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individual liberty

Peculiar Imbecility #1, Embracing Legal Coercion: Regarding Taxation (1/5)

by adam on February 21, 2009 · 5 comments

Most people have so effectively compartmentalized their moral sensibilities that they themselves are unaware of their contradictory stands regarding coercion. On the one hand, most people absolutely do not tolerate, excuse, or justify threatening and bullying behavior in their personal and professional experiences; on the other hand, most of those same people also acquiesce to and even express unabashed enthusiasm for public policies based on that same coercive behavior.

Where is this moral event horizon through which ‘threatening’ and ‘bullying’ pass and emerge as righteous conduct, worthy of encouragement, and mysteriously now immune from the customary requirements of justice? Under what conditions does this transformation of aggressive force from vice to virtue take effect? Does the moral defense of private property cease to matter if seizures of wealth are sanctioned by a government of elected representatives as opposed to a monarchy? Does merely being outnumbered eventually undermine an individual’s claim that her consent is needed to use her earnings?  A single robber holding you up at gunpoint— “Your money or your life!”— is unjustifiable; however, many bureaucrats, working nine-to-five, dressed in suits, sending you a well-written officially sealed notification that requires you to pay them a certain amount of money by a certain date to avoid further financial penalties or (gulp) incarceration are justifiable? How do we acquire the knowledge that a community’s “yes” vote trumps my “no” vote about the disposition of my body or property or earnings?

If an individual is coerced by a group of people in a forest so far from you that you cannot hear the echoes of his or her objections, has something immoral happened? Perhaps the more physically distant people are from instances of coercion the less urgently they feel the need to take a moral stand against them. Perhaps people have grown so accustomed to the threats underlying taxation that they see them the same way I see spiders, as terrifying natural phenomena, aspects of the world in which we live that are better dealt with by evasion than by confrontation. Perhaps most people are so intimidated by the risks they associate with resisting taxation that they would rather comply with it.

Perhaps most people simply don’t see taxation as that big of a problem.

For such cases of hysterical moral blindness, I prescribe calm, focused reflection on the principles of peace underlying people’s everyday social lives. Let yourself think about the realistic, influential presence of those principles in your personal relationships with friends and loved ones and in your professional relationships with coworkers and clients and employers and vendors. It is significant that you and I deal with people as individuals whose consent matters and who must demonstrate consistent respect for our voluntary consent, too. Mutual consent is a moral rule that provides the peaceful basis for all human relationships.

Imagine what would happen to your everyday life experience if laws suddenly enabled people with whom you transact to behave as if your consent were irrelevant, as if they were entitled to some arbitrary amount of your wealth before you had agreed to trade with them, even irrespective of your desire to have anything to do with them. You would immediately view yourself as living in a state of constant conflict with people. You would feel righteously defensive and take measures to protect your body, wealth, and property. Before too long, you would clamor for legal reforms that consistently protect your private property rights and that uphold mutual consent. Why would you stop short of requiring government to restrain itself in accordance with these same moral limitations?

Taxation perverts people’s sense of justice by enticing them to imagine all that might be accomplished by treating people as common resources instead of as individual human beings. On a daily basis, you avoid bumping into people on the street, you exercise the freedom to enter and exit relationships as you see fit, you honor contracts, you respond to changing circumstances and competition by learning, experimenting, and adapting.

All of this you do in accordance with the core principle of justice, specifically, that you are entitled to no more value from people than they are voluntarily willing to trade, or, in other words, that an individual cannot be used as a means to an end without his or her explicit, freely granted consent. If it is not limited by Justice, then government will be unlimited.

Therefore, proposals granting a taxing authority should be dismissed as foolishly naive or criminally negligent or fiendishly treasonous. Regardless of its originators’ intentions, as soon as a government gains the authority to tax, its growth into a parasitic, belligerent social structure is only a matter of time. This would not be the case were taxation merely the authority to raise money. (As I will discuss in an upcoming post, there are plenty of peaceful ways for a just government to raise funds.)

Government with the legal authority to tax will develop the coercive Power necessary to enforce the threats underlying its wealth transfer requirements, and will do so vigorously. With the Power to tax, government expands the scope of its operations and severity of its interventionist behavior, as it inexorably abandons its original function (and, by the way, its sole moral justification) as a guarantor of individual liberty and private property rights and a bulwark against coercion.

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More analysis and commentary regarding the essence of taxation, its myriad dangers and practical problems, and alternatives to it will be featured in a series of upcoming posts.

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Peculiar Imbecility #1: Embracing Legal Coercion

by adam on February 3, 2009 · 4 comments

Amidst debates over the practical effectiveness of the involuntary wealth redistribution bill President Obama has defended and praised as a “much-needed” and “urgent” stimulus plan, as the federal government forces gargantuan outlays of taxpayer earnings to banks and automakers, as people wake up in jail today because they were caught three times engaged in nonviolent drug-related behavior that President Obama has confessed even he participated in, I am struck by the terrifying absence of commentary on the moral status of a society that embraces legal coercion.

I elaborated on in an earlier post (“Dear Fellow Anarcho-Capitalists… Yes, I’m Talking To You”), the vast majority of us live our lives as if initiating force were not morally permissible. Most of us not only believe it’s wrong to treat other people’s bodies, minds, or wealth as means to our own ends without their explicit consent, but also choose to act every day in a manner that reflects our confidence in and reliance upon this essential moral principle. Which is to say, this is not a widely accepted but idle belief; the principle of nonaggression is an operative assumption relevant to every relationship in our lives.

If we want others to agree with us, we attempt to persuade. If we want them to work for us, we offer them incentives so that they may voluntarily choose to do so. We don’t resort to threatening people with the loss of their freedom or property, we don’t physically beat them into submission, even when we believe that agreement with our ideas or compliance with our requests is vitally important or involves an issue of tremendous moral significance. There’s a rule that we respect, one we intuitively grasp, which amounts to the idea that no person is or should be obligated against his or her will to act on behalf of others, or, in other words, that we are all equally entitled to be left alone.

It is our shared expectations (1) of not being interfered with when we act peacefully and (2) of not being coerced to act by others that form the moral basis for regulating social living. Before government and before laws, all individuals have the equal right to exist (“Life”), free from being coercively interfered with (“Liberty”), in order to pursue whatever goals each of them determines are worth pursuing. To uphold the right to live, the right to be left alone, the right to peacefully pursue the dictates of their own individuality, people form Governments. And though government always tends to expand its powers over time, its just law making authority is defined solely by the original intent of those who formed it in the first place. In Jefferson’s words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

One peculiar imbecility of our time is that people who believe that initiating force is never morally justified within the context of their physical experience of the world simultaneously believe that initiating force is morally necessary within the context of public policy. Suddenly, the very concept they consider poisonous in their private, interpersonal, and professional lives becomes an axiomatic and intoxicating prime mover of government action. Indeed, when it comes to politics, many people consider the initiation of force not only necessary, but even preferable to all alternatives.

How is this moral compass switcheroo possible?

People have proved themselves quite capable of adopting diametrically opposed perspectives. Their ability to do so is less of a mystery than it seems at first blush. They compartmentalize. They tend to consistently reject coercion in their lived experiences, and they tend to inconsistently support coercion when it’s committed by government under the banner of accomplishing what they consider to be worthwhile goals. In private, they act as if voluntary behavior and mutual consent are unbreakable moral rules; in public, they act as if there were social goods that (1) only the state can achieve and (2) only by coercive central planning of the economy and by restricting and regulating people’s professional options and recreational opportunities and by bluntly redistributing people’s wealth.

Although I am glad that people who are capable of this kind of compartmentalization are less likely to take it upon themselves to threaten me directly with the loss of my freedom and wealth to realize their utopian ambitions, it’s no consolation that they’re willing to empower the State to effectively do the same. I am oppressed by the brute fact of their insensitivity. I am offended by their deliberate unwillingness to accept responsibility for the costs incurred by all of us on account of their blasé tolerance of coercion. I am disheartened that fellow human beings shamelessly adopt such a fundamentally pessimistic and empirically impotent tactic. I am embarrassed that so many who condemn coercion in their personal lives are so willing to enthusiastically outsource the practice of it to their elected officials.

I am an abolitionist. I am opposed to all behavior and all laws that consist of or rely upon threats or uses of force.  I am an advocate of individual liberty and a principled defender of all nonviolent enterprises and consensual behaviors.

I am often asked for examples of the practicality of taking this moral position. To me, that’s like asking, “What’s practical about the the moral rule I’ve been living by, and the one rule I expect all people around me to adhere to consistently?”

A logical follow-up to that point consists of noting the consequences of peaceful human action: the tremendous amount of wealth created by people free to innovate and trade products and services, the extraordinary technological progress in health care improving and extending people’s lives, productivity gains that result in the expansion of leisure time options. I want more of this stuff, and so do you. There would be more of this stuff if we abolished the State’s coercive rules and interventions.

To requests for examples of governments that adhere to such an extreme moral standard, all that I can do is ask people to consider how people vote with their feet. The countries whose governments interfere less with private choices, private property, and private capital are places where people from all over the world attempt to relocate, places where profit maximizers produce technological innovations that enable people to live richer, longer and healthier lives, places where the individual’s right to be left alone produces the most expressive and dynamic communities.

Though this is rarely compelling enough, for some it’s a thought-provoking start. You who remain uncomfortable with my uncompromising moral defense of individual liberty usually reply with an avalanche of questions like the following: But we need the government to provide public goods! What about public schools? What about health care for those who can’t pay? What about the negative cultural impact of people freely using drugs? What about paying for abortions for people who can’t afford them? What about preventing corporations from making too much profit? What about bridges and tunnels and roads?

Well, some of those things may be worthy of support. But support given freely, of course, not compelled!

What about the idea that you need my permission to use my life (ie, my time, my energy, my wealth)? What does my right to life mean if you can decide how my time, energy, and earnings will be used without my consent? And who are you or anyone else to do this? If we’re equal, what gives you the right to use me without my consent to serve your ends? If you can do this, does that mean I can do the same to you? And wouldn’t that place us in a constant state of unresolvable conflict based on competitive claims over our preferred uses of each other? If you don’t think we’re equally entitled to be left alone, and further believe that because your values are superior to mine you may treat me like a resource, then you’re an advocate of tyranny and its practical counterpart, slavery.  No list of heart-warming causes justifies overriding my consent and my property rights to have me serve it. There’s no such thing as the virtue of a little slavery some of the time. At least not to the person being used against his or her will!

You may be capable of pretending that your delegation of coercive behavior to the government absolves you of moral culpability for its extortionist policies, but that pretense will be small comfort when you find yourself in the inevitable position of objecting to government’s use of you as a means to its ends.

More on that quandary in an upcoming post.

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Obama Likes the Rule of Law, But Not Enough To Marry It

by adam on January 24, 2009 · 3 comments

Though President Obama has repeatedly affirmed “the Rule of Law” throughout his campaign and in the early days of his presidency, there are reasons to be skeptical of his fidelity to the concept.

Of course, I applaud the actions he has taken to increase transparency in the executive branch, his superlative exhortations to all federal employees to exceed legal requirements in their compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, and his unLincolnlike resurrection of the principles of habeas corpus. In these instances, President Obama demonstrates that he likes the Rule of Law more now than he did last year when he voted in the Senate to support warrantless wiretapping. Is he moving in the right direction? No, this is not part of a coherent trend. Obama is clearly going to refuse to let his administration be restrained by ideological consistency. He will not allow principled adherence to the Rule of Law to capsize most of his presidential agenda.

The concept of the Rule of Law holds that no person is above the law, and, by logical extention, that all citizens are entitled to equality under the law. All laws must apply equally to all people. When laws apply unequally to people, say, for example, by conferring on some advantages that are produced at the involuntary expense of others, then the Rule of Law is no longer effective.

Laws that identify some as “entitled” and others as “involuntarily obligated” tend to be designed and promoted by people who rely on votes and donations from the “entitled.”  What it takes to prioritize such legal schemes more than the Rule of Law is a kind of narcissistic conviction that “greater goods” can be served by exercising power in an unprincipled manner. Obama’s inaugural address includes several strong hints not only about his unwillingness to allow his political ambitions to be caged by principles, but moreover his disdain for a principled worldview. So the same speech that contains this phrase…

…the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

… a clear allusion to the unequivocally libertarian Declaration of Independence, also contains the following:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.  The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.

Cynics? A free people should always be concerned with the moral basis for government action vis-a-vis individual liberty. And, to paraphrase Jefferson, a government big enough to give you everything you want is going to be powerful enough to take everything you’ve got. The history of the twentieth century validates Jefferson’s warning.

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If President Obama were to sign a law granting him dictatorial power, that would be no more or less a violation of the Rule of Law than his signing a law that grants to some percentage of the population claims over the wealth of another percentage of the population. In the latter case, it does not matter if such a claim would be based on gender or age or religion or income or ethnicity or political affiliation or industry, the Rule of Law is violated as a result of executing laws that do not apply equally to all. Other violations include laws that apply retroactively (ie, ex post facto laws), and laws that ignore the “presumption of innocence.”

There is an intimate relationship between the Rule of Law and Individual Liberty.

Embodied in the legal constraint on the State suggested by the “presumption of innocence” is a universal implication about the moral legitimacy of a State’s laws. It is implied that all innocent individuals (ie, those who are peacefully going about their lives) must not be be subject to laws that deprive them of life, liberty, or property outside of the context of outcomes of court cases in which they are found guilty of crimes. In other words, in addition to the issue of all laws applying equally to citizens is the notion that individual citizens have a fundamental expectation of noninterference by the State except under strict conditions.

If President Obama were serious about upholding the Rule of Law, he would call for Congress to reverse course on the TARP spending. Bank executives and employees should not have laws made for their benefit at the involuntary expense of taxpayers. Neither should automobile manufacturers, nor anyone else.

In accordance with the Rule of Law, President Obama should call for a flat income tax. If he had the audacity to propose a Constitutional Amendment undoing the Sixteenth Amendment, he could invoke the principle that an income tax unjustly punishes people for freely exercising their right to pursue their “full measure of happiness.”

President Obama should abolish all corporate welfare and also all corporate taxes. He should eliminate the capital gains tax and inheritance tax, cancel minimum wage laws, and do away with any tariffs and/or “protectionist” restrictions on access to markets. Any laws that artificially create winners and losers should be voided. May as well end the war on drugs, too.

Of course, the bottom line is that President Obama is not convinced that adhering to the principles of the Rule of Law require him to reform the entire federal government so that it consistently protects individual liberty. To him, the Rule of Law is not of overriding importance but rather one of many competing instruments (from his perspective, like the market or like a government mandate), and one that is more or less worthwhile given the particularities of different contexts. President Obama has signaled that he has collectivist sensibilities and a pragmatist streak, which is to say he is romantic about accomplishing goals that serve the common good using whatever means are required to do so. Thumbs up to the Rule of Law today and in particular contexts, thumbs up to coercive wealth transfers to banks tomorrow.

Though he has declared himself the harbinger of an age in which the size of government should be less of a concern than what works, he has a definitive bias in favor of government projects and against market processes. And historically, governments cause more problems than they solve, whereas markets create wealth and enhance people’s quality of life. Which means that despite mountains of empirical data about what does not work, President Obama may insist on the moral imperative of his collectivist intentions, emphasizing the potential of government to do good (once he makes it work well enough), even though it actually does the opposite.

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A Peaceful Transfer of Power Is a Good Start, But…

by adam on January 20, 2009 · 0 comments

Today, as President Obama takes the oath thingy about upholding the U.S. Constitution— his hand resting not on the Constitution itself, but instead on a book bursting at the seams with befuddling contradictions, cruel prejudices, self-destructive rationales, and death-defying wish-fulfillment fantasies— pundits aplenty will trot out the vapid cliche, “the peaceful transfer of power,” to congratulate the country and its political elites on not resorting to bloody insurrection to install a new president. “America,” cliche-peddlers will propound, “is the envy of the world,” because of this peaceful power transfer business.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against peaceful transfers. I was a half-back when I played football in my youth and always appreciated a decent hand-off at the beginning of a play. However, gushing over a peaceful transfer… of power… strikes me as jumping the gun in light of the obvious and pertinent question, the peaceful transfer of power to do what exactly?

Many people argue that a democratically elected president has earned the consent of the people, such consent being the prerequisite for the just exercise of political power. President Obama won the election fair and square, therefore he has the moral right to use his power to pursue the agenda that ostensibly got him elected. That’s an intuition-friendly notion, but it’s deeply flawed.

The process by which politicians are elected is separate and distinct from the source of an elected official’s moral legitimacy. The democratic means by which an American politician gains power do not justify the ends to which he purposes that power, just as the technical processes by which a bill becomes a law do not magically confer on that law the quality of being just. Tragically, we live in a time when the Constitution is treated primarily as an instructions manual for electing officials and passing laws. But it is fraudulent to assert that laws passed in a “constitutionally” adequate manner are necessarily constitutional. Substance matters, people!

How should elected officials morally justify their use of power?

In America, which is a republic not a democracy, each citizen’s freedom to act and our government’s latitude for passing and enforcing laws should be substantively limited (1) by the inherent value of individual human life and (2) by the concept that no one is above the law (ie, the rule of law). Doesn’t get more basic than this. Every person must be treated as the sole owner of his/her life; no person can be used against his/her will as a means to the ends of others; all laws apply equally to all people.

Another way of saying this is that in a free society, an individual’s actions and a legislature’s laws are justified by their consistent respect for private property rights, that is, each individual’s inviolable right to the use of his/her body, mind, labor, land, and belongings.

The most profound stimulus program that our government could possibly undertake would be based on (1) repealing all laws that regulate, tax, or punish nonviolent behavior, entrepreneurial activity, and voluntary trades and (2) repealing all laws that confer advantages and/or wealth on some at the involuntary expense of others. Respecting individual liberty and the rule of law would result in government we can afford and a sustainable, dynamic, wealth and innovation producing economy. And here’s the thing: President Obama has the power to advance this approach to our country’s dismal economic situation, which is itself a product of disrespecting individual liberty and undermining the rule of law.  Alas, don’t hold your breath. President Obama is launching his first term with politics-as-usual, nearly a trillion dollars worth of “stimulus” spending, using money he’ll borrow from ours and future generations’ earnings. Moreover, Obama promises more trillions in deficit spending to come. Audaciously, I hope that he’ll change his mind, give me something I can believe in, like real change, for example. Otherwise, I hope he’ll be thwarted by sensible opponents, though the ranks of the sensible are thin.

A peaceful transfer of power is a good start, but President Obama will be judged on what he did with the ball after the hand-off.  Here’s some of what I’ll be paying attention to over the next four years.

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• To what extent will President Obama use his power to repeal/weaken/affirm/strengthen laws that interfere with my freedom to make decisions about the use and treatment of my body? In medical, recreational, reproductive, and sexual contexts, will President Obama leave me free to make choices and pursue options on my own, or intervene in ways that criminalize peaceful options or increase the costs of legal ones? Will he interfere with the market processes that generate more and less costly health care options, or will he wedge more bureaucracy between me and health care professionals? Will he set free people who are wasting away in jail for simple drug possession/drug use/or selling to adults?

• To what extent will President Obama interfere with my freedom and ability to make money, invest capital, hire employees, grow my business. Will he restrict nonviolent career options? Will he reject the bullying techniques of unions? Will he support or reject price floors on labor, tariffs, wealth transfers to groups of people or industries? Will he eliminate/decrease/increase taxes on capital gains? Will he use the tax code to discriminate against levels of success? Will he abolish the Department of Agriculture, or at the very least eliminate the sinful practice of paying farmers not to grow (or even to destroy) crops? Will he downsize or upsize the federal government? Will he get the government out of the retirement insurance business or raise taxes to meet shortfalls?

* To what extent will President Obama expand or reduce the global U.S. military presence? Will he repeal the Patriot Act? Will he engage in preemptive interventions? Will he only engage in foreign military actions after a proper declaration of war by Congress?

My libertylovin’ fingers are crossed on both hands.

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