn645huKUg&t=1112s
In a Stateless society, workers would be perfectly within their rights to unionise. Indeed, voluntary collectives would be commonplace, as they were before the State became involved in the provision of Welfare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jug_AcVjeAM
It just doesn’t ring true that firms are coercive institutions because they tell their workers that they must ‘work or starve’. When a State demands ‘your money or your freedom’, as it does when it taxes you, the State itself is the source of this destructive dilemma. The threat of having to hand over your property is provided by the State, and the threat of incarceration (or worse) is provided by the State, too. The State is precisely an invader of the lives and the property of their citizens (and, when it wages wars, the citizens of other countries as well). They are functionally indistinguishable from a protection racket in this respect (which do actually provide you with the service of protection). This is categorically different from being faced with the dilemma of working or starving. As you correctly point out, we must work in order to eat. One might say ‘I should not have to work in order to feed myself’, but obviously this is impossible to universalise, since at least somebody must work, or else everybody starves. The fact that you must engage in resource-gathering in order to survive is simply a fact of nature; firms are not the source of this ‘threat’. So, when the firm offers you the means of employment, which you would not have had otherwise, it is quite skewed to understand this as the firm providing you with a destructive dilemma. They are offering you a means of escape from starvation (indeed, the most effective means that the world has ever known).
I have defined ‘State’ in a way that is quite conventional in political theory. There are alternative definitions, but they don’t alter my analysis in any important respect.
Quoting Judaka
To be sure, the State is a collective entity, a composite of persons, and these persons may have differing purposes, intents and goals. So it is simplistic to speak of ‘the interests of the State’ unqualifiedly. But I haven’t done this; I have spoken of the State’s incentive structure qualifiedly. I have drawn attention to the separation of powers, and that it may sometimes be the case that the regulatory influence of one branch of government is exercised over another. But I have also argued that, in general, it benefits a given branch of government to grow in power and influence if it has the ability to do so, and that all three branches of government have a common interest in this respect. Why should the State fear its own increased influence? I don’t see why this should be.
Quoting Judaka
This is why I have made qualifications like these:
(note that, when I speak of the State ‘acting’, I refer to the actions of those persons who comprise it, for collectives do not of themselves have the capacity to act).
Quoting Judaka
The branches of government are service-providers (law-producers, law-interpreters, law-enforcers), and they are indeed economically complementary in the sense that I outlined above.
Quoting Judaka
This seems completely arbitrary to me. Is power attractive, or isn’t it? If it is, then why should one seek merely to maintain power, but not to gain more of it? In fact the government in the US has grown in power enormously since its inception. Its history is one of periodic power-grabs. I doubt the founding fathers could have envisioned the monster that their originally libertarian project has created.
If you really believe that the State does not have an interest in growing in power, and that it even fears such, why are checks and balances even necessary at all? Should we even be concerned about the possibility of totalitarianism?
This is not correct. A State is a particular kind of human association, one which holds a monopoly on physical force over a given territory. It is not helpful to describe any peaceful state of affairs between persons as a ‘State’, because this does not bear any resemblance to the things which we ordinarily designate ‘States’. States are precisely non-peaceful and non-cooperative: they endure by initiating force, invading property, and benefiting special interests at the expense of others. Their very existence is a predatory existence.
Quoting Valentinus
The equality which Hobbes speaks of is a roughly equal equality in physical capacities. The point is that, if you were to imagine a person who is uniquely adapted to living in the war of all against all – supremely strong, quick, cunning, and so on – even he would be in perpetual danger in such a world, for he may be ambushed at any time, or may simply get unlucky in one of his twice-daily fights to the death. The work that this does in Hobbes’s argument is that it shows that we are all better off for escaping the state of nature, and thus better off for handing absolute authority to the State.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Do you do any philosophy here, or do you just say things like this?
Nope.
Whilst I can attest to the need for maintaining a certain brevity, at times, I nonetheless fail to see how my preceding exposition is of fault. Of greatest importance however, is that one caught in my position is likely to be unable to determine at all the finer meaning of any response, as given, inasmuch as it prove as briefly stated as yours. I ask then, that the nature of my error, as you regard it, be identified, such that I may have the opportunity to address those concerns which pertain to it, and if possible, amend its content, in full.
Just write like a human being. English is not my first language, and I'm not going to take the time to read something that's purposefully obscure. But ultimately you can do what you want.
Oh. I am sorry for that, truly. My intention was not to render any depth of understanding difficult to achieve, nor was it to impede your recognition of what had been said, on my part. Though, I must remark upon the extraordinary aptitude which you seem to have developed, in that regard. Unfortunately, I can only lay claim to my own usage of those non-native tongues for which I have some faculty((Latin, German, Spanish)), as being rather tenuous in standing((much unlike yourself)).
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
My intentions are simply to point out that historically, states (and other social institutions) and markets interface strongly. A lot of what social forms do concerns their economy (questions of access, distribution, production and exchange of goods) and who owns what. A lot of what economies do is provide a means to change who owns what . This is rather unsurprising. When we think of a state, we think of a state involved with a market economy. We have to look either quite far back in time or to quite isolated communities to find a social form which does not have something like a state and something like a market.
Notably, this doesn't mean that states and markets have to overlap. Nor does it mean that the ways central government interface with an economy are the right ways, nor does it mean that the ways markets interface with governments are the right ways. It's simply an observation that we have to imagine something very dissimilar to contemporary industrial societies, or modern merchant societies to drive a wedge between the two ideas.
As it stands, you've not done that. Does this demonstrate that the wedge you're driving between market and state is unimaginable? No. Does it mean that there can't be social forms with markets but no states or states with no markets? No. What it does suggest strongly is that you have to imagine something completely different from all common examples of states and market economies to drive a wedge between them.
A consequence of this difference is that reading the real world in terms of whatever notion of state and market you have is a category error; it's simply not relevant to the intertwined nature of states and markets that we have today. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I'm willing to entertain that your notions of state and market are merely stipulative, insofar as they don't correspond to social form similar in any relevant respect to what we have now, and what we came out of. This doesn't limit your imagination, just the applicability of your ideas to how things are.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is an invalid argument.
(1) X depends upon Y for its existence.
(2) Therefore Y does not have its own behaviour.
The causal structure of Y is simply depends in some sense on that of X. Atoms have novel behaviours from particles, compounds and molecules have novel behaviour from that of atoms, chains of chemical reactions have novel behaviour from that of compounds and molecules and so on. If you apply your argument in the general case, it would preclude the existence of compounds because they depend upon their constituent atoms. It would also miss a lot; chemistry and particle physics study different things. This is all there is to emergence as I am using it:
Y is emergent from X if:
(A) Y depends upon X for its existence.
(B) Y has its own behaviour which individuals of X lack.
Some examples of emergence in this sense, in addition to the previous ones: people negotiating (you can't negotiate with just one person), wars (This would never happen "New story just coming in, Chad declares war on America is equivalent to a Chad government official having a sudden desire to kill all American tourists due to an obnoxious tourist over the age of 40 wearing a cap backwards").
You seem not to be clear on this point, so I will spend more words on it.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The examples you gave seek to demonstrate that some properties of parts do not transfer to their wholes, not that wholes have no behaviours of their own. We could even be in the situation that no properties of parts transferred to their wholes, and still have properties of wholes which parts lack. EG, no properties of the subatomic particles of a wasp suffice to explain the shape a wasp have. Subatomic particles just don't have stable shapes in any sense. Adding to the list: wasps don't have electric charge, spin, quantised properties...
We can tell similar stories for people's jobs. No properties of subatomic particles determine what a manager does on a day to day basis. Managers allocate tasks to people (among other things). On your view this would be impossible, because subatomic particles can't allocate tasks to other subatomic particles.
They key concepts here are aggregation and interaction/arrangement. Properties of (interactions of people) are not properties of people. Properties of (interactions of atoms) are not properties of atoms.
When someone writes "Will America declare war on Iran?" what this means is that will the political authorities of America mandate violence on an institutional level against the people of Iran. Then this strongly suggests* that American soldiers will take action against the individuals of Iran. As we've seen, not even the president of the United States has the sole, unchecked ability to mandate "America will go to war with Iran", there is no representative individual who solely suffices to explain the situation, only individuals interacting and producing some output (a negotiation which results in a declaration of war with Iran) would go some way to explain the situation.
[hide=*]Strictly speaking it isn't even an entailment, as the people who would take action against Iran may collectively refuse despite the declaration of war![/hide]
So all of that talk is at once shorthand (no one who says "America declares war on Iran because America is angry with Iran" would impute a collective consciousness to America) and a recognition that aggregates can behave in new ways from their parts, due to the parts relating. Negotiations are relations, social organisations are relations. Laws are enforceable claims on people's conduct deriving from an (often clumsy and corrupt) negotiations of ruling bodies, forming a system of interaction unfolding forward in time between the actions of lawyers in interpreting the codes, the applicability of the codes changing over time with interpretation and circumstance, new laws being introduced through political action, laws being changed through political action. And so on.
You can't even talk about firms and [i]private property[/i[ without some construction like this going on in the background. Firms are aggregates of people with their own behaviours and properties!
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And a firm has no responsibility for firing workers attempting to unionise to stick up for their interests? Weird huh?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Ok. A landlord buys houses to rent in a community. Anyone (not really, systems are usually prejudiced) who can afford the rent can go in. Those who can't afford the rent can't use it. Under this definition, food can never be artificially scarce precisely because consuming food is "rivalrous" (you can't eat the same food twice). This definition is entirely independent of access and distribution of resources.
Two stories:
A village starves to death. They have no access to food. Food was scarce. They could not distribute food because there was no food.
Someone is homeless. There are enough homes for all homeless people. Homes were scarce. The homeless person had no access to a house. Homes could not be distributed to homeless people because...
Scarcity is better defined as insufficient access to a good for a purpose or group. How a social form distributes goods (partially) determines who has access to what.
Artificial scarcity - if a good is scarce not because of being unavailable (like water in a draught), but because of how access and distribution work and are constrained in a social form.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Fuck me, air is scarce**? I'll start stockpiling.
[hide=**]It follows the same logic as food.[/hide]
I have no real problems with your definition of the state and I read that you - which I really didn't need to read - are aware that the state comprises individuals and that collectives can't act. The problem is that despite your definition and your qualifications you continually talk about the state as a single entity.
Why would the state fear it's own power? I was being facetious in talking about the state, I'm going to stop using that word because I think your keenness on it is half of my problem. I live in Australia, most of my government is a sprawling bureaucracy charged with overseeing mundane things like providing services, overseeing projects, planning, overseeing the regulation of various sectors, dealing with legal problems and so on. Unelected officials who aren't plotting the subjugation of other components of the government. I am sceptical that they even have a clue what's going on in any department besides their own.
Across the ladder, people are primarily concerned with keeping their jobs, doing their jobs and maybe even getting a promotion. Corruption isn't even a viable option for most of them and where it is - they're being regulated by more government bodies that aren't elected, aren't motivated in any of the ways you're talking about.
In the higher levels of government, we have two different parties, liberal and labour that can fill them. A big scandal here is somebody spending tax dollars on an unnecessary or unnecessarily expensive means of transportation. Do politicians care about advancing their career, avoiding a scandal and being elected or advancing the power of a government body that they know they're only going to be in charge of for a small portion of their career? For what?
Corruption exists but it's people using their position to make themselves rich - there's really very little incentive to attempt to empower the part of the government they're working for. They won't be there forever, it's a huge risk, there's no unilateral support and there's likely no support from higher levels of their party - if they even belong to the one that's in power - or one at all.
A totalitarian government is the worst possible thing for pretty much everyone except the ruling elite.
It's not that we should take for granted the checks and balances - also I think Australian democracy is wildly better than many other democracies around the world. So in some countries, the risk is extreme.
I think the concern with totalitarianism is not a gradual and collective descent into power-hungry behaviour by the government. It's power-hungry individuals in the government or often outside of it, who are hellbent on having absolute power. Most democracies that fail have rampant corruption, limited control over the military and haven't been a democracy for long and likely never operated as a true democracy.
The distinction I have made is simply that between human activity which involves the initiation of force and the invasion of private property, and that which is peaceful, involving no such activity. This maps onto Oppenheimer's distinction between the 'economic means' and the 'political means'. If I understand your argument, you seem to be saying that, because the markets of our acquaintance are all Statist, whatever market would exist in the absence of the State would be so different from the things we usually call 'markets' that it is inappropriate to describe it as a market at all.
I don't see any reason to agree with this, since economists do speak of markets independently of the State (David Friedman, for instance, examines how the Stateless market for law would operate), and the way economists define 'markets' tends to be quite straightforward and non-stipulative. There is little more to markets than what I have drawn attention to: they are just exchange processes between buyers and sellers of goods and services.
But, even if you are correct, and the definition of 'market' somehow incorporates a State implicitly, this is more of a semantic issue than a substantial philosophical one. Choose a noun which you think appropriately designates a process of exchanges in the absence of a State, and we could use that word instead. Creating a Stateless 'market' is not the primary libertarian goal: the goal is to oppose and prevent the initiation of force and the invasion of property. There is no 'structural vision' which the libertarian is seeking to usher in, beyond this.
Quoting fdrake
Granted. But this is not the argument I presented. I pointed out that there are properties of my heart which do not trace to me unqualifiedly. And yet, I still exist, and engage in actions of my own. My point is that the kinds of things that are predicated of human collectives are not really proper to human collectives, but are really proper to persons. Countries per se do not mourn.
Quoting fdrake
But this argument - about what you would be likely to hear on the news - is only a linguistic convention. It doesn't have any ontological bearing. It is conventional to speak of human collectives as though they have their own independent agency; this does not mean that they really do. What is 'Chad'? If it includes all the country's citizens, then it is untrue that 'Chad' has literally declared war. 'Declaration' is an act of a purposeful agent, a person. Rocks, trees, planets and photons cannot 'declare'. Persons declare. Can multiple persons all engage in an act of 'declaration' together, in concert and for a common purpose? Certainly. But this does not produce a 'macro agent', hovering over and above the individual members. To say 'the football team is drinking beer' does not imply the literal, concrete, ontological reality of a twelfth agent called 'the team', on top of the eleven players. 'Drinking' requires a mouth, a gullet, and so on. Individual persons are the only things which have these. Just so for any kind of purposeful activity. Such requires a mind, which is proper to persons only. The non-literal predication of conscious activity to human collectives does not imply that there is a subsistent entity, with its own agency.
The examples you give of collective action are ultimately reducible to actions of individual persons. We just don't describe them in this way because it is inconvenient. It is easier to speak of a country mourning than it is to enumerate every individual who is mourning; even though, really, individuals are the only things that can mourn.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, this is exactly it: if you want to know in what the truth of 'America declares war on Iran' concretely and literally consists, you must translate it into the actions of persons. America, here, does not mean a country, a landmass, a citizenry, which is what 'America' is usually intended to mean. It refers to the actions of particular persons, the soldiers. The soldiers are fighting with 'Iran'. What does this mean? Are they fighting with every Iranian citizen? With the soil, the sand, the buildings? No: they fight with persons. The truth of these statements of collective action consists in the actions of individual persons. Note that this does not mean that every man is an island, a floating wraith, whose actions can be analysed apart from everything else in the world. But it does mean that only individuals are the agents of purposeful action, and the language of collective action which we use to describe this reality is a poetic and non-literal abstraction.
Quoting fdrake
Why should any person be obliged to continue to employ another person, if she doesn't wish to? The right to freedom of association by which workers are allowed to unionise is the self-same right that is being invoked when I decide that I no longer wish to employ someone. If you have the right to decide whom you wish to associate with, and whom not to associate with, and under what terms, then so do I.
Quoting fdrake
Not the point here, I know, but this is a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon I am talking about. A village starves? Not really, obviously. Starving is something which happens to an organism, like the individual members of the village. There isn't literally a 'starving village'. A perfectly acceptable way of speaking, but we ought not to exaggerate what this commits us to, ontologically.
Quoting fdrake
Why 'better'? It is certainly a less helpful definition in economics, since the entire discipline is addressed towards scarcity in the sense I spelled out above. Moreover, economics is a wertfrei discipline, and I am doubtful that 'insufficient' can be spelled out in a wertfrei way. Besides, we have other concepts like 'shortage' which may put in work in expressing what you are wanting to express.
Quoting fdrake
This certainly will do not do. Because we live in a world of scarcity, and because virtually all consumer goods are the result of production, all such resources exist in the quantities they do precisely because that is the amount that has been produced. For any such good, more or less of it might conceivably be produced. On your definition, all produced consumer goods are artificially scarce, because it is always possible to produce more. 'Labour' would be artificially scarce, because as we speak I am choosing not to enter into the labour market. It is a much too permissive definition.
But I really don't want to discuss this. These terms mean what they mean in economics, and I don't see anything wrong with them.
Quoting fdrake
Absolutely - if air were non-scarce, then it would be possible for everyone to use the air for whatever purpose they see fit, without denying anybody else, or their future selves, from doing the same. This clearly is not true. If air were truly non-scarce, we would have no fear of air pollution, and it would not be necessary to take an oxygen tank with you when you go deep-sea diving. There are all sorts of ways in which air must be rationed, which speaks to its scarcity.
What you have said functions when aggregate behaviours like negotiations, which are interactions of individuals that output states ("should we all do this?" "This law will be amended thus...") are analogised to individual properties. The functional relationship between a law and individuals, say, is that an aggregate of individuals acts together in the production of a law. An individual simply cannot produce a law through negotiation, as individuals cannot negotiate with themselves. The process of negotiation (an interaction of individuals) is what produces a law, not each individual.
Put another way; the outputs (like properties obtaining, propensities to be effected) of interacting aggregates need not be reducible to the isolated behaviour of individuals. The interaction is important, the individuals only enable and contribute to it.
The same principle applies in the paper I linked; macro policy influences how people interact, it's a "top down" process which works on interacting aggregates and thereby changes the individuals actions. Say an office has "friday casuals" day, then the workers can turn up in casual clothing. "Friday casuals day" is a firm policy, not reducible to the workers turning up to work in casual clothes, because it is what allows the workers to turn up on Friday in casual clothing and not be in breach of company policy.
Macro properties are "proper" (as you're using the word) of aggregates. A law which effects firms acts on firms
Individuals X composing Y does not mean Y behaviour is reducible to X behaviour. Wasps do things atoms can't. Collectives do things individuals can't - like have laws, negotiate, organise economic activity, form markets (themselves emergent in this sense) etc. Market behaviour is not reducible to individual behaviour. Microproperties don't uniquely determine macroproperties - this says the same thing.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You can speak of a market as an abstraction independent of a social form, you can also speak of a social form as an abstraction independent from a market. Real states and real markets are hopelessly intertwined.
.Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You make it sound like these "rights" are somehow imbued by a God. They're fought for. People establish rights through collective action; rights are really what people are entitled to under a given social form. That "entitlement" is a codification of hard won principles which applies to everyone in an aggregate, and acts upon the aggregate in constraining its behaviour. "Workers rights", "consumer rights" etc are only established through collective action; and every single one has been hard won. Your ability to reason like this, to have studied what you have, would not have occurred without establishing basic education as a right. Established as a right through successful collective bargaining, through establishing social institutions which are mandated to enforce the right. When we don't take care of these social institutions, the rights they enforce waver and die, as do the people who depend upon them.
In the absence of these rights, markets are extremely bad for workers. 14 hour days, children with black lung, perpetual immiseration as an alternative to starvation, slavery... If you want to see markets as the sine qua non of human freedom, note that the freedoms we have within them were established through collective action against their incredible power and those who wield it.
Your overall perspective sees markets as limited abstract mathematical devices, ways of matching individuals to available goods through the satisfaction of a constrained utility function. There's no history in it, no study of the social processes that markets are, where they come from, how laws interface with markets, how people collectivise to ensure that they are treated well in them. This has been shown to (1) not uniquely determine the behaviour of emergent properties (see the paper) and (2) has absolutely nothing accurate to say about markets as a form of human activity, and of how peoples and social institutions relate to them.
The foundations of this approach do not predict individual behaviour, nor do they describe it very well. Moreover, they are entirely unnecessary to explain individual or behaviour even when they produce the right things. That is, they are either redundant or wrong. Useless!
I think we are talking past each other. This was my initial statement with which you took issue:
we must never fall into the trap of thinking that 'States', 'firms', 'corporations' or 'markets' subsist. These are aggregations of individual persons, and it is only these persons who are the real actors, the conscious agents. Neither States nor firms have their own inherent agency.
I still see no reason to think that this is false. Your examples seem to be concerned mostly with analysis, or providing causal explanations of things, not with what kinds of things there actually are in the world of purposeful action. In your example, the 'policy' is that which explains and gives rise to the workers turning up to work in casual clothes. Explanatorily, then, the policy is not 'reducible' to the actions of the individuals. But the policy itself has no subsistence, nor does it have a mind or any purposes of its own. It does not act. It is not an agent. The only concrete agents at work are persons, as is the case of all the other examples you have raised.
Human collectives, considered as such, can indeed have properties which are not exemplified by any individual; my scrabble club exemplifies the property 'has four members', whereas I do not. But whenever you try to predicate any kind of purposeful action or intent of the collective, this is improper, because it does not have agency.
Quoting fdrake
If by 'real markets' you mean the kinds of markets which currently obtain, then of course this is trivially true. But, as I have pointed out, I see no reason why the kind of market which obtains in the absence of the State need resemble these. Why should it?
Quoting fdrake
I don't believe I have ever attempted to give an economic analysis of markets, beyond the broad-brush definition which economists conventionally employ. 'Markets' as such do not play a particularly central role in the argument I have presented, except to point out that, in general, peaceful exchange, which allows for competition, is more conducive to the separation of power than an agency of monopolised coercion, which does not. My preoccupation is less with 'markets versus the State' than with 'non-aggressive behaviour versus aggressive behaviour'. It just so happens that the State is the aggressor per excellence.
Any anaemia you detect in my analysis of markets is owing to the fact that I have not set out to analyse markets in general, or to promote one kind of market in particular. This avenue is one which you have brought into the discussion, and does not have an immediate bearing on the thesis for which I have argued. I should not like to say that markets are a condition of freedom, as you seem to suggest. That is, I do not say that we must first seek to establish a particular kind of market, and then individual freedom flows out from that. It is rather the reverse. If people are free from coercive invasion, both in their persons and their property, then their interactions will be confined to those that are peaceful and voluntary. 'Market' is just a description of what this would look like, after the fact. It is more of a posterior analysis than a structural vision to be strived for. As I mentioned before, libertarians have no structural vision. They merely object to the initiation of force and the invasion of private property.
There is a terrible tendency to declare as a 'right' what is really only an interest. Is there a 'right' to a 15-minute break after every 3 hours of work? I don't see any reason why there should be, though it would certainly be a nice thing to have, and to insist that you are entitled to have. Ultimately, any acceptable system of rights must be jointly-realisable; that is, everyone's rights must be non-overlapping (Hillel Steiner calls this property 'compossibility'). The reason is that the purpose of 'rights' is to determine who may do what, and when. Or, to put it another way, their purpose is to determine what you may not do to other people in pursuit of your own interests. If you were the only person in the world, talk of 'rights' would hardly be necessary. It is only because we must temper our behaviour so as to accommodate other persons that a system of rights is necessary. We cannot all achieve all of our wants all of the time, and this is why we must have a way of determining who may do what, when.
The only way in which a system of rights may achieve compossibility is if we understand all rights to be rights of use and ownership over scarce resources. Otherwise, my 'right' to engage in such-and-such an action may involve the use of a rivalrous resource which you also wish to use in the exercising of your 'right'. This would make our rights competitive, and in-compossible. Only if we understand the object as being proper either to me or to you can we achieve compossibility. If it is mine, then I may do what I like with it (provided that I not invade anyone else's property in the process). In other words, the domain of my rightful action maps onto the domain of objects which are rightly considered 'mine'.
So, rights may not be straightforwardly God-given, but there are certainly constraints on what can and cannot be a right. One cannot have a 'right' if that right affords one unbounded access to a scarce resource. But it also gives us clarity when it comes to 'workers rights', 'gay rights' and so on. You have the right to do as you please with your own property, or with other people's property to the degree that they have consented to it, on the condition that you do not invade other people's property in so doing. But you do not have a 'right' to anything of mine, beyond what I consent to. This is why there cannot be an unqualified 'right not to be fired if you unionise'. If it is a stipulation of our contract that I not fire you for joining a union, then of course it is a violation of your rights if I were to do so. But, beyond this, you have no such right.
This, ultimately, is the philosophical justification of libertarianism's non-aggression principle: that rights-violations consist in invasions of another person's property.
It’s a fact of life that blows up your entire philosophy. I’m just illustrating the FACT that your philosophy is ridiculously naive.
Where I come from, arguments are considered the stuff of philosophy.
If the State were dissolved, there would be massive unrest.
There are more guns in the US than people.
If there is massive unrest, there will be massive bloodshed.
If you value your property, you should not dissolve the State.
You value your property seemingly above everything else.
Thus, the State should not be dissolved.
QED (That’s smack talk for philosophers.)
This is not to engage at all with the argument which I have presented, but simply to ignore it. The assumptions you make in this argument are precisely those of Hobbes: that the absence of the State is that which gives rise to disordered, animalistic aggression, and it is the presence of the State which serves as the principle of peace and order. But this is precisely wrong at both ends, as I argued at length. Did you read the the OP? It is no serious objection to an argument, simply to assert that its conclusion is false. I provided game-theoretic reasons for thinking that Statelessness does not give rise to the kind of war of all against all which you and Hobbes envision, and I also provided reasons for thinking that the State has no reason not to aggress against us in the manner of a criminal gang or protection racket, as it in fact does when it extracts taxation, prohibits peaceful associations, depreciates currency, and wages wars.
If you have an objection to make against the presentation I have made, by all means make it. But it is not a challenge in the least for you simply to repeat back to me the position which I have already argued against in my original post.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Not exactly.
Obviously, you’ve never lived in the ghetto. I lived in one in Chicago and Madison. You clearly don’t understand the downtrodden like I do. There is a simmering rage ready to be unleashed at the slightest hint of societal (State) breakdown. Hobbes was right.
Society is not the State. States, as coercive institutions, are precisely anti-social in their working. The fact is, those whom you identify as 'downtrodden' are downtrodden on the State's watch. But I am sure, in your mind, it will be be laissez faire which receives the blame.
If you look at those goods and services which markets, and not the State, are presently responsible for providing, they are of almost exactly equal price and quality in less affluent and ghetto-ised areas as in more privileged areas. Goods like food, and clothing.
Meanwhile, there is an enormous disparity in quality between richer and poorer areas, when it comes to State-provided services. Education and policing are considerably and consistently worse in the very places you are describing.
If you are an egalitarian and have a concern for the poor and downtrodden, you might just consider being ancap.
Ancap = anarcho-capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Should I be taking this as a threat?
Furthermore, perhaps I grant you that the resources of the rich are merely of higher quality. Why do you think you are entitled to more property and higher quality?
No. I’m trying to help you.
You haven't understood the point I was making. My point is that the source of (at least this particular kind of) inequality is the State itself. 'Downtroddenness' is not owing to free exchange and enterprise, but the coercion which the State implements.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
How, exactly?
Property would have to be redistributed equitably before ancap would succeed. Perhaps I grant you that the State is the cause of inequality. But how do we start over?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
To get you to think about what I said above.
There is no need to 'start over'. When you successfully repel a thief from your home, or incapacitate a mugger, you needn't step back and ask yourself 'How now shall we organise society?' 'Society' is what happens when we don't aggress against one another and invade one another's property. The State will not be abolished through an overnight coup, from which we will have to wait for the dust to settle so that we can then rebuild civilisation. In some ways the State has grown, and in other ways the State has been totally out-manoeuvred by free enterprise, and shown to be the lumbering, ineffectual brute that it is (technology and the internet, especially, have contributed to this). If there is an end to the State, it will be through successive out-maneouverings by more competent service-providers, and in this sense the trajectory is good. We need not have a structural vision in our heads to anticipate the occurrence of such.
It would be hard to say that free markets exist when the state has always been involved, no? You're positing "markets" as some imaginary arrangement which has never existed:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
If the books you have referenced are consistent with your use of market; as an economic structure free from coercion; they are talking about an economic system which has never existed. I repeat, you are talking about something which has never existed.
"The free market" is an imagining that has long echoed through the rooms of ivory towers, and prophets whisper to this day that it shall come and save us from ourselves. It is a God, a perfect ideal entity, and all that humans do is found wanting in the light of its reflected glory, cast from the gold adorning its invisible hand.
We have fallen from the light of this perfection, like the prophet Friedman wrote, all our ills are rooted in our deviation from the perfect form of The Free Market. Each of us stands like Eve, tempted from the garden of economic freedom by the devil of social organisation and democratic legislative bodies; that which we call the State. The Free Market punished humanity, as the apple was not Eve's to take, the first violence done unto humanity was the violation of the first property right.
Why do we suffer? For we have sinned. Exercising the sacred faculty of our inviolable wills to take that which is not ours. All human pains are rooted in that which separated us from The Free Market.
The prophet Friedman, always the rebel, would give the devil precisely his due. The irony of the human condition was that to see the face of God and live together in accordance with her Holy form, we must entrust only what is necessary for God to manifest in our reality to the bureaucratic authority of the Devil. Humanity is a bridge tethered between light and darkness, Free Market and State, and we twist precariously in the wind.
The heathen investors believe it to be the breath of animal spirits, that the wind too is a whisper of God, but we know it to be the exercise of individual Will, that the essence of the Free Market is within us as our soul.
A load of horseshit really. It's just theology, "explaining" what happens to us with with reference to the edicts of gods which never existed.
It's not inevitable. Nuclear States might eliminate the human race before it happens. It is 'natural', in the sense that there is a tendency for poorer and less efficient service-providers to be out-performed by superior and more efficient service-providers. Violence, which is the State's modus operandi, is also very inefficient and expensive. The world's monetary systems and the Welfare State, for instance, cannot endure in perpetuity. But that is only one avenue of the road away from serfdom. Another important avenue is education. Changing minds and outlooks is an equally important ingredient. Students of economics tend, for instance, to be more economically liberal (in the good sense) than your average person, which shows the benefits of education in changing minds. If every voter were required to pass a course in economics before they were allowed to vote, there would be a tendency towards libertarianism (not that this is a proposal of mine).
:brow:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And lo, the prophet spake: "Let it be known that the human will, of sovereign import and power, seeks accord with its other as they are alike in essence, flowing from the ownership of our bodies and of things, the State will impose themselves upon you and the property which flows from your essence, and rob you of the power of violence which is your own. The statist will tell you that commercial private property is a social arrangement that arose contingently in the history of economic development after merchants leveraged their wealth to obtain other forms of power, but more truly it is the expression of the inviolable sanctity of our wills!"
:100:
We just burned all the books that talk about how private property became a thing. How it violates a previous state of unrestricted (or far less restricted) access and must have its ownership strongly enforced. This is the real history of private property; it was imposed on the unwilling to turn a profit on what was once theirs. Commercial private property arises as part of a victory against those who it dispossesses, and only after became embodied in legal codes in a more polite form; only those who had private property or benefitted from its acquisition had a hand in setting up how it worked. As a social process, it has always been rigged, a means of attaching value to land that was acquired by force, and owning that which comes from it.
[hide=*]Of course, control of access to things has always been a thing, property exists in some way in all societies, the specific way it interfaces with our markets has its origin in something like the above, though.[/hide]
Should I take it that we're not using arguments anymore? Is that what this is?
It seems obvious to us with thinking brains. I think Virgo has an axe to grind. Either that or she is delusional.
Are you daft? He’s tearing apart your premises.
Well, it's a shame. I thought we were having a good discussion.
Deleted the post since I wanted to explain why I wrote the parable, I thought it would be clear.
It's the evening and I decided to write down a parable rather than writing another essay.
I could've made the post more along the lines of:
(1) If a free market is only a stipulated idea, it has never existed.
(2) Therefore it has no causal powers.
(3) Therefore deviation from it is impossible.
(4) Therefore attributing blame to the state for the consequences of deviating from it is impossible.
"If only we didn't deviate from the Free Market by having a State (with such and such properties, then..."
Then pointed out the analogy:
(1) If God is only a stipulated idea, it has never existed.
(2) Therefore it has no causal powers.
(3) Therefore it can make no edicts.
(4) Therefore deviation from its will is impossible.
(5) Therefore attributing blame to people for the consequences of deviating from it is impossible.
"If only we didn't split ourselves from God by having free will (and doing such and such), then..."
And then pointed out that this is the reverse of a religious doctrine:
(1) God existed in our stipulated form.
(2) Therefore God made edicts.
(3) Therefore deviating from those edicts is possible.
(4) Therefore we can attribute blame to people for deviating from those edicts.
It was therefore easy to construe your position in terms of the religious doctrine. The parallels do not end there.
Going from (3) to (4) often involves "free will", which is "agency" in our discussion. An ideal system having "compossible rights" articulated in terms of "private property" and a "non-aggression principle" comes down to "in an ideal social system we cannot violate another's agency" and "violating another's agency only makes sense in terms of violating commercial property rights". These stipulations together give "the only way we can violate another's agency is by violating their property rights" - so Eve was punished for taking an apple which wasn't hers. This makes coercion attributable to some devil like The State which comes into the picture against humanity because private property rights are stipulated as intimately tied to agency. The ultimate situation of freedom is stipulated in your world as The Free Market, which is entirely non-coercive, and coercion becomes attributed solely to the State.
In that regard, in your view, humans are tied between two abstractions, a force of coercion called The State and a force of freedom called The Free Market, neither of which has ever existed (as aggregates or as individuals, as I'm sure you'll agree), but humanity feels the effects of deviating from freedom through the always illegitimate actions of the State. We feel these effects apparently as inefficiencies and needless poverty, prices far above the (always allegedly cheap) "true competitive rate", monopolies etc...
[hide=Edit, the stuff about Friedman]: the stuff about the prophet Freidman being a rebel was to introduce limited government in terms of the parable; a government should only be there to protect and enforce property rights. That even an ideal situation of freedom needs to have a powerful legislative body to ensure it stays that way. The stuff about "animal spirits" was a joke reference to the concept in investment; fluctuations in stock prices through changing aggregate emotional dispositions/reactions of investors, then a self referential joke about animal spirits being an emergent property of investors that drives some of the market noise, which fit into the discussion we had about emergent properties of aggregates having causal powers not reducible (qualitatively independent and multiply realisable) to the causal powers of their aggregates' constituents.[/hide]
This is exactly the same as deviating from the edicts of God, which has never existed, but still blaming our sufferings on deviating from the edicts. People however are tempted to use the witchcraft of The State, as in regulatory capture or the collective bargaining of unions, to do things which they otherwise wouldn't and (by definition) violate people's agency, through taxes, redistributive measures etc.
But it's a far more effective rhetorical strategy to portray it as a parable. Considering your model of The State and your model of The Free Market have never existed, the comparison is pretty strong.
The power of the State rests much less on its monopoly on the use of force than on its ability to manipulate its citizens into believing in the legitimacy of its action. Therefore, its stronghold on media and schools is actually much more important than its police force or its army.
In other words, the State's power rests on the fact that people actually believe what its representatives say. Restricting the State's power requires making people disbelieve the official State narrative and any of its claims to legitimacy.
The more that people are suspicious of the State's narrative, the freer that they will become. It starts by assuming that everything that the State or any of its representatives says, is a lie. All that remains to be done, time permitting, is to figure out why it is a lie.
For example, the concept of "law-abiding, tax-paying citizen". It is a manipulative lie. You should do exactly the opposite. Whenever you can, do not abide their self-invented laws, and do not pay their taxes. Why? You will discover the reason for that later on, time permitting. Start by rejecting the very concept already.
Now that we have evolved from a "television State" to an "internet State" the question becomes whether people in the "internet State" have finally become less gullible and manipulable than before?
I am not sure about that. In the end, it is largely the same people, and they largely still believe to their own detriment in the very same lies.
I feel like I butt heads with you too much. That is my shortcoming, not yours. I just have strong feelings about such things, but I shouldn’t get so emotional, especially in a philosophy forum.
The main problem is that you are hypostatising or reifying the free market, as though it were presented as a kind of subsistent ‘thing’. But it does not have subsistence. It is only an abstraction, just as ‘the State’ is an abstraction: there is really no such entity as a ‘State’, only persons who act coercively, and whom we identify as ‘governmental’. To set up the discussion as one of ‘free market versus State’ is really a red herring, and does not get to the heart of the issue. The relevant distinction is between the kind of human activity which is peaceful, which does not invade another’s person or property, and the kind of human activity which is aggressive, which initiates force against persons and invades their property.
When we speak of the ‘free market’, all that is intended is the aggregation of exchanges between persons, where this process is not invaded by an aggressor. There is nothing esoteric or abstruse about this, as you suggest in speaking of ivory towers. Your argument seems to amount to this: because such a state of affairs has never obtained, it is senseless to speak of departing from it, and therefore we cannot blame the departure from it on anything in particular, including the State. But this really does not amount to much, philosophically.
The free market and the State are not two ‘things’ to be compared. To say that markets have never been unaccompanied by the State is merely to say that the free associations between persons have always been invaded by aggressors. So what? Does this mean that aggression is not objectionable? Does it mean that peaceful activity must always be accompanied by coercive invasion? Of course not: none of this is implied, logically. States do not exist for the good of ‘us’. Their perdurance is not owing to their practical indispensability, their inevitability, or because of the good which they produce. They are agencies of monopolised coercion, which have an interest in their own self-preservation.
Quoting fdrake
Just as with the free market, there is nothing esoteric or abstruse about the State. The State, and all its subsidiary instruments, is composed of persons, and these persons engage in activities which we would identify as clearly criminal if any other persons were to act similarly. You are quite mistaken if you think that the libertarian considers the State to be the sole author of aggression. I am not sure where you have got this idea. The non-aggression principle opposes the initiation of force and the invasion of private property, and so all of the activities which involve such behavior are implicated. The reason why the State receives such attention is because the State has successfully persuaded the vast majority of persons of its necessity, its inevitability, its nobility, and so on. In some cases, it has even convinced people that it really is them! A perverse notion.
J.R.R. Tolkien put it best, in a letter to his son who was about to be sent his death by his government:
[i]My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning
abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would
arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England
and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of
recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it
would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an [sic.] and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to
clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.[/i]
I much prefer the kind of direct, philosophical engagement you were producing before. Little is gained from analogising my arguments to religious dogma, or translating my arguments into vocabulary of which I have not made use (like ‘free will’). My arguments are what they are. You can either engage with them, as you were before, or play around with them, as you are doing now.
Workers' rights had to be established because too many 'employers' treated workers horribly. You are suggesting that we go back to that, or at the very least, you're advocating the same situation which led up to the requirement for workers' rights.
Awww ok then. I was hoping that we might have a parable off.
I'm going to assume that you see tax as coercive. Coercive because a government takes stuff off people. Let's formulate that as an argument. Let's also brush aside the issue of a government having its own sense of agency, since you seem to be able to understand it as a shorthand.
(A1) If an agent A deprives an agent B of access to what they own, the depriving action is coercive.
(A2) Governments deprive agents of a portion of their profits or earnings through tax.
(A3) That action is coercive.
The argument as it stands is invalid, it needs an additional premise.
(A2a) An agent owns the portion of their profits or earnings which a government takes.
Unfortunately, that premise is false. The reason governments (at least the UK, I would assume it's the same for most countries with a tax system) can collect on tax is because they already own that portion of earnings or profits. How do they own it? They are legally stipulated to, in the laws that define who owns what. So in order for (2a) to be true and make the argument go through (assuming the other premises), people would have to own the taxed portion of earnings or profits in some other sense. An interesting implication of that argument is:
(B1) If an agent A deprives an agent B of access to what they own, the depriving action is coercive.
(B2) An agent deprives their government of a portion of their profits or earnings by not paying tax.
(B2a) Governments own that taxed portion of earnings.
(B3) That action is coercive.
While (A2a) is false, (B2a) is true. The validity of the first argument entails the validity of the second, so not paying tax is coercive. To make a convincing argument, there needs to be a sense of ownership distinct from the "mere" legal one that makes (A2a) true but (B2a) false.
If we add in the non-aggression principle, "we ought not do that which is coercive", we can conclude that "we ought to pay our tax". (this is because not(pay tax) is coercive, if we ought not (not pay tax), we ought pay tax).
Given that ownership (who owns what and on what basis) is necessarily determined by social codes, IE that ownership is determined by the (more or less codified) rules of ownership in a society, forcing (A2a) to be true and (B2a) to be false looks to require a standard of ownership which is not based upon adhering to social customs.
We're left with the conclusion that tax is not coercive, and that refusing to pay tax is. Unless you give an account of ownership rights that hold independently of social custom.
The main thrust here is to get you to say where property rights come from, and to address the contingent character of coercion within a social form based on the rules of ownership it follows.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Now let's return to the argument about individuals and states; that individuals exist but states merely subsist.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
If neither free markets nor the state have existed in the sense you describe them, they are useless as analytic categories - "the State is lumbering and inefficient" becomes a statement about an inexistent entity's behaviour. But let's put that aside for now, and focus on the principles that allow you to claim that persons exist but states merely subsist.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
(C1) If individual entities compose an aggregate, we can infer that the aggregate does not exist.
(C2) Human cells are individual entities.
(C3) Humans are aggregations of human cells.
(C4) Humans do not exist.
But clearly you believe humans exist. What principle of metaphysics allows you to claim that humans exist but not states?
I would suggest that you believe humans exist because we are agents, that we have distinct causal powers irreducible to the properties of the cells which composes us. Cells do not want or desire, only humans do.
Applying this principle consistently yields the existence of aggregates like states. and firms. Individual humans do not produce laws, social customs or economies, only aggregates do. Laws, economies and social customs would be impossible if only individuals existed, in the same sense that want, desire and agency would be impossible if only cells did.
The main thrust here is to challenge the ontological principles you are using in your arguments to deny causal powers to aggregates.
Engels made the argument that in a socialist society the institutions of the state would just whither away and coercion would no longer be necessary for a society to function. The state is replaced by “the administration of things”, which seems to me a distinction without a difference save for that it would be administered voluntarily. In practice, however, the state only became more entrenched or collapsed under their own weight in those societies.
Since the state operates in many ways as a monopoly (Crown corporation in the commonwealth, for example), could the free enterprise route to a the withering of the state risk trading one monopoly for another, one state for another?
I like what you have to say here, and I do this issue of free enterprise trying to outmaneuver the state is extremely pertinent to our times and is going to play out over the next few decades. We're seeing it right now with the rise of digital currencies which threaten to unhinge the state's control of surveillance and put it back in the hands of the public. The government is closely monitoring this, and other governments around the world are in the process of developing their own cryptocurrencies which would effectively just act as enhanced surveillance tools. Banks and intelligence agencies have been in bed together for a while, at least here in the US.
Make no mistake about it though, the state will not go without a fight. The state can offer pretty good salaries to programmers and a number of other benefits. They are well aware of the threat that they are facing coming from tech. I also think there's another dog in this fight and that force is big tech (example would be facebook's libra currency.) In sum, what we have is the public vs. corporations vs. the state.
EDIT: In china this battle is effectively lost. The state has won. To the best of my knowledge the programmers there are nationalistic and the chinese government has really mastered the art of using tech to further control their population. they were able to arrest hundreds of hong kong protesters using their subway card information to know that they were attending protests via their personal data linked to those cards.
I can get behind this in general if you grant that the corporations (at least the biggest ones) essentially control state policy. I have just as much distrust of the private sector as I do the government.
On the understanding that that which is expropriated by taxation is the rightful property of her who is taxed, taxation would indeed be coercive, for precisely the same reason as theft and extortion are coercive. Indeed, if we take Tolkien’s advice and view the activity of the State as the actions of ‘King George, Winston and their gang’ (or equivalent), then taxation becomes praxeologically indistinguishable from a mafioso protection racket.
Your strategy, then, is to deny the assumption that the taxed money truly is the rightful property of the victim (if that is not too prejudicial) of the tax. If the money really belongs to the State, then they may expropriate just as much of it as they please. You justify this move as follows:
Quoting fdrake
But this takes a good deal for granted. Your assumption seems to be that, if the State declares itself, by means of the law that the State itself produces, to own object x, then the State rightfully owns object x. Moreover, you seem to imply on one or two occasions that all ownership rights in general are what they are because the State declares them to be so. Perhaps you would want to refine this further, but since you haven’t, I am going to tease out some problems with this view.
One problem with this view is that it gives rise to in-compossible property claims. If, as currently obtains, there is more than one State in the world, then they may both lay claim to one and the same object (a landmass, for instance), which would show the above principle to be deficient in establishing a rightful property claim. To counteract this, we may limit the State’s ‘expropriation powers’ only to a certain territory. This seems like a plausible move, since this is already how we think of States as being distinguished from one another.
But this also needs justification. What we are calling a ‘State’ is just an association of persons. To say that the State may pass a law which gives itself license to expropriate any object within a certain territory gives rise to the following two questions: ‘Why may these persons, in distinction from all other persons, do so?’ and ‘Why may they do so over this landmass, in distinction from all other landmasses?’ This is nothing other than the question of political legitimacy; what makes the State a legitimate State. What is more, since the adherent of this view believes that the State may afford itself the legal right to expropriate anything within the territory, this implies that, in an ultimate sense, the State really owns the whole territory and everything within it, since the only way in which any person other than the State may come to own something is if the State graciously chooses not to expropriate it for itself. If the State wishes to expropriate an object from me and I wish for it not to, the State asserts its right to get its way, and this is just another way of saying that the State considers the object to be its own rightful property.
Unfortunately for the Statist, it is difficult to give a non-question-begging account of why these persons in particular come to own this territory in particular. One move available is to say that the State owns the territory because the law states that it does. But the circularity of this should be obvious. After all, I may write on a piece of paper that I own the same territory. Why does this not have the same authority? ‘Simple,’ says the Statist, ‘because you are not a legitimate State.’ In other words, the State’s statutes are successful in affording the State rightful claims because the State is legitimate. But this is no good as an argument, since the question of the State’s legitimacy is the very thing which we are trying to justify.
Quite simply: the State’s actions are ostensibly coercive, and so the natural move is to insist that they are not coercive because the State is doing nothing more than exercising its own rightful property claims. To justify the rightfulness of those very property claims, you must appeal to that which the State declares about its own property claims in the laws it passes. When the question is asked, ‘Why do the pieces of paper on which the State writes – rather than the pieces of paper on which I write – afford it such rights?’, the only recourse is to insist that the State’s piece of paper is authoritative because, unlike little old me, the State really is legitimate. But this is just to take us back to asserting the very thing that is in question. I hope the circle is clear.
But perhaps I am exaggerating your position. Perhaps you are saying nothing more than that the fiat currencies of our acquaintance – GBP, USD, Won – are just products, for which we have the State to thank. We may choose to use them or not to use them, but if we do, we consent to the State’s terms and conditions, which include the State’s right to expropriate. This story would be convincing, were it not for legal tender laws. Suppose that I raise the following defence: ‘I recognise the State’s right to produce its own currency and to set limits on its use by its customers. But I choose not to use this currency, thank you very much. I shall trade in gold/bitcoin/seashells.’ Would this make me exempt from paying taxes? Of course not. The State’s power to declare by legal fiat what does or does not constitute ‘money’ is the final nail in the coffin of a free monetary system. We are then forced back onto the question of why I should be subject to such a law, which in turns forces us back onto the question of the State’s legitimacy, which, as I have argued, is rather difficult to justify non-circularly.
Quoting fdrake
The contingent character of coercion – or, as I would rather put it, the fact that the NAP is philosophically dependent upon a system of property rights – is an observation I have made enthusiastically elsewhere. I resist strongly the identification of the law which the State produces with ‘social norms’. This should not be surprising, given how anti-social I believe the State to be in its essence. If you really do wish to make this identification, then the consequence would seem to be that the State can never be a coercive institution, by definition: any ostensibly coercive act in which the State engages may be legitimised as the State doing as it wishes its own property, on the understanding that its property is what it is because the State has declared it to be so.
An account of how rightful property claims are generated in the first instance is yet another rabbit-trail which would take up too much space in this post, but which may enjoy more attention at a later point. The three most prominent philosophical traditions here would be the right-libertarian tradition, which has its roots in John Locke, the left-libertarian tradition, which has its roots in Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the Marxist tradition, which has its roots in some guy called Carl, but which has been defended more convincingly by analytic Marxists like G. A. Cohen.
Very briefly, the right-lib and left-lib view is that each individual is a self-owner; i.e. each person’s body is her own private property. They part ways on the question of the ownership of external resources. The left-lib understands the world’s resources to be jointly co-owned by all persons, such that the individual comes into the world with an equal, quotal share in everything. The right-lib understands the world’s resources as being originally unowned, and come to be owned through productive acts of transformation (or ‘homesteading’). Thereafter, rightful property claims are transferred by bequeathal or exchange. Cohen, who may or may not be archetypical of the Marxist view, agrees with the left-lib as regards co-ownership of worldly resources, but also extends this egalitarian view to persons, which leads him to deny self-ownership.
Unsurprisingly, I agree with the right-libertarian view, inspired by Locke. I will not provide a philosophical justification for this here. Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, however, are I think the best apologists for this view.
Quoting fdrake
I don’t believe I have denied aggregative causal powers. And I have agreed that compositional aggregates can exist, and that there are certain things which are rightly predicated of a whole which are not rightly predicated of the parts. What I have denied is that aggregations of agents of purposeful action – persons – may be counted as ‘extra’ agents of purposeful action, above and beyond the members. I will not rehearse all of the illustrations I have provided for this ontological commitment. But it seems to me obvious that my scrabble club is not a person, it has no purposes or intentions to speak of; or, if it may be spoken of as having such, then this is a merely linguistic, merely poetic, abstraction from the purposes and intents of the individual members.
What would it take for me to be wrong about this? It would take my scrabble club’s having a ‘mind of its own’. When I and my co-scrabblers sit, the four of us, around our square table, what exactly do you think ‘emerges’? Have we now been joined by a ‘someone’, a 'who', that is not identifiable with any one of the four of us? It sounds like a séance to me. Forgive the facetiousness.
But of course! I can hardly write parables at you and not expect some facetiousness in return. :smile:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is what we are arguing about. Whether we should accept this as a premise, and why. Holding the background fixed.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Yes. My view is that the social customs that define who owns what are sufficient to define who owns what. More formally, a person's property is defined by what the social customs of property say is their property. Sometimes there may be legal disputes over the specifics, but as a rough and ready characterisation, yes, this is my view. Who owns what is defined by social custom. What it means to own something is defined by social custom. I believe this is accurate to how property works in the world.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Yes. Because who owns what is defined by social custom, property claims are incompossible. That is, it may be the case that nations and groups and firms disagree about who owns what and it what way. This is a fact of life. When an oil company builds a pipeline on a reservation, there is an ownership dispute. This doesn't get resolved by who has the most moral claim, it usually gets resolved by who has the most power. That is, it gets resolved politically rather than conceptually, and usually there is a huge power asymmetry which is leveraged in the resolution.
These are not logical contradictions, "X claims P exclusively" and "Y claims P exclusively" entail no logical contradiction, just a political or legal dispute. I am not providing a moral justification of this, just a description of how things are. What happens will happen even if there is no argument for why it must be so.
This is consistent with my strategy of showing that what you're talking about has no basis in reality. You are attributing blame to the state (which still, apparently cannot exist) for failing to live up to an impossible standard (and failing to behave like another thing which cannot exist). It really is like humanity being torn between God and Devil.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
It is extremely bizarre that you criticise the definition of property ownership through social customs like a state's laws on property ownership, but that you also think that the non aggression principle depends upon a social system of property rights. Presumably, in that system, whatever it is, who owns what on which basis and what ownership means is specified by the social code, such that owning something within that system is being in a situation of ownership as defined by the code!
Perhaps you are saying that ownership is defined entirely by social custom, but that different systems of ownership can be more or less coercive. Specifically, perhaps you are claiming that a system of ownership is non-coercive only when it satisfies the non-aggression principle.
To that end; I'll re ask a question from earlier which you dodged (or otherwise neglected to answer): a new resource is discovered in your ideal system, two distinct firms make a property claim for "productive transformation", how can you possibly establish which is right without defining ownership through the code and coercing the loser to back off?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I'm perfectly happy to accept that ownership rights are typically coercive - they are enforceable claims! How in the hell are you going to have a system of property rights without each right in accordance with the social customs being a claim backed up by violence? How are property rights established in a non-coercive way in your ideal system? It must be possible for property rights to be established non-coercively in order for the claim "we ought establish property rights non-coercively" to make sense; ought implies can, therefore if it is impossible to abide by a standard we are not obliged to follow it!
In absence of spelling out how this mythical system of non-coercive property works, how to put the social customs in place to ensure they satisfy the non-aggression principle, what you're talking about does not function as standard to hold current property rights up to
I am not defending excesses of coercion here, I am recognising that legal codes are always coercive to some degree; they are enforceable claims. By virtue that if one fails to abide by them one suffers the consequences. Politics top to bottom is saturated by power; negotiations, leverage, the "continuation of politics by other means", subterfuge, sabotage etc etc. Firms need no hand outs from the state to fuck with each other as much as possible, it's all in the spirit of competition.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You're missing a vital distinction, I'll try and spell it out formally. Say there is an aggregate A of individuals I. The individuals have a collection of properties, relations and functions (behavioural outputs) P(I), call these I type predicates. The aggregate has a collection of properties, relations and functions P(A), call these A type predicates.
Your claim amounts to the observation that I type predicates need not be a subset of A type predicates. Prosaically, individual predicates need not transfer to aggregates. I agree.
My claim amounts to A type predicates and I type predicates are distinct.
An example; the ability to communicate is an I type property. The ability to negotiate is an A type predicate. Laws are not I type predicates, laws are A type predicates.
A type predicates may depend existentially upon the presence of select I type predicates; writing requires hands. A type predicates need not be reducible to I type predicates: humans want, cells do not (non-reducible); gas molecules have speeds, gases have temperatures (average speeds, reducible in some sense).
For a given collection of individuals in an aggregate, can A type predicates constrain or promote I type predicates? Yes. Gas molecules have speeds but not enclosing volumes, decreasing the enclosing volume of the gas increases their temperature; the average speed of the gas molecules goes up. Does this require any specific change in gas molecule speeds? No, lots of speed distributions produce the same average.
In societies: an A type predicates like a system of ownership can promote an I type predicate like rent seeking behaviour. Does this require that any individual must rent seek? No, it makes it possible and advantageous; it introduces a statistical proclivity, just like decreasing the enclosing volume of a gas introduces a statistical proclivity for its molecules to speed up.
Do firms have A type predicates? Yes, they can change investment strategy or mandate the use of new technology. Does this mean that firms have minds? No. It does mean that firm structure can constrain or promote individual behaviour. Firms have properties like corporate personhood! Corporate persons can be legally responsible for things. That's a legal responsibility attributed to something which is not an agent. Update your metaphysics to accommodate this.
:brow:
I was with you til the above...
How did you get there from where you were?
If agency is only applicable to humans, and legal responsibility is only applicable to entities with agency, then agency is only applicable to humans. No agency => No legal responsibility. Flip that about. Legal responsibility => agency. Firms themselves can be a party in legal contracts. So firms can be legally responsible for things.
I don't believe they have agency in the sense humans have agency, but they do have causal powers and their own kind of existence, recognised by law, distinct from each of their employees (you could change every employee with another and keep the legal responsibilities intact, though this is not necessarily independent from employee roles within the firm (who signs the contracts for the firm.)
Isn't there a missing premiss? Something like humans are the only entities with agency... then agency is only applicable to humans.
If that is the case, and firms have responsibility, then it is not the case that responsibility requires agency.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think @Virgo Avalytikh's presentation suggests they agree with this premise.
I have to confess some disappointment with how little you have engaged with the argument I presented. I have denied precisely the identification which you insist on making, between 'social customs' and 'the laws which the State produces'. The State is not 'us'; it is an association of persons who hold certain monopolistic privileges over an arbitrary territory. If you are going to insist on identifying 'social norms' with 'what is written on a piece of paper by these particular persons in this particular territory', then you must give an account of political legitimacy. That is, you must address, which you have as yet neglected to do, the two questions I posed previously regarding the State's expropriation powers:
‘Why may these persons, in distinction from all other persons, do so?’ and ‘Why may they do so over this landmass, in distinction from all other landmasses?’
However, I have argued that attempts to do so end up being circular. You seem to have ignored this problem completely, even though it is fatal for the position for which you are arguing. The State is not legitimate, so the view that 'rightful property claims are what they are because that is what the State declares them to be' is false.
It is also surprising for you to resort to this avenue of argumentation. My initial impression was that you were sympathetic to my libertarian critique of the State, but felt that I ought to widen my critique to private firms. Now, it seems, you are arguing for straightforward authoritarianism: rightful property claims are determined by social norms (this is fine), social norms just are the content of the pieces of paper the State writes on, so everyone rightfully owns what they own because that is what the State declares them to own. As I pointed out above, this really implies that the State owns everything within the territory in question, for everyone else's 'ownership rights' are only ever provisional, and are potentially expropriated by the State at any time.
Apart from the fact that this view is not remotely plausible (you haven't actually presented an argument for it, that I have seen), and ends up being formally circular (as I laid out in my previous post), it is also a hugely unattractive view, which is why I am so surprised to see you resorting to it. It would entail that the firm's power structure really is justified, because everyone involved is simply exercising their own government-granted property rights. Is this really the result for which you were aiming?
Quoting fdrake
The very purpose of a system of rights is to determine who may do what, and when. A system of rights which gives rise to in-compossible results is simply not fit for purpose. That is not to say that there cannot be competing claims, but what a system of rights is intended to do is to distinguish the rightful from the non-rightful claims. My point is that there are principled ways of doing this which give rise to a set of compossible rights, and there are ways of doing this which do not, and the latter are unfit for purpose.
Quoting fdrake
I do not. I have objected, with no small amount of philosophical rigour, to the identification of 'social customs' with the State's edicts. Government and society are not the same. It is not us.
Quoting fdrake
There is a linguistic issue which ought to be cleared up. When I speak of 'coercion', I am referring to violations of the non-aggression principle. The NAP distinguishes between forceful acts which are initiatory, and those which are not (those, for instance, which are defensive or consensual). In order to make this crucial distinction, there must be a system of property rights. For this reason, it is putting the cart before the horse to describe systems of ownership as being more or less coercive; actions are coercive, and it is only on the basis of a system of ownership that they may be judged as such. What is more, if we acknowledge that there are ways of using force which do not violate the NAP, we are in a position to address the following kind of question:
Quoting fdrake
Rights are indeed enforceable. I have the right to turn down offers of employment, and I am prepared to enforce this right. If you try to coerce me into working for you, without my consent, then I may (and will) use force to defend my property (I am assuming that my body is my own rightful property). But this does not make me a coercer. To say that it does is to fail to allow the distinction which the libertarian makes when she invokes the NAP.
So, anyone may transform the land, in whole or in part. They are then within their rights to resort to force to defend their property.
Quoting fdrake
I actually see very little here that I would disagree with. But, nor do I see anything which looks particularly threatening to my thesis. What I said is true: my four-membered scrabble club is not joined by a fifth agent, with plans and purposes of its own, hovering above us when we gather, and spontaneously dispersing when we go home. You seem to be exaggerating my fairly innocuous observation into something far more ambitious, for which I have not argued, like 'aggregations can't have properties or causal powers'.
Quoting fdrake
This, though, is a very poor argument. Are you really suggesting that the pieces of paper on which the State writes determines metaphysics? Are you really saying that things which would otherwise be non-persons become persons because the State writes on a piece of paper that they are? Are there any constrains on this? And, more pressingly, does the reverse also hold true? If the members of the set 'person' are just those things which the State declares to be persons, then I am sure that I do not need to remind of you the dangers of this.
So, no, corporations are not persons, and the State does not have the power to render them persons by legal fiat. It is a legal fiction.
Why do I have to give an account of political legitimacy? I've never been arguing that states or markets are inherently moral institutions, I've been arguing that your criticisms of them are incoherent.
There's no more to a system of property rights than how it's set out in the law and how that law's enforced. A claim that you seem to believe, as you seem to believe that ownership is determined by social systems. The law is certainly a social system that determines who owns what. So, the state has the benefit of actually existing here, your proposed social system does not, it provides no enforceable claims to property, it cannot decide what is expropriative and what isn't.
I've never been arguing that "We ought to follow every law because it's written on a piece of paper" or "We ought to follow every social norm because it's there", I've been arguing that what it means for a person to be subject to a law is to be in the territory of a governing body, or other social form, that has that as its law. Laws are social customs, in the sense that laws are a subset of social customs, they can be changed. They're codes. Ought one follow a law? Depends on the law. Ought one follow a mandate from a political body? Depends on the mandate. The normative force follows both from social customs (the widespread belief and teaching that we should follow the social codes, which includes the law, and so includes private property) and from some social customs being enforceable claims (when they're laws). This says nothing about whether the social customs, laws, states, etc are somehow "legitimate" or "moral".
What it does say, however, is that how you're criticising them is based on category errors. If a law or social custom holds, it holds whether it is moral or not. Ought it not hold if it is not moral? Sure. Ought it not hold if it not holding for a specified reason cannot happen? No, ought implies can, cannot implies not ought. My argument strategy has been to show that what you're talking about couldn't possibly happen, or is based in category errors. Hence the argument about what it means to own something being solely a legal matter, or a matter of social custom.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You're right, governments aren't identical with the societies that they're in. Governments are (minimally) a collection of legislative bodies in a society.
Why I've been arguing is because if laws are social customs, private property is also a social custom. What you own and how you own it is determined by the laws that apply to where you live. There's no further sense of ownership for private property above and beyond how the law says private property works. Does that mean how people own things and who owns what is moral in any particular social system? No. It does mean that an impossible social system (such as you've described or elided to describe), where property ownership is not just legally mandated social relationship irrelevant of how moral it is or how expropriate it is is an inappropriate standard to judge societies by, by virtue of being logically contradictory.
Does the government own your tax?
Yes.
Is it expropriating your property when you pay it?
No.
When a loan shark legally reclaims all your stuff for failed repayments, are they expropriating your property?
No.
Because the law entitles them to reclaim their damages from what you own, they have their choice of what you own up to a specified value. They already owned it.
That is, in neither circumstance, no one is violating any property rights, because they're defined by the law.
When two people claim ownership for the same thing in a legal dispute, do they have conflicting items of property?
No, they have conflicting property claims. Who owns the thing is decided in the legal dispute. If the second person won, and the first person was preventing the second from access, maybe the first person has to pay damages, because the second person already owned it.
That's all there is to ownership of commercial private property. It's determined by the law, which is a kind of social custom - albeit a social custom that few affected by it can change. Your use of "expropriation" and the like are merely poetic (insofar as laws are sufficient to define who owns what!)
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
No, it's our capacity to form social institutions that can be held responsible for things that makes such a thing a necessary part of our social ontology. As far as the law goes, corporations are legal persons; they can be held legally responsible for things. What I'm doing is feeding facts like that into entailments you've suggested to show they're incoherent.
If your claim goes: "if X can be held legally responsible for something, then X has a mind", then corporations have minds because they are held legally responsible for things. If your claim goes "if X can be held legally responsible for something, then X is an agent", then I guess corporations are agents, so agents need not be humans at all.
[hide=*]"doesn't have a mind => can't be held legally responsible" flipped around is "can be held legally responsible" => "has a mind". Something you have used to criticise what I've said[/hide]
In general, you continue to criticise the state for failing to behave the same as something which does not and cannot exist, you agree that who owns what is determined by a system of property rights - like our system of property law - but you continue to criticise the state for "expropriating" what it already owns by that standard.
If anything, I'd hope that you pay your taxes with glee now, now that you know you're giving someone their own property back when they demand it. Hell, you are initiating force when you deprive them of their property! Non-aggression requires you pay it.
Indeed! The owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline were well within their rights to beat the shit out of protestors and Native American land residents on the land to defend their property. The protestors, in an attempt to deprive the firm of what was rightfully theirs, initiated brutal force. It was only right for protestors to be stripped naked and ogled by police, beaten and pepper sprayed, consistent with the defending the property rights of who rightfully owned the property. The violence of police was not coercive as they did not initiate it, the fault goes to the protestors and Native American residents. The owners were only defending themselves.
But you are right, in an ideal world, the State would not have provided police officers, the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline would have hired a mercenary group, or hired a private security firm, for a modest sum, who spend their time freely due to agreeing to the contract. Strictly speaking, these mercenaries could never have been coercive, as they did not initiate the violence. They were simply protecting the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline's right to transform the land...
This is not true. In my original post, I cited an article of David Friedman’s, ‘A Positive Account of Property Rights’, in which he argues – convincingly, to my mind – that a set of non-overlapping rights domains, as well as a set of self-enforcing contracts, can be bargained up to in the absence of centralised State dictum; indeed, without any communication at all. He also makes a case for this in the 3rd edition of The Machinery of Freedom. He gave a short lecture to this effect in 2018 (unfortunately I could not attend this one, although I did see him speak at my university that same year): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FORLmB57zrc
Quoting fdrake
No, this does not follow, logically. It is fallacious to argue as follows: ‘Rights are produced by social norms; laws are social norms; therefore rights are produced by laws.’ It is fallacious because, even if it is the case that rights are produced by social norms, this does not imply that they are produced by just any kind of social norms. That is like arguing, ‘Heat is produced by chemical reactions; dissolving ammonium chloride in water is a chemical reaction; therefore dissolving ammonium chloride in water produces heat’. But it doesn’t.
So, in order to make the argument formally valid, we must add a premise: we must have some reason for thinking that the laws which the State produces are adequate to generate property rights. This is why I am pressing you on the question of legitimacy. Unless you can give a (non-circular) reason for supposing that the pieces of paper that are written on by these particular persons, whom we identify as a ‘State’, over this particular territory, which we identify as a ‘country’, have some special rights-bestowing power which my pieces of paper do not have, there is simply no reason for thinking that we require centralised State dictum in order to determine who owns what.
This is all on the assumption, which I have disputed repeatedly and for which you have not even attempted to argue, that the pieces of paper on which the State writes are appropriately identified with ‘social norms’. I see no reason at all to make this identification. It looks to me as a typical case of equating ‘government’ with ‘society’, or our rulers with ‘us’.
Quoting fdrake
Yes it can. Why shouldn’t it? I don’t see what point you are trying to make here. The only thing which the State has going for it is that it happens to obtain in the present status quo. But what philosophical bearing does this have? This is a surprisingly conservative argument to see you making.
Quoting fdrake
Your original words were:
How do they own it? They are legally stipulated to, in the laws that define who owns what.
This looks to me to be a very uncomplicated way of expressing exactly the position which I have subsequently attributed to you, on the basis of this very statement. What are you saying here? You are saying that the law is precisely that which determines who owns what. Everybody owns what they own because that is what the law says that they own, and they own no more and no less than this. Who produces the law? The State. The law is the pieces of paper on which the State writes. But this view – that rightful property claims are the generated by the declarations of the State – forces us back onto the two questions which I keep pressing you to answer: Why these persons, in distinction from all others? Why this territory, in distinction from all others?
Quoting fdrake
I don’t see how you have done all this. What you claim to have ‘argued’ you really have only asserted, despite my repeated objections. There is no reason why the existence of the State is necessary, or even sufficient, to generate property rights. There is no reason to equate the law which the State produces with social norms. And there is no reason why property rights cannot exist and be enforced in the absence of the State.
Quoting fdrake
This won’t do, even as a partial definition, since a State is not necessary for the production of law. Stateless societies can have, and have had, legal systems in the absence of a State (Iceland, which was Stateless for the first three centuries of its existence, had an elegant justice system). Many libertarian theorists have discussed the private production of law. Many of the ingredients of such a system are already in place (private security and alternative dispute resolution, for example). The State is a human association which maintains a monopoly on the use of physical force over a territory. Not only is the State not equivalent to society, it is precisely anti-social, in the sense that it preserves for itself the prerogative to engage in behaviours which it would put you and me in a cage for engaging in.
Quoting fdrake
Again, why? I still have not seen an argument for this; at least, not one which does not require you to make assumptions which I have repeatedly challenged.
Quoting fdrake
I have not even mentioned legal responsibility as a precondition of personhood, or of being an agent of purposeful action. So I fail to see how any of this could be a faithful reconstruction of my position. To say that a corporation has ‘legal responsibility’ means nothing more than that it is spoken of in that way on the pieces of paper which are written on by an arbitrary association of persons. If these same pieces of paper declared rocks to have legal responsibility, this would not have any metaphysical bearing whatsoever. It would just be another absurd legal fiction, and there is no philosophical reason to take it seriously.
More precisely; people have no rights except for the ones afforded to them by social systems. If you want to know what a person is entitled to in a social system like ours, look to its laws, and look at how they may change. When the laws change, the rights changed. I assumed you believed this, perhaps you are arguing that there is some non social system by which people are afforded rights? Perhaps by some divine agent like the Free Market, the purveyor of all Goods, Services and Natural Rights?
If you could find me a natural right which is not merely stipulated to hold as a contingent feature of a social system, and which is not an enforceable claim when and only when it also holds in a social system or a legal system (which is a particular type of social system), I would believe they exist.
And these rights apparently
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
can be bargained, without any communication, and are not purely social or legal in character? Despite that they resemble how ownership works in a market society in almost every respect, except that they are somehow "legitimate"? Nonsense on stilts!
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Let me see if this jibes with you, as a summary of your argument.
(1) Legitimate rights are of form X.
(2) All legal rights afforded by a state are of form Y.
(3) Y precludes X.
(4) Therefore all legal rights afforded by a state are illegitimate.
Y are "incompossible" or "coercive" or "do not satisfy the non-aggression principle".
And all this time you've been arguing about natural rights? Presumably they also flow from [s]God[/s] The Free Market, the hitherto inexistent paradise on the hill.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You're looking for a philosophical (precisely moral) justification rather than a historical or political one, why must history have gone the way it did? I can't answer that, a state is as contingent a social form as a tribal council. What legal rights we have are ultimately a function of politics and history. Since there are no natural rights, what rights we have simpliciter are a function of politics and history. Why would different people in different countries in different time periods have different numbers of different rights if it worked any other way?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You're right, it is sufficient for the production of law. A collection of legislative bodies which produces codes that entitle select people to enforceable claims is necessary for the production of law. If you can find a social system with laws that does not have such a collection, I would be extremely surprised.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You may not have explicitly stated that legal responsibility is a precondition for personhood. But you have denied responsibility to aggregates, like firms, on the basis that responsibility applies only to individuals (humans). I just flipped the implication; if responsibility applies only to individuals (humans), then firms must be humans, on the basis that they are legally responsible for things. Clearly you don't believe that, which is inconsistent.
It's much more plausible that the only rights things have are of the same character; legal ones, socially mediated ones, and it doesn't matter whether they apply to agents or aggregates.
I would agree that we have obligations to each other in absence of the law, though. And would further stipulate that something being legal is not the same as it being moral. I'd also stipulate that something being socially obliged does not entail it is moral, though it would surprise me if there weren't things in a three way overlap of what is legal, what is socially obliged and what is moral. I'm going to continue to frame that what's illegal is outside of the set of what's socially obliged though; in particular, we're socially obliged not to do that which is illegal. We may be morally obliged to do that which is illegal sometimes.
One of the problems we are having here is the fact that you are making unwarranted assumptions, and taking for granted that for which you have not offered philosophical justification, despite my calling on you to do so. To allow that the content of our rights is determined socially is not to allow that our rights are determined by the State’s edicts, which are something else entirely. Why you would think that I believe that the content of our rights is determined by the laws the State passes, I haven’t a notion. I have denied such repeatedly, and offered reasons for thinking that such a view is indefensible; which is why, I assume, you have not tried to defend it, but have merely asserted it instead.
What is really happening, I suspect, is that we have a different understanding of the relationship between rights and law. Law, on my understanding, exists in service of rights, such that rights have a logical priority over law. This is certainly the more ancient view, as far as I can make out. It is also the correct view: if we accept Friedman’s argument, which seems to me a good one, rights-respecting behaviour pre-dates the human species, and so a fortiori it pre-dates the State.
What has happened to our thinking about rights, it seems to me, is analogous to what has happened to our thinking about money. Money, originally, was a commodity, such as gold, silver, iron or seashells. Banks, in their initial form, were little more than safes, which offered the service of storing money securely. Banks would offer paper receipts, ‘bank notes’, which served as entitlements of withdrawal for the bearer. Because it made more practical sense to trade in these notes directly, rather than ‘cashing in’ the notes and then giving the gold to someone else to deposit again, the notes themselves would come to be thought of as ‘money’; i.e., if I have given you a ten-gold-ounce note, I have functionally given you ten ounces of gold. Though, this is not literally what has happened. Rather, I have given you a receipt which entitles the bearer to withdraw ten ounces of gold from the bank. The note ‘represents’ the real money, and acts as a guarantor of it. However, as the world’s monetary systems have evolved (which, historically, has consisted in gradual invasions of the monetary system by States), the notes themselves would be divorced from any real commodity, and they would become ‘money’ straightforwardly, by little more than legal fiat. Cue periodic financial crises, though that is a rant for another time . . .
If you ask most people, they would probably tell you that the State, or something like it, is a sine qua non of having a monetary system. Surely, there must be a law which tells us what money is or isn’t; surely, the money supply must be overseen by a ‘regulatory body’ (none of which is true). Lurking underneath these claims is the intuition that the State, somehow, makes money ‘official’. You can call something money, but ultimately, money is what it is because of what the State declares it to be.
A similar phenomenon has occurred with rights. Rights can and do exist independently of the State. This is the case, whether they are determined by God, by nature, by philosophical reflection, or by the kind of successive ‘bargaining’ of which Friedman speaks (I don’t consider these possibilities as being necessarily exclusive). ‘Law’, then, comes rather late on the scene. Law, unlike the rights themselves, which are essentially conflict-resolution principles, is a service which exists so as to formalise rights, so that they might be protected and enforced. In producing law, one must ask ‘What kinds of things are worth recognising as rights?’, which gives rise to the concept of a ‘legal right’. But these legal rights are rather like the bank notes which would eventually come to be considered ‘money’: unoriginal, derivative, merely iconic. It is only because we have rights over our own selves and the things we produce that ‘law’ is created so as to defend them.
As with money, our thinking would come to be utterly inverted: now, the law is the indispensible source of rights, not merely their protector or guarantor. As with money, the common-sense view is that the State is that which makes our rights ‘official’; ‘You would not have any rights,’ the saying goes, ‘were it not for the State granting them to you.’ Frédéric Bastiat, in his most famous work The Law, bemoans this reversal in our thinking: ‘It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws.’ It is because of man’s nature, that we are persons, purposeful creatures, acting creatures, and also social creatures, that talk of ‘rights’ and ‘property’ (which is simply an extension of our personality) makes sense, in a way that would not make sense for rocks, trees or spleens, which do not exemplify these qualities.
‘Natural rights’ theory has often been accused of espousing a flimsy ontology, where the content of our rights is simply stipulated. In fact, this comes from a failure to appreciate what kind of philosophical project ‘natural rights’ theory is: man has a nature, as a purposeful, creative and social agent, and there are ways in which we might think of rights which allow man to act in accordance with that nature, and ways that do not. Perhaps this would become clearer by reflecting on the many ways in which a proposed system of rights may be contrary to man’s nature, some of the ways in which the individual may be dominated or have her ends constantly frustrated. See Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, chs. 1–6: https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Ethics%20of%20Liberty%2020191108.pdf
What is more, the critic of natural rights will tend to view the ‘legal rights’ which the State grants as being more real, more concrete. The rights we really have, the positivist will say, are those which the State declares you to have. The State makes rights ‘official’. But the ontology of rights which is presupposed by the positivist is no less ‘wispy’ than that which the natural rights theorist is accused of espousing. The State is just an association of persons, like you and I. The ‘laws’ it produces are just pieces of paper, like those on which I might write. Why are the ‘laws’ which I produce not ‘official’? Why are the rights that I grant myself by writing ‘I am the rightful owner of all the oreos in the world’ not as 'real' as those which are afforded me by the pieces of paper on which States write? This is why I have pressed you to give an account of the State’s legitimacy. Until you do, there is simply no reason to think that the State’s pieces of paper are remotely special, and therefore no reason to agree with your thesis that the rights we have are what they are because that is what the State says that they are.
Quoting fdrake
My point, again, is that you are making a false equivalence between the law which the State produces, and ‘social norms’. Because you are making this equation in your head, when I allow that rights are indeed social phenomena, you hear this as a concession that our rights really are granted by the State. Similarly, when I deny that the State is really the source of our rights, you hear this as a denial that rights are ‘social’. Because you make this equation, you see a gap in my philosophy. But the gap is yours: you are making a leap from one thing to another, without philosophical justification. I have already pointed out why this move is formally fallacious. But it is also a mistake to consider the State as being equivalent to, or the apotheosis of, ‘society’. States are no more ‘social’ than a mafioso protection racket, to which it bears a striking praxeological resemblance. If the State really were a part of, or representative of, ‘society’, then what we should expect to see is that the State is subject to the very same rules and constraints as the rest of us. But this is precisely what we don’t see. Rather, the State invades and is parasitic upon ‘society’, sustaining itself by engaging in the very activities which it locks the rest of us in cages for engaging in.
Quoting fdrake
On the contrary, I see no historical justification for the State, either. The kinds of mythologies which are typically related concerning the State’s inception – which usually take the form of a ‘social contract’ – are quite fictional, and do nothing to secure the State’s legitimacy. This is true even of the United States, minarchism’s failed experiment. See Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority: http://files.libertyfund.org/files/2194/Spooner_1485_Bk.pdf
Quoting fdrake
All I deny is that which you have quoted me as denying, no more and no less. Human collectives are not persons, agents of purposeful action, and should not be considered as extra instances of such in addition to the individuals which comprise them. When you behold me and the rest of my scrabble club in the middle of our game, and ask yourself, 'How many persons are there?', the answer is 'Four', not 'Five'. You may deduce however many other implications from that as you wish to. As far as legal responsibility goes, my point remains the same: a human association may write on a piece of paper that rocks are persons, but they are not. They have ‘legal responsibility’, only in the very modest and unimpressive sense that an association of persons whom we are accustomed to thinking of as ‘governmental’ have written on a piece of paper that they may be held responsible for things. The ontology for which I have argued is not in the least threatened by such an occurrence.
I understand a natural right as way people morally ought to be treated based solely on their nature. For people, natural rights are to be derived solely from human nature, they thus apply to all people and at all times.
I understand a social obligation as a way people normatively ought/are expected to be treated within a social system or society. Social obligations are particularly strong norms. They vary widely over social systems and societies.
I understand a legal right as an enforceable claim within a legal system. Legal rights vary widely over legal systems. It is possible for these to be codified to a large degree, as we're used to, to be based largely on custom, as is older, or some mixture of the two, as in appeals to documented precedent.
Since legal rights are enforceable claims, they induce particularly strong social norms, and thus induce social obligations. Historically, codified legal systems arise much later than customary ones; all societies have rules which are enforced, whether or not they are codified, and whether or not they have a central government.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Everything humans have ever done is possible for humans, and is thus within our nature. From the most brutal of tyrannies to hippy communes, from pre-monetary societies to capitalist states. Natural rights, then, are not a constraint on what is possible for humans to do, they are a constraint on what we ought to do, what is proper for us. How does property fit in here?
Let's stipulate that so long as there have been tribes, there have been possessions in some sense; a society in which people may claim exclusive access to land is much different from one where people may not, a society in which people may claim exclusive access to other people's bodies (like slavery) is different from one where they may not. Even this stipulation does not confer a natural right of possession, as it only recognises a historical coincidence of human societies with rules regarding what humans can claim to possess within them. It is not a derivation from human nature to possession, it's a historical observation. Further, in each case, a society has existed which has customs of possession which may differ depending upon historical circumstance, so we cannot attribute a natural sense of possession to humanity on this basis alone - we cannot distinguish what someone owns in a society by virtue of its customs, like laws, and what someone owns in a society by virtue of natural right on this basis.
We'd have to abstract from all societies and all senses of possession within them, to see through mere historical circumstance and its contingent forms of ownership, to something basic and shared for all humanity for all time; but notice that due to this historical variability of customs of possession, we cannot infer that such a natural right of possession is ever sufficient for the customs to reflect that right. Is there a sense of ownership from which all the others are derivative? In the sense of enforceable claims and consistency with custom, no then, there is always a gap between what ought to be, what is legitimate, and what is. If we are to derive a criterion of legitimacy for a mode of social organisation, it must be independent of the contingent features of all of them; firms haven't always existed, states haven't always existed. But within those, human bodies have, and have remained roughly the same.
Based on this, a promising candidate for the derivation of natural property rights seems to be the sense of possession one has over one's body; let's call that autonomy. Can we derive from autonomy conditions of possession which actually hold or have held? No, see the above, human bodies have been much the same for all this time, but the historical circumstances regarding possession vary wildly. In some customs of possession; like slavery; autonomy does not even entail the possession of one's body to be ensured in a social custom.
There needs to be a principle to bridge autonomy to social customs of possession; equating the senses of possession in each will not do. Each person stands in a unique relationship with their own body, nothing like dominion over any object. For stipulation's sake, let's say that a person possesses an item they have produced solely through their own labour in the same sense that they do their body. Then by what criterion do we judge social acts of production within an economy's division of labour? What about items produced through machines, ought the person who turns the plugs on at a factory own everything? Maybe the electricity is what is doing the work... As soon as productive labour requires any sense of teamwork or social dependence, the principle would no longer apply. Read. it has never applied, since as you say we are intrinsically social. It would also be impossible to ought to own anything regarding land or what is produced from it without intervention, as it is not produced solely through a person's labour since it is not produced by labour at all. Impossible to ought to own on the basis of autonomy alone.
It seems like what we need to transfer from autonomy to more abstract and socially mediated senses of possession is an equivocation between my possession of my own body and possession within a social custom. To think that Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos in precisely the same sense he owns his body is insane; bodies do not have shareholders or corporate headquarters, human bodies do not coordinate within themselves entire other human bodies. If Jeff Bezos has a shit, someone does not poop for him.
The idea that the Principles Of the Free Market can be derived and legitimated through human nature alone is just as nuts. "See this contingent social form in which production and exchange are organised? Yeah, that's the one true human nature, the only social form consistent with it. Btw, it has never existed."
People transform the land simply by taking part in the ecosystem. Your logic here would give indigenous tribes the rights to all the land outside of Europe. Mind you, there's those Homo floresiensis that the Indonesian Homo sapiens might have stolen from...
Your property rights strategy is going to get complicated quite quickly, but I'm all in favour of returning land rights back to the indigenous population, so that would be a good start, yes?