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.

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.

To his major points, the rabbi begins his letter with an immediate misunderstanding of atheism. He said “that there really are no true atheists” because such a belief would require absolute knowledge of the universe. But again this is wrong for at least three reasons.

Atheism is a lack of belief in a god, meaning there is no empirical (fact-based) evidence to support a belief in a god. For many atheists, that is the extent of their claim. They do not say that the existence of a god is impossible, only that they do not possess any empirical evidence to believe there is one.

The second fault in the rabbi’s thinking is that the burden of proof is not on atheists to prove that there is no empirical evidence for theism. The burden of proof lies with theist to prove that they have empirical evidence for their belief, since theists are the ones making a positive claim. A belief without empirical evidence is arbitrary, as in not grounded in reality, and therefore neither true nor false. If such definitive empirical evidence existed, there would be no reason to rely on faith, which is the act of acquiring a belief in knowledge in the absence empirical evidence or, more often, in spite of the available empirical evidence.

Even with those clarifications, the third fault in the rabbi’s reasoning is that we can prove by logical deduction that there is no god. Part of the difficulty in proving there is no god is that there are so many definitions for the word “god.” Some will say god is love or energy or the perfect good. We already know what those notions are or at least understand the thinking behind them, so there is no reason to use the word “god,” which brings with it supernatural connotations. At a minimum, “god” is defined as an eternal incorporeal being responsible for the creation of existence. Existence would be defined as the totality of all that had existed, that does exist and that will exist. The notion “god” can be proven to be self-contradictory and therefore non-existent in reality in the same way that a square circle cannot exist. Self-contradictory notion can be used as figurative tools, but it would be pointless to search the universe for a square circle, a married bachelor or an instance where two plus two is five.

Logically proving the self-contradictory nature of the notion “god,” an eternal incorporeal being responsible for the creation of existence, is as follows.

1. Consciousness is the faculty to perceive that which exists.
2. Consciousness can only occur if something exists to perceive.
3. In the absence of existence, nothing exists to be conscious of to perceive.
4. A being that lacks consciousness is unconscious.
5. An unconscious being cannot act purposefully to create existence.
6. The notion “god” exists as a manifestation of the human mind, which is an entity in existence.
7. Therefore, there is no god.

The basic summation is that if there were a god, it could never act. By the fact that existence exists, there can be no god.

The supposed attributes of quantitatively infinite goodness, presence, knowledge and power are themselves self-contradictory as well. As Leonard Peikoff said, ” ‘Infinite’ as applied to quantity does not mean ‘very large’: it means ‘larger than any specific quantity.’ That means: no specific quantity—i.e., a quantity without identity. This is prohibited by the Law of Identity.”

Having shown why the notion “god” contradicts the fundamental meta-physical principles of reality, I do not think that the rest of the rabbi’s open letter is founded. However, he does mention the good that has come of people’s belief in Judaism. Even if it were the case that Judaism was less opposed to human happiness and equality, that should not warrant its belief. Considering the teachings of other religions, Judaism had a pretty low hurdle to cross. Of the points he made about the positive impact of his religion, in no way is a religious belief required to perform them. Atheists are just as capable of justice and love as atheists.

Pointing to “Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot” as examples of secular injustices gives his case away. In the case of Hitler, he was very outspoken about his Christian belief. What united all of them were beliefs shared almost universally by theists, the virtue of self-sacrifice to the collective.

To the rabbi’s final point, atheism does not have to be asserted on faith. He added, “Being a rationalist, of course, you know that failing to make such an observation is different from proving that there isn’t one [a god], which, by its very nature, is an impossible task.” That is what the rabbi does not understand. A negative statement, such as one that there is no god, can be demonstrated as true if it is true. To demonstrate that two plus two is not five or 20 or 55 only takes proving that two plus two is four. To demonstrate that there is no god only takes demonstrating that existence exists and A is A, both (irrefutable) axiomatic primaries of logic. To say that one cannot prove a negative statement is itself a negative statement. So if the statement is true, it refutes itself. If the statement that one cannot prove a negative is false, that means negative statements, including that one, are then arbitrary and therefore meaningless. In either case, the statement that one cannot prove a negative is untrue. The purpose for the rabbi’s use of the statement that it is impossible to prove “that there isn’t one [a god]” is to deny that knowledge is even possible. If it is impossible to rule out the possibility that two plus two is not five, it is equally impossible to claim knowledge that two plus two is four. If I cannot prove that this thing I am punching my fingers on is not a poisonous snake, I cannot claim with certainty that it is keyboard either. The statement that one cannot prove a negative statement is a claim to knowledge that denies knowledge is possible.

Forgiving the fact that the rabbi completely misunderstands atheism and peddles the idea that we cannot use reason, even as he communicates through the use of our reason, I welcome having an “open mind and a spirit of appreciation for our shared humanity.” It is just that so many theists do not see it that way. The goal of this post is not to rob people of their beliefs, and for the most part I do not initiate conversations about religion with theists nor do I support violence in the name of my beliefs — if only I could say the same for statists, some theists and some anarchists (for that matter).

The second story relates to police brutality committed by a former Dallas officer who was fired and faces a misdemeanor charge of official oppression and not a more serious charge that his attack presumably warranted.

Both stories underscore the exploitative nature of government privilege and — for the former — state capitalism.

Under the “Principles” header of the 2010 Texas Republican Platform, the first claim is that Texas Republicans support “Strict adherence to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. and Texas Constitutions.” As recent developments have proven yet again, the adherence to those principles by Republican politicians — despite their platitudes about freedom and liberty — are groundless. Never mind that those documents are themselves in contradiction with one another. Whether you believe abortion is necessarily murder or not, it would be a contradiction to adhere to the principle of the Declaration of Independence that the proper role of government is the protection of individual rights and then support legislation seeming to support the principle that a proper role of government is to codify the legal process of violating those rights. Particularly for those who oppose abortion, those two principles are mutually exclusive. It would be like passing a law mandating which guns are to be used in armed robberies; the law would undermine the idea that one has no right to commit armed robbery in the first place.

In addition, the law violates individual rights by imposing positive obligations on behalf of patients and doctors. As the French classical liberal Frederic Bastiat said, “When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing but a mere negation. They oblige him only to abstain from harming others. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property.” Yet, this bill would require that patients pay for these extra procedures and that doctors perform them and release private medical records to the state.

Libertarian Solutions

Range-of-the-moment conservatives might argue on consequentialist grounds that they must support these measures, however hypocritically, to increase the number of women having sonograms, with hopes of reducing the number of abortions. But even this is a false dichotomy and does not consider the unintended consequences of the policy. There are literally dozens of ways that abortions could be reduced by taking consensual actions in the absence of government control, such as holding fundraisers to pay for the sonograms of women considering an abortion. Anti-abortion doctors could offer their sonogram services for free or at reduced fees for certain patients.

Women who initially declined once they had seen their sonograms to perform an abortion are likely to suffer even greater emotional stress if they eventually decide to abort later in the pregnancy. That emotional toll might be manifested in the destruction of their own life or future pregnancies. Even if signed into law, which seems to be likely, the legislation will do little to affect the 43 percent of aborted pregnancies performed on women who have had multiple abortions.

Another means of reducing abortions would be to take preventative action to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that took place and make adoption a more attractive option. Solutions might include making non-abortion forms of birth controls more widely available and increase the economic opportunities of women. Some grocery stores restrict the sale of contraceptives to behind the drug counter, which in small towns could make purchasing them socially awkward and downright impossible after the pharmacy has closed. It would also help to make contraceptive use more affordable by removing their sales tax. Medical licensing and intellectual property laws also increase the costs of medical procedures like vasectomies and equipment that reduce or eliminate chances of fertilization. If pregnant women were able to form contracts with prospective parents to sell the guardianship rights of the child, surrogate mothers would be less likely to find it necessary to abort. Finally, increased economic opportunities that would arise from repealing occupational licensing laws, burdensome zoning regulations, restrictions on labor organizing and all the other government-causing poverty policies could make parenting more affordable and abortion less necessary, in the eye’s of expecting women. This bill does nothing to address these other means of reducing abortions.

Far from having to abandon principles, conservative Republicans who wanted a limited government, a belief I do not happen to share, should rather re-examine their most basic principle: that life necessitates sacrifice, which mandates the existence of a welfare state to materialize. Since left-liberals have acted more consistently in that shared belief, they continue to have their goals implemented and expand state powers to counter-balance momentarily the unforeseen consequences of those expansionist policies. Once conservatives have gone so far as to reject the belief that life requires sacrifice, they will be one step closer to the idea that government is incapable of protecting anyone’s rights without first infringing upon them.