For example, liberals are keen to say that politicians, who have to be elected every number of years at least, can be flawed but are often more desirable than a rule by corporate oligarchs. I think the libertarians have the better argument that those corporate oligarchs are in power primarily because of politicians, which is all the more reason to strip government of the power to grant privileges to businesses and artificial restrictions on everyone else.

Leaving that point aside, I think there is a second point to be made about why the government’s direction of the economy and social affairs — central planning — is detrimental to the democratic process. Granted, having a say in who takes elected office and which statutes are enacted is preferable to not having a say at all. But what merit there is for having a genuinely democratic process is more often negated by the substance that process generates.

I think I have good reason for thinking why that might be. Having a unified plan of action is made more difficult in a legislative body. That is because the agenda has to be molded and interconnected in just the right way for it to function properly. However, planning a society requires making trade-offs among mutually exclusive ends using an unquantifiable number of means, each with a multiplicity of uses. And unlike coordinating fixed parts for an engineering design, there are over 300 million self-molding parts in the United States alone with their own motives and ideas. That kind of coordination would be difficult enough within a small committee of like-minded and trained experts, particularly as the committee process itself is not bent toward engineered action, but delay and compromise. Those inefficiencies are magnified again and again within a legislative body made of conflicting agendas.

As it becomes more apparent that central planning itself is inimical to a legislature’s piecemeal approach, policy making has to be entrusted to even more remote planners like the NCTCOG, TXDPS, NTTA, RCT, TRA, and any number of other alphabet state commissions and agencies just in my part of Texas. There are calls to “get it out of politics” or something similar, which really amounts to “do as we say.” Considering, it is understandable why people would favor giving power to planners who can escape political influence.

For a practical matter, unless the scope of the government’s powers are severely limited, the legislative and executive functions of government are likely to be tainted by corruption. To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, because politicians have so much sway over what businesses can buy and sell, the first thing businesses are going to buy and sell are politicians. Yet even in the unlikelihood that only incorruptible and uncapturable politicians and central planners were in power, the “iron law of oligarchy” teaches that their effort to direct people’s lives would increasingly become cartelized and cemented. If for no other reason, politicians and planners will have to rely on the economic data provided by big businesses for shaping their policies and determining how those policies impact the economy. Intentional or not, big government reforms will serve the interests of big business.

Some might say that democracy still functions as intended since these “independent” planners still face the scrutiny of legislatures, who are voted into office by the people. That is beside the point since there is no general consensus on the substance, only on the means for enacting what, the planning should consist of. Planning boards present their proposals as effectively a “take it or leave it” proposition. Some tweaks can be made, usually for it gain wider appeal, but the political pressures for approval will be coming from voters demanding that something — anything — be done to avert greater turmoil. That is hardly what democracy should look like. As Friedrich Hayek has pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, the legislature

will at best be reduced to choosing the persons who are to have practically absolute power. …

…; it will often be necessary for the will of a small minority be imposed upon people, because this minority will be the largest group able to agree among themselves on the question at issue.”

Whatever merit democracy might have, that surely is not it.

I regard democracy as a critical social value, but not as the primary social value — liberty — a value that individuals overwhelmingly share simultaneously with others in society. At its best, the democratic process is limited in scope and serves to maintain accountability to shifting popular opinion, but democracy does not in and of itself restrain the government (or restrain others at the behest of the government) from exercising arbitrary power. Unfortunately, the power of statism corrupts, and statism corrupts and distorts democracy just as it does the market economy and other beneficial practices.

I have my own concerns that charity, particularly government charity, acts more as a snare than a genuine safety net; that concern aside, I think libertarians can agree with left-liberals that positive liberty (or autonomy) is valuable and something to cherish. And liberals are right that negative liberty is not a sufficient condition for leading a meaningful life, but they are mistaken in not recognizing that both negative and positive liberty — complete liberty — are necessary conditions for human flourishing.

As a matter of practice in promoting liberty, someone who sees little benefit from their negative liberty in overcoming their struggles is going to have less regard for that liberty and be more willing to surrender it or interfere with the liberty of others. Again as a matter of practice, to someone who comprehends the nature of coercion, it does not follow that the state’s coercive tools are the least bit adequate in building positive liberty. That understanding comes from the fact that coercion is a tool of destruction.

Granted, when used properly, coercion can be used to destroy coercion and thus defend negative liberty. Defensive coercion acts as a counter-interventionist measure that indirectly aids progress by ensuring that voluntary exchange can take place. But any progress is still contingent on people being free to think and to act on their best judgements, an objective requirement of which would be to bar coercion from social interaction. That is the essence of negative liberty, a precondition for positive liberty to exist.

With that said, it is possible for the state to provide a semblance of a social safety net, but only by confiscating greater amounts of resources to overcome its own destructive nature in such a way that undermines its continued prospects. So along with an ever-shrinking source for revenues, government charity is inhospitable to autonomy, since welfare recipients shift their reliance to the good nature (or long-term parasitism) of program administrators, who are the primary beneficiaries of the welfare state.

A social safety net respecting negative liberty and which provides genuine autonomy is mutual aid, not charity and particularly not charity tied to career bureaucrats or the election results of politicians and their political appointees.

What does it mean to coerce someone if not to exercise ultimate decision-making authority? Inherently, coercion is monopolizing — incompatible with dissent. By retaliating, the victim of aggression too is attempting to impose his or her own monopoly, with respect to his or her attacker, on the provision of coercion. Simply put, someone using force — whether justly or unjustly — is not seeking to coexist, but to destroy. Victims are seeking to destroy the coercion taking place against them. Of course, coercion can be used justly or unjustly (based on the context in which it was used). So just as the only proper function of coercion would be to defend individual rights, it would follow that the defense of individual rights is the only proper function of ultimate decision-making authority.

Ethical Implications for the State

To my understanding, the principle of rights is applicable in a social context (i.e., interacting with others), which would seem to support the idea that individuals would have the right to the retaliatory use of coercion (ultimate decision-making authority) throughout society, not just wherever they have ownership rights. As I noted, force is inherently a monopolizing act. Within any given territory, large or small, only one legal system can prevail at a given time. After all, what is at stake is rule-making. If individuals have the right to the defense of their rights, they are acting within the bounds of morality by seeing to it that a legal system that genuinely defends rights prevails. If individuals organized an institution, the legal system, to exercise ultimate decision-making authority in defense of their rights within a given territory, in fact they would be forming a state, an institutional that cannot be challenged with impunity and which enforces rules of conduct within a given territory. So long as they were genuinely acting to defend individual rights, those individuals would be acting justly, as far as I can tell, in forming a state.

If it is any relief, the upshot of this rationale for the legitimacy of the state would be that its only justification would be to defend individual rights. I do not think this is necessarily at odds with market anarchism, as far as I understand, if the idea is that constituent functions of government should be open to the private sector to perform.

Just as people have the right to self-defense, they can decide that it might not be in their interest to act fully on that right. So while people have the right to form a proper state, at least as far as I can tell, there is no moral imperative that they must. In a scenario where the likelihood of conflict is diminished, implementing a government might be prohibitive for practical reasons, such as its possibility of being corrupted or even that its administrative costs would be too great. It goes without saying that just because a state exists, that does not necessarily mean it is proper or should be supported.

The most striking portion of the post highlighted why unequal power relations are the natural breading grounds for injustice. To name the most obvious that come to mind to me, power comes in many forms: economic, psychological, political, social and physical. As the state demonstrates, it is pretty apparent that centralized power becomes self-serving and oppressive. I think libertarians are reluctant to criticize certain forms of power, like economic power, because the commonplace response is to mobilize big government as the countervailing power to big business.

From an outsider’s perspective, that reluctance on behalf of libertarians to criticize corrupt non-political power looks like an endorsement though. For some, they may indeed support libertarianism out of a belief that non-political forms of power may gain strength in the absence of the heavy hand of government. I think they are wrong. Big business is heavily dependent on big government’s privileged subsidies and protections from competition to stay upright. Big government acts less as a restraint to cut big business down to size than it does as a crutch to keep big business from falling under the weight of its own diseconomies of scale.

Seeing that being able to make reasoned judgements is what distinguishes Mankind from other animals, libertarians oppose aggression because an aggressor thwarts the victim’s judgements for how to live his or her life. Notwithstanding, maintaining significantly greater degrees of power over another is bound to play a part shaping the less powerful person’s decisions. Equally important, opposing subordination does not necessarily endorse any particular means of discharging of that power. Subordination comes in different degrees and different kinds through different forms of power. As Gary Chartier said, “Acknowledging the reality of subordination as morally objectionable need not involve erasing moral differences among kinds of subordination or responses to them.”

A memorable lines from Frederic Bastiat’s The Law really elaborates on this point when he criticizes state socialists for not recognizing the difference between society and the state, so that “every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. … We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” His point was that because someone has a worthy goal, that does not mean state coercion, or any coercion at all, is the most proper means of achieving that goal.

An Opportunity to Clarify

Another good thing about the post is that some really cogent challenges are made of libertarianism. I think those points can be resolved with some added clarity, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll address what I think are the two most fundamental points. I can’t speak for all libertarians, so I’ll try to speak as broadly as possible.

One of the first challenges made against libertarianism is that there is not currently, nor ever can be, a free market. The point is made that any economic system is going to have some sort of framework or rules that prohibit or sanction certain activities. If challenged, conservatives would probably even concede that the financial success of behemoth corporations like Walmart and Northrop Grumman are not a reflection their performance on a free market. It is also a fair point that no economic system is going to be truly unregulated, which is also something libertarians rightly acknowledge. However, libertarians are not using “free” to connote unrestrained or costless. After all, it would be just as easy (and empty) a criticism to point out that nothing is free (of opportunity costs at least) on the free market. Libertarians are using the word “free” in a particular political context. To be free means to exercise one’s own will (within the context of honoring the will of others to exercise their rights). Prohibitions on theft, fraud, murder and slavery (all means of negating another’s will) is evidence of that libertarians understand the conditions necessary for a free market to exist. Regulations on (direct and indirect) aggression are not interventions into a free market since an economic system that condoned aggression would not be a free market in the first place. So when libertarians object to regulations, the implicit understanding is that they are addressing government regulatory controls that interpose on a free(d) market.

To intercept a possible objection, the so-called freedom to violate another’s freedom is a logical contradiction since it denies the very basis of freedom, our equality. So prohibitions on the initiation of force do not restrain freedom since the so-called freedom to initiate force does not exists. Ayn Rand reiterated, “Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.” As Jim May wrote recently,

It is not society that sets that boundary — it is the moral principle itself which does this, by its internal logic. Individual rights are thusly logically self-limiting, and self-constraining. Society’s role, properly constituted, is simply to recognize and enforce these logical, moral boundaries between men — not to author them.

A second criticism is that “The concept of ownership is a form of coercion.” I don’t think the author literally meant the concept of ownership, but perhaps the practice of ownership. In any case, the statement is conveying a common composition fallacy. Because the characteristic of a component of ownership, the right to defend one’s property, involves coercion, then the entire whole of ownership is coercive. A simple analogy reveals the logical error. An atom is invisible to the naked eye; cats are made of atoms, so cats are invisible to the naked eye.

In regards to ownership, a person’s action is voluntary or coercive based on that person’s relationship with the property being owned. In that case, the ownership (e.g., the right to the possession, use, disposal, and defense) of property is voluntary from beginning to end. The owner of a property is perfectly free to possess his or her property, to use it, and to dispose of the property. To note, it is not even incumbent upon an owner to use coercion to defend the property. Pacifists libertarians (like the late Robert LeFevre) are steadfast proponents of the ownership of property, and there is nothing internally inconsistent with supporting the ownership of property and renouncing retaliatory coercion. In fact, a mature free market society would likely recognize the destructive nature of punitive punishments like execution, imprisonment and fines and instead favor restitution practices that made victims whole again to the greatest extent possible and put offenders on a path to living independently and not off the enterprise of others.

Now with respect to that which is his or her own property, a person is not acting against the will or without the permission of anyone by defending it. Thus with respect to that which is his or her property, a property owner is acting voluntarily by choosing or not to defend the property from coercion.

Consider the actions of a non-owner. With respect to that which is not his or her own property, a non-owner exercising the rights of ownership is acting against the will or without the permission of the property owner. Thus a non-owner’s action, with respect to that which is not his or her property, would be coercive if the owner disapproved of it. Moreover, an aggressor has by his or her own will created a debt owned to his or her victim, who is entitled to exercise rights over that debt, including collecting it. If the aggressor continues to put up roadblocks to prevent the collection of debt by the rightful owner, the aggressor is doing so voluntarily and only has to end his continued acts of coercion against the owner (or owner’s agent) of the debt for coercion against the aggressor to halt.

It also occurs to me that the idea that ownership is a form of coercion could also be committing the fallacy of the stolen concept. In order to grasp and accept as proper the concept of ownership, a person first has to grasp that a person can use property voluntarily (according to his or her own will) to even make the distinction between voluntary and (involuntary) coercive use of a property. I am not so sure though, and I could definitely be stood corrected.

In Conclusion

Genuinely leftist ends are perfectly compatible with a libertarian theory of justice that responds in proportion and in kind to undesirable exercises of power. I would also grant that in a mixed economy like ours, the distinction between economic and political power is not always so clear. That is the danger of superficially dismissing criticisms (or worse rationalizing justifications) of the wretched treatment of employees by an employer, for example.

Another lesson libertarians might take away is that it is worthwhile to elaborate why and how the state undermines genuinely positive practices like democracy, social safety nets and property ownership for nefarious ends.

Ultimately, a libertarian movement will never get off the ground if cultural attitudes continue to condone general practices of social hierarchy, of which the state is probably the most visible figure. In that light, the legitimacy of the state is diminished when people regain decision-making power over their own lives. If nothing else, breaking up oppressive power (through economic and social means like mutual aid) is how libertarians can take the lead to enjoy immediately the benefits of the new world, in the shell of the old.

OK, I am not condemning all liberals, but anti-authoritarian liberals should call out this blatant power grab for what it is.

It even includes a reference to Hayek’s “Who, Whom?” question. Bernanke’s double is great too.

… and never will. So Frédéric Bastiat calling government “the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else” was more fitting than even he realized.

Evidently, this theory is founded on the false premise that a rational individual could not willingly benefit by receiving less than the full produce of his or her labor. Please understand, I agree that exploitation is a real phenomenon, which is what takes place when someone without consent expropriates the benefits of another’s property rights. With that said, workers are facing actual exploitation by government controls that restrict the rights to collectively organize, that reduce opportunities for entrepreneurship and that push people into the labor market in the first place.

To that end, I have said:

Communists are right in viewing the state as exploitative, but not because it upholds property rights, but because the state exists only by systematically usurping those rights. What would prevail in a stateless society — one without government propaganda championing that “taxation is voluntary,” “voting is freedom,” and “government is security” — is a strengthened sense of property rights and individual autonomy.

So I also support higher wage rates, but I would rather reduce the dead-weight loss of existing government controls instead of trying to counter-balance them with new government controls.

Why Agree to ‘Exploitation’?

This is not an exhaustive list, but there are a number of reasons why accepting less than the full produce of one’s labor would be sensible.

• Higher time preference — The premium someone places on the earlier satisfaction of a goal rather than a later satisfaction is called time preference. Someone with a higher time preference would value immediate gratification to a greater extent than a person with a lower time preference; someone with a lower time preference would still more greatly value immediate gratification, just to a lesser extent. A laborer who had a higher time preference might very well agree to accept reduced wages now instead of waiting for greater returns in the future, when a product’s purchase is completed by the final consumer. An employer facilitates the demand for earlier gratification by paying wages in the present and waiting for compensation from consumers in the future. The more distant the span of time between when the labor was performed and when the product’s purchase is completed by the final consumer means that the discount in wages would be more prominent. That is because a future good has less value than that of an otherwise identical present good. A dramatic contrast of a difference in time preference might be someone who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness compared to a young, healthy adult. The one does not have much longer to enjoy the benefits of his or her labor and may accept reduced wages that were paid immediately, while the other has a long life ahead of him or her and may be willing to wait until the final consumer has purchased the good produced. In an environment where savings were not eroded by money inflation, market-based interest rates encouraged savings, economic conditions were more stable, it was easier to start a business and people’s incomes were not confiscated through taxation or destroyed by coercive regulatory controls — anxiety about the condition of the economy would diminish so that people would be more inclined to adopt a lower time preference and demand a higher portion of the produce of their labor.
• Reduced risk — Even if time were not a factor in a decision, some people are less averse to risk than others. As the saying goes, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” The sentiment of that saying is that it is better to have a guaranteed reward than risking the possibility for even greater reward. That is an accurate statement for some people, but not all. Depending on the circumstances, which is practically impossible to share in common identically with another person, it could be more prudent to run the risk. A laborer with the resources to open a business could find it more sensible to continue working for a lower wage than possibly reaping greater rewards by opening a business and putting those resources at greater risk of loss. Here again, discriminatory tax policies and regulatory controls (like licensing laws and capital requirements) have made it is costlier and thereby riskier to go into business for one’s self, and the state’s crowding out of demand, like in the education sector, makes it more difficult to earn a return on investment. One of the reasons that large businesses favor greater regulatory controls is because those controls stymie competition from small businesses struggling to afford the added costs of regulatory compliance. Abolishing occupational licensing laws and zoning controls against mixed-use property would lead to a flurry of home-based, low-overhead enterprises, which are less risky and less costly to operate than store-front operations.
• Charity — It is pretty common for people to volunteer their time or offer special rates for their work if they know those savings are going toward a good cause. The social anarchist band Anti-Flag regularly plays at charity event, for example, and I do not ever recall its members mention they had been exploited by playing a charity event.
• Prevent competition — One of the reasons that profits tend to minimize over the long term is that profits signal that more resources need to be devoted to that good, which stirs competition. One way of preventing the rise of competition is to deliberately price a product or service for significantly less than its anticipated value to the consumer. The strategy is founded on the idea that resources will be devoted to more profitable investments first. The resulting diminished profit dissuades new competition from forming and may drive out old. In that way, businesses are also looking to build customer loyalty in case competition does arise. This works both ways. Purchasers, including purchasers of labor, have to be weary that paying too little will lead the seller of the labor to look more vigorously elsewhere for employment.
• Volume discount — One of the reasons that stores like Sam’s and Costco exist is because customers can save quite a bit of money by purchasing in bulk. The same principle holds for purchasing labor in bulk. To hire someone occasionally to make repairs around the house, the homeowner would expect to pay a higher price per hour than if he or she had agreed to pay a regular salary to work a set number of hours indefinitely or for some longer period of time. The person making repairs would benefit from having a steadier stream of income and reducing his or her time and expenses associated with recruiting prospective customers.
• Good will — Someone just entering a trade has a few disadvantages. One is that a potential employer is not quite sure of the laborer’s professional and personal skills. In order to entice a potential employer to accept the added risk of hiring someone without a known reputation, the laborer can improve his or her prospects by temporarily accepting reduced compensation. The same could hold true for someone wanting to improve a tarnished reputation. That is common for professional athletes, who might sign a short-term contract in hopes of displaying their skills for other potential employers.
• Experience — For people learning a trade, apprenticeships can be an important step to becoming an experienced professional. An ironic note is that Marx himself served as an apprentice for a German newspaper. By requesting a lower wage rate, more employment opportunities arise, which can provide a springboard to increased experience and higher compensation in the future, the same as what happened to Marx after attending college.
• Reduced warranty — One last scenario is that an agreement could be made that an employee would not have to guarantee his or her work. This arrangement is made less often, if only because one’s reputation typically is regarded as more valuable than any short-term benefit of avoiding the inconvenience of correcting a mistake. An example could be where a customer, over the objection of his or her car mechanic, insisted on having some mechanical repair or alteration made. An agreement might be reached that, for agreeing to a reduced fee, the mechanic is released of responsibility for warranting the work.

I am sure this does not include every scenario in which an employee could benefit from accepting a reduced wage. In a genuine free market, I think there would be fewer people working for a wage. More people would be able to afford to run their own business from their homes, or they could share spaces and tools at community-managed workshops. Self-organized, low-overhead market forces would be in a better position to rebuff widespread economic downturns, should they occur.

In an open market, two people are likely to have fewer mutually beneficial trading opportunities as their circumstances become more aligned, so they would not exchange at all if they assigned the same value to the items being exchanged. The noteworthy think about exchange is that it allows for people of distinct backgrounds and circumstances to flourish instead of conflict. Catallactic competition means that people with identical demands can more affordably satisfy those demands. The more people who have that same demand means that satisfying that demand can become less expensive. When a trade does occur, it does so because people in different circumstances have different values to satisfy. With that understanding, it becomes understandable why individuals would give greater importance to some values than they otherwise would for certain circumstances and why people in different circumstances perceive the benefits of achieving certain values differently.

Marxists and opponents of monied exchange are mistaken and do a disservice to alleviating actual exploitation in that they do not distinguish the one-sided nature of state privilege from the mutual benefit of consensual exchange. It is not only that they have a misunderstanding of the nature of property rights; they believe that the measure of an individual’s value exists independent of his or her unique circumstances (or context). To an opponent of the private ownership of property, an exchange involving money would be prima facie evidence of exploitation, since the measure of a value being equal across society, they believe one party’s benefit comes at the expense of the other. This is what leads them to believe that working for a wage is necessarily exploitation, claiming that workers are in a position of either receiving less than the value of their labor or starving. Besides being a false dichotomy and full of hyperbole, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of value. A self-interested person would not act at all unless he or she expected to gain or keep more than the value of the labor expended. Because of opportunity and transaction costs, acting to gain or keep less than or equivalent to the value of the labor expended would only hasten death. From the circumstances of the laborer, the wages received in return are more beneficial than the benefit that could be have been received by working elsewhere or taking leisure instead. It could still be the case that exploitation is taking place, that better opportunities were never available because of a systematic violation of property rights, but working for wage labor is not a sufficient condition of it.

Ad hominem attacks aside, YouTuber hawanja’s video on free-market anarchists seems to make the point that people “naturally organize themselves into hierarchies” that require violence to be maintained, so anarchism runs counter to the human condition. It is left unstated why violence is needed or ethically justified to maintain these hierarchies if they were so natural. He further claims that a state is the historically necessary “institution that enforces order through violence.”

The first of hawanja’s misunderstandings has to do with his definition of “state.” A key distinction I and Barack Obama would make is that a state claims a territorial monopoly on its enforcement of order through violence. The insinuation of hawanja’s definition, which ignores the territorial monopoly claim, is that any enforced order necessarily signifies the presence of a state. Throughout the entire video, viewers are presented with this false dichotomy: statism or chaos. Anarchists do not oppose order. The etymological origin of “anarchy” means no ruler (not no rules), similarly how “monarchy” means one ruler. Regardless, statists generally insist on conflating “anarchy” to mean a conflict for rulership that takes place in a failed state. Anarchism recognizes that rulers are not justified in their actions and are counter-productive to a peaceful, productive existence.

Another unfounded assertion is that “this natural hierarchical structure to human beings” is justified in using force to maintain its power. After all, just as a good majority of people naturally like ice cream, I hardly think that would justify “natural hierarchical structures” enforcing the consumption of ice cream.

The Enemy of My Enemy

Another tried and true fallback in defense of the state is the canard that a state is necessary to protect us from corporations, which hawanja rightly pointed out are creatures of plutocratic state protections and subsidies. They are granted limited liability by governments and are under a legal obligation to pursue the interests of shareholders, not employees or the environment or the public. However, should the blame rest with corporations or also with their architects (governments) that created them and shield them from accountability?

He cites laws prohibiting discrimination and child labor and food safety and consumer protections as examples of good government. Of course, governments have historically been used to promote all sorts of racial discrimination, child labor, and made food and consumer protections harder to come by and more expensive. hawanja unintentionally, I presume, confirmed this point when he showed a picture of Rosa Parks, the civil rights heroine arrested for disobeying a segregationist city ordinance that ordered she give up her seat to a white passenger, when he mentioned government laws prohibiting discrimination.

I think it is all well and good that government-enforced slavery and Jim Crow apartheid, the more overt government measures used to uphold discrimination, have been removed. However, that does not do so much to help those past victims of discrimination. All the ways that governments prohibit wealth creation has meant that past victims of government-enforced discrimination continue to suffer at the hands of government-enforced poverty. As Charles Johnson summed up in his “How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It” essay, “The poorer you are, the more you need access to informal and flexible alternatives, and the more you need opportunities to apply some creative hustling. When the state shuts that out, it shuts poor people into ghettoized poverty.”

Governments are not responsible for ending child labor. As a thought experiment, just consider what would happen if child labor was prohibited by law in Nepal. It would have the same effect as enacting California-style building codes in Haiti: absolutely none, because there is no wealth to implement those laws. The credit for the advancement of human civilization rests with the grandest form of human cooperation, the wealth-creating division of labor.

Coincidentally, I would think the issue of discrimination would create another dilemma for supporters of the state. Historically, racism, sexism and slavery would have been considered “natural hierarchical structure[s] to human beings,” just as the state is said to be. Yet, left-liberals, as I suppose hawanja is, do not propose that the enforcement of racism, sexism or slavery was just. Based on what principle though? And how would that principle not equally apply to racism, sexism and slavery?

hawanja also appears to be under the impression that governments were responsible for the abolition (or near abolition) of child labor, neglecting the fact that child labor is still legal in the United States under some circumstances. More to the point, mass child labor was an example of a problem exacerbated by the heavy hand of government. Had it not been for mercantilist and protectionist Robber Baron economic policies of the 19th century, wealth creation for the average family would have been realized much more broadly and quickly so that parents could afford to send their children to school sooner. Many social problems, including institutional discrimination, that governments are credited with fixing were largely already successfully being addressed through direct action before legislative interventions took place.

Consider consumer protections against price fixing. Historic examples of consumer protection during the Progressive Era were done at the behest of business interests. As noted liberal historical Gabriel Kolko wrote of the implementation of the Federal Trade Commission, in “The Triumph of Conservatism”:

The provisions of the new laws attacking unfair competitors and price discrimination meant that the government would now make it possible for many trade associations to stabilize, for the first time, prices within their industries, and to make effective oligopoly a new phase of the economy.

He called it a triumph of conservatism because federal intervention into the economy was able to secure the existing economic structure, what Kolko called “political capitalism” and what we know today as “crony capitalism” and “corporatism.” In Kolko’s conclusion, he said:

The varieties of rhetoric associated with progressivism were as diverse as its followers, and one form of this rhetoric involved attacks on businessmen—attacks that were often framed in a fashion that has been misunderstood by historians as being radical. But at no point did any major political tendency dealing with the problem of big business in modern society ever try to go beyond the level of high generalization and translate theory into concrete economic programs that would conflict in a fundamental way with business supremacy over the control of wealth. It was not a coincidence that the results of progressivism were precisely what many major business interests desired.

Kolko’s book is something, documenting how nearly every aspect of the Progressive Era legislation — from food inspections, environmental conservation and banking reforms, for example — were used as covers to cement the existing cartelized trusts already in power.

The book does a great job of documenting the problem with hierarchical institutions, that the people who already have the most access to the government are going to have the most influence in shaping what solutions are offered, how they are interpreted and how they would be implemented. Regulators — like all self-interested creatures — are sure to implement solutions that preserve their power and prospects for future employment, since their interests closely align with those of the regulated. If regulators or politicians are corruptible with bribes, the powerful can leverage their influence to a greater degree than they could in a freer market. For just a fraction of the cost, favorable regulations worth millions of dollars can be bought with campaign contributions. On a free market, it would be more costly to bribe someone who did not have the luxury of using taxes, as government regulators can, to pay for the enforcement of regulatory or legislative cronyism.

Making More Trouble

Next, the video documents social problems that libertarians typically attribute to government. In the past, I might have been guilty of short-changing why those problems are a consequence of government intervention, so I will take the time below to make the points clear.

1. Food prices — Yes, governments subsidize cattle and meat production at the expense of healthier, more natural forms of food, and place restrictions on the importation of those products. It is not a market phenomenon that it costs more to purchase a salad than a hamburger. All the resources devoted to feeding cows and other animals and creating bio-fuels like corn-based ethanol could have been used to produce food for organic diets. In addition, the federal government has sealed off arable land that could be used to farm, and city ordinances often place restrictions on mixed-use property, some of which could be used for home or community gardens on abandoned property.
2. Low wages — The ways in which labor organizing is discriminated against is too long to list. Just to list some examples, I would point to the ’35 Wagner Act, which was championed by business interests and conservative unions to clip the more wildcat unions like the anarchist International Workers of the World. Typical demands, like collective bargaining and calling for limited strikes, that unions are legally permitted to make today are pretty meek by comparison. Before the era of having to get government recognition, when most of the historic gains of the labor movement were actually realized, unions could call for general strikes and indirect boycotts, opened union hiring halls, signed closed-door contracts or demanded worker management of the firm. Other government interventions are through occupational licensing laws, use-restricted zoning regulations, legal tender laws, capitalization requirements and capital-favored taxation policies that mean more people have to work for wage labor in the first place.
3. College expenses — It is not a coincidence that college tuition expenses increase at the same time that governments actively encourage people to go into debt by providing low-interest loans and restricting the establishment of new higher education options. The government and the corporate credentialism fetish is also partly to blame. One major expense of college is the cost of textbooks, which are artificially marked up do to the enforcement of artificial intellectual property claims.
4. Environmental conservation — It is also no secret that common law environmental tort protections were removed from courts in the 1900s, which is how pollution problems were handled until environmental legislation that legalized greater environmental damage took power out of the hands of property owners. That is not to mention that the largest polluter in the entire world is the United States federal government.
5. Drug safety — Yes, illicit drugs are more dangerous because of government. They cannot be made under true laboratory conditions; there is no possibility of any legal redress for fraud; and every year millions of people acting consensually are terrorized by government agents and hundreds if not thousands are killed by those government agents. The crime and escalated costs associated with drugs are a consequence of prohibition.
6. Terrorism — See “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” by Chalmers Johnson.

At the beginning of the video, hawanja criticized the favoritism that governments grant corporations, only later to praise the cronyism of farm subsidies for multimillion dollar farm conglomerates. He said that government protection has led to stable food prices in the United States, which is not so true of late. However, the relative stability has only come because Americans already pay much higher prices for foods like sugar than do residents of developing nations. In terms of dollars, the average American family transfers an additional $146 to large agribusinesses every year because of these policies, which do not include the approximate $300 per family given directly to mostly multimillionaires through the federal budget. The costs of milk, butter and meat products would be deflated if trade restrictions on international markets were abolished, helping to reduce poverty overseas.

Looking at the unintended consequences of those subsidies, the abundance of corn, some of which is used to sweeten sodas, has been linked to increased obesity in Americans. There is also the problem that developing nations wanting to compete in farm production are constantly being underpriced by subsidized farmers, leading developing nations to become dependent on subsidized farmers for food. That is something developed nations hold over developing nations as part of “Open Door Imperialism,” but it is not a fact I would cheer. Without government protectionism, land use could become more environmentally friendly, as well. A Reason magazine article said:

The distortions and perverse incentives of U.S. agricultural policies have encouraged practices that damage the environment. Trade barriers and subsidies stimulate production on marginal land, leading to overuse of pesticides, fertilizers, and other effluents. A central if unstated purpose of American farm policy is to promote production of commodities that would not be economical under competitive, free market conditions. This often means emphasizing crops better grown elsewhere, requiring more chemical assistance.

The conclusion of the video makes a laundry list of mandates that hawanja thinks the free market could not provide, like affordable housing and health care, public transportation, environmental and consumer protections, expanded broadband internet coverage, protection for the homeless, protection of endangered species, food and medical safety and national security. He said that the free market cannot do these things; “we do these things because we need them to survive.” His unstated argument is that these are public goods that markets cannot provide for.

I have argued in the past that with a little creativity, public goods can be provided, assuming there is public support for those goods, which would also have to be the case in a democratic government. To quote Kevin Carson, “As always, it’s not a question of what we’ll do when the state stops solving the problem. It’s a question of how to stop the state from creating the problem.”

The problem becomes that regardless of the possibility of providing those public goods on an open market, those goods become harder to achieve with a government in place, which creates an entirely new set of obstacles for achieving those original public goods governments were purportedly created to solve in the first place. Public goods, like security and safety, are not impossible for governments to provide, just costlier and more difficult than they would be on a free market. The first new public good created by the presence of a democratic government would be an informed electorate. It is not in the average person’s economic interest to know much about the issues at hand or the candidates running for office. That is because a single individual’s vote has almost no significance in the outcome of an election, and even if a single vote could turn an election, a voter has no method of holding a politician to his or her campaign pledges. It gets worse. A single politician in Washington, D.C., is one of 535 votes in the legislature. The idea that a citizen’s vote would make any noticeable difference to the his or her life is almost inconceivable.

The second public good that must be provided for in order to solve the original public goods problems is the creation of just laws. When thinking about it, there are thousands and thousands of pages of legislation and regulation under discussion. It would be next to impossible and meaningless to read every line of every bill introduced or regulation proposed in order to find out if some special benefit is being given to this or that special interest lobbyists. Even if we could decipher what the legislation or proposed regulation meant and its impact in the future, which would be difficult enough, contacting a congressman or regulator is going to have a negligible impact on influencing policy. Even if we could change the policy, it most likely only means a savings of a few dollars or cents per voter. Special interests who stand to gain millions or billions are always going to have the time and money to devote to gaining special favors.

Since human beings are not perfect or all-knowing, market failure is possible, but as David Friedman notes, “In the political system, market failure is the norm. If you think of the political system as a marketplace, we cannot expect individual rationality to produce group-rational results.” So the idea that government would work if we could only get the right people in charge is a failed strategy in practice and beyond naïve in theory.

When a government does try to address public goods that allegedly cannot be provided by the market, policies are going to serve the powerful and wealthy. Seeing how I would actually like to see those public goods provided to people, I cannot support a government, because a government makes those products less attainable for the people who most desperately need them.

I claim that values are particular kinds of facts, that values relate to a specific person and for a particular reason. That is not to say that the process of evaluating which actions an individual ought to pursue is left to personal discretion, only that there are circumstances (or context) by which objective evaluations are made. For example, eating an apple provides a value (the satisfaction of my hunger) under certain circumstances. (Those certain circumstances, just to name a few, are whether I own or have permission to eat the apple, if the apple is sanitary and if the apple is ripe or not.) Since the decision to remain alive or to die is the only fundamental alternative I face, choosing to live establishes that my life is an ultimate value, an end in itself. My very own life, should I choose to remain living, is the only logically consistent standard of value I can have. I can discover these certain circumstances because they have empirically observable consequences on the standard by which I evaluate values. And it is that ultimate standard of value that can be used as a yardstick to evaluate the choice of alternatives within a given context, like eating the apple. That which promotes my life is a value, and that which hinders my life is a disvalue. Since this is true of all individuals, each individual’s life is an end in itself. For intrinsicists, values are not related to any particular purpose or any purpose at all since values just exist on their own. If someone were to ask an intrinsicist why eating an apple is a value, assuming the intrinsicist did believe eating an apple were a value in and of itself, the intrinsicist would say that eating an apple is the right thing to do. And why is it the right thing to do? Because eating an apple is a value. That is circular logic.

According to intrinsicism, a value resides in an object, thus shaping what that object is. So instead of saying that the nature of reality (what is) determines what are values, religions like Christianity are claiming that values determine the nature of reality (what is). A value would reside in the aforementioned apple, and it would be the right thing to do to eat more apples than less, regardless of the circumstances. One might object that stealing apples might not be appropriate since stealing is prohibited in the Bible, which is true. However, intrinsicism does not provide a way to formulate a moral code (or hierarchy of values) to evaluate possibly conflicting actions in light of particular circumstances. Since intrinsicism contends that values exist independent of their relationship to a particular valuer for a particular reason, intrinsicism cannot account for why an apple would be a greater value when a person is hungry rather than not, for example. Without a cognitive standard to make comparisons, a person would be left to decide which value is greater based on his or her desires (because one’s desires (or lack of) would be all that values shared in common). In practice, intrinsicists have to guess or take other people’s word for it. That is one reason why intrinsicism is a more elaborate form of subjectivism.

My experience is that theists will appeal to so-called innate moral knowledge as proof of objective morality. Yet, this so-called innate moral knowledge is often mistaken, according to theists, when confronted with the problem of evil. Suffering brought about by natural disasters or genocide would all be preventable by a god, yet those tragedies are permitted and orchestrated to take place by god. Because there is no empirical verification of innate knowledge, the argument is that god must have some reason unbenounced to humans for this destruction of innocent life to take place, which tells us that any innate moral knowledge is untrustworthy. The three possible conclusions (all of which theists deny is true) are that objective morality exists independent of a god, objective morality does not exist, or god is not naturally good.

Moreover, Christians are mistaken when they claim they believe that god is an ultimate value and that therefore god is the ultimate standard of value. For Christians, the ultimate value and the standard of value is the grace (or approval) of god. A value is that which one acts to gain or keep. Christians are seeking to gain or keep the grace of god so that they are accepted into the kingdom of god. Logically speaking, through, the grace of god cannot be an ultimate value because the grace of god is contingent on god’s decision to grant grace in the first place. God’s decision to grant grace could only take place if granting grace or not granting grace would somehow affect god, a purportedly all-powerful, all-knowing eternal being. An individual’s decision to accept and pursue god’s grace has no bearing on god, who is incapable of destruction and who is not susceptible to time constraints. Nothing can affect god, who cannot be changed in any respect. God would have nothing to gain and nothing to lose, so nothing can be of value to god. If nothing can be of value, there is no reason for god to act, let alone grant grace.

For the intrinsicist, these values — since they serve no actual purpose — are actually just duties. Why is it that god’s grace is something worth pursuing, one might ask? Because it is the right thing to do. Why is that? Because god’s grace is a value one ought to pursue. That is question-begging, and the illogic of that should be apparent before I can say “infinite regress.”

Frustrated, reasonable people might ask why should they accept that god’s grace is the standard of value. The answer is pretty straightforward: because you can either live in bliss with god or be tortured for eternity. The next question then becomes why should I consider living in bliss with god a good thing and being tortured a bad thing. Christians have one of two choices, as far as I can see. They can either return to the infinite regress of intrinsicism, or the intrinsicist can say that living in bliss with god feels pleasurable and being tortured feels painful. That does not really answer any questions either. Why should pleasure be considered good and pain considered bad? After all, pleasures can sometimes be harmful. For kids, only eating sweets might be pleasurable, but always eating sweets is not a good thing. Exercise phrases like “No pain, no gain” are expressing that one’s own life is the standard of value. Exercising can help an athlete become stronger, faster or build endurance. That is important because the achievement of those values helps one become a better basketball player or win more games, which would further boost self-esteem, a component of happiness. Genuine happiness is a consequence of achieving life-promoting empirical (fact-based) values and is a rationally consistent purpose of living one’s life.

A final argument given by intrinsicists is that their god is the lawmaker and that fact establishes the authority of god’s law. In fact, intrinsicists argue, god is responsible for every fact in the universe. Not only would god be responsible for the creation of existence, god is responsible for the identity (or nature) of all that exists. So things, including values and consequently morality, are what god chooses them to be. This would be the most overt and grandiose appeal to subjectivism imaginable and really underscores the subjective nature of a belief in god. If the subject of consciousness (god) has primacy over the subjects of consciousness (entities in existence) then nothing can be objective. If even a single consciousness has primacy over existence, then the law of identity, the basis for metaphysical objectivity, is meaningless.

Religious values are not based on facts, but on feelings. All the way around it, people accept religious teachings on faith. They accept on faith that god’s grace is the ultimate value because they feel like it. If the subjectivist teachings of religion were isolated to just theists, that would still be tragic. Unfortunately, it is much worse, and it is rooted in the truly evil idea that someone or something else is the beneficiary of another’s life. If the beneficiary of my life is god or god’s grace, I have no sanction to live my life for my benefit. Obviously, that is going to create some conflict. With all the religions in the world, not everyone is going to agree — particularly since god’s grace is not observable — what honors god’s grace and what dishonors god’s grace.

Since most everyone (including most atheists) agrees that I have no right to live my life according to my own judgement, then it is perfectly acceptable to apply coercion so that I might live my life by someone else’s judgement. The only things subjectivists have ever had in their favor are guilt and the gun. That is moral cannibalism.

Even on its face, the notion that a reduction in the regulatory power of government would inversely increase the power of businesses is mistaken. If businesses thought they could maintain, let alone increase, their market monopolies and cartels in the absence of government intervention, businesses would not put so much effort into supporting greater controls on the market and maintaining existing regulatory privileges, which inevitably come with strings of their own. Those privileges are only attainable through government’s unique authority on the legal use of force. Just as railroad corporations were able to use the United States military to steal Native American land and slave owners employed the Fugitive Slave Act, government intervention multiplies the influence of corrupt businesses and makes their exploitation more efficient, because those businesses do not have to pay for the full costs of their dirty deeds; the costs of enforcement are socialized among taxpayers.

What left-liberals, for the most part, do not realize is that big business and big government are not opposed, but symbiotically aligned to support one another. A portion of a businesses’ ill-gotten gains are diverted back to the politicians who support those government interventions, which in turn funds more interventions. Without any callous intent, well-intentioned laws are implemented in ways so that any reforms reinforce the regulator’s and regulated’s co-dependence, as alternative decentralized business models challenging the exigency of that relationship are choked off.

In actuality, government props up existing oligopolies by erecting barriers to entry (with the use of occupational licenses, monopoly protection, capital start-up requirements, zoning regulations, enforcement of so-called intellectual property and abandoned property rights, business permits and legal tender laws) and by aiding existing businesses (with the use of transportation and other subsidies, fiat currency, bailouts, restrictions on organized labor, price controls, purchase and loan guarantees, bankruptcy and limited liability protections, capital-favored accounting and tax practices, regulatory favoritism, “Open Door Imperialism,” protectionist trade policies, eminent domain seizures and general cronyism) in ways that suppress inexpensive market alternatives like self-organizing mutuals and co-ops for community services and decentralized production models for private goods and services. Concentrated corporate power exists because government protects it, and does so deliberately. Governments benefit from this concentration of wealth because it leaves most helpless to resist the tyrannous seizure of property, the expansion of government authority and restrictions on free speech, privacy and self-defense.

The reason for all those interventions is because big businesses cannot compete on the open market. A big business suffers, albeit on a smaller scale, from the same inherent structural flaw that doomed state socialism, as identified by the Misesian calculation argument: the informational diseconomy of scale. Together with the invention of electrical machinery, the total cost of production for most goods on an open market would be more expensive in centralized factory production than it would in home-based or community-run workshops.

The second half of the left-liberal argument is at best a fantasy. A government is not necessarily more responsive to the will of anyone. Residents who live in the country without the government’s permission and other foreign permanent residents cannot vote; neither can most felons. When people interact with government-supported businesses, at least they get something in return. Of those who vote every two years, only half the people get their way. Even when an election turns in their favor, voters have no guarantees. Politicians do the bidding of people who fund their elections and who take care of their family and friends. Seeing how each is dependent upon the other, regulatory bodies understandably become captured by the regulated. Seeing how big businesses have been so successful in capturing the regulatory state for their own benefit, this should be apparent by now. According to noted liberal historian Gabriel Kolko, virtually every aspect of the Progressive Era regulatory state was enacted at the behest of corporations to cement the private trusts that could not be sustained in the presence of a modicum of competition. The core problem with a government is that the costs of enforcing special privileges are dispersed among all taxpayers, but the benefits of enforcement are directed to a very few. Eternal vigilance or not, the game is stacked in favor of people who want to exploit that asymmetrical relationship for their own good, effectively making unjust laws a well-funded private good and just laws an underfunded public good that comes about precisely because of the existence of government power. There is no way of getting around that fact except to reduce the role of government or eliminate it altogether.

When politicians do propose a solution to a problem they enabled, it is not in their interests actually to solve the problem. They can always blame the opposition for not fully implementing their solution, which provides for them a fundraising issue in the next election. That is why troops remained in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay was kept open despite clear Democrat majorities to put an end to those crimes. When Republicans ran the show, nothing changed. As Noam Chomsky said in his recent book, “[Republicans] don’t want a small government any more than Reagan did. They want a huge, massively intrusive government, but one that works for them. They hate free markets.” The solution offered by left-liberals to these problems is to implement campaign finance reforms that provide public funding of candidates. As history has shown, campaign finance laws further entrench politicians and make them less accountable. For those libertarians who do not seem much difference between politically motivated corporate power and political power, in and of itself, they are opposed to monopolistic power in general, regardless of who wields it. We want to be free.

The last point that businesses are primarily focused on short-term profits and maximizing shareholder wealth is entirely a consequence of government meddling. Publically traded companies are required to report earnings quarterly, and their shareholder mandates and corporate governance structure are prescribed by law.

It is not some accident that big businesses act through the government, because they are virtually indistinguishable. To quote Kevin Carson, “Far from the system of ‘countervailing power’ hypothesized by [John Kenneth] Galbraith, the large for-profit corporation, large government agency, and large non-profit in fact cluster together into coalitions.” Government magnifies those in power. It entrenches them, shields them, and they in return become a tool of the government. Quoting Chomsky elsewhere, “Any form of concentrated power, whatever it is, is not going to want to be subjected to popular democratic control or, for that matter, to market discipline. Powerful sectors, including corporate wealth, are naturally opposed to functioning democracy, just as they’re opposed to functioning markets, for themselves, at least.” There is nothing egalitarian or progressive about bestowing one class of people with authority over another. The ironic thing in my eyes is that well-meaning left-liberals, not libertarians, are the stooges for big business.