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Brave Statists on Mises.org

As wrong as they are, I am quite impressed with several of the non-libertarians—and in fact outright socialists—who frequent the Mises blag discussion threads and offer their input as to why a Mises columnist or blagger was way off and why government is actually not so bad, and is necessary, besides.

I have no interest in trolling liberal, neocon, or other non-Austro-libertarian discussion threads, mainly because I don’t have the time. It’s also because I prefer recording my thoughts and feelings on my own web page to raising my blood pressure and clouding my mind with anger for a few hours by competing for Special Olympics medals with Statolatrists who have no interest in morals, philosophy, principles, or applying their imagination to potential benefits of libertarianism.

Several Statists do visit Mises.org and comment often, though. I think it’s great because they are usually civil and so are the libertarians who mop the floor with them. It’s great because these people are stepping out of their comfort zone of self-reinforcing homogeneity and reading the ideas of people who drastically disagree with them about the very nature of freedom, rights, and government.

Yesterday I observed this from a fellow named Tom Ritchford, who commented on Jeffrey Tucker’s post about the “informal sector” of the economy (gray market) and how taxation and regulation would prevent those mutually beneficial transactions from occurring, not facilitate them. I should start by crediting Tom Ritchford for admitting that government is evil (”a necessary evil”), but it’s all downhill from there. For one, he knowingly and openly supports evil. Here are some gems from his comments:

Sure, most of your taxes go on killing strangers and arresting people for smoking pot but that’s just because Americans are determined to destroy themselves and everyone else. In a civilized country, in a country where the government wasn’t going out of its way to prove that the government is only good for oppressing people and starting wars, you might actually see some good from your taxes, things like “health care” and “bridges that don’t fall down”…

If you look at your commie pinko welfare state countries, it’s amazing how well - and how long - they live relative to Americans, how much better educated they are. What’s particularly amazing is how much less they worry than Americans - they actually have a life outside of work and they don’t have those nightmares of suddenly falling off the bottom rung.

Public roads? Taxes. Clean drinking water? Taxes. Remember all those plagues? Polio? Even measles? What happened to them? Well, the government immunized all the kids - with your taxes. Education? Remember when kids came out of school being able to read and write? …

So ha ha ha you people don’t pay taxes, you’re SOOOO much smarter than the rest of us! Glad to have you responsible, ethical, honest people on board with us! I’m sure we can rely on you when the shit really hits the fan.

It is kind of depressing but no less amazing how many people assume unequivocally that if the State didn’t do something, it could never, ever get done. I’ll actually give credit to the United States government, the Soviet Union, and the WHO for eradicating smallpox and nearly eradicating polio and other diseases that struck children and lowered life expectancy so much. It’s funny that he brings up education because the State is precisely the reason Western education systems are so poor (not just in the U.S., obviously). But he will go on thinking that only the stupid Republican education reforms are bad and that just the right amount of government would solve all of those problems.

It’s also really weird that he thinks we “don’t pay taxes.” Our income tax rate has gone almost nowhere but up since the passing of the 16th Amendment. He probably hasn’t gone to any effort to learn anything about inflation (or he ignores what he has learned, since he is a Mises.org reader), but inflation is the most insidious tax and has also increased astronomically for the dollar since the founding of the Federal Reserve. Inflation is constant, debilitating, and used by the State to increase its domestic and foreign spending, just like income taxation.

Great public goods like “trucking” (where we get all this fresh food) can only exist because of a standardized system of roads, and that could only have been built with public money.

If you don’t believe it, please name a country - any country you might want to live in - where most of the roads were built with private money.

What an idiot. How about you name a country where the free market was allowed to flourish and enter the road-building enterprise. Name a country where purchase, use, and allocation of land was based entirely on freedom, property rights, and homesteading and not at all on government fiat.

I understand that the concept of “a living wage for regular work” is foreign to people here, that you want to have a few Randian superheroes and everyone else living as peasants…

The “living wage,” also known as the minimum wage, is an immoral violation of contractual rights, and not surprisingly the result is higher unemployment, not higher employment or more comfortable livelihood for people earning it.

I think his allusion to Ayn Rand on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website belies his misunderstanding of real libertarianism as espoused by the LRC/Mises group (generally, “right-libertarians”) and also of that espoused by all the left-libertarians out there (Roderick Long, Charles Johnson, Sheldon Richman, thousands of others). Anarcho-capitalists are the only consistent and convincing debunkers of Objectivism, because only the philosophy of true private property rights and true freedom from government can expose the fallacies of Objectivism with philosophical consistency.

[quoting another commenter] “It is not taxes that make the world go round and provide the infrastructure of society, but rather private individuals.”

No, it’s both, clearly. Some things are obviously better done on a “for profit” basis. Other things, like roads, are better done by a government.

But, according to your own admissions, tax money is often wasted by American politicians, on things like wars and No Child Left Behind (we assume that no politician with a “D” after his name has ever wasted a significant amount of tax dollars). Therefore, good governance and wise voting and a healthy dose of public skepticism are necessary to keep government in check and make sure it taxes people at the right rate and spends its stolen money on Good Things.

Gee, it’s a good thing we have people like Tom Ritchford around, or else none of us would know what to do with our own money! We wouldn’t know if ten, twenty, thirty, seventy-five percent of it should be graciously given to our State overlords, or what! We wouldn’t be able to build roads or sanitize the water without Tom Ritchford and his wise politicians! We’d just be throwing money into pyramid retirement schemes and terrible schools and corrupt court systems and incompetent bureaucracies without him allocating our own money for us! It’s a good thing you know what that proper income-theft rate is, you arrogant, intolerant, amoral, bullying, and willfully ignorant State lover. It’s a good thing you and your liberal socialist politicians of choice are spun from a finer clay than the rest of us, because while we would make publicly harmful decisions with 50% of our own money, you and your ilk do not suffer from such a shortcoming. How nice it must be up on your pedestal of arrogance and enlightenment, looking down on the rest of us ignorant, irresponsible freedom lovers.

That attitude makes me sick. It is a pretty common attitude.

Government is a necessary evil. Am I trying to claim that governments don’t rip the people off? Of course not. …

But a lot of good things come from government as well - just spend some time in Africa to see what happens in a country where government provides no services. I would say that there’s literally no place in the world you’d want to live without a strong government providing billions of dollars worth of services every year.

I have an idea: Let’s try one country or one state without a monopolistic government, and one with, and I can live in one and you in t’other, and we’ll just agree to trade but not bother each other outside of that.

Oh, what? Your moral code doesn’t work that way? You can force me to submit to your State and your morality, but I can’t do the same to you—I can’t even refrain from adhering to yours and leave you alone? Yeah, excuse me for not acting surprised at the fact that such an amoral and antisocial code of interpersonal relations has created most of the death, misery, and poverty the human race has ever known.

We’ve just seen what happens after eight years of a government that doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of government - the rich loot the government.

Right, that only happened during the last eight years of neocon rule. I see how in touch you are with reality. This is going downhill even faster…

When you’re a teenager, you have polarized emotions: “soldiers are evil”, “government is bad”, “save the planet”. When you grow up, you realize that the world is a more complex place and cannot be summed up in a few slogans; that government can sometimes be good and sometimes bad but is inevitable and essential and that you should try to make it work in the most efficient manner rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

His bizarre accusations that libertarians, of all people, rally behind slogans and simple emotion-based positions tells me this might be his first visit to Mises.org. I hope it isn’t his last.

For several years I have thought of Statism as a very childlike, if not downright primitive, social structure. Think of how many impulsive and irresponsible actions the State shares in common with a child. We want something someone else has—just take it! The law of supply and demand says this will never work as intended—I don’t care, I want it so let’s do it! Other people don’t want this government program—it doesn’t matter what they want, we want it so we’re going to force them to comply! That law is completely unjust; people who broke it shouldn’t be punished—I don’t care, we made the law and we’re going to enforce it, even if it means enslaving people in cages with real criminals for several years!

But, y’know, I’m sure Tom Ritchford’s wise and moderate (imaginary) government would never go to those extremes.

In well-run countries…

Ha! You lose.

I think what we have here is another Statist who fails to appreciate two facts: the aforementioned reality that Frederic Bastiat expressed so eloquently:

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

and the fact that even in the world of government, even in the world of “well-run, minimalist” government, trade-offs exist and you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Let me illustrate his failure to understand this by expounding upon a few of my own refutations above.

Tom Ritchford claims that a “living wage” is necessary for the people to live happy, comfortable, healthy, long lives. I think he would be right in that statement. What he really means, though, is a State-enforced prohibition of voluntary contracts between two parties—business and worker. I’m sure he is aware that there is an immense body of anti-socialist literature debunking every argument for the coerced minimum wage. The fact that he acts unaware of it proves either his lack of desire to understand reality or his inability to grasp the simplest economic concepts. What I’m sure he’s never considered is that you can’t have coercive minimum wages without the wasteful bureaucratic regulatory network that comes along with it—related and completely unrelated to labor law. The alphabet soup of federal agencies and their bloat and waste are always going to exist in any socialist-regulatory state. The “unnecessary” taxes, “unnecessary” programs, and “unnecessary” regulations are a huge strain on economies and bank accounts everywhere in the world. They raise prices and restrict job growth. They keep small businesses small or out of business. The wasted money and restriction of growth that governments are responsible for are so staggering as to be nearly unfathomable. He appears to claim that with the right politicians (i.e., left-liberals) in charge, the mostly-helpful State activities will still exist and the mostly-harmful ones will be abolished. He is a helpless Utopian dreamer.

He harps on public roads in his two comments. He claims that this necessary part of national infrastructure would never, ever have been remotely imaginable without bloated federal bureaucracy and massive income theft. (Oh, sorry, moderate federal bureaucracy and appropriate income theft.) He doesn’t appreciate the public waste that they represent and the inhibition of the development and flourishing of alternative societal structures that they cause. Alternative things like actual public transportation (railroads, short-range airplanes, who knows what else) and less-spread-out communities. Many libertarians have addressed public vs. private roads, and quite well. I’m not going to harp on it.

He also insinuates that he is enamored of State health care. Look, I think all the vaccinations and eradication efforts that governments organized were great, but Frederic Bastiat’s point still applies. The problem is that any State interference leads to total State management of health care. This is already turning into a disaster in Western Europe and Canada, and America will follow a few decades behind. This is still the one political issue that scares me more than any other, though expansion of warfare and institution of military slavery by a crazed Bush or McCain is gaining fast.

In my Biology of Aging class my senior year of college, we learned about a British doctor, Thomas McEwen, who wrote two books about the causes of the population explosion and increase in life expectancy that the United Kingdom experienced starting in the late 19th century. He concluded that medical innovation played a very small role in the increase in life expectancy, but that nutrition and improved living standards contributed the most to higher childhood (and adult) survival rates. This is largely because people were healthy enough to survive childhood infections, whereas they weren’t before.

Now, given Tom Ritchford’s propensity to ignore the obvious and tell outright lies, he will probably claim this is all due to the wisdom and beneficence of the glorious British mixed economy. Every bit of economics knowledge that has ever existed tells us that free-market capitalism lowers prices, increases the supply of goods to the common man, and raises everyone’s standard of living, especially the poor. Socialist road systems probably played a role in transporting food across the country; I don’t know how many roads there were or how they were funded in Victorian England; but the socialism part was not necessary to get the transportation part. It takes a special kind of ignorance to claim that capitalism can bring food, housing, clothing, automobiles, computers, and every kind of service industry to the common man, but it fails miserably at water, education, and roads and the government does better.

The government did not and does not make people healthier, nor does it facilitate the private sector making people healthier. It only takes and destroys, it doesn’t produce or create. Even if some magical middle ground in State regulation of health care did exist, it would be absolutely impossible for the State itself to discover it and settle there. The State will keep growing (it always has, after all), and the unintended consequences and the waste and the restrictions will accumulate, all while politicians and their gullible voters call for more State fixes to solve the problems the State caused in the first place. This has been gone over before.

I have a personal question for people like Tom Ritchford. Maybe I should have posted it on the Mises blag last night, but I read it really late and I had to go to bed and wasn’t going to let myself get sucked into writing about politics. But this is a simple question. It isn’t about political, philosophical, or pragmatic details. I just want to know: How do you feel about the fact that, whereas libertarians want to fight for a world where we would be unable to impose our will upon you (and you upon us), the very basis of your entire Statist system is that we are unable to even defend ourselves against you and your agents, much less opt out entirely? What do you think about that difference in goals and moralities?

One last question, again personal: How do you feel about the fact that in order to accomplish all the glorious things that, supposedly, only governments can accomplish, it has to take the funds from peaceful people by force, upon penalty of death if they don’t submit obediently?