Free Market Rhetoric, Indeed!

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

During college, I had an elderly professor from Hungary who, it was rumored, still had fragments of a bullet in his back because he had the temerity to vote against Communist rule with his feet. That bullet came to mind yesterday when I ran across a pair of news stories about people avoiding confiscatory tax rates in America and what governments are starting to do about it.

First, New York is hemorrhaging productive citizens:

More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.

The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

"The Empire State is being drained of an invaluable resource -- people," the report said.
Except for the story's emphasis on how much loot these people are taking with them, I agree with that last line. Were I a New Yorker, I'd be concerned that there were fewer opportunities to trade with those who left. Forget my taxes or the replacement of those who left with the less productive and parasites: These new people would mostly not be a problem but for the fact that the welfare state turns many of them into problems by chaining them to anyone who hasn't left yet.

Fortunately, New York can't prevent people from fleeing, but if you haven't left yet, your state might take a cue from Chicago and do what it can along these lines:
Chicago and Cook County residents aren't the only ones about to get shocking tax news; the city is debuting a "tax whistle-blower" plan that could turn neighbor against neighbor in Chicago's business community. [minor format edits]
The bullets haven't started flying yet, but on a national level, the gun is already cocked. Recall that there is already an emigration charge for people who renounce their American citizenship for tax purposes and that both parties collaborated on the law, which Bush signed. Interestingly, the bill includes a measure to confer benefits to soldiers, giving it a pro-American veneer that will mollify the unobservant.

That bone tossed towards the patriotic and the fact that a Republican President signed the exit tax into law remind me of something else: Glenn Reynolds points to a Libertarian's blog posting on a Robert Samuelson piece about the physician slavery debate in Congress. Specifically, Samuelson notes that Democrats are now using terms associated with the free market to re-brand socialized medicine.

Samuelson calls that "genius," and the Libertarians seem pretty impressed with that observation, but this is nothing new or rare at all. As another example look no further than the Chicago story above, where a tax official quoted about the new tax snitch program refers to the bounties as an "incentive."

More to the point, I've been on this scent for a very long time.

Has anyone ever heard of "cap-and-trade?" That government fuel rationing scheme sounds enough like capitalism for Arnold Schwarzenegger (who once fled socialism himself) to back it and tout it as a "free market" solution to global warming. Or "privatization" of infrastructure that merely replaces a socialist arrangement with a fascist one?

Republicans have been branding statism as capitalism for a very long time. There's no "genius" in the Democrats applying new labels to their various schemes. That's just monkey see, monkey do -- and by a monkey very slow on the uptake at that.

If you want to call a deception that will make America less free if people fall for it "genius," you will have to dig a little deeper. Anyone can see the veneer peeling from the wetted, dripping particle board in the above examples. Think of a freshly-varnished chair made of fine, but rotting wood and you'll get the idea of what "genius" is really like.

For "genius" of this kind, consider a group that makes lots of hay out of the similarity between our two big government political parties and the fact that their policies will lead to tyranny. Consider further that in the process of doing so, this group is constantly plagiarizing the conclusions of a brilliant political philosopher, even to the point of glomming on to the popularity of one of her most famous works -- while at the same time smearing its author as "intolerant" and "dogmatic" as a means of belittling the principles she used to reach the conclusions they're plagiarizing. Such a group will pose as an "alternative" to the main two parties, while selling the exact same product not just in a different bottle, but with different flavoring. That group is the Libertarian Party.

To start to comprehend this deception, one must ask: "What is the essential thing wrong with tyranny?" To appreciate the answer, "It violates individual rights," one must know what rights are, which means knowing what man is and why rights are important. (This is just where one has to begin.) One must also understand the nature of physical force and the moral difference between initiating it against another man and using it in retaliation in self-defense. Only after one has done this can he see why this question is important, consider how best to protect himself from others who will seek to harm him through physical force, and consider whether and how to delegate his retaliatory force to others in order to form a proper government.

The Libertarians pretend that no such careful thought is necessary, and that one can simply destroy all government to achieve freedom. They take the moral principle that Ayn Rand discovered that man should not initiate force against others out of context and misapply it to politics in order to pass off anarchism as capitalism. (The ones who do not actually advocate anarchy help those who do by pretending that this is a minor quibble.) To them, government as such is a bad thing. This is not true.

A hint of the rot comes when one tests the chair: Since Libertarians reject thinking in terms of principles, they frequently react to the fair question of how an individual will be protected from the initiation of force under anarchy any better than under a dictatorship with smears like that the one noted above and with insults. As Nick Provenzo once put it so well, "Want to enrage a Libertarian? It's easy. Just have standards." (Obviously, this is no refutation of Libertarianism, but it should cause one to wonder what exactly is going on.)

Caveat emptor. Just because someone can correctly point out the deficiencies in the products currently on the market does not mean that what he is selling is any good. Just because someone says that freedom is cheap doesn't mean it is. The struggle for freedom is difficult and will be lost without careful, principled thought on the part of pro-freedom intellectuals about fundamental issues, of which non-initiation of force is neither fundamental enough to serve as a starting point nor even meaningful outside such a context.

If a slave market is not capitalism, neither is anarchy freedom. Capitalism does not exist when rights are violated and rights are not protected without a proper government. And I don't care how good that might sound: Do not take my word for it. Do not take Ayn Rand's word for it, either. She can make your thinking easier, but obviously, she can't do it for you. Your agreement will mean nothing unless you understand what all of that means for yourself.

-- CAV

14 comments:

Rob said...

What? No buttons for Twitter or Facebook?

Gus Van Horn said...

True, but they're coming as soon as I have some time to edit my blog template.

Rational Education said...

Gus,

while you are updating you may want to know that your blog is in the list of networkedblogs at http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/gus_van_horn/
The application is easily accessed by individuals on facebook and added to profiles for blogs that people follow -I have yours and 5 others on my list. I get all the blogs with latest updates on one page thru this application. Also you may want to claim yourself as the author of the blog -it currently stands as author unknown!

Jasmine

Gus Van Horn said...

Jasmine,

Thanks for mentioning that, too. Sounds like I might need to make a general call for this sort of thing on my next roundup post.

Gus

Steve D said...

Gus,

Great post. Not a lot to add.

"Do not take my word for it. Do not take Ayn Rand's word for it, either. She can make your thinking easier, but obviously, she can't do it for you. Your agreement will mean nothing unless you understand what all of that means for yourself."

It is the understanding of how the world works which is so very crucial, especially today. The only way to understand this is to think and keep thinking TO THE CORE. This requires tremendous effort and often considerable time. However, if enough people were to do this, and probably only a small proportion of the total number, it would save the world. This is what Rand did, letting nothing stand in the way of her understanding. We are all capable of it and the choice is up to us.

I have a question, though about a point you put in parentheses.

"(The ones who do not actually advocate anarchy help those who do by pretending that this is a minor quibble.)"

I hadn't noticed this. Do you have examples of this? I don't think it works the other way since those who advocate anarchy usually argue that it is NOT a minor quibble.

Steve

Gus Van Horn said...

Steve,

The whole idea that there can be a big tent among the Libertarians that includes anarchists and "minarchists" fighting for a common cause (freedom or mere destruction of the state?) indicates that the Libertarian Party itself IS such an example.

What is it fighting for? Freedom or destruction of the state?

It's either-or: The fact that an anarchist wants to smash the state while I want to stop Obama from establishing tyranny are not degrees of opposition to the same enemy, but phenomena that differ in KIND to the extent that such an alliance CAN not help my cause (since freedom has to be protected BY a government). Of course, if I help an anarchist achieve his goals, HIS ends are certainly furthered. Destruction is always easier than building.

Gus

Mo said...

yeah it seems anarchists can't differentiate between anti-state and statism

Gus Van Horn said...

Mo,

Some don't, some won't, and some deliberately confuse the issue, be it to promote anarchism intentionally or in a short-sighted attempt to gain "allies" in the fight for freedom.

Gus

Steve D said...

Gus,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my query which was obviously not the main point of your blog entry.

I agree with your second paragraph. I did a double take, however after I read your first paragraph. What I didn't know is that there were anarchists in the Libertarian Party. Is this really the case?

If so, I don't know what is more absurd, the anarchist joining a political party which by its very nature is working towards running the government or the minarchist willing to belong to the same party.

One or the other (or both) can't be acting in a principled manner.

Steve

Gus Van Horn said...

Steve,

I don't know any personally, but given the debate over anarchism that took place within that party and a former in-law's dogged insistence that the LP was "superior" to Objectivism as a movement for not having "litmus tests" (i.e., standards) for membership, I would say it's a pretty safe bet.

As Walter Block once put it:

"[Libertarianism] allows for an amazing diversity.... We've seen priests, monogamists, family men as the fellow-Libertarians of the gays, the sado-masochists, the leather-freaks, and those into what they call 'rational bestiality'.... Only Libertarians could gather together the homosexual motorcycle gang, the acid-dropper fascinated by the price of silver, and the Puerto Rican nationalist immersed in the Austrian school of economics."

Murray Rothbard adds:

"... Libertarianism is a coalition of adherents from all manner of philosophic (or nonphilosophic) positions, including emotivism, hedonism, Kantian a priorism, and many others. My own position grounds Libertarianism on a natural rights theory embedded in a wider system of Aristotelian-Lockean natural law and a realist ontology and metaphysics. But although those of us taking that position believe that only it provides a satisfactory groundwork as a basis for individual liberty, this is an argument within the libertarian camp about the proper basis and grounding of Libertarianism rather than about the doctrine itself."

Given its history, my own past experience interacting with a member of the LP, and the words of these two major libertarian theorists (at least one of whom, Rothbard, was a member of the LP), I would be far more surprised to learn that there were NOT anarchists in the party.

Gus

Mo said...

I don't know about the party but the free state project certainly has anarchists and libertarian conservatives involved. There are some rational minds there but in a large sea of mess including market "socialists" libertines. Truly a big mess.

Gus Van Horn said...

Interesting.

Also interesting is the fact that many anarchist thinkers are regarded as important to libertarian thought. (Block could well be one of these.) Whatever the official position of the LP on anarchists, the movement treats the question of anarchism as an in-house squabble rather than a fundamental issue. That and the frequent collaborations between anarchists and libertarians on things like this (which are, by nature, not merely ad hoc measures), renders the question of whether there are anarchist members of the LP moot.

Steve D said...

Gus,

That's an interesting Wikipedia entry. I didn't realize that about the Libertarian Party. - well I already knew they were a mess but its worse than I thought.

I don't see how you can have a debate without two sides so that's proof enough me.

Steve

Gus Van Horn said...

Steve,

Many better Libertarians, and I have known a few, are initially shocked to learn what a mess their party is.

I suspect that most simply see the results for themselves rather than have someone point them out, as well as why they are a direct consequence of the libertarian approach of dismissing the importance of fundamental ideas.

Most of them simply leave, although I worry a little that too many do so without fully understanding the source of their frustration, and therefore end up cynically rejecting the whole idea of reversing the trend towards statism in America.

Gus