This morning’s piece by Adam Martin reminds me of the need to get the word out about the great English political philosopher Auberon Herbert (1838-1906). He used the term “voluntaryism” to describe the only type of social arrangement that respected people’s self-ownership–voluntary, non-coercive cooperation, which stands in sharp contrast with the state as we have long known it.
Herbert’s arguments for voluntaryism represent the “moral side” of the case for liberty, as mutual consent is the only form of organization which respects every individual’s ownership of himself. Self-ownership and the rights that derive from it are so essential that he described them as “supreme moral rights,” so that “therefore force may be employed on behalf of these rights, but not in opposition to them.” State-imposed compulsion, on the other hand, inherently violates that essential principle.
As Don Lobo Tiggre put it, “to Auberon Herbert…The state is the largest and most all-encompassing system in the modern world that routinely crushes individual differences and interests under the wheel of simply brute power.”
At a time when, regardless of the rhetoric employed, the practical philosophy of governments is that they own as much of any individual as they choose, Herbert’s challenge to the idea that others have “a commission to decide what [their] brother-man shall do or not do” is essential reading.
Consider the principles he laid out in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays:
Self-Ownership and Liberty
…this is the question always waiting for an answer: Do you believe in force and authority, or do you believe in liberty?
There are two roads, and only two roads, which offer themselves to us. One is the road of restriction…the other is the road of free action, unlimited competition, and voluntary association… all the methods of restriction…are wrong and will only end in disappointment after a grievous loss of effort and time…the weight of argument is strongly on the side of liberty of action and unrestricted competition…
…force should be used to defend the rights of Self-ownership, and not for any other purpose…the rights of Self-ownership are…supreme moral rights, of higher rank than all other human interests or institutions; and therefore force may be employed on behalf of those rights, but not in opposition to them. All social and political arrangements, all employments of force, are subordinate to these universal rights, and must receive just such character and form as are required in the interest of these rights.
…only in Liberty–Liberty in thinking, acting, acquiring, and enjoyment–is salvation to be found…
…each man must be left free so to exercise his faculties and so to direct his energies as he may think fit to produce happiness–with one most important limitation. His freedom in this pursuit must not interfere with the exactly corresponding freedom of others.
…reject compulsion in every form…
…private property [is] inseparably connected with liberty or self ownership (since the free self, its free exercise of faculties, its freedom to acquire, to produce, to exchange, in the open markets of the world, form one inviolable whole), and [is] far more productive of happiness and contentment than those sham forms of property, which being placed under a State lock and key, are subject to no real control or enjoyment on the part of the individual.
…without the fullest recognition of property there can be no real liberty of action. It is idle to say in one breath that each man has the right to the free use of his own faculties, and in the next breath propose to deal by the power of the State with what he acquires by means of those faculties, as if both the faculties and what they produced belonged to the State and not to himself.
Destroy the rights of property, and you will also destroy both the material and the moral foundations of liberty. To all…belong their own faculties, and as a consequence, equally belongs to them all that they can honestly gain in free competition, through the exercise of those faculties.
…all systems of restriction hurt more than they advantage…
If you desire progress, you must remove all obstacles that impede for each man the exercise of his reasoning and imaginative faculties in his own way; and you must do nothing to lessen the rewards which he expects in return…
…allow free trade, free enterprise, free initiative, free arrangements to develop in every direction…
…make the free trade footing universal for all…universal individual choice…
Self-Ownership and Justice
…without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are no such things as true moral qualities…
…when you [expand the role of force] you at once destroy the immense safeguard that exists so long as [each] must give his consent to every action that he does.
No man…can reasonably claim more than what his work is worth to his fellow men…he has no title to more…
I deny that A and B can go to C and…extract from him certain payments and services in the name of such State…
…the damnable practice of voting property out of one set of pockets into another set of pockets… corrupts the public sense of what is fair to each other…teaches the hypocritical doctrine that it is wrong to bludgeon and rob your neighbor on the high road, but right to knock him down with majority vote, and pillage him…
If we are self-owners, neither an individual, nor a majority, nor a government, can have rights of ownership in other men.
Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man…
Do we wish to make men juster…We shall certainly not succeed by acting more unjustly…
…Voluntaryism…denies that any good or lasting work can be built upon the compulsion of others…It invites all men to abandon the barren problems of force, and to give themselves up to the happy problems of liberty and friendly co operation; to join in thinking out–while first and foremost we give to the individual those full rights over himself and over whatever is his…how we can do all these things, without at any point touching with the least of our fingers the hateful instrument of an aggressive and unjustifiable compulsion.
Force rests on no moral foundations…
If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.
…force users will be force begetters.
Government Undermines Both Liberty and Justice
…this question of power exercised by some men over other men is the greatest of all questions, the one that concerns the very foundations of society…
All these various wholes, without any exception, in which an individual is included…exist for the sake of the individual. They exist to do his service; they exist for his profit and use. If they did not minister to his use, if they do not profit him, they would have no plea to exist.
You may appoint a committee, a government, or whatever you like to call it, and delegate to it powers already possessed by the individuals, but by no possibility can this delegated body be seized with larger powers than those possessed by the individuals who called it into existence; by no possibility can the creature possess greater authority than those who created it.
…no man can have rights over another man unless he first have rights over himself. He cannot possess the rights to direct the happiness of another man, unless he possess rights to direct his own happiness: if we grant him the latter right, this is at once fatal to the former.
If you lose all respect for the rights of others…if you lose your belief in liberty…what can all the gifts of politicians give you in return?
There is only one result you can get out of the suppression of the individual, and that is the organized dominant faction triumphing over the defeated faction.
…you will gain far more by clinging faithfully to the methods of peace and respect for the rights of others than by allowing yourselves to use the force that always calls out force in reply…
And what sort of philosophical doctrine is this…that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest those rights in others…
How should it happen that the individual should be without rights, but that the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?
So long as we admit that the property of individuals lies at the mercy of the largest number of votes, we are intellectually and morally committed to state socialism…
The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation.
What magical power comes over [a majority] because they are one more in number…therefore they suddenly become possessors of the minds and bodies of these others?
Far the larger amount of intolerance that exists in the world is the result of our own political arrangements, by which we compel ourselves to struggle, man against man…
…the moment you have entered the path of restriction, you may be sure that whatever further restrictions are necessary to make your first restrictions efficient will presently be employed. That is the danger of all restriction; there are so many steps waiting to succeed to the first.
Restriction will always breed restriction, both because the first restriction is found to be incomplete without the second, and the second without the third; and because men who once lend themselves to restriction acquire the temper of betaking themselves to restriction in face of every difficulty.
…no person who once enters the road of restriction ever stands still. Either, conquering all former scruples, he goes on supplementing the old restrictions with new restrictions in order to make them efficient, or, disgusted with the odiousness of compelling men to act against their own wishes and of reducing them to ciphers by regulation, he throws up the whole attempt and retraces his steps…
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In our era, where myriad government bodies tax and regulate away individuals’ self-ownership far more than when Auberon Herbert wrote, we need to hear and act on his compelling case for liberty, and thus voluntary arrangements, as the organizing principle of society. As he recognized, the alternative involves the widespread abuse of people’s rights in themselves and is ultimately futile: “all the methods of restriction…are wrong and will only end in disappointment.”
{ 6 comments }
I don’t like the term self-ownership, but I don’t know if whomever is using it at a particular time means what it implies.
If I own something, I can sell it or lease it, in whole or in part.
Therefore you can make faustian bargains. If you “own” your self, “the taxation and regulation” are merely the words for selling your freedom for whatever the state mess o pottage happens to be. The minute you use a public road, attend a subsidized school or otherwise accept any handout from the state, it can demand in exchange a piece of your self that you own.
Rush Limbaugh has an expression “Talent on loan from God”. This describes how I think rights work. Because God has given them to me (or use a pagan or secular substitute), but in a lease that runs from conception until natural death, I do not “own” my self or my rights – God is still the owner. I am the user and the guardian. Like a lease car, I can drive it wherever I want, but I can’t sell it, and I may get a rebate or penalty depending on if I take good care or abuse it.
The term inalienable rights works for me, because inalienable also means I can’t alienate the rights from myself.
(Nor is this a trivial point even without a state – in a thread on commercial contracts, many maintained I could limit any right of another as a condition of sale, where I noted ownership isn’t transferred if even one right of ownership, much less one liberty of the owner is limited).
Is “inalienable rights” what is normally meant by “self-ownership”, or is it closer to being able to sell yourself into slavery if you so desire?
I agree that “self-ownership” is a suspect term precisely because it implies being able to sell oneself into slavery, although I think most people who use it mean “inalienable rights”.
See Walter Block on alienability.
I started reading Walter Block – thanks for the reference. But I think he misses my point that the entire state coercive appratus is then justified, or even merely a form or voluntary slavery. As Block points out it may be stupid to sell your labor for $1 per year, but not illegal in his system. So your right not to surrender a good amount to taxation, not to bothered while driving on the roads, all those liberties have evaporated in some long ago forgotten transaction like when you got a social security number or applied for a driver’s license. No matter how tyrannical a master, the state is a perfectly valid master as you volunteered to be its slave, though might regret the decision now.
Or to use one of his kind of examples, I kidnap you and torture you, and say I will only stop if you voluntarily agree to be my slave and hold me harmless for the kidnap or torture. You might die before you are found, and anyway find the torture unpleasant (Or you might just be stuck in the middle of the desert, and I have a vehicle with enough gas and/or water without which you will die, but it is a perfectly “voluntary” choice). Or I give your child a poison of which there is no discomfort until death, so instead of needing a million dollars for a cure (as in his example), you need the antidote only I can provide. The only difference is that I put you into that position, but the decision is not less “voluntary”.
Also my guardianship model avoids some of the forefeiture problems. If you are in a coma, you can’t actualize your rights. If there is enough clear evidence you are abusing your position or otherwise can’t handle guardianship of your rights, a different guardian might be appointed until you can handle them.
Or to use one of his kind of examples, I kidnap you and torture you, and say I will only stop if you voluntarily agree to be my slave and hold me harmless for the kidnap or torture. You might die before you are found, and anyway find the torture unpleasant (Or you might just be stuck in the middle of the desert, and I have a vehicle with enough gas and/or water without which you will die, but it is a perfectly “voluntary” choice). Or I give your child a poison of which there is no discomfort until death, so instead of needing a million dollars for a cure (as in his example), you need the antidote only I can provide. The only difference is that I put you into that position, but the decision is not less “voluntary”.
This surely stretches the idea of “voluntary”! After all, if you think that voluntary slavery would permit people to take control of other people’s person by threatening them with torture, etc. then you must also think that allowing voluntrary sales of other forms of property, like houses or cars, is likewise so permissive. Most people do not, and are correct in not doing so, regard giving money to a highway man because he is pointing a gun at you as a voluntary transfer of wealth. Nor would they do so if the highway man poisoned their child and refused to cure it unless the money was handed over.
But the man with the sick child is under duress and that is the only reason he would sell himself into slavery in Block’s example. Voluntary? The person either wills that the child dies or he becomes a slave and this particular universe has only those choices. There is no charity or even a loan available. The “stuck in the middle of the desert” simply moves the threatened person from the child to the man himself – live as a slave or die are the only two “voluntary” choices.
Also, the question of beating the slave is given, but not slow torture or murder – the rich master might be a sadist and take pleasure in the infliction of pain and use the slave for that purpose and not labor. Maybe the rich man would like both of the slave’s kidneys. Why stop at freedom?
But the basic problem is if my examples aren’t “voluntary”, neither is the case Block uses to establish his idea. To choose between multiple evils might admit of will but would not be “voluntary” in the sense of the word the way it is normally used.
The choice betweed different goods (high risk high pay, or steadier low pay), or things of moral indifference (red or blue) can be voluntary. Given a choice, we would normally assume people would never choose any evil (or the very choice for evil is illicit – which then begs the question), so constructs with a greater and lesser evil are inapplicable – like Bush and Kerry if you need a contemporary example.
I’ve before admitted health care as it pertains to life is where things get difficult with my model (since I consider Life, Liberty, and Property to be a list in decreasing order of priority). A lot of property sphere choices can affect lifespan.
If Block or anyone else cannot construct a choice between goods which would involve life or liberty, I don’t see how the example applies or would be different. If nature puts someone into a coercive situation I can exploit, the exploitation is evil.
If such exploitation is not intrinsically evil, I can legitimately coerce someone into agreeing to be my slave, then simply pay for my coercion without violating the transaction. I threaten you – you become my slave, I pay you whatever the going rate for credible threats are, but order you to give me back the fine immediately.
Or to go back to Block’s example, say the man paid for the treatment, but it was unsuccessful, or that there was some unrelated accident where the child died anyway (before, during, or after the treatment).
I think of the Roman who would take a bag of the then inflated coins and go around striking people and pull out a coin – something like a nickel today – and pointed out that the 12 tables specified this as the fine for striking someone.
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