The Roundup Viewpoint section welcomes student opinions; these views reflect the ideas of the writer and not those of The Roundup or Jesuit.
I begin with a story. A thief accosts his victim in the night and presents him with a choice, pay now, or witness the destruction of his livelihood. This coercive control permits the thief to feed off of society. He promises the victim protection, but his coercive tactics further his manipulation of the market. The thief is the state. To cooperate is to engage in a system of infinite and hegemonic violence.
If people did what they advocate the state do on their behalf, we would have them locked up as dangerous criminals.
I present a two-pronged kritik of state coercion. First, I develop a utilitarian and empirical indict of state action. The state fails to deliver what it promises in its attempts to resolve what its bureaucratic pawns identify as “market failures.” It intensifies systematic inequalities and oppression writ large. Second, I present the deontological phase of my thesis. The state is morally illegitimate because it necessarily infringes on the rights to life, liberty, and property ownership inherent to the individual. I then conclude with the forwarding of an alternative worldview, a libertarian praxis as a strive towards individual freedoms.
**Note: I intend to engage in academic dialogue with fellow Roundup opinions, including that of our resident statist Peter Loh. Please tell me why I am wrong.
Capitalism, I’m a big fan:
In my opinion, and in the opinion of most Chicago and Austrian economists, including Nobel prize-winning Milton Friedman, the utilitarian indict of the state is both the most logically sound and persuasive as it is at least partially acknowledged by most and is factually based.
This section is, in reality, a justification of capitalism. The only real point I think needs to be made, since defenses of capitalism are well-established, is two-fold. Capitalism is the antithesis of statism, and the capitalist economy is yet to be properly implemented in today’s mostly statist economies.
Capitalism is the only voluntary and equal economic system and is a prerequisite to freedom. Voluntary and contractual capitalism means that everyone’s best interest decides the allocation of goods in a market. As per F.A. Hayek’s Knowledge Problem, any governing structure can never know enough about a given population to make informed economic decisions in the best interest of everyone. Thus, the only way for a society to prosper is to maximize those liberties that facilitate voluntary participation in an economy.
“Governments never learn. Only people learn.” -Milton Friedman
Since states interfere with human freedoms through taxation, welfare, regulation, and redistribution policies, and states are in control of all modern economies, capitalism has never been properly implemented. While the state can do some good and can at times be a necessary evil, it is most of the time worse for growth, innovation, and economic prosperity than free markets. This is proven empirically by basically all of economic history since the dawn of Western culture and the creation of the United States.
Indeed this makes capitalism and freedom the proper ordering structure for a prosperous and equal society:
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” -Milton Friedman
The State As A God:
A common assumption by a priori statists is that the government is a prerequisite to action on behalf of the general population. Collectivism begins with the desire to help and culminates in the desire to control. This is empirically proven. Take, for example, the communist regimes of the 20th century. The Russian Communist tendencies were facilitated by a desire to be free from aristocratic rule and organize a collectively beneficial society. They were finalized with the dystopian worlds presented in 1984 and One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich.
My critique of collectivism is underpinned by a defense of natural rights.
Natural Law
I argue that there are natural rights intrinsic to all human beings: the rights to life, liberty, and property ownership. The labor theory of property, developed from the Lockean depiction of rights, states that since human labor is required to produce resources and goods, those properties are inextricably linked to the person who created it. The good has, in a sense, become an extension of the person who’s labor was required to create it. Since property belongs to the creator, life and property ownership are inextricably linked.
Taxation and redistribution are, thus, forms of theft, and federal regulations stamp down strives towards freedom and equality, as they limit our ability to labor in a system of contractual obligations. These powers, when given to the state by a naïve populous, tend to culminate in invisible necropolitical violence. The coercive prison systems, the failing border crisis, the war on drugs, and the usage of the military draft (a particularly egregious instance of modern-day slavery) represent empirical manifestations of state biopolitical control which were and have been mostly ignored by the tacit public.
“if one believed in freedom as a supreme value and the proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.” -Sylvester Petro
This is an excellent place to transition to the second part of my moral defense of freedom from state coercion. Freedom is a prerequisite to happiness, and liberty is the obvious ordering principle for a proper society. Capitalism is the empirical example of this, but, ignoring the utilitarian defense, we should “look at how people vote with their feet,” according to Milton Friedman. For example, were people trying to get in or out of Hong Kong before the ownership transition? Do people want to escape from or remain under the totalitarian rule of the Kim regime in North Korea? The power of an absolute state over the livelihoods of their subjects should not be underestimated.
That freedom from coercion is both a fundamental human right and a necessary prerequisite to the value of life is known. The Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights are just a few examples.
All this to say, morally, freedom is a priori. It requires property rights and is a prior question to legitimate government and a life worth living. Any statist who declares the state an end and the individual a means is thus epistemologically bankrupt and ideologically dangerous.
Thus I propose: A decentralized transition towards freedom or, preferably, towards free market capitalism.
The blueprints for my ideal society are difficult to present. I’m advocating a worldview or thought experiment, not a specific set of policies necessarily, although I think there is value in policymaking when discussing the pathway towards my alternative.
Essentially, I advocate a diffusion of federal power into the hands of the states and a development of local polities to replace the union’s status quo governing bodies. This could be achieved a few ways:
- Secession – if the right to property is intrinsic, then it is unacceptable that I can be denied my right to exit the United States and establish my own land as an external political entity. A common example I use is this: If the West Coast disagrees with the United States, they should have the right to secede. If the state of California disagrees with the West, they can secede. Then the city of Arcadia can secede, and the neighborhood of Santa Anita can secede. It is, in effect, an infinitely regressive secession to limit tyranny. For a more detailed explanation, see “Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities” by Ryan McMaken, the editor in chief of the Mises Institute.
- Limiting federal power – we don’t need complete secession and dissolution of the state, but rather, a limiting of its power. This minimization of control would be based around the few principles a federal government should serve to function: providing a court system for the settling of civilian disputes, and providing a military to protect its population from coercion.
Given the framework above for a federal government, or potentially lack thereof, I present the ideal functioning of the local polities.
The decentralized states would erase the idea of the nation state (or, if the federal government still exists, simply minimize the nation state’s tyranny), minimize unnecessary coercion and flawed federal programs, and the federal government would devolve all those responsibilities to local institutions and, in the anarcho-capitalist model, so called “free private cities.” Local Institutions entail a small and localized organization of maybe anarchist, cooperative communities which formulate allocation of resources voluntarily and contractually, and based off the best interest of the community, whether that be the free market or other democratically agreed upon means, as the more local the community becomes, the more possible forms of socialism or anarcho-communism become.
The “free private city model,” as per Titus Gebel (read his book to learn more as I am only relaying a summary of my limited understanding), entails having the governments compete for you. Groups could organize themselves into cities with benefits provided publicly and funded with voluntary taxation which you consent to by choosing to live in the city. These cities must compete to provide the best benefits of education, welfare, and other public goods, thus incentivizing a maximization of costs in favor of the consumer. That’s the invisible hand of the market. If you choose not to live in the city, walk down the road 5 minutes to another piece of land. Ease of transportation is a given in an infinite number of decentralized states. The impacts of the increased borders and potential tyranny warrant their own articles but, in general, it can be said that tyranny is only sustainable in large states. Empirics prove this, as was the case in Nazi Germany, which never achieved immense power to control its population like Soviet Russia did. Land is key to totalitarianism, thus limiting it is a net positive for freedoms.
Whether anarchist or not, these local models of governance function to severely limit the coercion potential of the state. Empirically, smaller states are more just and free. Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Ireland are prime examples.
In conclusion, I seek to warn the reader of the impending tyrannical control that states will soon wield. The threat is ever-growing. Only a strict adherence to a praxis of freedom will create the basis for liberation and sustainability of liberty. Challenging state encroachments on freedoms via legal means is still possible, but our abilities wane every time a new mandate or program is authorized.
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” -Ayn Rand
