How about slavery?  Suppose one of your friends began to argue in earnest that slavery was not only beneficial in history because the nations of the west were built on free labor from whipped African backs, but that the nations of the world need to return to a slave economy.  If it’s the only political position they will entertain, would you continue to be their friend?

But suppose to justify the slavery this person said things like, “these people simply cannot take care of themselves,” “they’re far too simple and stupid to live free,” and “they need to be protected from the world and their own bad behavior.”  Could you see how they might have a point?

Suppose this person said the slaves would be allowed to choose their masters and the work they did to serve those masters.  It might be a bit arduous and complicated for the slaves to change their positions, or it may be made simpler with bribes and favors.  But either way the slaves may not work if they don’t have a master’s even hand to guide them.  And if they work for themselves, their most recent master may hunt them down and force them to work for him or even kill them if they resist.  Would that convince you to believe in the righteousness of this person’s plan?

Suppose that the slaves this person wants to create were allowed by their master to keep as much as half of what they earned after all accounts with the master were settled—perhaps they could keep as much as three quarters if they weren’t able to earn much—Instead of just the shacks and rags and vegetable patches that were the bulk of the possessions of slaves in the US of old.  And suppose also the slaves were allowed to trade what they were allowed to keep with other slaves in ways approved of by the masters.  Would you accept their position as reasonable then?

Suppose this person insisted everybody—both you and he included—should be enslaved this way.  And suppose instead of “slaves” this person says these people should be called “citizens,” that the nations of the world may be their masters, and that most of the rest of the people in the world have already submitted to this position.  Would that make the enslavement they propose tolerable?

Regards,
Chris Hitzroth

May 21, 2009

Political Intolerance was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

So when you hear anyone say that the level of taxation in a country should be based on the “ability to pay”, be very afraid. These people are not only coming for your money. They’re coming for your economic liberty too. Ultimately, that means they’re after your political liberty as well.

Progressive taxation is the idea the larger your disposable income, the larger percentage of that income you ’should’ pay in taxes. Proponents of it—and these days nearly everyone one is—claim it is more ‘fair.” But let’s be honest and call things by their right names and say what progressive taxation is really about.

Even John Stuart Mill, who favoured it, called progressive taxation “a mild form of robbery.” That’s because progressive taxation is about using the tax code to redistribute wealth. It’s base on the class-warfare idea that the rich get rich illicitly and conspire to keep the riches of society for themselves. It uses the law (coercion) to correct what some people see as the social and economic injustice meted out by the marketplace.

But how people treat private property (and wealth IS private property) determines the character of society. A society that promotes the idea of wealth accumulation and that everyone can get rich is one in which standards of living will rise over time. It doesn’t mean getting wealthy is the only or even the most important ambition in life. That’s a matter of personal choice and values. But it just means that if you want to raise standards of living over time, you should guard economic liberty and not use taxation to punish personal incentives.

The only fair argument for progressive taxation is that indirect taxes (consumption taxes) hit the poor harder than they hit the rich. This is certainly true for taxes on consumption goods. But it is not true for income taxes, most of which the poor do not pay anyway. A tax on Gucci handbags is less onerous than a tax on a slab of beer. But that doesn’t justify the argument that just because you can pay more taxes, you should.

When is it ever right for a man to come in to your home and take what’s yours simply because he’d decided that someone else needs it more? And how is the government arbitrarily deciding to raise income tax rates on only certain citizens, based on their ability to pay, any different? Yet that’s the argument for progressive taxation in the modern world. And most people seem to think it’s fair and just.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean that free people can’t use legislatures to levy taxes in order to pay for projects they believe should be provided by the State, like roads, bridges and other infrastructure. But there is a difference between that kind of public spending and public spending financed by wealth redistribution to achieve particular social and economic outcomes.

How did we get to the point in civil society where a democratic majority that does not pay taxes can, through its elected representatives, legally confiscate the wealth of a minority? Friederich Hayek gives the history in, The Constitution of Liberty.

“As is true of many similar measures, progressive taxation has assumed its present importance as a result of having been smuggled in under false pretences. When at the time of the French Revolution and again during the socialist agitation preceding the revolutions of 1848 it was frankly advocated as a means of redistributing incomes, it was decisively rejected. “One ought to execute the author and not the project,” was the liberal Turgot’s indignant response to some early proposals of this sort.

“When in the 1830’s they came to be more widely advocated, J.R. McCulloch expressed the chief objection in the often quoted statement: ‘The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without a rudder or compass, and there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit.’”

“In 1848,” Hayek continues, “Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels frankly proposed ‘a heavy progressive or graduated income tax’ as one of the measures by which, after the first stage of the revolution, ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state.’

And these measures they described as ‘means of despotic inroads on the right of property, and on the condition of bourgeois production…measures…which appear economically insufficient and untenable but which, in the course of the movement out strip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.’”

If Marx and Engels are to be taken at their word, progressive taxation was never about fairness. It was about putting production “in the hands of the State” and “revolutitionising the mode of production.” In the world of State-run capitalism, this is what we seem like we’re headed towards.

Now, we can take a step back and ask whether a State-run, union owned Chrysler makes a better car than the shareholder owned management-run Chrysler. It’s a fair enough question. We’d argue that government-built and designed cars are going to be about as appealing as a leather boot for breakfast. But that is not really the point.

The point is that the politicians are lying to you about the goal of progressive taxation. The goal is not to produce more “fairness” or “social justice.” It’s to place the State at the centre of economic production, so it can regulate and tax with impunity.

There is both a psychological and crassly economic motive to this movement to displace the free market with the State as the organiser of economic life. The smarty pants elitists in both political parties, with their ties to union and corporate money, really believe the world would be better off it was run be benevolent bureaucratic despots. Or maybe using coercive taxation to steal from the rich is simply envy-based class politics, a kind of populist theft conducted with the consent of a hi-jacked system for passing laws.

Once you go down this road of socking it to the rich instead of reducing spending, you get higher and higher rates of taxation that eventually shrink the economy. Britain adopted the income tax in 1910 and the U.S in 1913. At the time, the top tax rates on income were 8.25% and 7% respectively. Yet within 30 years, thanks to the Great Depression and the World Wars, those rates had risen to 97.5% and 91% respectively.

“Thus in the space of a single generation,” Hayek writes, “what nearly all the supporters of progressive taxation had for half a century asserted could not happen came to pass…All attempts to justify these rates on the basis of capacity to pay was, in consequence, soon abandoned and supporters reverted to the original, but long avoided, justification of the progression as means of brining about a more just distribution of income.”

How much a man should reasonably a pay to the State was no longer an economic question about his ‘ability to pay.’ It was revealed as the purely political decision it always was. Or as Hayek says, it’s “an attempt to impose on society a pattern of distribution determined by majority decision.”

That’s what we meant by the character of society. Do you want to live in a country where over 50% of a man’s income can be taken from him simply because the majority votes for it? In that kind of country you want to live in, where you have no real property rights and you don’t have equality before the law.

Upward income mobility is undermined in this kind of society. People don’t try to get rich because there’s no point in it if your gains are going to be confiscated. The net result of decades of progressive taxation is lower capital formulation, more consumption, less production, and ultimately a lower standard of living for everyone.

In that society, your only means of social and economic advancement is based on your personal connections and political patronage. Not surprisingly, in that society, politicians exercise enormous power. And decisions are not made by businesses that aim to offer consumers better products and services at lower prices; they are made by politicians who aim to cement their electoral position by favouring certain constituencies.

Progressive taxation has nothing to do with fairness, justice, or equality. It is unfair, unjust, an unequal. But hey, if that’s the kind of country you want to live in, or if you’re someone who’s getting the check instead of writing it, that might not seem like such a bad deal.

We’d just advise you to prepare for a lifetime of dependency on busybody politicians who become increasingly grasping, moralistic, and intrusive. If you’re a free man, you’d better pack your bags and look for some other luckier country.

This is not to glorify getting rich as the most important thing in this world (or any other world.) It isn’t. And there are much more important things in life. Whether you choose to pursue material gain is up to you.

And just as a government should not use the tax code to punish the rich, it ought to quit tinkering with it and providing so many deductions and rebates that allow anyone with a good accountant to avoid paying large income taxes. A much simpler taxation system based on consumption would be fairer for everyone and it would force the government to finally live within its means.

Of course that probably won’t happen. Ever. But it would be nice to think so. In the meantime, a society that discourages wealth creation and capital formation through so-called progressive taxation is eventually going to make itself a lot poorer and a lot less free.

Regards,
Dan Denning
Australian Daily Reckoning

May 15, 2009

Progressive Taxation, an Assault on Liberty was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

I am fairly vocal amongst my friends (and a few strangers) regarding my bias towards limited government.  The typical response I get is something along the lines of, “Are you crazy, America is the freest country in the world!”  I think the secondhand dealers in information (public school teachers and the sensationalist media amongst others) have done a great job of indoctrinating the general population into believing that we are truly free.  They really don’t notice the subtle effects of a new law here and a new regulation there.  It’s kind of like the curse of income tax withholding where by stealing our hard-earned money a little bit at a time (each paycheck) we don’t notice that we are being robbed.  I feel that our freedom is being stolen a little bit at a time.  To help drive home the point, I’ll use an average day in my life as an example.

My alarm goes off each morning somewhere between 6 and 7 am.  I am not a big fan of the buzzer so I typically set my alarm to “radio” mode.  I haven’t paid up for satellite radio, so I still wake up to “Free FM.”  Well, I am awake for a whole 10 seconds and here is my first interaction with Big Brother.  The beast known as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a complete stranglehold on what we hear over the radio waves.  As is the case with the majority of government regulation, we supposedly need the FCC to “protect” the people.  In this particular case, we are being protected from offensive material on the airwaves.  Of course, “offensive” is defined by whoever happens to be calling the shots at the FCC at the time.

Next, it’s time for breakfast!  Thank goodness for those FDA-mandated nutritional labels.  Without those, I would be a confused soul eating nothing but glazed donuts and breakfast sausages.  The FDA says it best on their website under their 2009 budget recap, “FDA affects the lives of every American every day.”  After polishing off my breakfast, I head to the shower.  I have to be honest with you: I didn’t really think about how the federal government regulates my showering activities until I read an entertaining article by Jeffery Tucker which discusses the Department of Energy water-pressure regulations.  I proceed to get dressed and get ready to leave my house.  Just to recap, I have already rubbed shoulders with the FCC (2009 budget of $339 Million), Department of Energy (2009 budget request of $25 Billion) and the FDA ($2.4 Billion).  I haven’t even left the house yet!

I live in Chicago, so to avoid the perpetual road construction and ensuing traffic, I typically commute via public transportation, constructed and managed by the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA).  The CTA’s motto is “On-Time, Clean, Safe, Friendly.”  If you polled 100 CTA riders on the accuracy of the above motto, my guess is 99 of them would proceed to laugh in your face.  Now — of course — if you only ride the CTA through the nice parts of town where political pandering results in significantly more expenditures on amenities, you might agree with their motto (except for the on-time part).  I happen to ride the CTA (both busses and trains) throughout the entire city, and I can ensure you that, “Late, Dirty, Dangerous, Arrogant” would be a better slogan.  But, that doesn’t solicit additional state/federal funding, so I don’t expect to see that one used in any marketing materials in the near future.

It would be one thing if the CTA were fully funded by its riders so that some aspect of market forces would take hold.  That isn’t the case.  As you can see from page 20 of the 144-page 2009 proposed budget, CTA only recovers only 53% of its expenses through system-generated revenue.  The remaining $723 million is footed by taxpayers, many of whom don’t ride the CTA (or even live in Chicago).

Well, I’m finally at work, and now the fun really begins.  Without getting into too many details, I provide investment advisory services to qualified retirement plans.  In short, this means that I probably could not have chosen a more regulated industry (maybe health care, but I am not conceding this one just yet).  In short, I deal with the Department of Labor (DOL), the IRS, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the State of Illinois, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of the Treasury, and a host of others that I probably don’t even know about.

In fact, many of these organizations have underlying agencies that focus on different areas of the big picture (for example the DOL has no fewer than 27 different sub-agencies).  Is it really a wonder that America is facing a retirement funding problem?  How much wealth is being destroyed by all of these agencies and their vague, subjective, regulations?  There is only so much to go around, not to mention the opportunity cost of this perverse anti-business mentality.  We have to remember that every $1 that funds one of these agencies is $1 siphoned out of the pockets of taxpaying citizens (or created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve) that could have been put to more productive use elsewhere.

Well, it’s been a long day, and its time to go home.  I board the CTA train (after a 15-minute delay) and finally get home for some R&R.  I flip on the TV (please refer to FCC comments above), for about an hour before I hit the sack for the night.  As I lay in bed, dreaming of life in a truly free society where free trade, personal property, and low taxes rule the day, I feel a scratching sensation on my cheek.  Low and behold, I haven’t even escaped Leviathan in my bed.  The scratching sensation I feel is from the tag attached to my pillow that tells me that my pillow meets the requirements of The Bureau of Home Furnishings Technical Bulletin # 117.

Regards,
Chris Lakumb

May 8, 2009

An Average Day in a Free Country was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

But let’s put this into perspective. In December, the non-farm payroll (NFP) figure was 577,000 jobs lost. In January, the NFP figure was a worsening 598,000 jobs lost. Then in February, 651,000 jobs lost. But that incredible decline is not the whole story.

The December numbers were revised to 684,000 — an additional 107,000 jobs lost. January’s number was also revised, up to 655,00 — an additional 57,000 jobs lost. What are the odds that the brutal February numbers are going to stand pat or get better? As I have said many times, some people have a vested interest in controlling (manipulating) these report numbers. A certain amount of fear is useful among the populace in the midst of a crisis.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel said, “You never want a serious crisis go to waste. This crisis [the economic turndown] provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that thought by saying “never waste a good crisis” in Brussels as she droned on about climate change.

Just before his election, Barack Obama proclaimed, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Sadly, the fundamental change has already begun.

A New York Times reporter asked the president if he was a socialist. Obama dismissed it as a joke, but just a few hours earlier, Hugo Chavez, socialist president of Venezuela, invited Obama to, “Come with us on the road to socialism. This is the only path. Imagine a socialist revolution in the United States.”

Disgusting. Unnerving. Scary.

While a certain amount of fear may be helpful, panic and pandemonium would be absolutely counterproductive. I think it is in the government’s best interest at this point not to release the full damage in the employment market. Frankly, I am taking bets that the next set of jobless numbers will include a revision for this month that will put the February numbers at 725,000 jobs lost. That would put the official unemployment rate at just over 9%.

Of course, as it stands, we need to understand that the unemployment rate in and of itself is an average. The average figure is mitigated by categories on the lower end of the spectrum. For February, the lower categories of unemployment were Managerial and Professional Positions at 4.5% and 3.5% respectively. Not too disturbing…

But when we look at the other pieces of the puzzle, we see double-digit unemployment among Hispanics (10.9%), and African Americans (13.4%).

By broad category, we see the following unemployment news:

• Construction workers — 22.0%
• Farm and Forestry — 22.0%
• Production — 13.7%
• Transportation — 12.5%

These sectors will only continue to worsen, and they may in fact be worse already.

“So why,” do you ask, “are you going to such lengths to describe the gloominess of the situation?”

Today, it serves as the springboard for the commentary, and the lesson of the week.

John Marshall, Supreme Court Justice from 1801-35, left us this memorable quote: “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” It is well worth memorizing. But we are watching it at work all around us. Here is what it has to do with you and me.

When governments levy taxes, and there is some need to do so, they act as a parasite. Their modus operandi is to take, but never to create. The State’s real role is to be a negative influence, not a positive one. They are to inhibit evil on a personal level by constricting crimes against citizens. They are to inhibit evil on a federal level by acting against powers that would attack us.

Beyond there, expansions become positivistic. They become world improvements. Better roads. Better schools. Better commerce. Better parks. Better art. Better money. Better housing. Better health. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam.

The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel relates the efforts of the first State to improve its lot in life. “The people are one (of one mind—Ed.). And now nothing will be withheld from them which they have imagined to do.”

This is the State mantra: “Yes, we can!” And States imagine that they can do anything. All they need is a few more bucks and a few more taxpayers who think that what they want to do next is just the best idea since sliced bread. But what they (the taxpayers) forget is that the government is a net destroyer of wealth. In order to “create” anything, they must take wealth from whoever is currently holding it.

In our day we are seeing the net effects of taxing everything in sight…

When you tax a man’s income, his income goes down. The power to tax is the power to destroy.

When you tax a man’s income, you are taxing his employment. So unemployment rises and employment goes down. The power to tax is the power to destroy.

When you tax a man’s ability to work, he works less. True productivity goes down. The power to tax is the power to destroy.

When you tax a man’s work, you tax the chief source of his freedom. “Six days thou shalt labor…” The power to tax is the power to destroy.

You see, a government can tax all kinds of income for all kinds of reasons.

But not Liberty.

Freedom is beyond a government’s ability to control (although they will try!). Freedom comes from God. Our Creator endows men with certain unalienable rights. Among them is Liberty. When a government tries to tax Freedom, it moves to different shores. It packs up all its inestimable benefits and heads to lands where it will be treated better. Where it will get a better reception. Where people who have been enslaved too long hunger and yearn for its gifts. To citizens who are willing to lay down their lives to secure it and fight back the forces of bondage to keep it.

But we have forgotten such things. We are not the noble people we once were. Much of our citizenry is infected with indolence. Multitudes look to the State as the supplier of everything from soup to nuts, cradle to grave, and womb to tomb. You can see it in the faces of ordinary Joes when they light up at getting their “tax refund.” Forgetting the tremendous sum of money the state has already taken, they are just glad to “get something back.”

We have become a nation of slaves. Bound to the idea that the government will provide.

As we come up on the Easter season, it is customary in many homes to watch Cecil B DeMile’s, The Ten Commandments, his depiction of the freeing of God’s children from bondage and slavery. What he doesn’t show is how the people complained shortly after being freed that their lives were too hard. (Because living free isn’t easy.) They said to Moses that they would rather go back to Egypt. They’d rather be slaves.

Hunting for food. Finding water. All this was too much responsibility.

In Egypt, life was simple. Their taskmaster’s brought them food. Their slave-driver’s brought them water. Their lords told them how many bricks to make. (And they were happy to have 100% employment!)

But the rigors of living free were just too much for them.

So it has become in our own day. Men would rather live in servitude to an all-providing State, reveling in their own laziness, than to take up the mantle of responsibility and live free.

That is true of many. But it is not true of all.

It is not true of me. I hope it is not true of you. And I suspect it isn’t. Otherwise we would never have found each other here.

But for the long run, the excessive taxing of wealth and the attempted taxing of Liberty does not bode well for our Motherland. A man reaps what he sows. So does the country in which he lives.

Days to come will find wealth following in the wake of Liberty — shifting to other quarters. We will begin looking for other opportunities in places where freedom reigns supreme. But for now we will have to work with what we have. Money will continue to flow into and out of the major currencies for a while yet.

Regards,
Bill Jenkins

March 20, 2009

The Power to Tax Is the Power to Destroy was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

We’ve lived through eight years of the threat from the Right. It was all about nationalism, militarism, war, torture, state secrets, attacks on privacy, the use of tax funds to subsidize “conservative values,” the outsourcing of government in a fascistic business-government partnership, the banning of products and services that government doesn’t like, the regimentation of educational life, government impositions in the name of security, and so on.

With the end of the Bush years, many of these threats have receded, if only slightly. Consider the problem of nationalism, for example. The neoconservatives who ran the country during the last two Bush terms exploited this dangerous impulse for all it was worth.

If you were not for their wars, you were against America, and hence deserving of jail without trial. The whole ideological apparatus of the Bush years was profoundly anti-intellectual, and while the neocons shouted down anyone who compared their administration to the Third Reich or Mussolini, the ideological comparison was actually quite apt: right-wing government control stems from the same motives of exalting security, discipline, and chauvinism above liberty.

In two short months, however, that ethos has subsided, and it has been replaced by a threat from the Left. It is tragic that Obama should be president at all. If we had a position called “national well-wisher,” “national greeter,” or “national symbol of accomplishment,” he would be perfect for the job. He is elegant, graceful, and articulate, and he inspires people in an unusual way. As chief policymaker, however, he has revealed himself as nothing more than a two-bit socialist.

After all the ghastly statism of the Bush years, you might think that the Left would back off from using power to achieve its aims. Instead, they have learned nothing. The Left has been lying in wait for its chance. As the Obama people entered the White House, it was as if they found a closet labeled “failed ideas of the past.” They opened it and the contents spilled everywhere. They started grabbing things and putting them in the regulatory books and in legislation.

What an amazing pile of junky, worn-out, bogus policy ideas! Equal pay for equal work. Infrastructure spending. More money to the public schools. Socialized medicine. Rock-bottom interest rates. Welfare! Every wish granted by government. Down with business. Down with business failures. Curbs on fat-cat pay. Down with Wall Street. Turn on the money spigots. Expropriate the expropriators. Subsidies for every lifestyle that flies in the face of bourgeois prejudice.

Thus are we again reminded of what a profound threat the Left represents to liberty. It’s been more than a decade now since we’ve seen this at work, and probably longer really. Clinton was a pain, but he was smart enough not to take his reigning ideological framework too seriously. He actually showed some deference to reality from time to time.

The Obamaites are different. They are woefully ignorant of economics. They seem to actually believe all that socialist claptrap that has provided an excuse for innumerable foreign dictators: the idea that government is the source of wealth and can make anything happen with the push of a button.

They see no limits to the possibility that government can make society perfect, righting every perceived social injustice, and bringing prosperity to all via stealing from the haves and giving it to the have-nots. Is there inequality? Mandate equality. Is there deprivation? Provide! Recession? Spend hundreds of billions!

What we have here is not just a profound love of the state; it is a profound confidence in the capacity of the unlimited state to create heaven on earth. How does this square with the idea of human liberty, of social cooperation, and of the rights of all? Herein lies the great mystery of leftism. The Left seems oblivious to the relationship between their chosen means and their ends. It’s not that they hate liberty as such; it is that they believe that it must always take a backseat to other social priorities, like equality. In the end, they have a tendency to build the total state and find themselves taken aback when the whole of society ends up in a cage.

Those Obamaites! So compassionate, loving, universally minded, progressive — except that their ideological cousins managed to starve and destroy whole civilizations. Loyalty to their creed means death, because their ideology is the pathway to the gulag — and for one simple reason: their preferred means of social change is the state. The state is always and everywhere a threat to liberty, and liberty is the basic building block of prosperity and civilization.

Despite the slogans about progress, the upshot of the Obama administration is as deeply reactionary as anything that Bush conjured up. Despite all the hype and hope, what Obama offers is nothing new. It amounts to the robber state and the regimentation of society, a plan that will kill off prosperity and the conditions that allow for it.

The Republicans are right to fight this tendency at every turn, for it represents a radical attack on all things truly American. Worse still, by playing with the printing presses, the policy tendency here is also deeply dangerous. It could destroy the dollar internationally and domestically, igniting a hyperinflation that no one will be able to control once it gets going. One only wishes that the Republicans had been so principled when their president was in charge!

The Obama administration says that we have to give the stimulus time to work. No need. The stimulus will not work. If we manage to pull ourselves out of this slump, it will be despite and not because of this stimulus package.

When putting together my book, I wondered which threat was actually more dangerous for us, the Right or the Left. I’m still not sure, for national socialism and international socialism are in close competition. I ended up focusing on both. It’s a hard truth for Americans to face that neither team in Washington is going to guard what we love the most. That is something we are going to have to face. Liberty is for the citizens to guard themselves.

Regards,
Llewellyn Rockwell
LewRockwell.com

February 18, 2009

The Left in Power was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

No government has the right to exist.

First, I must specify what I mean by a right. We can define a right in many different ways, but the one thing that all conceptions have in common is that they are, ultimately, a justification for the use of force, or more simply, “I’ll kick your ass if you try to take this away.” If I have, for instance, a right to action or property, this means ultimately that I am ethically justified in using force to oppose you if you try to take my freedom or property away.

So far so good but, as for all other ethical principles, the trouble comes with the implementation. The government, for instance, claims the right to extort taxation money for all sorts of actions and trades, including simply working or owning a piece of land. Does it have such a right?

Groups cannot have rights above and beyond those of their component individuals, as only individuals can use violence and determine its validity. Any group is nothing more than the addition of individuals and the property and principles they produce or acquire for the purposes of the group’s activities. Therefore, if the government has the right to tax, meaning that it is justified in using force to take people’s money for its purposes, it must be the case that the individuals composing the government also have that right as individuals.

But it should be clear that no one has such a right. If any random person came to your door and demanded five thousand dollars so he could use it for his own purposes (say, giving it to poor people), you’d probably consider him to be a lunatic. If he drew a gun and threatened you, you’d consider him a dangerous lunatic thief. The only difference between this person and an IRS agent is that we don’t scream “thief!” when an IRS agent does the exact same thing, because, through indoctrination, takeover of many parts of society and sheer threats of force, government is given more legitimacy than a common thief. One cannot fight against the government or the system as a whole, therefore one must submit and forget about the unpleasant truth that one is being exploited.

Statists use many arguments to try to hide this obvious fact. Generally, they claim that government is necessary and that its purposes are essential. But it’s important to remember that all that a government does is control and corrupt production through tax spending and law, getting all sorts of benefits from this control. Government does not stop criminals: it controls and corrupts the production of policing services. Government does not build roads: it controls and corrupts the production of roads. The issue therefore is not how we can produce things, because individuals already do this, but rather how we want production to be controlled. Whose interests do we wish our institutions to pursue, those of the power elite or those of society as a whole? Republicans and Democrats are in the former camp (although they would generally not admit it), while most people who oppose the system would answer the latter. There is a lot more to say on this topic, obviously, but this is the problem as simply expressed as possible.

Another argument used by statists is that the government is justified by the consent of its subjects. This is a strange argument on the face of it, since no one is asked to consent to government before being its subject. The United States Constitution was not verbally or formally consented to by anyone alive, except government employees. But even if it was, we’d have to conclude that it was done under duress, since failure to accept the rules would deprive one of a living. How would anyone possibly say no?

This, by the way, is the basis of a recent argument, made by Charles Johnson and drawing from work by political theorist Crispin Sartwell, which seeks to demonstrate that there can be no such thing as consent to the State. To simplify, the argument says that, the fact that one has no alternative but to submit to the State means that there can be no such thing as consenting to the State, because consent (as opposed to desire or acceptance, which are purely private) can only exist in the presence of alternatives. The obvious statist reply is to claim that one is free to leave, but, notwithstanding the fact that this is not always true and that it also costs a great deal of money, this does not prove that one is consenting to government, since there are governments everywhere one might want to live.

But it’s important for me to point out that, even if either argument was true, they would not solve the problem of rights. Even if every single person in a given society could consent, and consented, to the existence of a government, it would not make the government any less coercive. Even if government was absolutely necessary for some essential function (something which sociological and historical studies disprove conclusively), it would not make government any less exploitative.

The obvious question arises: what does it matter if government is unjustified? They have the guns and “might makes right.” Certainly there is merit to this line of reasoning, not in the sense that might actually does make right (a position so repulsive that few non-insane people would accept its logical consequences), but in the sense that, as the ability to use force is a prerequisite for the expression of rights, might dictates the degree to which one can use one’s inherent rights. In our current society, you have the right to complain, sure, but that right is useless without the power to actually change anything. All it does is make people feel like they’re achieving something of significance, when all they’re doing is talking to a wall.

Now, as for why it matters: because we are all to a certain extent responsible for what happens in our society. The only manner in which a society can change for the better is by an awakening of all those people who know “something” is wrong, with their lives, with the system they live under, but can’t identify what. It is because they keep obeying this system of exploitation that it continues to flourish. As Anselme Bellegarrigue beautifully put it: “You believed until now that tyrants exist? Well! You were wrong, there are only slaves: where no one obeys, no one can command.”

For this to happen, there needs to be a global realization that the emperor has no clothes, both from a moral and from a practical standpoint. We need to get people off the mindset that we have to “save” our capital-democratic system, that if we can just get the right people or the right approach we can mend a process that was broken from the get-go. If you looked for a new car in the classifieds and found one that is advertised as not working, you just wouldn’t buy it. Buying it and then desperately trying to put it back together when you need to go to work would be a fool’s errand.

The belief that “good people” would make government itself become an apparatus dedicated to the well-being of its subjects is contradictory, because people who are so altruistic and dedicated would not need government to begin with. Even the framers of the Constitution, a document which is held as a paragon of freedom and yet gave birth to one of the most dangerous centralized governments in the world, understood this fact:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the  great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

– James Madison

In the statist mindset, there can be only one sort of relation between people, and that is control. Any other mode of relating to others is excluded as being insecure, “not good enough” to keep society running. And if control is the only way we can run society, therefore the only debate left is how this control is to be implemented, whether it is to be implemented in one or three distinct organizations (which is really all that the so-called “checks and balances” of the Constitution are about), whether it is to be run on liberal or conservative principles, whether the supreme ruler should be named by a popularity contest or by the privilege of birth, and so on.

To this view of society we must contrast that of freedom: that each individual should be free to act in accordance with his own values, without being controlled by any exterior determinism. This view should be distinguished from ethical nihilism, which is in fact nothing but the flip side of statism. When might becomes the primary standard, there can be no fixed principles, only the whims of rulers. Any realistic conception of freedom must entail that our institutions, whether political, economic or social, must be constructed and maintained, not on the basis of might, but on the basis of moral principles.

Regards,
Francois Tremblay

January 30, 2009

The Social Non-Contract: Governments Have No Right was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

But with a woman.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that women are antithetical to freedom (though that’s undeniably the case for some married men) — only that what really got me thinking about how Americans perceive freedom came from my brief association with a particular lady not long ago. Here’s how it happened…

After meeting up for some late drinks at a local pub, I spontaneously invited a woman I’d had numerous dates with back to my house. Now, this girl had read a lot of my Whiskey & Gunpowder essays, so she knew what I was all about — trucks, guns, motorcycles, hunting, bourbon whiskeys, the whole deal…

So as she followed me home, I really didn’t think anything of the fact that I had four or five hunting rifles leaning up against the back of the sofa in my living room (I’d gone to the gun range the evening before). Frankly, I was more concerned about whether I had anything she liked to drink, the condition of the bathroom, whether there were dishes in the sink — that kind of stuff.

However, the first thing she said when she came in the door and looked around wasn’t any kind of critique of my housekeeping, but rather, upon spying the rifles:

“Jim, how many guns do you NEED?”

It’s Not Freedom if You Need ‘Um

I’m mentioning my date-gone-sour because it’s emblematic of the fact that a lot of educated people who think they’re all about freedom really aren’t — at least not when the chips hit the table. This woman is a perfect example. She’s smart as a whip, degreed, professional, tuned-in and fancies herself a liberty-minded American…

Yet the first thing that jumps into her mind when she sees the trappings of liberty is the quasi-Marxist notion that its exercise should be tempered by the dictates of practical need.

What’s so tragicomic is that I find this kind of thinking to be typical of how a lot of Americans regard freedoms OTHER people find important — but not necessarily those they indulge in themselves. If I’d said to her “How many pairs of shoes do you need?” or “How many pets do you need?” she’d surely have balked…

I once got this same gun question from an uncle of mine, a man of great temperance, education and intelligence. In the ensuing exchange, he suggested in perfect seriousness that it should be determined, by earnest study and analysis, exactly how many guns and of what types an American could ever encounter a need for — and that the law should be modified to restrict our freedom to own guns beyond the dictates of these criteria!

If NEED were the litmus test of liberty, we would cease to be in any way free. And yet, a lot of Americans use this concept (necessity) as a looking glass when it comes to the freedoms their neighbors enjoy. This is disconcerting to me.

But it isn’t even the most insidious way in which a lot of us look at freedoms all wrong…

The “Balance Sheet” Mentality

Today, it’s the tendency of politicians, commentators, advocates on both sides of an issue — and increasingly, American citizens — to distill the debate about any personal liberties to one of numbers. Statistics, not principles, rule the day.

That’s because there’s an inherent credibility to an argument backed by numbers — they are assumed to be impartial. And they are. It’s only when numbers are contorted by people with an agenda (any time they come out of politicians’ mouths, basically) that they become treacherous, and anything but unbiased.

Think about this for a minute. Is there any liberty-based debate in the public discourse today that doesn’t center on an argument about numbers — that hasn’t become merely a contest of “dueling statistics?” The point of those statistics is always the same: To determine whether a freedom makes bottom-line sense in a twisted equation in which liberty is allowed to stand or fall based solely on its mercantile merits…

The smoking debate is a good example. Few are talking about smoking in terms of its intrinsic value as an exercise in personal freedom. Most only talk about it in terms of economics: Mainly, whether the increased costs of health insurance and medical treatment for both active and passive smokers is greater than the profits bars, restaurants, public sports venues and the like (tobacco-company profits are rarely mentioned) gain from smoking.

Actually, smoking is a great example of a personal freedom that is ensured by bottom-line factors. Politicians may bang the regulatory drums in the name of public wellness and health-care cost savings, but they would never ban smoking outright. They’re all-too-aware of how corporate taxes on hugely profitable tobacco companies, federal excise taxes on cigarettes, and state tax revenues from cigarette sales dwarf any increased costs smoking may incur on society. Even if they didn’t, tobacco-related tax revenues are more immediately meaningful to politicians than any trickle-down economic boon that banning smoking might produce. But I digress…

Numbers also play a huge role in the dialogue about illegal aliens (if you think there’s no personal liberty angle to this issue, wait until we all get national I.D. cards or RFID chips under the auspices of distinguishing citizens from non-citizens). This debate — whether among politicians or pundits in the mainstream media — is appallingly one-dimensional in its focus not on the principle of whether non-citizens should be allowed to live, work, and suck at the public teat in the U.S., but rather on whether illegal aliens are a net boon or drain on our economy!

As though dollars and sense were the sole determining factors in the matter — security, fairness, equality, sovereignty, and the integrity of existing law be damned.

With few exceptions, today’s debate about personal liberties is overwhelmingly focused on need or economics — and driven by statistics. But as I’m about to show you, when numbers drive a discussion of freedom, we become vulnerable to deception on a much greater scale than if that debate focuses principally on principles…

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

There are two main justifications the various levels of government in America use to abrogate your freedom: Saving lives and saving money.

Perhaps the best example of this is the debate over a liberty that almost everyone has been brainwashed into believing it’s a good idea to restrict: Helmet-less motorcycling. As always, this debate has been dominated over the years by the discussion of numbers that SEEM to show that from both a bottom-line and human life standpoint, mandating motorcycle helmets is a no-brainer.

However, as is the case so many times when liberty is shackled, these statistics are an utter sham. Here’s the “Readers’ Digest” version of some hard numbers I included in my article on this topic in May 2006:

“At first glance, most statistics used to support the argument that helmets save lives and/or reduce injuries — or rather, that helmet laws accomplish these things — are compelling. Most of them look like this oft-cited data from California, the state with the most road-registered motorcyclists by far in America:

~~~~~

“Looks like the helmet law reduced brain injuries by more than 53%…

“Let’s put these numbers into perspective: …

• “According to data from the National Association of State Motorcycle Safety Administrators (NASMSA), California motorcycle registrations plummeted in the 4 years following passage of the mandatory helmet law by approximately 20%. This fact alone should result in 20% fewer accidents and brain injuries, all other factors being equal…
• “According to a 1994 UCLA study on the effects of the 1992 California helmet law mandate, in just the 2 years following the law’s passage, the total number of motorcycle accidents decreased by 34.98% (-25.46% in 1992 and -9.52% in 1993)! It stands to reason that brains injuries would also drop by at least this amount…

~~~~~

“These data can point to only one conclusion: When helmets are mandated, bikers ride less, which equals fewer accidents. Any statistics that fail to adjust for this — like most of the raw numbers being trumpeted by the pro-helmet lobby — are bogus…

“But back to the UC San Francisco School of Medicine chart for a moment: Isn’t it odd that the chart only catalogs brain injury hospitalizations, not fatalities? Could this be because the fatalities numbers paint a less-than-flattering picture of helmet usage?

~~~~~

“You’ve already learned that in California, the total number of motorcycle accidents decreased by 35% in the 2 years (1992-1993) following the mandatory helmet law. So, if helmets improved accident survivability, then the ratio of deaths to accidents should have fallen at a greater rate than this during those two years…

“But it didn’t. Based on NASMSA’s records of fatalities per motorcycle registered in the Golden State, the fatality rate in the last year of voluntary helmet use (1991) was approximately 7.55 deaths per 10,000 motorcycle registrations. At the end of 1993, this ratio was approximately 5.30 per ten thousand bikes…

“A difference of only 29.8%.

“This means that the California mandatory helmet law made it MORE likely that a motorcycle crash would result in death to the rider — nearly 15% more likely, in fact.

“California is not alone, either. In similar comparisons of public accident and fatality data across all 50 states in 1993 (the year in which mandatory helmet laws most recently peaked in the U.S.), the numbers look like this:

“As you can see, the rate of accidents per participant nationwide is 14.5% higher (222.21 vs. 194.02) in mandatory helmet states, and the rate of fatalities per accident is also higher, by nearly 3% (2.98 vs. 2.9)…”

Stay with me here. Now I’m going to relate all of this helmet talk back to the “balance sheet” idea…

Power Politics of the “Golden” Rule

My home state, Maryland, passed its helmet law at the same time as California (1992) on the grounds that it would save both lives AND money — since it would eliminate the state’s long-term care costs of those uninsured riders who were hospitalized with head injuries helmets would have prevented. Assuming that the California data would hold roughly true in the Old Line State, this would indeed likely have been the case, even adjusting for a similar decline in registrations and rider-ship…

However, nary a peep was made during the pre-mandate discourse about the negative economic impact Maryland’s bars, restaurants, motels, gas stations, bike dealerships and cycle parts and service centers would have sustained from a drastic decrease in rider participation in response to a helmet law. This number would surely have far exceeded the fiscal liabilities involved with treating brain injuries of the uninsured.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: If bottom-line concerns really are the “Golden Rule” of legislation, why’d Maryland and California politicians pass helmet laws that seemingly subtracted from their real-world bottom lines in the early 1990s?

Because the Federal government bribed them to.

At the tail end of 1991, the sweeping Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) was signed into law by Congress. Among other liberty-quashing, government-expanding, commerce-shackling and public-payroll-increasing provisions, that law revived millions of dollars in dormant-since-the-‘70s incentives to states that had passed both car seat-belt and motorcycle helmet laws. Some of this money was earmarked for specific transportation-related programs, and some of it was discretionary for states to spend as they pleased.

Basically, since the Feds couldn’t pass a national helmet mandate without looking iron-fisted, they simply dangled a few million bucks in tax-pork bride money in front of state legislatures, and some of the more greedy ones (Maryland and California) took the bait. It’s hardly a coincidence that both these states enacted helmet laws in 1992.

What this proves to me — and what it should prove to any thinking American — is that raw, liquid money in their hands is more important to politicians than likely far greater sums infused into the economies of their home states…

That state road-maintenance and other low-wage jobs paid for by federally subsidized pork are more important to them than private-sector jobs lost in their own districts by needlessly limiting freedom…

And that it’s more important for them to be able to say, even falsely, that they “saved lives” and “created jobs” than it is for them to say they preserved liberty and allowed the free market to find its own unfettered economic equilibrium…

My point is that limiting personal liberties — smoking, drinking, helmet-wearing, gun-carrying, kite-flying, you name it — is almost always hostile to the real-world, entrepreneurial bottom line. But such restrictions are often favorable to the bottom lines politicians care about: Image, pork money, tax revenue, votes and government jobs.

And so they become the law.

Rhetorical Red Herrings

To me, there’s something even scarier than the fact that our government, from Capitol Hill on down to the town hall in Podunk, Georgia, is doing everything it can — through its own perverse bureaucratic alchemy of laws, lies, rhetoric, taxation and regulation — to convert various chunks of our liberty into money in their pockets…

That’s the fact that we’re all thinking in their terms about it.

Like quick-draw artists in Old West movies, pundits in the media, on the Boards of special interest groups and even around the dinner table go into arguments and debates armed NOT with simple reason and the fundamental righteousness of liberty, but with numbers they can sling at the drop of a stat.

And like I’ve shown with the helmet law example, in many cases, those numbers are colored, skewed, pared down and stacked to prove one point and not the other…

This is the end result of a calculated move by government, perpetuated by the dim bulbs running the lap-dog media. On the one hand, they’re programmed us to see things only in terms of dollars and cents — and on the other, they’ve obfuscated, dumbed-down, and co-opted the debate to the point where fundamental American principles get buried under stacks of irrelevant statistics, never to see the light of day.

It’s a three-part formula that campaign managers, hired-gun pollsters, and PR slicks know all too well:

1) First, make people greedy by threatening their bottom lines, or fearful by threatening their safety. (“Drinking is costly to society — if we don’t pass this law lowering the DWI standard to .000000000000008, we’ll have to raise taxes,” or “A gun in the home is more likely to harm the family than an intruder — if we don’t outlaw them, kids will die!”)

2) Second, show them numbers — real or not, it makes no difference — that outrage them and support abrogating freedom. (“Just look at how much money these invalided motorcyclists and seat-belt-less drivers are costing the rest of us decent, hard-working people!”)

3) Finally, pit freedoms against each other to make folks think they’re patriotic for restricting OTHER Americans’ liberties. (“These smoking libertines are threatening your freedom to go where you want without risking emphysema yourself!”)

It’s a total racket, too. Politicians know that by definition, practitioners of any single liberty are in the MINORITY. Far more people don’t smoke than do. Loads more people don’t ride motorcycles than do. There are a lot more non-skiers than there are skiers. There are fewer gun owners than those without any firearms (though not by as much as you might think)…

Therefore, it’s relatively easy to limit any single liberty by majority vote. All our leaders have to do is give us a red herring to look at — like a bunch of statistics — and we’ll forget all about the fact that liberty is its own reward…

And it’s worth paying for even if the numbers really don’t validate it.

Bottom Lines on Liberty: Theirs and Ours

Though I often use the terms liberty and freedom interchangeably, to my way of thinking, liberty most accurately refers not to those fundamental freedoms that are guaranteed to us by law (e.g. see Bill of Rights, the)…

But rather to all those things that aren’t explicitly protected by law.

In other words, everything Americans are supposed to be able to do without fretting about Big Brother busting them for no good reason. Ideally, this should mean (and it used to) that you can do just about anything you want to — especially on your own property — as long as it’s not directly harming anyone else. That’s the TRUE American model, handed down from Locke, Rousseau and others the Constitution’s framers thought were onto something…

Now think about this for a minute: If the “balance sheet” mentality that has driven the changes in just one liberty — like motorcycle helmet legislation — were to become the boilerplate model for laws concerning all kinds of other liberties, what kinds of things would still be allowed in America at the end of the day?

Only those liberties that can pass a societal bottom-line bean-counter test?

Or would it be only those that contribute to government’s bottom-line?

Here’s OUR bottom line, as American citizens: Liberty isn’t always safe, sensible or good for us. It isn’t always noble, and it isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always tasteful or moral or high-minded. It isn’t always profitable and it doesn’t always add up in the “plus” column on paper…

But it shouldn’t have to, because liberty is always important. It has value on its own, and is almost always worth whatever it costs us. And if we’re going to limit it, there should have to be a damn good reason for it.

It’s my great fear that if “we” — I mean people like me in the fringe media and you at the dinner table and in the town hall — don’t start re-directing the liberty debate back toward principles and away from mere principal, none of us may end up being able to do so many of the things that makes our lives worth living with passion.

I also think that as we’re about to vote on a measure or candidate who supports limiting the exercise of some liberty we find personally offensive, we should all stop and ask ourselves this question…

When some money-grubbing, headline-grabbing politician puts MY favorite freedom in the crosshairs, will those whose right to liberty I’m betraying right now stand up for ME?

Always lobbying for liberty,

Jim Amrhein
Freedoms Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

July 16, 2007

The Liberty Equation was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder