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.

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.

Now, I understand that there are many strains of socialists. Some are state socialists, some libertarian (or voluntary) socialists and even some socialists are pro-market (as much as right-wingers might not like to acknowledge it).

A common misconception I run across from anti-market socialists is that they oppose the profit motive and markets, instead favoring non-market economies like gifting. I happen to think that gifting would have its place, but it would not be the primary form of economic activity.

Market anarchists view profit making as a natural phenomenon taking place among living beings, so it is more of a descriptive observation than it is a prescriptive notion about how living beings ought to behave. As a nexus of all of our consensual economic decisions, markets serve to remove human dissatisfaction.

To understand this, profits that free-market supporters speak of do not necessarily take the form of money, either. When bartering, people will trade for goods or services which they more highly value. With even the simplest interaction, it is natural that pleasure is more desirable than pain. Of course, people are going to have different time preferences for valuing particular pains and pleasures. Nevertheless, the psychic values of these pleasures and pains are not reducible to quantifiable interpersonal comparisons. They originate and remain in the mind of the person who holds them. That is, these values are not fixed to the objects themselves but instead represented in people’s own judgements.

So it is possible for a set of people who hold different judgements to exchange objects they each value and still mutually benefit from that exchange, rendering a greater output of wealth for all. In a free market (which is not in place today), consumers would determine who has best combined less-valued resources into higher-valued products and thus profited.

The work before us market anarchists is obvious.

At present, there are all sorts of government interventions, from “lemon market reforms” to socialized information diseconomies of scale and artificial barriers to entry, that limit the number of firms competing in the market. The problem is not so much much markets as it is statism.

• Committing Genocide — In the first book of the Bible, God decides Man is so evil that almost all living things must be killed in a worldwide flood, including children and animals. There is little discussion of why such a step is taken, and no convincing explanation is offered. Also left unanswered is why it was necessary to kill so many animals, which could have provided some value to the poverty stricken people of that time. It is inconceivable that it could be. Unfortunately, this would not be the last time God was responsible for the premeditated murder of children.

  In Egypt, the Israelites were being held as tax slaves to the state. Following a series of plagues that God commanded in an effort to besiege the pharaohs into freeing the Israelites, God concluded by killing the firstborn child of Egyptian families. By comparison, the American government’s economic sanctions and illegal invasion of Iraq, which together have resulted in more than a million deaths, seem tame.

• Condoning Chattel Slavery — I have never heard of a respected living conscious being that has ever condoned slavery, save for God. Surely, he must have seen the shift in public opinion coming.

  Throughout the Bible, though, slave owners are told how to conduct themselves but not that slavery is evil, that the pretense of the ownership of another person is evil. Sickeningly, slaves are even told to obey their masters.

• Enforcing Inherited Guilt — A central tenent of Christianity is that everyone is evil as a result of the fall of Adam and Eve from God’s grace in the Garden of Eden. The early parts of the Bible display cases of people being punished for the sins of the father. Really, what sense does that make?

  Morality is a matter of choice. To say that human beings are inherently evil (or good) would mean that they are not responsible for their decisions. It would be like a doorman forcing me into a casino to play craps only to find out during my roll that I have no choice but to play with the trick dice provided by the casino. I then have to pledge my unquestioned support and offer remuneration to pay off the inevitable debt I have incurred. The whole idea is mad and undermines a proper conception of morality.

• Punishing Victimless Crimes — For not supporting god, according the the Bible, I can expect eternal punishment. The belief as to what exactly such a punishment consists of spans across a wide spectrum. Some believe this punishment will consist of unspeakable torture, while others say an unbeliever remains in an oblivious unconscious rest.

  A central tenant of a civilized legal theory is that a crime has only occurred when a non-consenting individual has sustained an articulable injury to one’s person or property. Refusing my allegiance to the Bibilical god can in no way be an injury to a living person, much less to an immaterial entity. For example, even if I refused to acknowledge that Michael Jordon existed or if I believed that he was a terrible basketball player, I am not causing an injury to his body or property. A further difference is that Michael Jordon exists in material reality, while believers in the concept of god concede that god exists only in an immaterial supernatural realm that I presently am not able to experience.

  Since I can pose no possible injury to a god, I have a pretty strong case of being a victim of extortion since this almighty god has purposefully made such an ambiguous threat of eternal torture against me.

These are just some of the more egregious moral failures of the Biblical god. Even for those who believe the concept of god is valid, the tyrannical god described in the Bible could very well be a test of a believer’s moral code. So even if we played Pascal’s wager, there is at least as much reason to not lend your support for such a vile creature.

Some of the latest studies have concentrated on the “culture of poverty,” which predominantly has been the domain of conservatives for the past 40 years to rest blame for the plight of the poor. As the Times reported, today’s studies differ in that they assign blame for the “destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.”

Though I am not one to reject the historical legacy of racism that denied blacks equal opportunities and equal treatment under the law, I tend to reject both conventional liberal and conservative explanations for poverty. That is, I do not believe poverty is a result of the market, nor is it the result of laziness.

Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson said the “poverty trap” is “related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think,” again according the article. Sampson conducted a study whereby he dropped stamped, addressed envelopes in different neighborhoods to see how many were returned. The results were dramatic. In a former housing project, no envelopes were returned, but more than half were returned in another neighborhood with a similar income demographic. He said the differences were due to cynicism people had about their communities.

Others are looking into how growing up in a violent neighborhood reduces socialization and hinders the development of linguistic abilities by some six IQ points. Family structures are also an important piece to understand the persistent state of inner-city poverty. One-parent families are much more commonplace today than ever before, which reduces the level of parental development and caretaking.

I have to say that these latest studies are a blessing, even if the researchers are not yet hitting on the root of these problems — statism.

A lot of the cynicism stems from a genuine distrust of the law and the people trusted with enforcing the law. Those trapped in poverty have no alternative justice services to support, as allowing competing justice services would compromise “what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is the monopoly on violence,” Barack Obama acknowledged.

Just in Dallas County alone, a dozen people who were serving prison time have been exonerated based on DNA evidence. These are just a few of the thousands of cases in which DNA evidence was available. Most people languishing in prison are there for petty, non-violent crimes in which no one was put in danger. The drug war has disproportionately hit black men more than any group, so of course there will be more single-parent homes in predominantly black neighborhoods. Welfare programs also incitivize mothers to stay single, according to Mary Ruwart’s book “Healing Our World.” In fact, a Heritage study said that children who recieved aid show “cognitive abilities 20 percent below those who had received no welfare, even after holding family income, race, parental IQ, and other variables constant.”

Additionally, if you do not expect to receive justice, what good is there to care about the law, particularly when the law itself if so unjust? What hope could there be?

Drug prohibition, just like alcohol prohibition, is the cause of rampant amounts of violence and corruption among the police and politicians. For instance, during alcohol prohibition, the murder rate roughly doubled from its pre-war high. Since the war on drugs began in the 1970s, murder rates have nearly doubled again. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it does put to the rest the idea that prohibition lowers crime.

Well-intentioned welfare-statism is not helping the poor much either. Most liberals recognize the income disparities and economic distortions created by government intervention on behalf of corporate interests. Instead of focusing on doing away with those government actions, in the name pragmatism most liberals insist on creating further distortions with the hopes of balancing the playing field, heaping further counterweights on an already unsustainable system that mostly benefits the program administrators. Economic distortions like the minimum wage do little to provide a safety net, but instead place a hurdle in which young people must leap.

That attitude, though counterproductive, is somewhat forgivable. It is nearly impossible to shrink the state; people in a monopoly government are more inclined than most to expand power and deflect blame in order to amass more control. It becomes evident that two wrongs cannot make a right.

While petty handouts are contemptuously put forth as a show of compassion, the big-ticket criminals who run this cartel can waltz home with a clear conscience. That is what the state does. “It bites with stolen teeth,” as Friedrich Nietzsche explained. You might too say it gives back your bootstraps but only after taking your boots.