In response to a contention that I made in the comments section of an earlier Samizdata.net article that ‘wealth redistribution’ was intrinsically immoral, a commenter replied:
Have you considered that many people consider wealth redistribution morally right, and consider it morally right to use violence to achieve it?
Well I happen to believe in objective (albeit conjectural) truth, and hence objective (and yes, conjectural) morality, so the subjective views of other matter little to me when deciding what is and is not a moral use of violence. I understand that statist people think it is ‘moral’ to take my money under threat of violence. I also know that some people think it ‘moral’ to prevent mixed marriages, ‘moral’ to kill Jews, ‘moral’ to treat women as chattels, ‘moral’ to jail people for sodomy. So what?
To say my property is there for others to help themselves to is to negate the very existence of several (i.e. ‘private’) property, which is of course what paleo-socialists are quite up front about wanting to do and modern socialists want to do in the fascist manner (i.e. allow ‘private’ property whilst regulating its use to the point ownership becomes a meaningless notion).
Yet without several property, there is no modern western civilisation, let alone liberty, so taking my money is not just theft, it is an assault on civilisation itself, and I have no objection to using violence to defend it. I am all in favour of shooting burglars that a home owner finds in their house, so my views on tax collectors and the people who sent them (i.e. anyone who legitimises what they do) should not be hard to figure out. The only reason I am not out shooting people and putting bombs in cars is a purely utilitarian cost/benefit analysis that it is not the most effective way to secure my liberty and the liberty of others. Those who love liberty can (mostly) play a waiting whilst economic reality has its way with the nations just as it did with the Soviet Union, but that does not mean fighting figuratively and literally for liberty is not moral. In fact, it is really one of the most moral reason for fighting there is.
Perry,
one of your remarks in the discussion that preceded this posting was that hospitals INTEND to cure people. Without wishing to completely disparage the heroic efforts of Europe’s biggest army of bureaucrats (the National Health Service): How could they tell?
Well put Perry.
The objective right to private property is simple, if a man does not have the right to keep what he has earned by his own efforts, then what is the purpose of his life? Service to others, (or the State), as the sole justification of his existence? …………Slavery?
When the argument it is put this way, justifiably equating socialism with slavery, most Socialists slither away….
(continued)……However, some socialists and statists do remain and try to justify the confiscation of private property for redistribution on the basis of Marxist “brother love” and Kantian “Duty”…but reality always beats them in the end.
Wealth is of course produced by productive work. Productive is the key word, spending half the day digging a hole and the other half filling it in is hard work but it’s not very productive.
Production requires that people have access to the proper tools. One man can do more digging in five minutes with a backhoe than ten men can do all day with their bare hands.
Productive also implies that the work is making something that people actually want. A factory could spend a week making Yoko Ono CDs, but they still wouldn’t have produced anything of value.
As it turns out, figuring out how to organize work so that it is productive is much harder than doing the actual work. This is why the people that can arrange to bring the tools and workers together so they can make something useful get rich.
But I guess the left doesn’t think it’s ‘fair’ that some people should use their talents (either natural or learned) to their own advantage…
OK.
But, wealth isn’t the only measure of happiness in life. So why not socialize other kinds of human activities as well.
Family, friendship, and free time are all just as important as money. But for a real good laugh imagine trying to socialize sex.
We would have to fill out complex forms under penalty of law every time we got laid. Welfare sex benefits would be available for those that just couldn’t get any. The sexually rich would be forced to have sex with the sexually poor.
Considering how the left is I should probably just shut up about the whole thing before it catches on. Getting fu*ked on my taxes is enough.
While I agree with the tone and message of this posting (my view is that all rights are essentially property rights), this sentence is a little disconcerting:
The only reason I am not out shooting people and putting bombs in cars is a purely utilitarian cost/benefit analysis that it is not the most effective way to secure my liberty and the liberty of others.
So if you knew that putting a bomb in someone’s car would bring about a (more) libertarian state (in which there was less arbitrary taxation in favor of, say, fee-based government services) you would go ahead and do it?
Or perhaps 500 bombs, in the cars of 500 legislators, to bring about a libertarian majority in Congress?
Having a regard for the political process through which tax laws etc are made is an important civic virtue – and that means agreeing to stick with the process even when it doesn’t produce the result you want.
As an alternative, how about: so long as the ability to obtain a redress of my grievances exists, and so long as there is a practical political process for change, I will protest nonsensical and tyrannical tax laws while respecting the ultimate property right – the right not to be murdered – even for those who hold idiotic views.
Perry,
The point was not about what is right or true, but about what real life people *will do*. Simply knowing better is not enough.
Also, if you’re going to quote me, I’d appreciate if you put my name and a link to my blog.
“Family, friendship, and free time are all just as important as money. But for a real good laugh imagine trying to socialize sex.”
Read “Brave New World”. Everything is socialized there, procreation, sex, friendship, and drugs. Far scarier (though less realistic) than “1984”, IMHO.
I look at it in a somewhat Okham’s Razor way. In a free state (not a free government, a neutral state of being) what do transactions revert to? They revert to a simple supply/demand capitalistic state. If you want something, you have to give something for it. If a lot of people want it, you have to give more. There is no natural communist state (except on the very, very small scale where it does work to an extent). That’s the way black markets all over work.
Capitalism is the natural state. It is the one that everything reverts to when a government isn’t there to enforce its policies. IMO, that makes it better. K.I.S.S.
Court, I’m afraid that that is not a good argument in favor of capitalism. People do a lot of stuff with no governments, including going around in marauding bands of thieves.
You could probably even find marxists who agree with you that capitalism is the natural state of humanity, and use that as an argument against it! If capitalism is to be justified (and I think it can be and has been), it must be justified on higher philosophical grounds. Read Milton Friedman’s various books on the subject (of which I’ve read “Free to Choose”), and I think you’ll find much more satisfactory reasons why capitalism is a good system.
According to a comedy routine I heard, ummm, I think it was the Brits …. exploring somewhere for the first time, probably meeting the Native Americans, perhaps a specific tribe, i forget……but anyway, the point was the people they ran into *had no system of ownership*. So, I don’t see how capitalism can be declared the natural state.
(And even if this bit of history is wrong, it’s still conceivable that it could be true of some culture without government)
I will happily agree capitalism is *better* than no system of ownership, I just insist it is not self-evident — it requires knowledge.
allow ‘private’ property whilst regulating its use to the point ownership becomes a meaningless notion
John Prescott’s plan to permit councils to forcibly let out empty houses in the SE is a recent example which disturbs me. I suppose if I go away for a long holiday I’ll have to leave a note in the kitchen window. And what about the proposed 200,000 new houses over 10 years? Did he think a 5-year plan to build 100,000 houses would sound too Stalinist?
Reading Isabel Paterson’s 1943 classic, The God in the Machine, she had a nice defence of property, which goes like this – two men cannot occupy the same space of ground at the same time.
Bombadil: Having a regard for the political process through which tax laws etc are made is an important civic virtue – and that means agreeing to stick with the process even when it doesn’t produce the result you want.
Ah but therein lies the essence of my problem with ‘the system’: I am threatened with violence every time I am compelled to pay a tax… the fact a man does not actually come to my house and stick a gun in my face cannot disguise the fact that ultimately if I do not pay up, the state will do exactly that by sending around the boys in blue.
Therefore my willingness to condone violence if it was actually likely to advance the cause of liberty should be viewed within that context. I have no regard for the ‘political process’ whatsoever, I merely respect the fact the state has more ability to use force than I do… and it does so every day, hence my willingness to use non-violent means is based on the observation that there is currently no rational alternative. Violence is only moral if it is likely to actually achieve a moral end… however the idea of using violence against a kleptocratic institution itself rooted in violence is not one I have a philosophical problem with.
I agree with Perry. The reason we don’t “kill the bastards” isn’t because they don’t have it coming. It’s because we can’t effectively do it, and even if we did, they’d just be replaced by MORE BASTARDS.
The Assassination Game can get out of control quickly, and usually leads to more fascism — the opposite of what we want. But this is a LOGISTICS issue, not an ETHICS issue.
Court, I’m afraid that that is not a good argument in favor of capitalism. People do a lot of stuff with no governments, including going around in marauding bands of thieves.
That is true. And I’ll be the first to admit that my “proof” is not very good, but it does make sense to me.
But the difference between a natural state of thieving and a natural state of capitalism is that a natural state of capitalism will not self destruct. In a state where everyone is a thief, property becomes meaningless, thus, so does stealing. In a capitalistic state, this sort of collapse upon itself does not happen. It reaches an equilibrium that other “natural” states do not reach.
the Brits …. exploring somewhere for the first time, probably meeting the Native Americans, perhaps a specific tribe, i forget……but anyway, the point was the people they ran into *had no system of ownership*. So, I don’t see how capitalism can be declared the natural state.
(And even if this bit of history is wrong, it’s still conceivable that it could be true of some culture without government)
Well, to be fair, I think the Native Americans did have a system of ownership, otherwise we (the US) could not have swindled them out of Manhattan. But that’s just picking nits. The real answer is that in small groups, communism is the natural state. For a tribe of Indians, it is better that they all work together to reach common goals. They share buffalo because one person cannot bring one down, etc…
But, when the example is extrapolated up, it breaks apart as can be seen in the Soviet Union. Just like capitalism cannot be extrapolated down to very small groups. It can, but it does not work as well as communism.
Where is the thresehold? I have no idea. Again, these are just my random ideas. And I’ll admit, my brain works somewhat goofy, but it makes sense to me 🙂