Law-Enforcement Socialism
Every year, more prisons are built, more money is funneled to police departments, more criminal law is written and yet domestic crime remains a major problem. Explanations abound as to why this is. There fundamental explanation makes logic out of the entire mess but is almost never voiced: Socialism. Law enforcement agencies, courts, prisons, legislative bodies — all of the key institutions that are supposed to produce justice are owned and maintained by the state. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (102)
John coleman
Anthony Gregory's piece, Law-Enforcement Socialism, is little more than warmed-over NORML propaganda dressed up for Christmas as our secret Santa. Von Mises was not an advocate of victimless crime, whatever that may be, and surely was no fan of unregulated drug use.
In "Liberalism" (1927) von Mises said, "It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices."
The power of the state, exercised in the form of its military or its police, is coercive, plain and simple; everything else the state does is form and process. That the state acting on behalf of its people and their representatives has seen fit to pass laws regulating drug usage, among other things, has nothing to do with the oxymoronic concept, "victimless crime," and everything to do with protecting against what von Mises warned us about.
On a global scale, we have done precisely what Mr. Gregory seems to suggest. We are to most countries in the world and certainly to those in our own hemisphere, the "privatized" and efficient prisons for many of the world's top misfits. As of November 2006, the US Bureau of Prisons reported a total federal inmate population of 193,359, of which 54% are imprisoned for drug offences.
A total of 52,207 (27%) of all federal prisoners are non-US citizens. As the world's largest importer of drug crimes and drug criminals, it is no wonder we have the relatively large prison population we have.
However, the good news for Mr. Gregory and his followers is that by baby-sitting the world's biggest, badest, and best criminals, in a sense we are providing the "private" service he advocates to other nations, like Mexico and Colombia, that ultimately may allow them to prosper. Coercion is coercion.
When used by the state in ways governed by the people and managed carefully to prevent excesses, it is beneficial for the sake of liberty, prosperity, and freedom; when exercised by criminals in the form of multi-national cartels and their local franchisees, coercion is hardly victimless. Whether one sees this struggle as a balance between good and evil or simply a contest between two evils is, I believe, a test of civilization.
Published: December 22, 2006 7:58 AM
jeffrey
I'm not entirely sure what John is getting at, but Mises was most certainly an advocate of complete decriminalization of drugs.
Published: December 22, 2006 8:01 AM
Sam
If sole-proprietorships/partnerships are the pinnacles of economic freedom then it stands to reason that social justice freedom is best obtained through vigilante justice.
Published: December 22, 2006 8:23 AM
RogerM
"...yet domestic crime remains a major problem."
Is Gregory claiming that crime would no longer exist under anarchism? If so, would that be because people no longer committed crimes, or because private police forces would do a better job of catching criminals and private judges would do a better job of prosecuting? Or would it be because anarchists would decriminalize every activity but theft?
Published: December 22, 2006 8:24 AM
Reactionary
RogerM,
I'm frankly coming to the view that there is no such thing as anarchy other than as a theoretical construct in the minds of a few academics and their 20-something students, but that's for another day.
Gregory's main point is that the errors inherent in the socialist calculation will show up in government law enforcement as well. After all, it's just a bureaucracy with guns.
The percentage of people who commit violent crime is very small, which means the government has to come up with more crimes to justify its large, armed-to-the-teeth police forces. (In a truly bizarre twist in the world of down-is-up conservatism, most police departments are better equipped than many Marine infantry platoons.)
The obvious solution for government is to extend criminality to consensual activities that generally don't harm anybody other than the participants, like drugs and prostitution.
Another method is to alter the structure of society itself through welfare and secularism, so that anti-social behavior is increased. In a society where people are free to segregate and discriminate, and pledge their loyalty to traditional institutions, anti-social behavior would be greatly reduced.
Published: December 22, 2006 9:28 AM
Dan Coleman
John Coleman (nice name, by the way), I'm glad to see you quote Mises on the matter, but you stopped just a little short in the paragraph. From Liberalism:
"No words need be wasted over the fact that all these narcotics are harmful. The question whether even a small quantity of alcohol is harmful or whether the harm results only from the abuse of alcoholic beverages is not at issue here. It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora's box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism.
"Whoever is convinced that indulgence or excessive indulgence in these poisons is pernicious is not hindered from living abstemiously or temperately. This question cannot be treated exclusively in reference to alcoholism, morphinism, cocainism, etc., which all reasonable men acknowledge to be evils. For if the majority of citizens is, in principle, conceded the right to impose its way of life upon a minority, it is impossible to stop at prohibitions against indulgence in alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and similar poisons.
". . .We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual's mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. . . . A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police."
It was crafty to quote such a narrow selection to prove that Mises stood against the freedom to use drugs, but by reading further in the paragraph we see that Mises supported freedom to use drugs in spite of it being considered a vice.
::
Roger M,
Come on, give the author some credit here. You wrote:
"...yet domestic crime remains a major problem."
Is Gregory claiming that crime would no longer exist under anarchism? If so, would that be because people no longer committed crimes, or because private police forces would do a better job of catching criminals and private judges would do a better job of prosecuting? Or would it be because anarchists would decriminalize every activity but theft?
Now imagine that you are reading an article on Mises.org that talks about health care persisting as a problem despite lots of government resources (taxes) being used to "fix" it. Would you respond with:
"Is Gregory claiming that disease would no longer exist under anarchism? If so, would that be because people no longer contracted illness, or because private hospitals would do a better job of treating them and private doctors would do a better job of diagnosing them? Or would it be because anarchists would privatize every activity but theft?"
Or perhaps Gregory would write a piece in favor of shoes and how the market produces them at such low costs. Would you write:
"Is Gregory claiming that bare feet would no longer exist under anarchism? If so, would that be because the poor could suddenly afford shoes, or because private charities would do a better job of distributing them and private entrepreneurs would do a better job of selling them? Or would it be because anarchists would privatize every activity but theft?"
The fallacy that you have committed is that you have assumed something on the author's part, put words into his mouth, and then proceeded to knock down the straw man that you created. Be fair to the author in conversation and we all might get somewhere.
Published: December 22, 2006 9:43 AM
andrew
One could also argue, especially when hearing a politician talk of laws promoting "family values", that dependence on the state for social services and as a moral authority to root out various vices usually leads to more crime, both the victimless and violent types, by reducing the influence of the family and church as moral authorities. It’s not a coincidence that the family unit is weakest and violent crime is highest in inner cities, the areas most dependent on the welfare state’s social services.
Published: December 22, 2006 10:59 AM
David C
I am really open to the idea of a private enforcement system. However, because of market forces I could see these private enforcement agencies consolidating into two or three large companies or niches. And then because, of cultural and political differences I could see clashes between these companies (eg, consider copyrights today and those who benefit and those who don't) - it could easily cause a clash between enforcement agencies. And then I could see a lot of bloodshed and pain resulting, and everyone wanting to have a single enforcement system that can work out its differences within to avoid such pain in the future. And then I could see that those who pay that enforcement agency becoming disenfranchised because of all the free riders, so they insist that things get set up so that everyone pays something. And, hence we have a big enforcement agency called the government that everyone pays for and we are back to square one.
Published: December 22, 2006 11:48 AM
billwald
The problem is more basic. Our constitution was designed for nominally Christian people or at least civilized people. Until the 1800's, the uncivilized people could "go west" to rape and pilliage the Indian People and each other. After Lincoln's War, the West was fenced and claimed. The outlaws - the uncivilized people could no longer hide in rural areas so they took control of the best hiding places - the large cities.
4,000 years ago Sorcates taught that "moral people are happy people." Why, then are many people not moral people? Because, he concluded, "They are crazy."
When the crazy people could "go west" the civilized people on the east coast could afford to contain the uncivilized who remained. Our Constitution was not designed to control the large percentage of uncivilized people who are now living in the USofA.
Over half our city and county taxes go to law enforcement and we spend more for private security measures (alarm systems, door guards . . .) than the total cost of all national, state, county, and local policing. Over one percent of our population is in prison. Would people feel safe if it was two percent?
We can no longer afford justice and revenge. Everybody gots to be someplace. We put up signs, "drug free area," but don't tell the druggies where they can go so they go to my neighborhood.
We need a system that geographically seperates the civilized people from the uncivilized people. The rich people live in patrolled high rises and gated communities. The working poor don't have a fighting chance to protect themselves.
I've been thinking about this for 40 years, having put 30 years with the Seattle Police Department. First, city neighborhoods should be permitted to form local improvment districts for the purpose of restricting access to their community. The community would be fenced and access be restricted to three or four streets. Camaras would monitor all foot and vehicular traffic. This would give the working poor an equivalent of the gated communities for rich people.
Second, nationally admit that many of our citizens want to smoke dope on a regular basis and give them a place to live. I suggest Nevada. Nevada has already legalized most every other vice. Except for truckers crossing I-80, no one has to travel to Nevada. It would be an interesting economic experiment.
Published: December 22, 2006 11:58 AM
Reactionary
David C,
That in fact is the nub of the problem. A "rights protector" that can't assure its verdicts won't get set aside by a wealthy defendant simply paying them more than you, or by hiring a "rights protector" with more guns than yours, has nothing of value to offer. So, what you're going to get is an agency that sets up shop within a territory it knows it can control to the exclusion of others, and marketing itself as a sure, safe haven for commerce. People will move there, be born into it, inherit property, and be deemed to automatically accede to the covenants. The radical individualists will have to make do as they can as vagrants in undeveloped areas.
Published: December 22, 2006 12:17 PM
Francisco Torres
The percentage of people who commit violent crime is very small, which means the government has to come up with more crimes to justify its large, armed-to-the-teeth police forces.
Excellent point! Many of the so-called "crimes" are nothing more than ad-hoc justifications for more government pork.
Published: December 22, 2006 1:12 PM
N. Joseph Potts
The article notes that government-funded law-enforcement institutions (can) benefit when evidence of increasing crime surfaces.
The same is quite true of private law-enforcement institutions EXCEPT as there may be competition among these. THEN, the incumbent institution faces the prospect of being fired (or seeing its business decline) by customers who lay some of the blame at the feet of the incumbent.
Published: December 22, 2006 1:31 PM
Saturdaynightspecial
I think Anthony Gregory wrote this, in part, because of socialists like 'billwald'.
Government is our worst enemy - worse than any mugger, rapist, murderer, vicious animal or terrorist. It will get more people harmed or killed than any other threat (ie, VietNam and the war on drugs).
To simplify the essay 'Law-enforcement Socialism' we only need to be allowed our gun rights (allow an armed citizenry and teach or advocate the social (natural) responsibility of providing for our own self-defense) and then we will be more safe, have less intrusive bullying government and be more free.
Excellent essay and he is completely correct. HEY ! Just cutting the size of every police department by half would make us all more free and safer too; and we could lower our tax bill. Gregory is a genius.
Published: December 22, 2006 1:58 PM
RogerM
Dan:"The fallacy that you have committed is that you have assumed something on the author's part, put words into his mouth, and then proceeded to knock down the straw man that you created."
Wow! You sure got a lot more out of my post than I intended. Do you teach literature? I don't recall assuming anything, other than that the author is an anarchist, which isn't a stretch of the imagination. Also, I didn't attack the author; I had some honest questions.
The author states that the state has failed at law enforcement. I think he should provide some clues as to how anarchy would do a better job.
On the other hand, the author should demonstrate that crime is a problem. He just assumes it is. Some places in the US have very low crime rates. Many in law enforcement are confused over the fact that while crime has decreased significantly over the last decade, people are more concerned about crime now that when it was much higher. So it's legit to ask what level of crime the author finds acceptable?
Published: December 22, 2006 3:36 PM
RogerM
I'm no crime expert, but I've read that crime was much lower in the 1960's than in the 1990's, while the US was much more socialistic in the 60's. Another question for the author might be "Why has the crime rate varied widely while the social system has remained pretty much the same?"
Published: December 22, 2006 3:41 PM
Anthony Gregory
When crime is low, it is despite the state. Crime has varied a lot, but the more the socialist criminal justice system takes on, the worse it generally gets. Criminal justice has always been a government program, but there was much less of that program in earlier times in America, for example. The modern system is largely a 20th century development.
Published: December 22, 2006 3:48 PM
averros
Ah, the warlord objection always raises its ugly head, no matter how many times and how thoroughly one debunks it.
David C claims that enforcement agencies will consolidate into few conglomerates and fight each other. While I wouldn't say consolidation is impossible [*], there's a very strong indentive for them NOT to engage in warfare: no one wants to be affiliated with a belligerent agency (as he'd have to pay for this belligerency - and because that makes him a target for the supporters of the opposing belligerent; if the parties sunk to the point of shooting each other, it also makes sense for them to inflict economic damage by forcing the opposition to pay for the "accidents" happening with their customers).
As long as customers are free to leave for other protection agencies, any attempt to start fighting without nearly universally accepted cause will result in mass exodus of customers. Every customer leaving results in higher costs for staying customers - making even those who have deficient morals less willing to support immoral causes.
The states can make wars precisely because their "customers" are de facto captive.
Reactionary plays the "wealthy will have their way by paying off" scare card. Oh, please, take your head from whatever place it is stuffed into and take a long look around. See much crime in wealthy suburbs? The wealthy *already* have a good life and something to protect, so they're interested in preserving peace and order much more than the rabble. In fact, they're interested in that too much, as they often concede (in private) that taxes and welfare are needed to keep the rabble pacified.
And, mind you, a wealthy person is just as vulnerable to the bullet of a seriously pissed off victim of his previous crime as anyone else. If anything, wealthy have to try to be as inoffensive as possible, for no protection agency can protect anyone from a bullet already flying - and the all-too-human envy puts them high on a target list of any two-penny sociopath.
-----------------
[*] Fighting petty crime is something which does not lend itself to the economies of scale or industrial production. You have to have people familiar with the neighbourhood, right there. And every large company have large dis-economies in the form of lower motivation of employees who are no longer feel the economic effects of their work, and in the form of middle-management bureaucracy.
So the economically realistic scenario would include large number of local protection agencies hired by few large insurers (just like AAA works, by the way, though they protect from flat tires rather than from pickpockets), and sharing information about perps and suspects using one or few centralized IT systems, over the Internet.
Even warfare against states is better done if seriously decentralized - as being demonstrated by Iraqis and Afganis who keep screwing the mighty US army, and will eventually drive it out of their land.
Published: December 22, 2006 7:54 PM
averros
I'm no crime expert, but I've read that crime was much lower in the 1960's than in the 1990's, while the US was much more socialistic in the 60's
1. There was no war on drugs in 60s.
2. It takes time (generations, even) to eradicate morality from the people and make them into the Builders of Socialism (aka "habitual thieves"). Russia is a lot worse off crime-wise than Baltic states (which spent less time receiving the collectivist wisdom from public schools and such). These in turn worse off than Eastern European countries which were occupied later and freed themselves earlier.
Another question for the author might be "Why has the crime rate varied widely while the social system has remained pretty much the same?"
"Crime" as defined by an arbitrary law or crime which is clearly identifiable as such? Aside from the state-generated crime such as gang violence, there's no much variation in violent crime over time which cannot be attributed to purely demographic factors. Property crime such as burglaries inversely correlates with the ability of citizens to defend themselves (i.e. laxity of gun prohibitions and punishments for defensive violence).
Published: December 22, 2006 8:09 PM
RogerM
There's an economist who has tracked the number of crimes prevented by guns for several years, though I can't remember his name. He claims about 2 million crimes per year are prevented mostly by just the display of a gun. Crime has also dropped in states with laws that permit carrying of concealed weapons.
Most crime is black-on-black and hispanic-on-hispanic. Don't see how the state is involved there.
Published: December 22, 2006 10:28 PM
Brandon Helm
Talk of "socialism" is inappropriate when we live in a state of fascism. Fascism is about control. You think it is the government that wants control, but really it is the agenda of the plutocracy that is driving. We still live in a imperial world with an obvious end goal of one world market controlled by a one world currency created by dirty air instead of thin. It is all so obvious to me.
Published: December 22, 2006 10:31 PM
Sam
If the transition away from a Statist justice system is to be successful then there has to be an equivalent empowering of the individual. I personally would have no problem against decentralisation of law enforcement provided that the individual has greater capacity for self-protection.
Last time I looked around the Western world even if you have the right to carry a gun, you don't generally have the right to use it. If you shoot a burglar dead in your own home you'd probably find the police are going to be arresting YOU for either murder or manslaughter.
I would think a great deal of everyday crime would plummet if everyone was allowed to carry a gun AND have the right to use it. Indeeed I agree with averros that if citizens were allowed to defend at the point of the crime without fear of being arrested themselves then I think you could save huge amount of resources then and there.
Finally, what of the American proverb: God didn't make people equal, Sam Colt did. Wise words indeed.
Published: December 22, 2006 11:38 PM
Daniel Coleman
Roger M,
Wow! You sure got a lot more out of my post than I intended. Do you teach literature? I don't recall assuming anything, other than that the author is an anarchist, which isn't a stretch of the imagination. Also, I didn't attack the author; I had some honest questions.
My apologies. . .on a second reading of your post I didn't see whatever it was I was seeing before. I think I originally read your questions as leading a potential anarchist interlocutor toward some conclusion that you thought was absurd, but (like I said) I'm not seeing that now.
Two of the questions strike me as answerable from the text:
Is Gregory claiming that crime would no longer exist under anarchism?,
Clearly, no. This also makes the next couple of questions irrelevant (as they begin, "if so, then. . ."). Your last question, however,
Or would it be because anarchists would decriminalize every activity but theft?
Touches on an interesting point. Libertarians have no concern over an action that does not aggress against someone's person or property. Therefore, they would decriminalize every activity except for those that constitute aggression against someone else's person or property.
As it stands to Gregory's article, however, this is somewhat beside the point. The free society will not have less crime only because its members will view fewer actions as crimes. As Gregory points out, the state must aggress in order to exist; therefore, its mere removal from our lives will reduce crime greatly.
Roger M writes:
The author states that the state has failed at law enforcement. I think he should provide some clues as to how anarchy would do a better job.
In the first place, while I can't read the article for you (I think that Gregory does provide such "clues," but perhaps you don't agree), I did notice that he also pointed to several resources for understanding the nature of how rights would be enforced without a state.
If you are looking for specific plans on precisely how those rights will be protected, it is going to be difficult to satisfy your inquiry. Such innovations are produced by the market and through market processes. Recall for a moment how difficult it can be to explain to a democrat or other statist how private health care, non-state controlled money, or private roads will work better than what the government has in place. It is easy to convince a libertarian of why this is so, but statism runs so deep among the average person that this is a monumental task in ordinary conversation.
One of the best answers we can give to a statist is merely to say: "Look at the failure of the state in this area. Aggression cannot be the solution. Here's how liberty might work -- let's give it a chance. . ." (again, as the author states: there is plenty of literature that suggests how this might 'look' in a free society).
Hence, Anthony Gregory does us a great service by showing how it is that the state cannot serve as a proper defense for our rights. This is primarily because the state only exists through aggression. If the "state" was merely a part of the framework of free association in a free society, we would (in this case) know it by a different name: a private security firm!
As it stands, the state must practice immorality if it is to function at all. Therefore, there is no reason to think that it is necessary any more than tax-funded grocery stores, hospitals, roads, post offices, schools, colleges, community centers, recreational fields, and so on.
Published: December 23, 2006 12:04 AM
Saturdaynightspecial
""Government is our worst enemy - worse than any mugger, rapist, murderer, vicious animal or terrorist. It will get more people harmed or killed than any other threat (ie, VietNam and the war on drugs).
To simplify the essay 'Law-enforcement Socialism' we only need to be allowed our gun rights (allow an armed citizenry and teach or advocate the social (natural) responsibility of providing for our own self-defense) and then we will be more safe, have less intrusive bullying government and be more free.
Excellent essay and he is completely correct. HEY ! Just cutting the size of every police department by half would make us all more free and safer too; and we could lower our tax bill. Gregory is a genius.""
Most of you are over-doing it, and reading too much into it. By allowing an armed society, and by allowing the freedom of using our firearms, we can reduce the need for government pigs by a significant quantity. We can double our freedom, and our safety at the same time just by respecting the 2nd amendment.
Dr. John Lott's book 'The Bias Against Guns' is a research, using statistics as proof, about the benefits of gun possession versus the costs. John Lott is a trained economist. The conclusion is simple: more guns in the hands of law abiding citizens results in less crime because criminals are deterred by armed citizens.
Anyone opposing Anthony Gregory's essay and our need, benefit, and right to arm ourselves is a fascist who profits from more government and less freedom. Socialists have corrupted brains. Socialists such as most politicians are, are crooks, con-artists, thieves and murderers. Otherwise why would they, or anyone, want government to do so much of which we can easily do for ourselves.
And there you have it: the reason the fascists demand gun controls: to enrich themselves by the power grab that transfers power from the individual to the government.
And is not every Judge biased against every individual accused of a crime ? A judge is a government employee who receives his paycheck from the government. When a judge appoints a psychiatrist or psycho-therapist to evaluate an accused 'individual' then how is it that individual will receive an unbiased evaluation when the expert is being hired and paid by the government?
What kind of creep would oppose Gregory's essay ? A fascist. It takes an unselfish person to stick to our Constitution.
Published: December 23, 2006 2:43 AM
Joe
What I'd like to know is why the picture of an Argentine policeman was used to illustrate this article?
Published: December 23, 2006 4:53 AM
Björn Lundahl
Hoppe:
“As tax-funded monopolists of ultimate decision-making, states can externalize the costs associated with aggressive behavior onto hapless taxpayers. Hence, states are by nature more prone to become aggressors and warmongers than agents or agencies that must themselves bear the costs involved in aggression and war. Insurance companies are by their very nature defensive rather than aggressive agencies. On the one hand this is so because every act of aggression is costly, and an insurance company engaged in aggressive conduct would require comparatively higher premiums, implying the loss of clients to non-aggressive competitors.”
“Lastly, it is worth pointing out that while states as tax-funded agencies can – and do – engage in the large-scale prosecution of victimless crimes such as "illegal drug" use, prostitution, or gambling, these "crimes" would tend to be of little or no concern within a system of freely funded protection agencies. "Protection" against such "crimes" would require higher insurance premiums, but since these "crimes," unlike genuine crimes against persons and property, do not create victims, very few people would be willing to spend money on such "protection."”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe16.html
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 23, 2006 5:14 AM
MW
Anthony Gregory claims that "It is no wonder then that the more expansive the state is in law enforcement, the more money it spends, and the more people it jails, the less safe are our street".
This is a factual assertion about empirical facts. Can Anthony or any of his supporter come up with any empirical evidence to support this assertion?
Published: December 23, 2006 5:32 AM
Anthony R G
For all Austrians talk about Praxeology, why haven't they investigated the historical origins of private police and protective forces?
Could it be that the information is so damming to their privatization urgings?
If law enforcement and protection services are not controlled by the state, then they will be controlled by who has wealth. They will be mercenaries, plain and simple.
Because of the particular nature of protection services, it is not a good idea for them to be mercenaries. Let me give an example:
In the United States before state controlled fire departments were established, many insurance companies would form departments that would protect only structures insured by the company. Because fire does not care who’s underwriting a building, it would burn down whole towns before the fire departments would come to protect the buildings that they were being paid to protect. Another problem was that some mercenary fire departments would literally fight over who would put out a fire while fire raged. Many people died because of this! There is a reason why people turned to the state! It’s because the private market failed them!
Because of the particular nature of law enforcement, it is not a good idea of them to be mercenaries. Let me give an example:
A private police agency will seek to keep its knowledge of a case secret and to hinder other agencies weather they are private or public so that they will be responsible in the end and get paid. This same problem occurs in private research institutions. The end game is that the case gets solved slower or not at all because information was not shared.
Alternatively, they may refuse to protect or investigate people who do not pay for the service (similar to a private fire department), which will surely result in total injustice for poorer people.
Finally, they will be inclined to investigate easy cases, which will be profitable. Hard cases will never be solved. This is called “cream-skimming.”
Let me give you a shining example from my own experience. The Illinois State Police contracted a private forensics lab to do some DNA cases, since they had a severe backlog. It was later found that the private agency had many false negatives on the cases they worked. Basically, they didn’t look hard enough for the DNA on the evidence, because the more DNA they found, the more labor would be required to figure out the case, and the less profit they would make. Because of the alarmingly high rate of false negatives, the ISP had to do each case over again, costing Illinois’ taxpayers millions.
The problem here was not that this was an unscrupulous or lousy private forensics lab. The problem is the profit motive. If the law enforcement agencies motives are profit-driven rather than justice driven, there will inevitably be problems.
Published: December 23, 2006 12:49 PM
Lisa Casanova
Can you prove your assertion about private fire departments? My parents pay for subscription fire service and their town is still standing.
Published: December 23, 2006 1:49 PM
Anthony Gregory
"Anthony Gregory claims that 'It is no wonder then that the more expansive the state is in law enforcement, the more money it spends, and the more people it jails, the less safe are our street'. (sic)
"This is a factual assertion about empirical facts. Can Anthony or any of his supporter come up with any empirical evidence to support this assertion?"
The homicide rate rose during Prohibition and rose substantially between the 1960s and 1990s, when there was a large expansion of government law enforcement. In the Wild West, when there was very little in the way of government law enforcement, nothing like the present, there was much less crime.
Published: December 23, 2006 3:41 PM
Anthony Gregory
"Anthony Gregory claims that 'It is no wonder then that the more expansive the state is in law enforcement, the more money it spends, and the more people it jails, the less safe are our street'. (sic)
"This is a factual assertion about empirical facts. Can Anthony or any of his supporter come up with any empirical evidence to support this assertion?"
The homicide rate rose during Prohibition and rose substantially between the 1960s and 1990s, when there was a large expansion of government law enforcement. In the Wild West, when there was very little in the way of government law enforcement, nothing like the present, there was much less crime.
Published: December 23, 2006 3:41 PM
Alex Davidson
Gregory's article is certainly inspirational and I personally agree with the point he is making.
However I always run into variations of the warlord objection when attempting to discuss with my socialist-indoctrinated acquaintances. The favorites are Somalia – "if that's an example of a free market legal system then no thanks"; and of course the alleged gang warfare between certain US private fire fighting agencies.
I'm never sure how respond. Attempts to move the discussion away from the anecdotal to logical reason are met with the utopian world objection – "it would never work in practice" – and it is hard to come up with strong counter-examples.
To successfully evangelize the ideas presented here we need to be able to address the practical issue of selling them to a doubting public, so I'd like to see a follow-up article with detailed rebuttals to the common objections, and some strong counter-anecdotes.
Published: December 23, 2006 7:03 PM
Sam
What's that with your entry Alex Davidson? What's with words like 'evangelise' and 'selling' about Libertarian ideas? Words like those suggest that you are trying to make Libertarianism sound like a cult-ish religious ideology. Perhaps if your style of arguing is the standard Libertarian way then it is understandable that Libertarianism hardly get heard outside of the Internet.
Published: December 23, 2006 8:10 PM
Sam
To Anthony R G:
You said, I can agree, that simple privatised agencies would only protect paying customer and there'd be not much protection for the poor. But didn't I suggest a way that everyone can benefit is for the everyone be allowed the right own a firearm (or knife, baseball bat, metal bar, etc.) and be allowed to use it in self-defense?
Published: December 23, 2006 8:39 PM
Mark Brabson
A well armed citizenry would negate the requirements for large police departments. The solution to this is to simply repeal all weapons laws and to allow unrestricted open and concealed carry. Also, enact the "stand your ground" doctrine nationwide.
There would be no need for proactive law enforcement, it would only exist to examine crime scenes. Of course, as part and parcel with this would be the repeal of all victimless crimes.
Published: December 23, 2006 9:22 PM
Sam
Indeed, the right of citizens to own and use firearms at the point of a crime will maximize the risk for the would-be perpetrator. This means street crime would be deemed to risky for a mugger and can only mean a reduction in violent crime overall.
Published: December 23, 2006 9:28 PM
MW
Anthony, the 1960s were a period when the criminal justice system became more lenient. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of serious crimes (violent crime + burglary) rose from 1 million to 2.9 million. Meanwhile the number of people actually convicted for these crimes actually fell. It was only after crime policy got considerably toughened during the 1990s that serious crime started to fall.
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artID=294
Arguing that a tougher approach on crime won't reduce crime is really ridicolus. Just as the existence of positive incentives is necessary for people to work hard and invest, so the existence of negative incentives is necessary to deterr crime. Negative incentice for crime is a function of the risk of getting caught and the level of punishment when getting caught. The more you increase the risk of getting caught by hiring more cops or expand their authority and the more you increase sentences, the bigger the negative incentive will be. It is you who are the socialist here, given your egalitarian view of the irrelevance of negative incentives.
Further illustrating this was the explosion of crime and looting after the criminal justice system collapsed in New Orleans after Katrina and in Baghdad after the U.S. invasion. And crime and violence have continued to stay much higher in Iraq than before, as a result of the collapse of Saddam Hussein's authoritarian rule. Saddam may have been very bad in most aspects, but he did illustrate that if you are tough enough, you can maintain relative peace even in a country like Iraq.
Published: December 24, 2006 4:52 AM
Sam
Yes MW, I certainly am a get-tough-on-crime advocate, but I suppose the arguments here is perhaps when the State has all the power to punish, it might abuse it, whereas if law-enforcement is left to the individual things should be better hopefully.
Published: December 24, 2006 5:01 AM
Saturdaynightspecial
"It was only after crime policy got considerably toughened during the 1990s that serious crime started to fall."
Bull crap: it was after more citizens owned guns, after more law enforcement abuses on everyone, and after more other types of reasons that crime dropped. You can have less crime in a police state where police fail to respect privacy (political uncorrectness). Don't try to credit tougher penalties by itself without mentioning the detriments (loss of freedoms and rights.)
An essay like this one will bring out all the socialists, PIGS (on-duty) and other government cheerleaders.
Today, more than ever, on-duty police are patrolling web forums and blog sites, and ruining them by participating in them by contributing bull crap information. I've said this many times: only after we can eliminate the NSA, BATF, CIA and cut in half the size of every police force will we ever have our privacy guaranteed.
Can you imagine (this is fact) on-duty police writing to members of the press and tv news media and politicians, informing them of their positions and asking them to ban the possession of guns. They are a large influential body of activists; they do this while the population is busy (too busy) earnng a living and unable to influence politicians, especially if the Press is busy brainwashing the public about the false negative effects of gun possession, and the bogus need to give up freedoms for the increase need for more safety and security.
It is a statistically proven fact that when citizens are allowed their gun rights then crime rates will drop. Only a pig would comment, after the obvious fact, that this may be true (when it is true).
Published: December 24, 2006 5:35 AM
Björn Lundahl
“Free riders and government failures”
To talk about the government as an alternative to the market is an illusion.
If there is such a thing as a free rider problem at all, then we should quickly get rid of the welfare state. In the welfare state some people are net payers and some are net beneficiaries and, therefore, free riders. The people who are supposed to solve this so called problem are themselves free riders i.e. people working for the government and in the state apparatus.
People working in the government apparatus are not in an efficient way providing services for bettering the market system. People in the government apparatus are only blind when it comes to efficiency and they are only following and fulfilling randomly chosen values without knowing if there are any market values at all in the supposed services which they are delivering. When the political machinery intervenes in the market to a greater extent as in the former Soviet Union, the destructiveness is revealed. The very function of the state apparatus is anti market.
If the market participants would receive their incomes through violating people rights and this also would be a natural way for the market to function, we would not even consider free enterprise as an alternative way of making society wealthy and prosperous. In other words, we would not consider if the free enterprise system was based on “market failures” as the system would not be considered at all!
Some people are wealthy in a free market system because people through the market process have voted, voluntarily, for their productive efforts.
In a pure free market; rich, poor, black, white people etc have rights. If a poor man has not bought any protection services from a protection agency, he still got his rights. If someone would violate his rights, a protection agency might very well protect him any way, as it could reap its incomes from the violator i.e. if necessary, through forced labour.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 24, 2006 5:55 AM
Tom Fiedler
A caveat upon the recommendations Mr. Anthony offers is that public-private partnerships already build and maintain prisons in the United States. Privately owned prisons are a new growth industry which profits from people receiving prison sentences. This may contribute to America's high percentage of her own citizens being incarcerated as much as prosecuting "victimless crimes".
Consider this. The Federal Reserve has expanded the money supply so much that it no longer publishes the M3 money supply. Can the eminent collapse of the Dollar be far in the future? With the provisions of the Patriot Acts I and II, the revised bankruptcy laws and new classifications of financial terrorism, the prison industry promises to be the new watershed opportunity of the 21st Century. But with the demise of the American middle class the likely investors will be those holding Euro-dollars, Petro-dollars and Sino-dollars. How would you like to be sentenced to a debtor's prison factory owned by the Chinese People's Revolutionary Army, the Bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia or I.G. Farben of the European Union?
Mr. Gregory analyses the problem well. But are his proposed solutions a cure more dangerous than the disease?
Published: December 25, 2006 12:34 PM
Reactionary
"Attempts to move the discussion away from the anecdotal to logical reason are met with the utopian world objection ... "
That's because a logical construct that can't be found in the real world is just that: an imaginary utopia.
"To successfully evangelize the ideas presented here we need to be able to address the practical issue of selling them to a doubting public, so I'd like to see a follow-up article with detailed rebuttals to the common objections, and some strong counter-anecdotes."
There are political reasons this cannot be done. The reason anarchy in Somalia results in thuggery and violence is because the Somalians are by and large ignorant, violent people. The bourgeois Somalis fled the place long ago.
Obviously, for anarchy to result in anything but Liberia or Somalia, you need people committed to the rule of law who, to take it a step further, are allowed to discriminate against and segregate themselves from ignorant, violent people.
If the central government were to disappear from, say, rural Pennsylvania, the results would be quite different than when the central government disappears from, say, New Orleans or Mogadishu. This is not a message that goes over well in the social democratic West, so the anarchists, most of whom are cultural Marxists themselves, prefer to stick with their logical constructs.
Published: December 26, 2006 12:12 PM
RogerM
While in theory anarchy could work, history is against it. Crime rates increased after 1960 even though the ratio of police per capita decreased dramatically and liberal judges released criminals by the boatload.
Guliani didn't clean up New York City by adopting anarchist principles. Since leaving office, he has advised London and Mexico City on reducing their crime rates. Europe now has a violent crime rate twice that of the US.
Unfortunately for anarchism, most societies throughout history didn't have state police forces. Historically, most law enforcement was carried out by citizen militias or posses, which frequently deteriorated in mobs who inflicted as much injustice as justice, and caused citizens to pray for a professional police force.
Most crime is committed by single males between 15 and 30 years of age and the percentage of those who are criminals seems to be constant. I don't see how anarchism will change that.
In spite of my reservations, I would like to give anarchy a try.
Published: December 26, 2006 1:08 PM
Björn Lundahl
If Somalia is supposed to be an example of failure of anarchism it is also, logically, a failure of the state. Any system needs the support of the people to function as it is supposed to do. Iraq and Afghanistan are other examples. If the population is divided in different contradictory strong beliefs, problems occur. That is the reason for that democracy can be difficult to “implement” in Iraq. Democracy is not, probably, as strongly supported in Iraq as in the western countries. The wide support among the people is the essence for stability. Stability can, obviously, occur even if the people believe in voodoo ethics or superficial ideas; the essence is that they believe in something. The police or protection agencies will chase those few people who violate the will of the many.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 26, 2006 5:11 PM
Björn Lundahl
The Austrian Economics Newsletter
Austrians and the Private-Property Society
An Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe
AEN: Yet Mises attacks anarchism in no uncertain terms.
HOPPE: His targets here are left-utopians. He attacks their theory that man is good enough not to need an organized defense against the enemies of civilization. But this is not what the private-property anarchist believes. Of course, murderers and thieves exist. There needs to be an institution that keeps these people at bay. Mises calls this institution government, while people who want no state at all point out that all essential defensive services can be better performed by firms in the market. We can call these firms government if we want to.
http://mises.org/journals/aen/aen198.asp
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 26, 2006 5:29 PM
Anthony Gregory
"A caveat upon the recommendations Mr. Anthony offers is that public-private partnerships already build and maintain prisons in the United States. Privately owned prisons are a new growth industry which profits from people receiving prison sentences. This may contribute to America's high percentage of her own citizens being incarcerated as much as prosecuting 'victimless crimes'. . . . Mr. Gregory analyses the problem well. But are his proposed solutions a cure more dangerous than the disease?"
I am very much against police and prison "privatization." In my original draft of this article, I had this graph which was cut because it opens up a whole new can of worms.
"Troublingly, some libertarians are particularly enthusiastic about reforming state law enforcement by contracting large segments of it out to private players. This is most commonly proposed in regard to prisons. But this simply turns criminal justice socialism into criminal justice fascism. The means of production of law enforcement are still monopolized by the state, costs are still socialized and market share is still guaranteed by an institution of aggression – only now profits are privatized. Aspects of the system might run more efficiently, but to favor such reforms is putting too much faith in the notion that most of what the state is doing in the world of criminal justice is activity we would want to see done more efficiently."
I hope to do something on law-enforcement privatization someday.
Published: December 26, 2006 5:38 PM
billwald
I propose another economic experiment. Post a sign, "ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK," at every freeway entrance and pull the state patrols out. See how well anarchy solves the traffic problem.
Published: December 26, 2006 7:34 PM
Sam
Indeed, private prisons do make me cringe. Run for profit? How? Prisoner must be working for no pay only board and meals? Why not, when demand exceed supply, start incarcerating people for longer sentences and start jailing for misdemeanours? Why not, over time, have the entire working population in prison, more sumptuous profit gain, but elsewhere wouldn't that be called 'slavery'? Indeed one example the Catholic Church had for 'just' slavery was prison labour.
In a more down-to-earth private law enforcement would, after the trial, would really have to choose between restitution, corporal punishment or capital punishment. A real Libertarian society couldn't justify a loophole for slavery, can it? I can't see how prison should exist in a Libertarian society.
Published: December 26, 2006 7:38 PM
John Coleman
RogerM: You are correct and I apologise for not having provided the entire Mises quote. The reason I didn't was that Mises said this in 1927, more than a decade after the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act of 1914. Thus, what he warned about at the end of his statement, and that you faithfully restated, had already happened. That said, if given a choice between Gregory and Mises, I would still choose Mises. His excess of the heart, in my mind, does not outweigh the soundness of his head.
Published: December 26, 2006 8:17 PM
RogerM
John,
That was Dan Coleman's post, not mine.
However, I did think of an example of the application of anarchist principles that seems to have worked well in law enforcement. About ten years ago, London tried giving heroin addicts cigarettes laced with heroin. As a result, theft, armed robbery, and prostitution declined dramatically in the areas where they tried the experiment. Pushers moved on to other areas. The police discovered that much of the violent crime, theft and prostitution was to support an addiction. Does anyone know any more about that experiment or why it wasn't expanded?
Published: December 27, 2006 8:49 AM
Anthony Gregory
"I propose another economic experiment. Post a sign, 'ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK,' at every freeway entrance and pull the state patrols out. See how well anarchy solves the traffic problem."
billwald, you really think the State keeps the highways safe? If not for government protection of the roads, there'd be more than 40,000 American highway deaths per year?
Yours is an unfair experiment in one sense: The government still has a monopoly on the roads themselves. I do not doubt that private roads with private policing would be safer.
Published: December 27, 2006 12:43 PM
Kevin B.
"I propose another economic experiment. Post a sign, "ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK," at every freeway entrance and pull the state patrols out. See how well anarchy solves the traffic problem."
Are you referring to public freeways? That isn't anarchy, bud.
Speaking of freeways, having lived in southern California, I have many times longed for private freeways.
I ask my relatives who live here, "Couldn't you build a grimy, pot-holed, bumper-to-bumper road yourself?" Imagine a talented entrepreneur on the job!
Once the State is out of the way, it is easy to see how private freeways could flourish. I'm not sure how streets could be taken care of, so I wouldn't make my millions there. Has anyone seen a good article on privatization of city streets?
Published: December 27, 2006 6:40 PM
Kevin B.
Individuals are the system. It is pointless to argue that government is broken and anarchy would fix it.
The government (or the system) is broken because most people are broken. Anarchy, or anarcho-capitalism, would be a great system - something to shoot for. But anarchy requires that most people respect each other's rights. In reality they don't. Ask yourself how many people believe it is ok to steal, cheat, kill, etc. under certain circumstances. I'd say the majority.
I'm not saying we need government because people are this way. We HAVE government because people are this way. Government is a symptom, not a band-aid. It is the hand motivated by the moral deficiency of numerous individuals.
Don't bother asking whether anarchy would work, because it doesn't matter. What matters is when will most people respect each other enough to achieve anarchy.
When it comes to others' rights, all they see are shades of grey.
Published: December 27, 2006 7:24 PM
averros
Kevin B. --
But anarchy requires that most people respect each other's rights.
Any system requires most people to respect each other's rights, as understood under that system. Without that respect any society disintegrates into a chaos of barbarism and tribal warfare.
The Western-style democracy, for example, is totally impossible with a population of thieves or a culture elevating clan loyalties above the common law. Neither it is possible in a culture having little respect of the individual rights (the democracies without respect to individual rights tend to spectacularly disintegrate - taking millions of lives with them, as the 20th century amply demonstrated).
We HAVE government because people are this way.
We have government because people have that irrational belief in the Government Almighty. The beliefs can change, though. They can change really fast, if the recent history is any guide - as any eyewitness to the collapse of the Soviet state can testify.
It is pointless to argue that government is broken and anarchy would fix it.
It is not pointless to tell people that their beliefs are wrong. Some of them will listen and understand the truth. They will tell it to more people. Eventually enough people will hear.
Published: December 27, 2006 8:14 PM
Sam
How exactly are the 40,000 deaths on the roads the Government's problem? Was it because the Government forced people out of their quaint, slow horses & buggies and forced them into fast, dangerous cars? How is it Government's fault some people speed, drive under the influence of drugs/alcohol, drive whilst fatigued, fail to slow down in adverse weather conditions, run red lights, etc. What would private enterprises do differently to minimize the road toll?
Published: December 27, 2006 8:16 PM
Kevin B.
averros,
It isn't just that people believe they need government. Many people WANT government. They want someone to coerce you into being the good person they think you should be and they want you to pay for it. Tell them it is stealing and they won't agree, or they'll say it's ok in this circumstance.
"The beliefs can change, though."
Good luck changing a nation of thieves into a nation of respect. Count me in.
"It is not pointless to tell people that their beliefs are wrong."
How do you tell a thief that stealing is wrong?
I am not saying anarchy is impossible, nor am I saying that government is necessary. I am saying that the people don't want the system you advocate because they want to have control over others.
"Any system requires most people to respect each other's rights"
I meant that anarchism would require more respect than presently shown.
I don't believe we have the State because society is ignorant of the alternatives. I say we have the State because society is corrupt.
So how do you convince a thief that he should stop stealing?
Published: December 27, 2006 9:11 PM
Peter
How do you tell a thief that stealing is wrong?
If you meet a thief, try saying "stealing is wrong". Most likely response will be "I know".
Published: December 28, 2006 1:27 AM
Mark Brabson
Kevin B.
I find that staring down the business end of a .357 will convince most thiefs of the error of their ways.
Published: December 28, 2006 1:31 AM
John Coleman
RogerM: The London experiment wasn't quite as you described it. Heroin is an approved opioid in the U.K, as it is in several other countries in the world. What you may be referring to is a provision that was passed allowing heroin to be prescribed to addicts for treatment of their addiction. Several clinics, as I recall, were opened in Liverpool and perhaps London for this purpose. The results were mixed. Yes, there were fewer infections from dirty needles and contaminated fillers one finds in the street form of the drug. But, the addictions actually worsened because of a universal phenomenon known as tolerance that one who takes opioids cannot avoid because of the pharmacology of the drug. I am not certain but I believe these heroin maintenance programs are pretty much on the outs nowadays. I've heard they are still in existence in Germany and perhaps Holland. The nexus between drug use and crime is sometimes overplayed. No doubt there were some drops in certain types of crimes but this is a small benefit for something that degrades the funtion of government. It's hard to see how life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness is in synch with providing deadly dope. I think, for what it's worth, Mises was troubled by what he saw in his day in terms of the drug problem. Of course it doesn't comport with some of his theoretical positions but then, what was it that Emerson said about a foolish consistency? My guess is that Mises was pretty much like the rest of us and had his good and bad days. Happy New Year!
Published: December 28, 2006 5:28 PM
Tom Fiedler
How did the text of Gregory Anthony's "Law-Enforcement Socialism" generate so many references to "anarchy"? Is this some application of hyperbole attributed to Mr. Anthony's desire for privatization of many aspects of the criminal justice system? One of the Biblically justified roles of government is to establish, maintain and enforce a just standard of weights and measurements. (Leviticus 19:36, Ezekiel 45:10}
Without an arbiter of just weight and measure in the value of money we suffer an anarchy that secures neither private ownership nor private enterprise. Such anarchy we suffer with a private central bank like the Federal Reserve. For the Fed does not establish a constant value for its unit of currency (the Federal Reserve Dollar). Consequently there can be no constant value for the goods and services for which we exchange that currency. To make the situation worse, the Fed permits no audit of its assets, no oversight of its practice nor accountibility for its policies.
Scripture reveals that we all need the Lord's Government. Scripture also reveals that we are all (believers and infidels alike) in rebellion against His Government. Since the Lord Elohim Immanuel is infinite love and infinite wisdom He is the only one qualified to govern justly. But He gives us free will to govern ourselves, with or without His Guidance.
From all our feeble efforts to "...form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,..." we fall woefully short compare to what He would have us enjoy under His rule. Of all the tyrannies to be avoided, anarchy (which is to submit to the tyranny of one's self) is the most pernicious. For in anarchy we abuse both ourselves and our neighbor through unmitigated ignorance if not outright malice.
Published: January 1, 2007 1:24 PM
Björn Lundahl
As Rothbard stated: “For the support rests in the willingness of the majority (not, to repeat, of every individual) to go along with the system: to pay the taxes, to go without much complaint to fight the State’s wars, to obey the State’s rules and decrees. This support need not be active enthusiasm to be effective; it can just as well be passive resignation.”
Well, this support rest, of course and “happily”, on ignorance. That is why we had, for example, the great depression. Most people did not, really want it, but they probably did support those destructive policies that caused the depression.
One other “great thing” is that the mafia and its supporters know that they are criminals the state and its supporters does not. We have an extremely awkward situation here.
As Rothbard also have stated: “For if the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang. Hence the necessity of the State’s employment of ideologists; and hence the necessity of the State’s age-old alliance with the Court Intellectuals who weave the apologia for State rule.”
Alternative and in other words, Lysander Spooner:
“The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/twentytwo.asp#_ftnref6
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Posted by Björn Lundahl at December 30, 2006 3:19
Published: January 3, 2007 1:43 AM
Björn Lundahl
Mark Humphrey “I don't want to precipitate trench warfare with devoted Rothbardians, but I strongly suspect that Rothbard owed his insight about "life as the standard of moral value" to Ayn Rand. I can't prove this, of course. Sadly, in "The Ethics of Liberty", (published in the early Eighties) Rothbard chose to, in a sense, blacklist Rand by claiming that NO ONE, other than himself, in the libertarian movement was working to develope a system of rationally defensible ethics. (Maybe Rothbard meant "at the moment I am writing this statement".)”
Björn That life is an axiomatic value and functions “as the standard of moral value” in an ethical system, Rothbard could, alternatively for example, have gotten this insight from Mises himself through analyzing his statement in his book, “Human Action”, page 11:
“We may say that action is the manifestation of a man's will.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap1sec1.asp
I am not saying that Rothbard did get his insight from Mises; I am only saying that it was possible. Surely, many other possibilities exist which we do not know anything about.
Mark Humphrey “It has been awhile since I've read Hoppe, and Rothbard; but I suspect Hoppe's reasoning goes: either we all own ourselves, or everyone owns everyone else. Since the first proposition is clearly more defensible than the latter absurd proposition, one can affirm self ownership as valid. But if this is the argument, it fails. For that argument assumes that which it sets out to prove, namely that an ethical concept, "ownership", exists. But on this basis, ownership remains unproven, so that one could just as well assert: "no one owns anything, and anything goes."”
Björn Self-ownership is a natural fact, since a man in his very nature controls his own mind and body (natural disposition), that is, he is a natural self-owner of his own will and person (having a free will) and if this was not true, neither could he effectively control any property and, therefore, not own it. In other words; “nothing could control and own something”.
Naturally, praxeology the science of human action, by itself logically confirms the natural fact of self-ownership, since praxeology is based upon “the acting man consciously intending to improve his own satisfaction” and I quote from answers.com:
“From praxeology Mises derived the idea that every conscious action is intended to improve a person's satisfaction. He was careful to stress that praxeology is not concerned with the individual's definition of end satisfaction, just the way he sought that satisfaction. The way in which a person will increase his satisfaction is by removing a source of dissatisfaction. As the future is uncertain so every action is speculative.
An acting man is defined as one capable of logical thought — to be otherwise would be to make one a mere creature who simply reacts to stimuli by instinct. Similarly an acting man must have a source of dissatisfaction which he believes capable of removing, otherwise he cannot act.
Another conclusion that Mises reached was that decisions are made on an ordinal basis. That is, it is impossible to carry out more than one action at once, the conscious mind being only capable of one decision at a time — even if those decisions can be made in rapid order. Thus man will act to remove the most pressing source of dissatisfaction first and then move to the next most pressing source of dissatisfaction.
As a person satisfies his first most important goal and after that his second most important goal then his second most important goal is always less important than his first most important goal. Thus, for every further goal reached, his satisfaction, or utility, is lessened from the preceding goal. This is the rule of diminishing marginal utility.
In human society many actions will be trading activities where one person regards a possession of another person as more desirable than one of his own possessions, and the other person has a similar higher regard for his colleague's possession than he does for his own. This subject of praxeology is known as catallactics, and is the more commonly accepted realm of economics.”
http://www.answers.com/Praxeology?gwp=11&ver=2.0.1.458&method=3
Further:
The Ethics of Liberty, page 45:
Footnote:
“[1]Professor George Mavrodes, of the department of philosophy of the University of Michigan, objects that there is another logical alternative: namely, “that no one owns anybody, either himself or anyone else, nor any share of anybody.” However, since ownership signifies range of control, this would mean that no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/eight.asp
Or in my own words from the essay “Normative principles”:
“Why must anybody own anything?
In accordance with our objective test to find out if something is a condition for something else, we grasp a state of things where the following principle is none existent anywhere and at all:
“Everybody owns themselves and their Justly owned property rights”.
Nobody would be able to do anything, since nobody has the right to control anything. Not even themselves (see below about property rights in your own person).
This question is not only a contradiction it is also silly. You ask a question which means that you control yourselves (natural disposition), that is owning yourself (see below the excellent writing of Hans-Hermann Hoppe). The other contradiction is that if nobody would own anything, nobody would be able to hinder anyone to own anything either since they would otherwise have an invalid control (having the disposition to) of everyone else, that is having an invalid ownership to everybody else (see below about valid property rights in your own person).
Ownership itself is, therefore, an objective condition for the preservation of human life.”
http://normativeprinciples.blogspot.com/2006/12/normative-principles-pure-free-market_10.html
An Animated Introduction to the Philosophy of Liberty:
http://www.isil.org/resources/introduction.html
The animation in full-sized window:
http://www.isil.org/resources/introduction.swf
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 3, 2007 1:52 AM
Sam
I watched that link you gave, Björn Lundahl, and I'd say the key word about the whole thing is 'philosophy'. It is good to impore people to stop aggressing and respect everyone's right to life and private property but I fail to see how anyone (unfortunately) could call rights 'natural'.
I'm sure 6 million Jews found out how 'natural' that the right to life was when Nazis decided otherwise. Slavery, on the other hand, has been an acceptable practice for aeons. Indeed people in ancient times seemed to live by the Golden Rule: 'we have no problems being slave owners because if we become enslaved we won't complain'. And, of course, the right to property was easily annulled for the natives of North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
Published: January 3, 2007 4:33 AM
Björn Lundahl
Self-ownership is a natural right since “self-ownership is a natural fact, since a man in his very nature controls his own mind and body (natural disposition), that is, he is a natural self-owner of his own will and person (having a free will) and if this was not true, neither could he effectively control any property and, therefore, not own it. In other words; “nothing could control and own something”.”
Right to property is also a natural right since it preserves life and self-ownership.
If people respect those natural rights are entirely a different thing and have nothing to do with it.
All ethical rules and principles such as Christian, utilitarian, democratical etc need respect and support to be powerful.
The debate is not, in this case, about that. Please, do not get confused. The debate is instead about which rules are good and just and which rules are bad and unjust.
It is the same with economics. We do not say that Austrian Economics is wrong because the Nazis or the communist in former Soviet Union did not support it.
If all people were physically forced by nature to follow a libertarian ethic or to support Austrian Economics, we would not need to have a debate at all. Such a debate would, also, be entirely pointless.
The essence is, instead, the logical validity.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 3, 2007 6:43 AM
Sam
What on earth are you talking about Björn Lundahl? A person may have the potential to grow up and become strong and own property, but how it is natural? If you're born to slave parents into a slave-owning society where would these rights come from?
Interesting is the way different cultures have different ethical standards. What may seem natural to some cultures would be repulsive and forbidden in others. Example such as slavery, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, widow-burning, polygyny all spring to mind.
Published: January 3, 2007 9:53 AM
Björn Lundahl
Sam
As Rothbard wrote in his book The Ethics of Liberty:
“IF, THEN, THE NATURAL law is discovered by reason from “the basic inclinations of human nature . . . absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places,” it follows that the natural law provides an objective set of ethical norms by which to gauge human actions at any time or place.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/three.asp
The meaning of this is that those norms are objective, true, good and just, independently of any culture, time or place.
As I have said; if people respect those norms are entirely a different thing.
When the opportunity exists they can revolt against the exploiters.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 3, 2007 12:20 PM
Björn Lundahl
From the book Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises:
“Within the frame of social cooperation there can emerge between members of society feelings of sympathy and friendship and a sense of belonging together. These feelings are the source of man's most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence. However, they are not, as some have asserted, the agents that have brought about social relationships. They are fruits of social cooperation, they thrive only within its frame; they did not precede the establishment of social relations and are not the seed from which they spring.
The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec1.asp#p143
“Man cannot have both the advantages derived from peaceful cooperation under the principle of the division of labor within society and the license of embarking upon conduct that is bound to disintegrate society. He must choose between the observance of certain rules that make life within society possible and the poverty and insecurity of the "dangerous life" in a state of perpetual warfare among independent individuals. This is no less rigid a law determining the outcome of all human action than are the laws of physics.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap15sec6.asp#p280
From the book Ethics of Liberty, by Murray Rothbard:
“For the assertion of human rights is not properly a simple emotive one; individuals possess rights not because we “feel” that they should, but because of a rational inquiry into the nature of man and the universe. In short, man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual man’s capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. In short, man is a rational and social animal. No other animals or beings possess this ability to reason, to make conscious choices, to transform their environment in order to prosper, or to collaborate consciously in society and the division of labor.
Thus, while natural rights, as we have been emphasizing, are absolute, there is one sense in which they are relative: they are relative to the species man. A rights-ethic for mankind is precisely that: for all men, regardless of race, creed, color or sex, but for the species man alone”
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/twentyone.asp
The Ethics of Liberty:
Hesselberg continues:
“But a social order is not possible unless man is able to conceive what it is, and what its advantages are, and also conceive those norms of conduct which are necessary to its establishment and preservation, namely, respect for another's person and for his rightful possessions, which is the substance of justice. . . . But justice is the product of reason, not the passions. And justice is the necessary support of the social order; and the social order is necessary to man's well-being and happiness. If this is so, the norms of justice must control and regulate the passions, and not vice versa.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/two.asp
All organizations have a “code of conduct”. Even the mafia has it. It is the very foundation on which they last. It is an illusion to believe that this is not so.
In a society there must, also, be a “code of conduct” i.e. a legal code. A society cannot function without those norms. As Mises, Rothbard and Hesselberg have pointed out, without a society we lose, so the great question is not if we should have a lawless society as it cannot exist and is an illusion, but rather something else which we, therefore, cannot avoid to answer; which legal norms or principles are Just and true?
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 3, 2007 1:06 PM
Björn Lundahl
The human mind, independently of any culture, is based on the same logic.
Quotes about logic from the book “Human Action”, by Ludwig von Mises:
“Thinking and acting are the specific human features of man. They are peculiar to all human beings. They are, beyond membership in the zoological species homo sapiens, the characteristic mark of man as man. It is not the scope of praxeology to investigate the relation of thinking and acting. For praxeology it is enough to establish the fact that there is only one logic that is intelligible to the human mind, and that there is only one mode of action which is human and comprehensible to the human mind. Whether there are or can be somewhere other beings--superhuman or subhuman--who think and act in a different way, is beyond the reach of the human mind. We must restrict our endeavors to the study of human action.
This human action which is inextricably linked with human thought is conditioned by logical necessity. It is impossible for the human mind to conceive logical relations at variance with the logical structure of our mind. It is impossible for the human mind to conceive a mode of action whose categories would differ from the categories which determine our own actions.
There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind. An event not open to an interpretation by one of these two principles is for man inconceivable and mysterious. Change can be conceived as the outcome either of the operation of mechanistic causality or of purposeful behavior; for the human mind there is no third way available [9]. It is true, as has already been mentioned, that teleology can be viewed as a variety of causality. But the establishment of this fact does not annul the essential differences between the two categories.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap1sec6.asp
“But the problem of the a priori is of a different character. It does not deal with the problem of how consciousness and reason have emerged. It refers to the essential and necessary character of the logical structure of the human mind.
The fundamental logical relations are not subject to proof or disproof. Every attempt to prove them must presuppose their validity. It is impossible to explain them to a being who would not possess them on his own account. Efforts to define them according to the rules of definition must fail. They are primary propositions antecedent to any nominal or real definition. They are ultimate unanalyzable categories. The human mind is utterly incapable of imagining logical categories at variance with them. No matter how they may appear to superhuman beings, they are for man inescapable and absolutely necessary. They are the indispensable prerequisite of perception, apperception, and experience.”
“Everybody in his daily behavior again and again bears witness to the immutability and universality of the categories of thought and action. He who addresses fellow men, who wants to inform and convince them, who asks questions and answers other people's questions, can proceed in this way only because he can appeal to something common to all men--namely, the logical structure of human reason. The idea that A could at the same time be non-A or that to prefer A to B could at the same time be to prefer B to A is simply inconceivable and absurd to a human mind. We are not in the position to comprehend any kind of prelogical or metalogical thinking. We cannot think of a world without causality and teleogy.”
“It is a general fallacy to believe that the writings of Lucien Levy-Bruhl give support to the doctrine that the logical structure of mind of primitive man was and is categorially different from that of civilized man. On the contrary, what Levy-Bruhl, on the basis of a careful scrutiny of the entire ethnological material available, reports about the mental functions of primitive man proves clearly that the fundamental logical relations and the categories of thought and action play in the intellectual activities of savages the same role they play in our own life. The content of primitive man's thoughts differs from the content of our thoughts, but the formal and logical structure is common to both.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap2sec2.asp#p33
“We may refer to what has been said in the preceding chapters about the fundamental issues of the logical structure of mind and the categorial principles of thought and action. Some additional observations will suffice to give the finishing stroke to racial polylogism and to any other brand of polylogism. The categories of human thought and action are neither arbitrary products of the human mind nor conventions. They are not outside of the universe and of the course of cosmic events. They are biological facts and have a definite function in life and reality. They are instruments in man's struggle for existence and in his endeavors to adjust himself as much as possible to the real state of the universe and to remove uneasiness as much as it is in his power to do so. They are [p. 86] therefore appropriate to the structure of the external world and reflect properties of the world and of reality. They work, and are in this sense true and valid.It is consequently incorrect to assert that aprioristic insight and pure reasoning do not convey any information about reality and the structure of the universe. The fundamental logical relations and the categories of thought and action are the ultimate source of all human knowledge. They are adequate to the structure of reality, they reveal this structure to the human mind and, in this sense, they are for man basic ontological facts.[14] We do not know what a superhuman intellect may think and comprehend. For man every cognition is conditioned by the logical structure of his mind and implied in this structure. It is precisely the satisfactory results of the empirical sciences and their practical application that evidence this truth. Within the orbit in which human action is able to attain ends aimed at there is no room left for agnosticism.
If there had been races which had developed a different logical structure of the mind, they would have failed in the use of reason as an aid in the struggle for existence. The only means for survival that could have protected them against extermination would have been their instinctive reactions. Natural selection would have eliminated those specimens of such races that tried to employ reasoning for the direction of their behavior. Those individuals alone would have survived that relied upon instincts only. This means that only those would have had a chance to survive that did not rise above the mental level of animals.
The scholars of the West have amassed an enormous amount of material concerning the high civilizations of China and India and the primitive civilizations of the Asiatic, American, Australian, and African aborigines. It is safe to say that all that is worth knowing about the ideas of these races is known. But never has any supporter of polylogism tried to use these data for a description of the allegedly different logic of these peoples and civilizations.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap3sec4.asp#p86
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 3, 2007 1:33 PM
Björn Lundahl
From Answers.com:
polylogism
"Polylogism is a fallacy often associated with social philosophy according to which persons of different races, social classes or time periods use different kinds of logic. Marxism, Nazism, and some other political and social philosophies allegedly make this mistake. For example, Marxists have contrasted "proletarian logic" with "bourgeois logic", and Nazis have contrasted "Aryan logic" with "Jewish logic", etc.
Since any two of these "logics" can conflict they can not be part of the same logical system. However, since people holding these various "logics" live in the same reality all of these "logics" must be compatible with this reality and therefore with each other. Since these "logics" would then have to be compatible with each other but also possibly incompatible they would self-contradictory, and thus could not be considered valid. By contrast the fallacy of polylogism considers them to be equally valid."
http://www.answers.com/topic/polylogism?method=26&initiator=answertip:more
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 3, 2007 4:00 PM
Sam
I still don't get it. Plenty of animals both predators and prey assemble in co-operative groups such herds, flocks, prides, families(?), etc. Still animal groups, on the other hand, do fight other groups over food or each other for females and the such like. It's nice to say if we all co-operate and be nice we'd all be much better off, but humanity's capacity to assemble into groups that can co-operative but also nbe aggressively compete seems far more natural and historically accurate.
Published: January 3, 2007 7:23 PM
Sam
Hey Björn Lundahl here's a link for you:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-rights.htm
I like to give me a constructive response to that type of arguments. ;)
Published: January 3, 2007 10:43 PM
Björn Lundahl
Sam
I do not think that the link you gave me is a constructive response at all. All those “arguments” against natural rights I have already considered. Those “arguments” do not logically prove anything.
The main point is, as I have said, not if people respect those rights but if they are logically true and valid.
If people fights or not, are therefore in this case, of no interest, what are of interest are rights discovered and derived from “the basic inclinations of human nature . . . absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places”. That is why they are called natural rights as they are derived from the basic inclinations of human nature or alternatively the rights are derived from our basic biological way of functioning.
As Rothbard put it, The Ethics of Liberty:
“In fact, the legal principles of any society can be established in three alternate ways: (a) by following the traditional custom of the tribe or community; (b) by obeying the arbitrary, ad hoc will of those who rule the State apparatus; or (c) by the use of man’s reason in discovering the natural law—in short, by slavish conformity to custom, by arbitrary whim, or by use of man’s reason. These are essentially the only possible ways for establishing positive law.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/three.asp
It is still possible to arrive at an objective ethics without the use of the words “natural rights”, if that would make you happier. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has logically proved those rights without using those words*.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe “ON THE ULTIMATE JUSTIFICATION OF THE ETHICS OF PRIVATE PROPERTY”:
http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications/econ-ethics-10.pdf
As I have also already said : “without a society we lose, so the great question is not if we should have a lawless society as it cannot exist and is an illusion, but rather something else which we, therefore, cannot avoid to answer; which legal norms or principles are Just and true?”
But even if we “wanted” to be illusive and would want to argue for a “lawless society”, we would still need objective logical valid arguments for its justification. Otherwise our “arguments” would only be subjective and therefore they would also be wrong and unjust.
• I would still believe, though, that human nature is recognized implicitly in Hoppe´s justification.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 4, 2007 2:29 AM
Peter
Sam: it abuses the term "rights" to mean something declared legal by the state - e.g., it says "There is a huge difference between what a right actually IS and what it OUGHT to be. For instance, we know that white Americans once had the "right" to own slaves, even though they morally shouldn't have.". Well, that's not what we mean by "rights"; note: nobody ever had the right to own slaves.
Nor are rights self-evident. People have been arguing over the definition of rights since the days of the Greeks philosophers, with no end of the debate in sight.
Slightly different definition of "self-evident", as well, I suppose. Rights are self-evident in much the same way mathematical proofs are self-evident: anyone who understands what they're doing and applies the logic correctly will reach the same conclusions, but, e.g., understanding a mathematical proof requires some background in mathematics; it's not necessarily "obvious" before you understand it.
For example, Aristotle believed that humans fell into a natural hierarchy, and those at the bottom could never hope to climb higher due to their lack of talents. This was the logical justification for slavery
Do I need to point out that Aristotle's belief is not logic, by any stretch of the imagination?
In ancient times, rights were extremely limited privileges that kings handed down to their subjects, just enough to keep them in line and functioning. In modern times they are social agreements among voters, defended by police and military forces.
So...what gives the kings, voters, police and military forces the right to do that? Is this a "might makes right" argument, or it skipping over the question altogether and hoping the reader won't notice?
Our right to unlimited procreation increasingly runs counter to our right to life and reasonable happiness. When changing survival conditions bring rights into conflict, one of them will have to be repealed — inevitably.
Read that again, and see if you understand what it's really saying. This is truly scary stuff!
Society actually designs rights and laws to prevent humans from following their pathological and sadistic natures.
What is this "society"? (If it was humans, it obviously couldn't do what the writer claims, so the natural interpretation is that it's not humans...then what is it?)
Published: January 4, 2007 5:21 AM
Sam
Well Peter and Björn what makes a right a Right just because you want it to be so? What then of 'animal rights', 'plant rights', 'land rights' (as per claimed by pre-existing natives of the New World), 'traditional hunting rights' (as per before), etc. You know, the left-wing pinko claims to rights that would make Conservatives and Libertarians start reaching for their guns?
Published: January 4, 2007 6:35 AM
Björn Lundahl
If we were going to discover objective ethical norms with the use of reason, it would be a quite funny thing if we started to analyze the basic inclinations of the nature of ants, grasshoppers, plants, giraffes, elephants etc. As this would not be a successful inquiry, the nature of man must at least be implicitly assumed to exist and, therefore, to be studied in such an examination.
Ethical norms are also, only, related to the species man. The proof of this is that “if man did not exist nor would any ethical norms and rights persist”.
In other words, ethical norms and rights by themselves, reveals the existence of a nature of man.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 4, 2007 6:54 AM
Sam
S'pose there is a nomadic tribe that travels the land far and wide. S'pose a person fences off a large section of land builds a house and starts farming. Then if the tribe complains about the loss of a large section of their nomadic pathway (for a lack of a better term) would the correct response that the farmer has the natural right of property ownership? That the tribe, on the other hand, have no claim to ownership because of their lack of fences, property deeds and non-sendentary lifestyle? Or even that the farmer is living a 'natural existence' and the tribe was living an 'unnatural existence'? Or the tribe had too much land and should let others live on it too? Would you be offended if you had a large backyard yet came home from work one day and find a family had fenced some of your backyard off, built a small shack and started a veggie garden?
Published: January 4, 2007 8:41 AM
Peter
If the nomads have been regularly traipsing over that land before, they have presumptively established an easement allowing them to continue to do so, absent any agreement with the farmer.
Published: January 4, 2007 8:54 AM
Sam
What I was trying to say before is that societies generally wouldn't recognise a nomadic tribe's claim to any land because you don't own land just by walking through every once and a while. People would more likely see a farmer having land rights due to the occupancy and work of a patch of land. But, of course, why would one type of existence be more 'natural' than the other? In the previous scenario nomads and farmers would see each other's way of living as unnatural.
Published: January 4, 2007 9:06 AM
billwald
The new nomads live in fancy motor homes. They have problems establishing a legal residence for purposes of voting and getting a driver's license. Many join a camping club (forget the name) in Texas to get a legal residence. The club greatly outnumbers the town which is resented when it comes to local elections.
Published: January 4, 2007 12:45 PM
Björn Lundahl
Peter
You are probably right here. In a libertarian society the court of law would decide if it would be any dispute between the participants.
Whatever “natural existence” would mean it has nothing to do with it. What “societies generally recognizes” have nothing to do with it either.
In Rothbard’s own words:
“Ignoring the imperious demands of an arbitrary status quo, let us hammer out—hackneyed cliché though it may be—a natural-law and natural-rights standard to which the wise and honest may repair. Specifically, let us seek to establish the political philosophy of liberty and of the proper sphere of law, property rights, and the State.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/five.asp
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 4, 2007 12:47 PM
RogerM
Douglass North, et al, has a good paper on the rise of the state that's relevant to this discussion. You can find the link at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/01/juntas_vs_open.html
Published: January 4, 2007 4:10 PM
Björn Lundahl
The principle of utilitarianism is destructive.
Utilitarianism means that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Intellectually the principle lets the door stand wide open for the use of physical violence and theft against people which happens to belong to the lesser number. If we grasp a state of things where the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people exists in using physical violence and theft everywhere and in all human situations and places (i.e. in the classroom, shop, street, airport, forest etc) against all those people that happened to belong to the lesser numbers, the human race would quickly perish.
As we have seen, the principle of utilitarianism if followed by all groups of people in all places would lead to human destruction and this, therefore, proves that the principle is destructive. Any crime could be done in the name of utilitarianism such as murder, theft, rape, slavery etc. The lesser number of people would always be at the mercy of the greatest number.
Private groups of people in society are therefore, naturally, not allowed to commit crimes in the name of utilitarianism.
The state has a “legal right” to commit crimes and the state nearly, always does it in the name of utilitarianism.
In the name of utilitarianism Hitler could have justified all the murdering of the Jews that he made. He probably, also, thought that he by doing those crimes achieved the greatest happiness for the greatest number of Germans.
Let us not forget:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-309490343652240839&q=hitler+jews
Or, alternatively, as Rothbard wrote in his book For a New Liberty:
“Let us consider a stark example: Suppose a society which fervently considers all redheads to be agents of the Devil and therefore to be executed whenever found. Let us further assume that only a small number of redheads exist in any generation-so few as to be statistically insignificant. The utilitarian-libertarian might well reason: "While the murder of isolated redheads is deplorable, the executions are small in number; the vast majority of the public, as non-redheads, achieves enormous psychic satisfaction from the public execution of redheads. The social cost is negligible, the social, psychic benefit to the rest of society is great; therefore, it is right and proper for society to execute the redheads." The natural-rights libertarian, overwhelmingly concerned as he is for the justice of the act, will react in horror and staunchly and unequivocally oppose the executions as totally unjustified murder and aggression upon nonaggressive persons. The consequence of stopping the murders—depriving the bulk of society of great psychic pleasure—would not influence such a libertarian, the "absolutist" libertarian, in the slightest. Dedicated to justice and to logical consistency, the natural-rights libertarian cheerfully admits to being "doctrinaire," to being, in short, an unabashed follower of his own doctrines.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/newliberty2.asp
If anything should die, it is the principle of utilitarianism.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 4, 2007 6:02 PM
Sam
Ha ha, it was nice to you (Björn Lundahl) and Peter to get offended at the link I gave you two. Yous got offended cause yous didn't want to hear the obvious: 'rights' are arbitrary whims of a particular society.
The quest you seem to have, Björn Lundahl, sounds like the one of the Holy Grail. Because you presume 'natural rights' exist you'd keep searching for them and never find them. Never mind to the outside observer that would say if you haven't found something by now then it probably doesn't exist.
'Rights' are simply privileges bestowed by Society on everyone in the society to act in a way that benefits everyone in that society. Coincidentally the rights you happen to cite are ones that one would expect to find in a Libertarian Constitution. Whereas in a patriarchal society womens' rights would be non-existent and yet that society would perceive that as natural. Maybe rights seems 'natural' because a lot of rights are shared between non-related societies.
Published: January 4, 2007 7:58 PM
averros
Sam --
> Rights' are simply privileges bestowed by Society
You're making a logical mistake of attributing to the Society (which is merely a class of people) the features it does not have - such as a singular will and ability to act.
The Society (being a class, not an individual) cannot bestow anything on anyone. It is an abstraction, a non-entity. Individual people may have beliefs about justness or unjustness about other people's actions - and that is it.
Thus, your entire argument depends on the logical fallacy of confusing class with entity (or, which is the same in this case, antropomorphising the abstraction) - and, threrefore, your argument is completely invalid.
(BTW, the system of the "natural" rights does exist - there's a proof by existence, found in Rothbard's books. The fact that people mostly deny it does not change the fact of its existence - no more than majority opinon regarding flatness of the Earth had any bearing on correctness of heliocentric theory).
Published: January 4, 2007 8:29 PM
Peter
Ha ha, it was nice to you (Björn Lundahl) and Peter to get offended at the link I gave you two. Yous got offended cause yous didn't want to hear the obvious: 'rights' are arbitrary whims of a particular society.
I'm not offended (except in the sense that claiming to answer a question without actually providing an answer offends me). Don't you see that what you're saying simply makes no sense? To say that "'Rights' are simply privileges bestowed by Society on everyone in the society to act in a way that benefits everyone in that society" is either avoiding the question ("society" cannot be the source of rights, since "society" is just people who, you're saying, have rights only by virtue of society - i.e., society can grant rights because society already has rights...so where do they come from? That's the question you're supposed to be addressing!), or supporting a "might makes right" ethic (in which case why talk about "rights" at all? And why bother about "benefiting society" when you start from a position that can be shown to be antithetical to society?)
Published: January 4, 2007 9:22 PM
Björn Lundahl
averros
"The fact that people mostly deny it does not change the fact of its existence - no more than majority opinon regarding flatness of the Earth had any bearing on correctness of heliocentric theory)."
Very true and well said. That is the point!
Björn Lundahl
Published: January 4, 2007 10:56 PM
Sam
Because Peter I can't claim to have a magical right against being robbed whilst walking down a street. I can have personal power to defend myself against a would-be robber. I can also be part of a society that (through a law and constitution) they'd try to catch and punish the robber, thereby creating another (well, hopefully) deterrent factor. But I don't see what my 'right' to not be robbed would otherwise mean other than positive thinking.
Likewise if I was a slave in a slave-owning society in a world of slave-owning societies, my claim that no-one has the right to own slaves would be laughed down.
P.S. I used the term 'society' rather than 'State' if that helps.
Published: January 4, 2007 11:01 PM
Björn Lundahl
Peter
"society can grant rights because society already has rights...so where do they come from? That's the question you're supposed to be addressing!"
A good comment too! Constructive!
Björn Lundahl
Published: January 4, 2007 11:02 PM
Björn Lundahl
Sam
Don’t be silly, how it would be possible that I could be “offended” by your supposed arguments, I cannot imagine. You are just ignorant. Your questions reveal that all the time. You are missing the points!
The link you have posted will only lead to a man’s opinion not worth more than a parrot’s blathering.
There are a lot of people in history that were against the concept of a natural law. It is nothing new. Arguments against it, are not either new. It is silly to believe that we are not aware of this. Mises himself, for your knowledge, was also against the idea of a natural law.
Human Action:
“But the teachings of utilitarian philosophy and classical economics have nothing at all to do with the doctrine of natural right. With them the only point that matters is social utility. They recommend popular government, private property, tolerance, and freedom not because they are natural and just, but because they are beneficial.”
“Bentham, the radical, shouted: "Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense."”
“In rejecting the illusory notions of natural law and human equality modern biology only repeated what the utilitarian champions of liberalism and democracy long before had taught in a much more persuasive way. It is obvious that no biological doctrine can ever invalidate what utilitarian philosophy says about the social utility of democratic government, private property, freedom, and equality under the law.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec8.asp#p175
Mises statements do not logically, though, prove anything. As I have shown above, utilitarianism is instead a logical fallacy.
What is relatively new is Rothbard’s book The Ethics of Liberty:
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp
And Hoppe´s proof of an objective ethics:
http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications/econ-ethics-10.pdf
It is the logical arguments in those writings that are convincing.
I do believe that you cannot see the difference between a logical proof and a subjective opinion.
Naturally, Mises and people in the past did not know anything about this material that Rothbard and Hoppe (when he wrote Human Action) have produced.
I think that it would be better if you studied this material before criticizing and you will find all the answers that you cannot find through the link that you have posted. Ignorance does not convince anyone.
The Austrian Economics Newsletter
Austrians and the Private-Property Society
An Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe
AEN: In applying this a priori approach to ethics, were you attempting to supplant natural rights.
HOPPE: No, not at all. I was attempting to make the first two chapters of Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty stronger than they were*. That in turn would provide more weight to everything that followed. I had some dissatisfaction with rigor with which the initial ethical assumptions of libertarian political theory had been arrived at. Intuitively, they seemed plausible. But I could see that a slightly different approach might be stronger. Murray never considered my revisions to be a threat. His only concern was: does this ultimately make the case? Ultimately, he agreed that it did.
*Now I know Hoppe’s motive, before I guessed it. He has confirmed my speculation. Hoppe is really something!
http://mises.org/journals/aen/aen198.asp
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 4, 2007 11:14 PM
Björn Lundahl
Normative principles
A pure free market is based upon the axiomatic principle "that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else".
This is the very principle which the courts and the legal system should follow.
How do we know that this principle is an axiomatic principle?
I quote from the book “For a New Liberty”, written by Murray Rothbard, page 45:
“THE CENTRAL THRUST of libertarian thought, then, is to oppose any and all aggression against the property rights of individuals in their own persons and in the material objects they have voluntarily acquired. While individual and gangs of criminals are of course opposed, there is nothing unique here to the libertarian creed, since almost all persons and schools of thought oppose the exercise of random violence against persons and property”.
http://mises.org/rothbard/newliberty3.asp
So, generally, all persons and schools of thought oppose the exercise of random violence against persons and property.
Above statement is an answer why the principle is an axiomatic one. But this is not the only reason. There are rational ones as well.
Life as a value is an axiomatic value that no one in a debate logically can deny as this value is the very condition for the debate and the participators existence.
I quote from the book “The Ethics of Liberty”, written by Murray Rothbard, page 29:
“It may well be asked why life should be an objective ultimate value, why man should opt for life (in duration and quality). In reply; we may note that a proposition rises to the status of an axiom when he who denies it may be shown to be using it in the very course of the supposed refutation. Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion, indeed he would have no business continuing to be alive. Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of one’s life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom”.
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/six.asp
This is also confirmed with Ludwig von Mises statement in his book, “Human Action”, page 11:
“We may say that action is the manifestation of a man's will.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap1sec1.asp
Which principles are an objective condition for preserving the human race and human life?
To objective examine if something is a condition for something else, we have to mentally grasp a state of things, where the supposed condition doesn’t exist anywhere and at all.
For example, if we suppose that the existence of oxygen is a condition for the preservation of the human race, we grasp a state of things, where oxygen doesn’t exist anywhere on earth. If we would let some oxygen exist somewhere on earth, then we couldn’t make a valid conclusion. We wouldn’t know if oxygen were a condition for preserving human life. To make a valid conclusion we have to grasp where oxygen doesn’t exist anywhere and at all. Under this condition we can, naturally, conclude that no human life would exist. We can, because of this reason conclude that oxygen is a condition for the preservation of the human race. We can also conclude that when we objectively examined as we just did, if oxygen was a condition for preserving human life, we would be bound to take under consideration the whole reality and not only some parts of it. We wouldn’t let oxygen exist somewhere on earth, because if we had done so, we wouldn’t have grasped the effects, under consideration, to the whole situation (the whole reality), and our conclusion would therefore have been invalid.
We can only make one choice, either we take under consideration some parts of reality or we take under consideration the whole reality. Reason and logic tell us that if we take under consideration the whole reality, this will reflect the truth, because we can’t consider anything more absolute and perfect. This procedure is an axiomatic procedure.
Is “the principle of physical violence” a condition for the preservation of the human race?
To examine this principle under consideration of what has already been said about the procedure of finding out conditions, we have to grasp a state of things where the principle of none physical violence doesn’t exist anywhere and at all. If we let some people live by the principle of none violence, a procedure which we have just discarded, then we wouldn’t make a valid conclusion. Logically we are bound to let all people live by the principle of physical violence. Because of this fact the human race and life would immediately exterminate.
We can therefore conclude “that the principle of physical violence” is a condition for the preservation of human extermination and that “the principle of none physical violence” is the condition for human preservation.
We can also conclude, that human life wouldn’t exist, if the principle of “not to have the right to use threat of physical violence” didn’t exist.
If we grasp a state of things where this principle doesn’t exist, anywhere and at all, everyone would be threatening everyone else. Nobody would be able to live and fulfil their needs and dreams. Action to preserve ones life would be an impossible mission.
Not anybody would dare to act because if this anybody did, someone would always be threatening this anybody. A perfect static situation would occur and the human race would immediately exterminate.
Our conclusion will therefore be that “the principle of threat of physical violence” is a condition for the human extermination, and “the principle of none threat of physical violence”, is a condition for the preservation of human life.
As life is an axiomatic value which we want to preserve, it is also logically true that we axiomatically want to preserve the principle which is a condition for life, namely “the principle of none physical violence (including not to have the right to use threat of physical violence)”.
Let us now examine if “the right to steal” is a condition of the preservation of human life.
If we want to define what objective theft is, we will have to define property rights, based on an axiomatic Justice.
If we consider what has already been said in this document, we can also understand that an axiomatic Justice is those principles which are a condition for the preservation of the human race. Unjust are those principles which are a condition for the preservation of the human extermination.
Just property rights are, therefore, those property rights which are conditions for the preservation human life. Unjust are those property rights which are conditions for the preservation of human extermination.
In order to survive, man cannot live alone in an environment which is free from physical violence. To survive and prosper man has to use his reason and energy to transform nature into useful things. Man lives and prospers because he is a creative animal.
We can therefore conclude that creation in itself is a condition for the preservation of the human race.
We can therefore conclude that Just property rights are those rights which preserve man’s creative efforts.
In order to define these property rights we will have to grasp a state of things when man, for the first time, enters this world of ours. This because we want to define original property rights based on Justice. In order to define property rights based on Justice, we don’t want either to be deluded by existing potential unjust property rights. Only, in a state of things where no man, yet, has owned anything, we don’t take the risk of being deluded.
When the first man, for example, broke a branch and made himself a bow, the title of property of this creation was also his. Why does the title of the property (the bow) belong to this man? Because man is a purposeful agent and if man doesn’t own his original creation and the results of his actions, he won’t act.
Let us examine if the last statement is objective and true.
We examine and grasp a state of things, in accordance with the mentioned procedure to examine objectively if something is a condition for something else, through not letting the examined principle be existent anywhere at all.
We grasp a state of things where the following principle is none existent anywhere at all: “the originators right to the objects which he through action, has created”. Everyone would be stealing anyone’s creation and the human race would immediately exterminate.
This proves that man is a purposeful agent and when his motivation exterminates, he stops acting at once.
This is also the objective reason why theft is a condition for the preservation of human extermination, and that the principle of none theft, the originators creation in accordance with the above reasoning, is the condition for the preservation of human life.
Let us now define Justly owned property rights to land.
Man doesn’t create land but he acts and creates on, in and out of land.
Also here we examine a state of things when man for the first time, enters this world. When, then, the first man enters the untouched land, and creates by action on or in or out of land, then this part of the land which he has now touched, belongs to him. Why the first man? If the first man doesn’t have the property right to this part of the land, nor does individual number two, three, four, five etc have the right to the land, and while they are waiting for the last man who hasn’t yet entered this world, man will quickly perish.
If we grasp a state of things, where the following principle is none existent anywhere and at all (this objective test is, of course, in line with our reasoning about such a procedure for finding out a condition for something else):
“When someone creates by action on or out of land, then this part which he has now touched belongs to him”.
This would mean that everyone would be stealing anyone’s Justly owned land, that is as soon as someone starts creating by action on or in or out of land, someone else would have the right to the land in question and the human race would immediately exterminate.
We can conclude that the condition for the extermination of the human race is to preserve the principle “the right to steal the land which the first man has touched and created on or in or out”. Our conclusion will also therefore only be that the condition for the preservation of the human race is that no man ever should have such a right.
Why must anybody own anything?
In accordance with our objective test to find out if something is a condition for something else, we grasp a state of things where the following principle is none existent anywhere and at all:
“Everybody owns themselves and their Justly owned property rights”.
Nobody would be able to do anything, since nobody has the right to control anything. Not even themselves (see below about property rights in your own person).
This question is not only a contradiction it is also silly. You ask a question which means that you control yourselves (natural disposition), that is owning yourself (see below the excellent writing of Hans-Hermann Hoppe). The other contradiction is that if nobody would own anything, nobody would be able to hinder anyone to own anything either since they would otherwise have an invalid control (having the disposition to) of everyone else, that is having an invalid ownership to everybody else (see below about valid property rights in your own person).
Ownership itself is, therefore, an objective condition for the preservation of human life.
Now, then, we haven’t ended our definition of Justly owned property rights until we have analyzed the right to make contracts. We will have to examine the right to make contracts, because, sooner or later the owners of Justly owned property will trade with each other. Sooner or later disputes will occur among the trading partners and then, we will have to know, the rights the trading partners have to the property and which the dispute among them is all about.
Some economist argues that the Justification for the right to make contracts is that the right promotes economic prosperity.
It is true that most of us want economic prosperity, but this is not an axiomatic Justification for the right o make contracts. “Economic prosperity” is not an axiomatic value. As we want to be objective, this argument is not good enough.
Some individuals argue that trading partners have an “agreement” and this is the reason why contracts should be legally binding. Why should such an agreement be legally binding if one of the partners wants to change his mind? Why shouldn’t we respect such a change of man’s will? Why should an earlier manifestation of a man’s will be considered proper and Just and a later manifestation of a changed will be regarded as improper and unjust? Where is the objective Justification? Where is the logical point of view? To argue that the trading partners “knew what they got into and that is why “agreements” should be legally binding”, is, of course, nonsense. It only proves that agreements are artificial constructions which haven’t anything to do with axiomatic principles founded in the nature of things.
The Justification for binding contracts is not that they are “agreements or for that reason are contracts”, but for the reason that we can derive, because of them, Justly owned property titles. “The right to make contracts” is not a right in itself which can objectively be defended as such, but is an expression which symbolizes the interpretations to derive Justly owned property rights and if theft has been done or not.
This is the title transfer theory of contracts, see also Murray Rothbard´s excellent book “The Ethics of Liberty”, chapter 19:
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/nineteen.asp
On what base can this interpretation be related to contracts and Justly owned property titles? This we can conclude because of the reason that contracts only confirm exchange of original Just titles to property (in accordance with above definitions of original Just titles to property), that is the transferring of Just property titles between the trading partners.
The reason that a property title will be transferred from one person to another is that the original property owner has renounced his Justly owned property title to be transferred to another person, and we can only, because of this, make the interpretation that the property title has been transferred. In other words, it is the renunciation of the Justly owned property title in itself, which is the very cause to the ending of the original property owner’s title to the property and the transferring of the title to the new owner, which the original property owner has renounced his property title to.
Logic and reason tells us what has been renounced and transferred, in fact, also is renounced and transferred. For what has been done cannot be undone.
Logically a man cannot renounce his right to self-ownership, since a man in his very nature controls his own mind and body (natural disposition), that is, he is a natural self-owner of his own will and person (having a free will) and he will still be so even if he has “tried” o renounce his natural self-ownership to another person. He cannot renounce something which is a biological and physical fact of his very own life and which will never, as long as he lives, leave him.
In other words, we cannot interpret with the help of reason that the supposed slave’s natural self-ownership has been transferred to another person which the supposed slave has tried to renounce his self-ownership to.
We can therefore conclude that this fact of natural self-ownership, always, logically, neutralizes every attempt to renounce it.
Another logical confirmation of this fact is that when we in this document concluded that none physical violence and none theft preserves human life, we wouldn’t make such a conclusion if we didn’t control our minds and bodies. We wouldn’t be able to make such a conclusion, since we wouldn’t control ourselves and either would life exist, in a state of things, when everyone had the legal right to fully use his self-ownership, that is, in other words, in a state of things where physical violence and theft is none existent at all.
In regard to what has now been said we can conclude that it is objectively true that every man is a Just property owner in his own right. Because of this, slave contracts should not be legally binding, as their existence is only a” legalization” of physical violence. If we would neglect this fact, we would violate the principle of self-ownership and be using physical violence and also, because of this, violating the condition for the preservation of human life.
It is true that the possibility to make contracts and to trade is the very foundation for specialization and spurs creative processes which accounts for a very large part of man’s creative efforts. To “legally” hinder the enforcement of contracts and therefore also trade, would not only mean extreme poverty, but also death to most individuals on earth.
The enforcement of contracts, in accordance with our definition, we can conclude, is the condition for preserving these creative processes among individuals. Other definitions of contracts, which are only some sorts of agreements, (really, only different grades of slave contracts) should not, as have been pointed out, be legally binding. These illegitimate contracts include only those destructive seeds that violates the condition for the preservation of the human race, namely the “principle of none physical violence and none theft”, and because of this fact alone, they don’t include those productive processes which account for a very large part of man’s creative efforts.
We have now ended our definition of Justly owned property rights.
We have established that human life is preserved by the condition “that no man shall have the right to use physical violence and theft”.
Our conclusion will therefore be that the principle “that no man shall have the right to use physical violence and theft” is synonymous with our definition “that no man shall have the right to violate the rightful ownership in person and property”.
We can establish that the absolute and perfect condition for the human extermination is the none existence of the principle “that no man shall have the right to violate the rightful ownership in person and property”, and we can also conclude that the absolute and perfect condition to preserve the human race is the none existence of any violations.
Isolated violations of the principle are therefore absolutely perfect, destructive actions which undermine the condition and the preservation of the human race, since the very existence of these destructive actions deviate from the absolutely perfect condition for the preservation of the human race.
As life is an axiomatic value which we want to preserve, it is also logically true that we axiomatically want to preserve the principle which is a condition for life, namely “that no man shall have the right to use physical violence and theft” or in other words,” that no man shall have the right to violate the rightful ownership in person and property”.
Alternatively, an axiomatic end (human life) is preserved by an axiomatic mean (“that no man shall have the right to use physical violence and theft”).
If we take under consideration what has been concluded in this document, we can also conclude that another meaning of the principle of none violations, is that the principle also brings an absolutely perfect opportunity for the survival of human life. This means that the principle brings a totally perfect opportunity for the survival of all human beings.
As it is true that the principle is a totally perfect condition and a totally perfect preservation of human life, it also logically follows that the principle brings a totally perfect opportunity for the survival of all human beings.
This can also be proved by the fact that everyone’s violation of the principle (total physical violence and theft) brings an absolutely perfect impossibility for the survival of any human beings.
In the “philosophical debate” Liberty, as all values, is seen as a subjective value. This opinion may seem as a confirmation of the reality. There are vast political values. Liberty seems to be only one of these subjective values. But it is a superficial believes.
The reason for this is that we have established that everyone’s violation of the principle brings an absolutely perfect impossibility for the survival of any human beings. This means that we all would be, by objective means coerced to die that is objectively coerced to not “value and wanting to preserve our own lives”.
Isolated violations of the principle are totally destructive because they totally undermine by objective coercion our possibilities and opportunities to “value and wanting to preserve our own lives”.
Ethical conclusions in this document, I believe, are in agreement with some ethical conclusions that the giant Hans-Hermann Hoppe has done.
Please read some of his excellent writing from the book “The Ethics and Economics of Private Property”:
http://mises.org/etexts/hoppe5.pdf
And to:
http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications/econ-ethics-10.pdf
Principles derived from the ethics concluded in this document, are exposed in the masterpiece that I have already mentioned and that is “The Ethics of Liberty” written by Murray Rothbard, please read his book:
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 4, 2007 11:42 PM
Björn Lundahl
Ethical norms, religious believes, political philosophies etc, regardless if they are true or not, needs the support of an amount of people in society that is great enough to be powerful.
Libertarianism needs too the support of an amount of people in society that is great enough to be powerful.
The difference is not that.
The difference is that Libertarianism is based on ultimate principles of justice and economics.
Not because of the reason that I have said so, but of the reason that Libertarian ethics and economics (Austrian economics) are based on logically true valid principles.
Or as Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts it in his book “The Economics and Ethics of Private Property”, page 234 and 235:
“In the present situation of a world-wide crisis of governmental legitimacy, of the collapse of East Bloc Socialism and enduring stagnation of the Western Welfare States, the chance for Austrian rationalism to fill the philosophical vacuum that has appeared with the retreat of positivism and to become the paradigm of the future is as good or better than ever. Now as before it requires moral courage as much as intellectual integrity to propound the Austrian social theory – the opposing statist battalions still represent a formidable majority and are in control of a far larger share of resources. Yet with the total breakdown of socialism and the concept of social ownership staring everyone in the face, the antithetical Austrian theory of private property, free markets and laissez faire cannot but gain attractiveness and win support. Austrians have reason to believe, then, that the time has come when they may succeed in bringing about a fundamental change in public opinion, by reclaiming ethics and economics from the hands of the positivists and the engineering powerful and restoring public recognition of private property rights and free markets based on such rights as ultimate, absolute principles of ethics and economics”.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 5, 2007 2:05 AM
Sam
Are you a religious envangelist in your spare time Björn Lundahl? Sheesh what a long-winded entry that last one was . . .
All I can surmise it if society is going to be wonderfully better off if we were all Libertarians then (in Libertopia) why not inspect children from birth to detect signs of either aggression (future warmongers and criminals) or dependency (future dole bludgers, Socialist and all-round slackers) and snuff their bad genes ASAP? Problem solved.
Published: January 5, 2007 7:23 AM
David White
Muddleheadedness, cynicism, obstructionism, inanity, and defeatism. Such is your ongoing "contribution" to this site, Sam, and as it's clear that you have no constructive alternative to libertarianism, one cannot but wonder what motivates you beyond finding something for your otherwise idle mind to do.
But thanks for continually reminding us that there's no substitute for critical thinking.
Published: January 5, 2007 8:05 AM
Sam
OMG!! You mind-reader you, D. White! :O
At least please try to enlighten a retard in a few lines of simple small words what a sensible thinking position is?
Published: January 5, 2007 8:33 AM
David White
I didn't say you're a retard, Sam, I just said that unless you are willing and able to engage in critical thinking, you really don't have anything constructive to offer, here or elsewhere.
And since critical thinking begins with questioning your assumptions, you need to step back and, in this case, ask yourself what your assumptions are about concepts like good, evil, human nature, liberty, property, society, the state, money, etc, as they are the foundation upon which the Austrian School of Economics is built. And insofar as your assumptions about such things are un- or ill-defined (i.e., muddleheaded), it behooves you to define them so that you can examine them -- i.e., think critically about them -- vis-a-vis the world as it presents itself and others who do the same. In this way, instead of potshots about snuffing children's bad genes, you can level your intellectual firearms at a legitimate target and pull the trigger in a constructive manner.
Granted, this high standard is rarely met even here, but such is the nature of the Austrian School and of libertarianism (not to be confused with the politics of the Libertarian Party) that both can be examined quite literally on principle, such that if one doesn't agree with this or that one and/or the conclusion(s) drawn from it, we can at least understand why, with the possibility of being persuaded accordingly.
That, to me, is the "sensible thinking position."
Published: January 5, 2007 10:33 AM
Scott D
Bjorn is one of the most consistently helpful, polite, and knowledgeable posters here, and I carry a great deal of respect for him. Your comments are way out of line. If you feel the need to resort to personal attacks, I think you need to rethink the strength of your own arguments.
I'd like to think that you are really trying to figure these things out and promote discussion, but you're quickly heading towards simply being ignored as a troll.
Published: January 5, 2007 10:39 AM
billwald
Cities were invented while people were still 90% agricultural workers for the purpose of separating the civilized people from the savage people. The farms were platted within running distance of city walls and the farmers slept inside the city walls.
By the end Prohibition the savages had control of the large cities but only exercised their life style in specific areas of the cities that were avoidable by most of the civilized people. This raised the cost of city life but not the death rate of people who avoided the downtown areas at night and stayed out of bars and taverns.
The Big War created the Great American Dream of a house in the country and a job in the city. The Eisenhower Highway System made the dream a reality.
The Civil Rights Act of '64 destroyed the public school systems in most large cities. The rich people put their children into private schools and the middle class escaped to the suburbs.
In this century the cities are unfit for people with children. The poor people, the retired people, and the single people are moving into/staying in the cities and the shrinking middle class owns the suburbs. The joke is that for the school age population, the cities are safer than the suburbs.
Published: January 5, 2007 11:20 AM
Björn Lundahl
David White & Scott D
Thank you very much!
Björn Lundahl
Published: January 6, 2007 5:21 AM
Björn Lundahl
“All human beings act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings. We could not conceive of human beings who do not act purposefully, who have no ends in view that they desire and attempt to attain. Things that did not act, that did not behave purposefully, would no longer be classified as human.”
Murray Rothbard, “Fundamentals of human action” (praxeology)
An axiomatic Justice
In the political debate all political parties proposes some different ends (values or goals).
These ends or, alternatively, values are subjective such as “building more motorways”, “women’s liberation”, “social equality”, “social security”, “prosperity”, “making America great again”, “combating inflation”, “joining the EU” etc.
To accomplish those goals there are also debates on how to accomplish those goals (debates about the means). The means are almost always subjective i.e. the ends can be accomplished in different ways.
To accomplish an axiomatic Justice I have chosen, in my essay “Normative principles”, life as a value as an end by itself.
I have also shown that this end “life as a value” or alternatively, human life, is preserved objectively by the mean “that no man shall have the right to use physical violence and theft”.
As this objective mean preserves an axiomatic value and as this mean is derived from an axiomatic value, the whole system is an axiomatic system.
The final result is: “an axiomatic end (human life) is preserved by an axiomatic mean”.
As we cannot, logically, deny life, as long as we chose living, we cannot either, logically deny its axiomatic condition i.e. its axiomatic mean.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: January 6, 2007 5:48 AM
Björn Lundahl
I will post this again since I do believe that my comment regarding none existence of any property rights is here presented more clearly and logically than in my above post.
Life and self-ownership
Mark Humphrey “I don't want to precipitate trench warfare with devoted Rothbardians, but I strongly suspect that Rothbard owed his insight about "life as the standard of moral value" to Ayn Rand. I can't prove this, of course. Sadly, in "The Ethics of Liberty", (published in the early Eighties) Rothbard chose to, in a sense, blacklist Rand by claiming that NO ONE, other than himself, in the libertarian movement was working to develope a system of rationally defensible ethics. (Maybe Rothbard meant "at the moment I am writing this statement".)”
Björn That life is an axiomatic value and functions “as the standard of moral value” in an ethical system, Rothbard could, alternatively for example, have gotten this insight from Mises himself through analyzing his statement in his book, “Human Action”, page 11:
“We may say that action is the manifestation of a man's will.”
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap1sec1.asp
I am not saying that Rothbard did get his insight from Mises; I am only saying that it was possible. Surely, many other possibilities exist which we do not know anything about.
Mark Humphrey “It has been awhile since I've read Hoppe, and Rothbard; but I suspect Hoppe's reasoning goes: either we all own ourselves, or everyone owns everyone else. Since the first proposition is clearly more defensible than the latter absurd proposition, one can affirm self ownership as valid. But if this is the argument, it fails. For that argument assumes that which it sets out to prove, namely that an ethical concept, "ownership", exists. But on this basis, ownership remains unproven, so that one could just as well assert: "no one owns anything, and anything goes."”
Björn Self-ownership is a natural fact, since a man in his very nature controls his own mind and body (natural disposition), that is, he is a natural self-owner of his own will and person (having a free will) and if this was not true, neither could he effectively control any property and, therefore, not own it. In other words; “nothing could control and own something”.
Naturally, praxeology the science of human action, by itself logically confirms the natural fact of self-ownership, since praxeology is based upon “the acting man consciously intending to improve his own satisfaction” and I quote from answers.com:
“From praxeology Mises derived the idea that every conscious action is intended to improve a person's satisfaction. He was careful to stress that praxeology is not concerned with the individual's definition of end satisfaction, just the way he sought that satisfaction. The way in which a person will increase his satisfaction is by removing a source of dissatisfaction. As the future is uncertain so every action is speculative.
An acting man is defined as one capable of logical thought — to be otherwise would be to make one a mere creature who simply reacts to stimuli by instinct. Similarly an acting man must have a source of dissatisfaction which he believes capable of removing, otherwise he cannot act.
Another conclusion that Mises reached was that decisions are made on an ordinal basis. That is, it is impossible to carry out more than one action at once, the conscious mind being only capable of one decision at a time — even if those decisions can be made in rapid order. Thus man will act to remove the most pressing source of dissatisfaction first and then move to the next most pressing source of dissatisfaction.
As a person satisfies his first most important goal and after that his second most important goal then his second most important goal is always less important than his first most important goal. Thus, for every further goal reached, his satisfaction, or utility, is lessened from the preceding goal. This is the rule of diminishing marginal utility.
In human society many actions will be trading activities where one person regards a possession of another person as more desirable than one of his own possessions, and the other person has a similar higher regard for his colleague's possession than he does for his own. This subject of praxeology is known as catallactics, and is the more commonly accepted realm of economics.”
http://www.answers.com/Praxeology?gwp=11&ver=2.0.1.458&method=3
Further:
The Ethics of Liberty, page 45:
Footnote:
“[1]Professor George Mavrodes, of the department of philosophy of the University of Michigan, objects that there is another logical alternative: namely, “that no one owns anybody, either himself or anyone else, nor any share of anybody.” However, since ownership signifies range of control, this would mean that no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/eight.asp
Or in my own words:
Why must anybody own anything?
In accordance with our objective test to find out if something is a condition for something else, we grasp a state of things where the following principle is none existent anywhere and at all:
“The existence of property rights”:
In a world without any property rights nobody would be able to do anything, since nobody has the right to control anything. Not even themselves (see below about property rights in your own person).
This question is not only a contradiction it is also silly. You ask a question which means that you control yourselves (natural disposition), that is owning yourself (see below the excellent writing of Hans-Hermann Hoppe). The other contradiction is that if nobody would own anything, nobody would be able to hinder anyone to own anything either since they would otherwise have an invalid control (having the disposition to) of everyone else, that is having an invalid ownership to everybody else (see below about valid property rights in your own person).
Ownership itself is, therefore, an objective condition for the preservation of human life.
Please read some of Hans-Hermann Hoppe´s excellent writing from the book “The Ethics and Economics of Private Property”:
http://mises.org/etexts/hoppe5.pdf
And to:
ON THE ULTIMATE JUSTIFICATION OF THE ETHICS OF PRIVATE PROPERTY:
http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications/econ-ethics-10.pdf
Björn Lundahl
Published: March 15, 2007 2:55 PM
Kiwi Polemicist
Click here for an amusing example of the service level that people receive from socialised law enforcement:
http://kiwipolemicist.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/new-zealand-police-cant-even-catch-rogue-cyclists/
Published: September 21, 2008 7:28 PM
harpoonflyby
Didn't Robocop teach us some inherent problems with this? Directive 4?
Published: November 24, 2008 6:53 PM
Colin Duesterhaus
The issue with crime can be easily reduced with more gun ownership, and there is even an example of this in a country in Europe. Yep you guessed it Switzerland, they are required by law to have and maintain weapons and ammunition. They even have programs that teach the kids while their young of how to proper handle and use a weapon. The country has probably the lowest crime rates in the world.
Published: July 16, 2009 12:11 AM