Often libertarians (and pro freedom folk in general) cite writers who are not libertarians at all – a good example being the number of times I have heard the name of Tom Paine being cited as a great defender of freedom (Tom Paine the ardent welfare statist and defender of confiscatory taxes on landowners, who [like so many of his kind] used the words “freedom” and “liberty” endlessly).
However, sometimes libertarians (and other folk) will cite a something that is a great work – but a work that is full of danger for the reader.
Such a work is Jose Ortega Y Gasset‘s Revolt of the Masses. This is great work and such people as M.J. Oakeshott and F.A. Hayek were right to praise it – particularly for the examination of the origin and nature of the “mass man” that one finds within the work and for its examination of the importance of the mass man in the modern world.
Few people (thankfully) read a great work and assume that all the opinions in it must be true, but a lot of people read what they (rightly) consider a great work and assume that the factual information in it must be true.
This was the danger I was reminded of when I recently reread this work – I came upon very many errors of fact. I do not know whether I was too ignorant to recognise these errors when I read this work as a child, or whether my memory has so far decayed that I can not remember reading the errors – but be that as it may, my purpose here is to warn readers to trust no piece of information they find in this work. The book in front of me (“The Revolt of the Masses” having been originally been published in Spanish in 1930) is the Unwin Books Forth Impression of 1972 and (for reasons of space) I will, mostly, present errors I have found in Chapter XIV “Who Rules the World”.
Page 105 – Russia cannot be Marxist (in 1930) because the pre Soviet Russia had no industry. Actually Russia in 1914 was the forth-greatest industrial power in the world and had the highest growth rate of the great powers.
Page 106 “America has not yet suffered; it is an illusion to think that it can possess the virtues of command” and “America is only starting its history. It is only now that its trials, its dissentions, its conflicts are beginning”. The author appears to have forgotten about such things as the American Civil War (in which more than half a million people died out of a population of, I believe, about 30-35 million people).
Page 114 the fallacy that it is just the “size of the market” that lead America to being more prosperous than Europe. Yes European free trade would help (sadly the EU ‘single market’ is not free trade, it is endless regulations), but as for “No one doubts that a car designed for five hundred or six hundred million customers would be much better and much cheaper than a Ford”.
Well just as when J.S. Mill says that “no one doubts” or “no one disputes” (normally when he is about to praise some bit of statism in “Principles of Political Economy”) these words are a bad sign. America was not just more prosperous than European nations in the 1920’s because of a large internal market – the United States had much lower levels of government spending and taxation (and, in many ways, regulation) than almost all European nations in the 1920s – the author, Jose Ortega Y Gasset (who I shall henceforth refer to as O.Y.G) either does not know this, or forgets to mention it.
Page 126 footnote 1. “It is well known that the Empire of Augustus is the opposite of what his adoptive father Caesar aspired to create. Augustus worked along the lines of Pompey, of Caesar’s enemies”.
This refers to the theory that O.Y.G. supports that Caesar wished to do away with the idea of an Empire centred on a single polis – political community (civitas), the city of Rome.
Perhaps this was Caesar’s intention – although he did spend vast amounts of wealth (plundered by conquest) to win the favour of the Roman mob. But the Empire of Augustus was not centred on the institutions of Rome – it was centred on Augustus. Just as the Empire of Caesar (as O.Y.G. knows) was centred on Caesar.
There is no evidence that Caesar was going to create institutions for a wider nation – for example federal institutions such as the ones the Lycianian Federation of cities in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) had possessed for centuries, let alone a federation of nations not cities. Caesar was a de facto Monarch (as Augustus and those that followed him were) and he was a Monarch by usurpation – and Pompey seems to have rejected his chance to go down the path than Caesar and then Augustus trod. Yes Pompey died (as did Cato the Younger and the rest), Caesar and Augustus are also dead – all men die, but not all men die traitors to the Republic.
O.Y.G. says the Republic was corrupt, which it was (although not as corrupt as he claims – with no election unrigged and no law case honestly decided), but he claims that Caesar was a visionary without providing evidence that Caesar had a vision for other than his own power.
Augustus may have shown some polite respect for the outward forms of the Republic – but the principle of his rule was the same as Caesar’s (not “the opposite” of it), and under rule of the Emperors the state expanded and civil society decayed – as O.Y.G. knows (see pages 92-93). Hardly what Caesar’s enemies had in mind.
On page 123 we are told that Caesar was “very nearly the opposite of Alexander” because Alexander choose the Asiatic East and Caesar choose to build a new nation based on “the Germans and the Gauls” as well as the old Romans.
Actually Alexander choose to fight Persia because it was the long standing enemy of Greece (not because of his spiritual kinship with Eastern despotism – although such as a kinship may have existed). Caesar went North (“West” if you wish) because the Rome various disputes in the East had already been the concern of Pompey – Gaul was the only area of opportunity that Caesar could get from the Senate.
Certainly Caesar did far more than deal with border raiding and sign treaties, but he hardly built a new nation. He used some Germanic tribes (rather than making them a nation) to help in the conquest of the Gauls – and he did this (with slaughter on a vast scale – even by the standards of the time) not to build a new nation, but rather to gain land and loot to support his political ambitions. Yes Caesar’s policy in Gaul was different from the policy of Pompey in the East – but not in the way O.Y.G. thinks.
And when Caesar gained power he allied with Cleopatra (producing the son that was intended to rule after them?) and planned an invasion of Parthia (which did not take place, due to his assassination) – hardly a lack of interest in the East.
On page 140 we are told that in (pre Soviet) Russia there was “no bourgeois” and (in the footnote) that this “ought to be enough to enough to convince us once and for all that Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator”.
Not just absurd, but highly convenient for people who might wish to pretend that the Soviet Union was not “proper socialism”.
I could go dealing with errors, but I will end with a “cheat” (i.e. an error not taken from chapter XIV). In a footnote on pages 76-77 (chapter XI) we are told that the reason that the English aristocracy is not degenerate like other European aristocracies (no evidence is produced for either claim – either that the European aristocracies are degenerate or that the English aristocracy is not degenerate) is because England was not “superabundant” as other European countries were. After all the “fundamental fact is forgotten that England was until well within the eighteenth century the poorest country in Europe”.
The reason this is “forgotten” is because it is false.
Interestingly O.Y.G. actually seems to be half aware of his lack of respect for truth. As he says on page 55 (footnote 2) the “paucity of Spanish intellectual culture is shown, not in greater or less knowledge, but in the habitual lack of caution and care to adjust one’s self to truth that is usually displayed by those who speak and write”.
This is important as O.Y.G. explains in the text of page 55 – the “varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards”.
I will not comment about Spanish culture (I do not know enough about it), but O.Y. G. is correct. All societies produce theories (or rather have people within them who produce theories), but not all societies (or rather people) respect fact.
For example a man may believe (rightly or wrongly) that the United States is controlled by a Zionist conspiracy, but if such a man says “after all the President is Jewish” he should respect the fact (when it is pointed out to him) that Mr Bush is not a Jew. If a theorist does not respect facts then he is a barbarian – “Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made” (page 55).
A great and intelligent man (and O.Y.G. was such a man) has a heavy responsibility to check his facts, so that (as far as is in his power) he avoids misleading people who read his works.
When a theory can be strongly argued against do not present it as obvious fact that no intelligent person could doubt, and avoid making statements of fact that are just not true.
And for a reader – never think that because a work is great that you can trust the facts given in it. One must check for oneself.
Paul, a superb post. BTW, I read this book about 8 years ago and felt the same way.
You seem to assume that private property ownership is an intrinsic right rather than something that is socially constructed (ultimately by force or threat of force) to restrict other people’s freedom of access to that property. In modern societies, even the ‘property’ itself is usually created by somebody else, and purchased with tokens and credit that are collective creations. You may be right in your assumption, but as long as there are reasonable arguments against it, why should advocates of freedom disown Paine?
For myself, I have always found the masses to be revolting!
Ben, I see you haven’t lost your flair for distorted logic….
“You seem to assume that private property ownership is an intrinsic right rather than something that is socially constructed ”
Perhaps because it is an intrinsic right that is not socially constructed. Basic rights are natural and flow from nature and nature’s God.
Ernest Young: But distorted how?
Shawn: In the high middle ages, when people attached rather more importance to ‘nature’s God’, there was a big debate over whether the prelapsarian state included private property or not (for example, Scotus and the Franciscans argued that property was helded communally, and that regenerate humanity should do the same thing). Aquinas argued, on the either hand, that there is natural inequality (e.g. young vs. old, male vs. female), and therefore not only natural property rights but also natural political domination (so not exactly a libertarian position).
What do you mean by ‘nature’ – a very slippery term that is usually doing some dodgy ideological work? In the absence of any definition, I’d deny there is any contradiction between private property ownership being ‘socially constructed’ and ‘natural’, neither of which implies it is ‘intrinsic’ (we’re social animals, after all). Society could naturally construct something else (public property ownership) – and in fact it often does. The private/public distinction is itself a social agreement, and as soon as one investigates the complexities of that distinction (or lack there of) in, say, medieval feudal property rights (see Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, for a particularly headache-inducing treatment) the idea that it is divinely ordained ‘basic right’ breaks down pretty rapidly.
Now you, like Paul Marks, might be right. But it seems to me that, because proving you are right would be tricky, other believers in freedom are free to understand freedom in ways that are not incompatible with welfare and taxes. Libertarians might not be, but why should they have a monopoly on the word ‘freedom’?
Paul,
May I second Johnathan — I’m sure you’ll be delighted to learn that as one of Samizdata’s race realist leper colony I also found your contribution fascinating and brilliant.
You write:
“A great and intelligent man (and O.Y.G. was such a man) has a heavy responsibility to check his facts, so that (as far as is in his power) he avoids misleading people who read his works.”
Well, I suppose we allhave a responsibility to check our facts — even not quite so great and not quite so intelligent people like ourselves. and if you want to learn how not to check your facts, browse through ‘Crooked Timber’ occasionally.
Of course, OYG is one of those men who are so “great and intelligent” that they are on our one-day-I’ll-get-around-to-reading-that-guy list. And some day I will.
Recommended further reading on OYG: sui generis Chris Brand’s article entitled ‘What went wrong with Conservatism’, published in ‘The Sprout’ of June 2003, which you’ll find here.
Sorry, para 3 should have read:
“Well, I suppose we all have a responsibility to check our facts ….”
The price you pay for not previewing properly – but there seems to be some problem with separating a single italicised word from the following one, so I put the word ‘all’ in bold instead.
race realist? I prefer just plain old word “racist”. Slipping the term “crypto-fascist” in there somewhere works fairly well too.
You seem to assume that private property ownership is an intrinsic right rather than something that is socially constructed (ultimately by force or threat of force) to restrict other people’s freedom of access to that property.
Force resides in each individual first, and is used to protect that which he has an intimate and familiar relationship with a resource, likely transformed via labor (mental and physical), and so becomes property, which will be defended by force. Force (pro-active and retributive) can be abated and effectively transferred to a State, with a considerations flowing evenly between the two. Once the use of Force is prostituted for a select few, tyranny will be recognized and an overthrow of the existing order will follow. But in so doing the contract will be broken, and the native force will be used once again. So in a nutshell force doesn’t eminate from the collective first, it eminates from individuals before all.
In modern societies, even the ‘property’ itself is usually created by somebody else
I don’t know what this is really driving at. We certainly do live in a specialized world, but simply because someone else makes a product doesn’t manifestly mean that a collectivist or statist mentality follows. It is assumed that something of equal value (at consumation) as determined by the maker and the buyer are traded, and so both are marked against each other at that time. It’s called trade, and should be a voluntary activity based on the value judgements of the participants.
and purchased with tokens and credit that are collective creations
Money (in its proper form) is simply a paradigm upon which people, voluntarily collecting, mark the value of the resources and property that surround them. It begins as a means to store value between transactions with material goods, of course being identifiable in and of itself, it becomes a commodity in its own right. But this is simply a confluence of personal value judgements, and is only valuable because people agree that it has value. If your point was to show that money, in today’s world, is largely a ‘product’ of the State, and therefore all we transact in ultimately is tied to the ebbing and flowing of Statism, there certainly is a tie-in. But that simply begs for money that is free of State interference and eminates from free association. In such a manner it has pitfalls to be sure, cornering the commodity that is used as ‘currency’, natural disasters that effect value/create shortages. But using money as some sort of intrinsic ‘insurance’ policy that should never lose its value regardless of actual, real-world circumstances, merely makes it a Statist mechanism for transfer.
It is fallacious to have a currency marked against the ‘good faith of a government’ since it is nothing more than the taxpayers who make it up, and the Force inherent to take the manufactured money from them. This ‘play money’ certainly makes it easier to assert that it is merely ‘on loan’ to you so its confiscation is proper, and confiscating a large portion of the credit market upon which it is based (to the tune of trillions) is also proper. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Statism arises as a set of people presume to have the formula for ‘proactive’ maintenance of social interaction, and stimulate the positive effects of voluntary association, and the mitigattion of its negatives (which there are plenty, at least by my estimation). But such folk blind themselves to the fact that they cannot create anything, they can only dictate who, what, when, where, and why, based on their formula, which, when applied proves empty and simplistic.
But the motivation is constantly there; associations and collectives are Good, economies of scale are produced, and greater production and output can be achieved. Therefore, this Good must be fostered and controlled by a central command of the enlightened to make sure the Good never ends, and take credit for individuals creating and trading as if they are the origin of it. And once there, based on this convoluted logic, it is invariably hi-jacked by fundemenalist creeds or the self-serving.
In other words, recognizing the fact that people associate with each other doesn’t necessarily mean that Statism is a natural result. That is the biggest, and falsist, paradigm that exists in our culture. It is no surprise since the State now controls schooling, contracting involving labor, health, retirement, etc etc etc. A system that is based on individual value systems, freely trading, had never been fully realized, and may never be so, but it certainly should be seen as the starting point and level of State we have should be justified against this ideal.
Great comment, Toolkien! I think you nicely deal with the notion of property as a “social construct”. Well, in a superficial way, I guess it is. But for libertarians property ownership is of a piece with the idea of “self-ownership”.
This is not really the place for a long comment about natural rights, but when I think of property rights as natural, it is because the ability to hold, acquire and transfer property is an essential feature of how humans can live and survive, given what we know about human nature. Humans, as beings with volitional consciousness, to borrow Rand’s term, require liberty of thought and action. Such liberty necessitates the ability to have property.
So property can be thought of in this sense as a natural right. However, the tricky part comes in defining property rights in practice, which is where all the messy “social” stuff comes in!
Two interesting posts from Toolkien and Johnathan Pierce. I think you’d be able to find plenty of advocates of freedom who would disagree with you, however, and agree with Paine.
But a couple of specific observations/opinions:
1. Toolkien seems to define property as ‘that which he has an intimate and familiar relationship with a resource, likely transformed via labor (mental and physical)’. This seems close to Locke’s legitizimation of private property in the Second Treatise of Government (ch. 5), but Locke specifically reserves the rights of the needy over surplus property: ‘no Man but he [who has mixed his labour with something to make it his property] can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.’
2. I don’t buy Locke’s or Toolkien’s argument that mixing my labour with something makes it ‘mine’ in some profound moral sense.
3. Toolkien’s scenario involves labour, exchange, and defence creating property rights. This is conceivable in a utopia. But in practice this sweet model is completely skewed by inequal power relations. Modern property and credit is the product of millennia of ‘theft’, sometimes by individuals but more importantly by groups (e.g. states and employment cartels). Indeed, in so far as anything like Toolkien’s scenario exists in the real world, it is created by the rule of law, not some sort of stateless anarchy.
4. Toolkien’s idea that currency ‘is nothing more than the taxpayers who make it up’ seems odd, not least because it takes no account of the international nature of economies, and hence international factors in currency valuations.
5. I agree there’s something absurd and presumptious about the idea of government ministers or institutions ‘running the economy’. But what they do obviously has crucial effects on the economy.
6. States are imperfect (some more so than others) instruments. But I remain unconvinced that they are worse than the alternatives. I’m dubious that the sort of free market Toolkien envisages can be created without statist structures, and I’m even more dubious that it would create a better world.
8. Pearce’s idea that property is a part of ‘self-ownership’ seems rather dehumanizing. I would have thought that caring membership of human society (i.e. taxation for welfare) trumps property-ownership as an essential part of human selfhood.
9. Strictly, private property may even be incompatible with freedom, because it is ultimately very hard to distinguish property from power (the medieval example I mentioned before makes this even clearer).
Test to see if this thing will finally let me post a comment.
First I must apologise for my sloppy typing (natual crapness plus only typing whilst being tired from a shift of security guard work).
Whether a libertarian holds that private property is a matter of natural right (or natural law) or,like Ludwig Von Mises, hold that it is utilitarian matter they are still going to reject Tom Paine style statism (and other styles).
For myself – yes I do hold that robbing people is wrong, and I do not believe that the concept of private property was the creation of the state (or “society” in the sense of a collective entity as opposed to civil interaction between human beings). However, even if I laid my reactionary morality on one side I would still oppose statism – as it does not achieve its objectives. It does not make the poor better off it makes them worse off.
Now let us see if this bit get on – before I try the next big.
“bits and bit” not “bit and big” – of course.
Tom Paine.
First my stupid typing of “confiscatory taxes on landlords” rather than “confiscatory taxes on big landlords”. If I mislead someone with my bad typing I apologise (although my apology clearly carries little weight as I still can not bear to check through my own stuff before banging “post”). Even in “Agrarian Justice” (1796 – if my memory serves) Tom Paine never supported confiscatory taxes on all landlords – only big ones.
The story goes back to “Rights of Man” part one – lots of talk of freedom-liberty and hostility to the statism of the Monarchies, then “Rights of Man” part two – more stess on state welfarism (education funding, pensions and so on), but it will by O.K. because it will be paid for by abolishing the monarchy and the and the pensions of hangers on (and so forth).
The math was B.S. – and so finally in Agrarian Justice the cat is out of the bag and we have confiscatory taxes on big landowners (and other taxes).
Now let us see if this bit gets on.
Well that (badly typed) bit has got on so let me try and finish here – before I smash the computer I do some other stupid thing (like falling asleep).
Tom Paine was a man of many good qualities (he truly cared about other people – and he had genuine courage), but he would not see where his own efforts led.
The violence of the French Revolution horrified him – but he would not admit that the Revolution was rotten from the start (it was just betrayed by wicked power seekers).
Had he been successful in creating a revolution in Britain it would have been another statist revolution – he would have been thinking things like “why are there all these murders, and why are all these people starving – this has nothing to do with me, my ideas are about helping people”,
Even in the case of the American Revolution if Tom Paine had won out the government would have been out of control from the start – John Adams understood what Paine was and faught him (not that Mr Adams was perfect – but by comparison…..).
One last point. Paine (like a good libertarian) opposed fiat money (vile Emperiors, Kings and Aristocrats cheating the people) – UNLESS it was to be issued by a democratic government, then it was fine.
In short either Tom Paine was a con man, or he conned himself (or both).
I should have typed “the concept of property was NOT the creation of the state…..” Oh well now to bed.
In my defence (like the fisherman with the “one that got away” story) I had the post typed correctly and banged post – and got “You are not allowed to post comments”.
After I got that about 20 times I fell apart.
Paul,
I wasn’t trying to law down the law about whether Paine should be seen as a libertarian, so much as objecting to your conflation of ‘libertarians’ and ‘pro freedom folk in general’ on a platform inimical to welfare statism and taxes on [big] landholders. As your post noted, Paine ‘used the words “freedom” and “liberty” endlessly’. As I tried to suggest in my posts above, libertarians don’t have a monopoly on the meaning of freedom (whether they should is another matter) and, from certain perspectives, the apotheosis of private property and the market over deliberate collective action in the interests of all (i.e. in this imperfect world, the benevolent state) is the antithesis of freedom (think Rousseau here).
‘[H]e would not admit that the Revolution was rotten from the start (it was just betrayed by wicked power seekers).’ Your interpretation of the interpretation is no more or less debatable than his; but I think both are over-simplistic given that Revolutionary history is a quagmire of contradictions, U-turns, and dead-ends. Perhaps what ultimately stained the Revolution with innocent blood was the (1) the willingness of the counter-revolutionaries to take up arms against the demolition of the Ancien Regime, which contributed to (2) the collapse of the Revolution’s initial (and quite genuine) respect for freedom of difference in conscience, opinion, and expression. But given the role that the collapse of sovereign state power played in facilitating the consequent orgy of violence and the role of Parisian crowds and militia in precipitating the bloodspilling, it seems ironic for a anti-statist libertarian to claim that the Revolution was ‘rotten from the start’ because it had welfare statist sentiments.
Sorry, Paul, that should have read ‘…your interpretation of the French Revolution is no more or less debatable’
Ben writes:
“In the high middle ages, when people attached rather more importance to ‘nature’s God’,”
This is a false statement. In the West people have attached importance to God pretty consistently since St Constantine. Im fairly sure that German Lutherans in the 18th century, the Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock, and the Christians who have been at the core of the conservative counter-revolution in America since the 1950’s would be surprised to learn that only the high middle ages took nature’s God seriously.
“there was a big debate over whether the prelapsarian state included private property or not (for example, Scotus and the Franciscans argued that property was helded communally, and that regenerate humanity should do the same thing). Aquinas argued, on the either hand, that there is natural inequality (e.g. young vs. old, male vs. female), and therefore not only natural property rights but also natural political domination”
Debates aside, the consistent teaching of the Catholic church, as well as classical Protestantism, is that property rights are part of God’s order.
“(so not exactly a libertarian position).”
The roots of modern libertarian thinking can be traced back to Aquinas in part, as well as to other teachings of the Church, including subsidiarity.
Libertarianism however is a modern secular political philosophy. An agnostic libertarian may understand rights in a purely natural way, but a Christian is well grounded in his tradition in understanding that rights flow from God and from Man’s nature which is made in God’s image.
“What do you mean by ‘nature’ ”
I mean the created world.
“I’m dubious that the sort of free market Toolkien envisages can be created without statist structures,”
A free market requires only a minimalist state, a state whos only role is to protect individual rights and property.
” Pearce’s idea that property is a part of ‘self-ownership’ seems rather dehumanizing”
Why? The opposite to self ownership means you are owned by another person. The technical term for that is slavery, which I would think is truly dehumanising.
” I would have thought that caring membership of human society”
Caring membership of society does not require the state to force people to be caring. And in fact this is not caring at all, it is obedience through fear.
As a Christian I am a firm believer in social solidarity, but for this to be genuine solidarity and genuine compassion and caring it must be voluntary. A person simply obeying the dictates of the state is not being compassionate and caring because they have no choice in the matter. Virtue, to be virtue, must be voluntary and freely chosen.
“(i.e. taxation for welfare) trumps property-ownership as an essential part of human selfhood.”
Interesting that your sceptical of natural rights but quite happy to talk about essentials of human selfhood.
Your mistake is to assume that taxation for welfare has anything to do with caring and human nature. You are, imho, also wrong in assuming that private property stands in opposition to a caring society.
In many respects the modern welfare state is the least caring and least humane socirty in Western history. People are reduced to cogs in the machinery of the state. The peoples traditions and natural loyalties to their faith, their culture, their ethnic group their family and country, are attacked, destroyed if possible and declared hate crimes by the state and by the enemy class that controls it in their drive for transnational socialism. There is nothing caring here. The state simply steals from one group of people in order to enslave another on welfare to turn them into dependent and obedient slaves.
Moreover, the welfare/nanny state is a dismal failure by any standards. Virtually every social statistic you can name has been getting worse for the last hundred years. Despite compulsory taxpayer funded education, we are less educated and less literate than ever. Schoolchildren in Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand do not know the basic facts of history. Many turn up for university unable to read. Many cannot name who was on which side in the second world war, an event that took place in living memory, let alone have a basic understanding of Western history.
The welfare state has created intergenerational welfare dependency and addiction. State housing for the poor has created poverty ghettos riddled with crime and despair.
By any measure, the welfare/nanny state has been a destructive failure of epic proportions. Yet its apologists think that the answer to this failure is yet more of the same. In the words of one of the great philosphers of our time…Duh.
“Strictly, private property may even be incompatible with freedom, because it is ultimately very hard to distinguish property from power”
Private property is the only defense against the abuse of power. If there is no private property, then everything is owned by the state. The 20th century is filled with the graves of millions who died from states based on the idea that private poperty was a social construction that could be done away with. Do the names “Soviet Union”, “Khmer Rouge” and “Maoist China” ring a bell?
Property is power? In what sense? What kind of power? Simply saying property equals power is really not saying anything at all.
” Modern property and credit is the product of millennia of ‘theft'”
Prove it. Making blanket statements like this without offering any evidence or even examples is pointless.
“But it seems to me that, because proving you are right would be tricky, other believers in freedom are free to understand freedom in ways that are not incompatible with welfare and taxes. Libertarians might not be, but why should they have a monopoly on the word ‘freedom’?”
Because freedom is not a matter of subjective opinion. If your going to claim that your political philosophy has something to do with freedom then you have to back this up. You have to define what freedom is. You have to define why it is necessary. You have to define its limits. You have to define what limits can rightly be imposed upon it and why and how. And you have to be able to show that your claims have at least some relationship with reality. I believe that freedom is a gift from God. But I can also define and defend freedom on purely rational and objective grounds.
Freedom is not a slogan you can just appropriate and wave around. And in claiming, without offering any arguments to defend your claim, that freedom is compatibale with compulsory taxation and welfare, your really just saying that slavery is freedom and then complaining that someone else points this out.
Shawn,
Thank you for your extensive critique.
The high middle ages gave a greater explicit role for ‘nature’s God’ in the formulation of the rights and wrongs of public policy. This may be less true over in the US, unfortunately. But even there, the Godly Right represent themselves as fighting against a Liberal media and academia. The role of God in medieval media and academia was relatively unchallenged.
‘[C]onsistent teaching of the Catholic church’? The Church has long been a broader school than it presents itself as. In the high middle ages, much doctrine was up for grabs. It’s generally true, however, that the powers-that-be came down on the side of property rights – no big surprise there if we think they are the antithesis of freedom!
My point about Aquinas was that libertarians don’t have a monopoly on the dictates of ‘nature’s God’ anymore than they do on the meaning of freedom.
‘A free market requires only a minimalist state, a state whos only role is to protect individual rights and property.’ That doesn’t sound very minimalist to me. And what about employers’ cartels and workers’ unions?
‘Caring membership of society does not require the state to force people to be caring. And in fact this is not caring at all, it is obedience through fear.’ That’s a matter of perspective. The ideal would be for people to make a collective decision to look after each other’s welfare, rather than automatically assuming that the state is robbing them. This sort of voluntary collective action is what social contract and democratic theory is supposed to be about.
I’m deeply unimpressed by claims that individual Christian charity is more virtuous that collective action. People can be treated as if they had a choice for the purposes of public policy, but I don’t see anything profoundly free about human will. Many Christians would admit that God’s omnipotence implies predestination. As for ‘obedience through fear’, what about the threat of damnation that keeps Christians on their toes? And even if Christians are charitable out of the benevolence of their character, there’s nothing particularly virtuous (in Kantian terms, for instance) about that, it’s just a quirk of their nature.
‘Interesting that your sceptical of natural rights but quite happy to talk about essentials of human selfhood.’ I’m sceptical about most things, but I’m quite happy to talk about about almost anything. And yes, I agree, both are pretty vacuous notions subject to ideological subversion, and yet are nonetheless terribly important.
‘[T]he welfare/nanny state is a dismal failure by any standards’. Certainly, we need to do better. But a ‘free’ market and reliance on Christian charity is not the way forward, in my opinion. Education and housing need improvement, but I don’t see why these would have been better without the welfare state. I am highly sceptical about your idea that today’s children are less ‘educated’ than their 1900 equivalents.
‘Virtually every social statistic you can name has been getting worse for the last hundred years.’ How about the rising possession of one-time luxury goods (e.g. washing machines, hoovers, dishwashers)? What about the rising use of birth control? What about the falling crude death rate (1.7% in 1901, 1.0% in 2001 in England and Wales)? What about the large increase in the numbers of people going to university at all?
‘Private property is the only defense against the abuse of power.’ Ah, I hear the echo of the Ancien Regime!
‘Do the names “Soviet Union”, “Khmer Rouge” and “Maoist China” ring a bell?’ Yes, they do, but I think it’s perverse to say that their mass graves were the result of economic doctrine. The mass graves were the result of a belief that it’s permissible or rational to kill people who disagree with you or pose an intangible threat. It’s entirely possible to be pacifist and for the welfare state.
I don’t understand how you can claim one moment that ‘Private property is the only defense against the abuse of power’ (of course it’s not) and the next moment that property isn’t power of any sort.
But one example is that private property on its own doesn’t protect against its own abuse by employer cartels to artificially inflate profits.
The opposite of absolutism and totalitarianism is not private property but the diffusion of power and the inculcation of a respect for other human beings’ needs.
‘Making blanket statements like this without offering any evidence or even examples is pointless.’ Some random examples: rights over by land have been created by violence (this is true of US – grabbed by the Europeans; this is true of Englamd – grabbed by the Saxons, then by the Normans). Are you denying that the history of employer cartels and the (sometimes violent) repression of trade unions? An example of unfair profits today might be the modern use of agricultural subsidies in the First World and pushing free trade on the Third World, thus undermining native agrarian subsidies.
‘your really just saying that slavery is freedom and then complaining that someone else points this out’. No, I’m not. I don’t doubt you could offer up your definitions of freedom (I notice you don’t, however). That doesn’t change the fact that other people’s definitions and understanding of freedom differs from yours. Given that slavery was defended as a God-given free right to property, your accusation strikes me as somewhat ironic.
What I am saying is that it is perfectly possible to adopt an essentially positive attitude to the welfare state and engage in a collective enterprise of helping other people, ‘an association where the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.’ The great thing about the social contract and democracy is it allows us to choose that association.
I hope that makes any sense.
Ben:
Not really. What you are describing as ‘collective action’ should be more correctly labelled ‘coerced collective action’. A charity is also collective action… the collective is made up of voluntary members and contributors acting in a social manner: non-coerced collective action.
Illogical. A ‘welfare’ state is maintained by taxation and taxation is collected by force. Try opting out of taxes and see how the state reacts if you do not believe me. To be a pacifist and yet support the force backed appropriation of wealth from someone means you are not a pacifist at all.
In fact almost every point you make about sundry abuses just confirms the thesis you are seemingly opposing: if the state exists exclusively to prevent the use of force against others and violating their several rights, then please explain which of the uses of force and violations of rights you catalogue about would still happen if the role of a minimal state was to prevent them?
How can you have a diffusion of power if you have anything other than a minimal state (at most)? More or less by definition a state which has wide ranging power (i.e. a state which is not minimal) is a concentration of power. Sorry but you really are not making much sense at all.
Copeland: Theories on objective rights can be derived through reason, built on the foundations of an epistimology based on the conjectural nature of how we understand objective reality. A critical preference for a moral theory is formed until that theory is falsified and a better one comes along. Try reading some Popper.
This is the last direct reply I will make to any comment of yours for reasons I will make clear later. Don’t bother replying as your comments will be deleted from now on as I do not think you are amenable to reasonable discussion.
“The Church has long been a broader school than it presents itself as. In the high middle ages, much doctrine was up for grabs.”
I would dispute this claim. There is a consistent teaching regarding property rights that goes back well before the middle agaes to the chruch Fathers and to the Bible itself. The majority of the Hebrew Law in the Old Testament is concerned with protecting property rights. The summation of that law in the 10 commandments is illustrative. Two of those commandments are concerned with protection of property rights.
Check out “Christianity: Mother of Political Liberty” at
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/sandlin1a.html
“That doesn’t sound very minimalist to me.”
Compared to the current state it certainly is.
“And what about employers’ cartels and workers’ unions?”
What about them? So long as they are purely voluntary associations they are a normal part of civil society.
“That’s a matter of perspective. The ideal would be for people to make a collective decision to look after each other’s welfare, rather than automatically assuming that the state is robbing them.”
Firstly, it is not a matter of subjective perception, but of objective fact. If I am forced to do something against my will, or forced to hand over my property to someone with a gun, my freedom has been violated. That is not perception, it is fact.
How can the people make a “collective decision”? What does that mean in practice? What if one person out of all the people does not agree? Are they then forced to obey? Then this is not freedom. If I live on a street with 10 other householders, and 9 of them get together and vote to collectively rob me, is it any less theft simply because they got together and voted?
The kind of collective decision making your talking about is simply not possible. Someone is always going to disagree. And in a society with millions of citizens, it will be far more than just one. The idea that 350 million people can can all agree on an issue without any dissent is ludicrous. And this is the problem. When “collective decision making” faces this dissent it turns to force to make those who are dissenting obey.
“This sort of voluntary collective action is what social contract and democratic theory is supposed to be about.”
Social contract and democratic theory are are justifications for totalitarianism. Collective action is simply the mob forcing their opinions on me and stealing from me. Majoritarian democracy is mob rule and might makes right.
” but I don’t see anything profoundly free about human will. ”
Of course you dont. Admitting that people have free will gets in the way of using them as slaves.
“Many Christians would admit that God’s omnipotence implies predestination”
Actually this has never been a widely held view outside of Calvinism and to a lesser extent Luthernism. The Catholic and Orthodox churches have always upheld free will as do most Evangelical Christians.
“As for ‘obedience through fear’, what about the threat of damnation that keeps Christians on their toes?”
Actions have consequences. Freedom comes with personal responsibility. The Church does not preach unlimited freedom (and nor do libertarians). Howeverm the church has always taught that vitue must be freely chosen in the first place or it is not virtue.
“And even if Christians are charitable out of the benevolence of their character, there’s nothing particularly virtuous (in Kantian terms, for instance) about that, it’s just a quirk of their nature.”
Kant was a fool. And this is wrong anyway. Christians are not benevolent out of their “character”, they are because they choose freely to be so. Most Christian virtue requires going against apsects of our character, our desires, selfishness and lusts. So it is not a quirck of our nature, it is in fact freely chosen acts that are often AGAINST our nature.
“I’m sceptical about most things, ”
Thats very conveniant. Your sceptical about most things except the desirability of enslaving millions to an authoritarian state. Perhaps your scepticism is slightly misplaced.
“Certainly, we need to do better. But a ‘free’ market and reliance on Christian charity is not the way forward, in my opinion. Education and housing need improvement,”
In other words more of the same paid for by forced labour.
“I am highly sceptical about your idea that today’s children are less ‘educated’ than their 1900 equivalents.”
Its not my idea but a matter of fact. Look it up on the net. There have been major stuidies done in Britain America and New Zealand proving this.
“How about the rising possession of one-time luxury goods (e.g. washing machines, hoovers, dishwashers)? ”
A direct result of living in a capitalist system.
“What about the rising use of birth control?”
This is not a social good, but a social evil.
” What about the falling crude death rate (1.7% in 1901, 1.0% in 2001 in England and Wales)? ”
This is a result in the improvements of heath care etchnology and science which are the result not of the welfare state but primarily of the private health care industry.
” What about the large increase in the numbers of people going to university at all?”
What about it? Larger numbers are going but what has this to do with welfare?
“Yes, they do, but I think it’s perverse to say that their mass graves were the result of economic doctrine.”
Its not perverse but fact. In both the Soviet Union and Maoist China mass starvation that killed millions was a direct result of economic policy. In Russia it was farm collectivisation. In China it was centrally planned economic policy.
See: http://209.82.14.226/history/famine/gregorovich/
And: http://ncafe.com/northkorea/uncountedmillions.html
And here is an excerpt regarding China: “Some of the darkest chapters in recent human history have been written in the People’s Republic of China. From the radical experiment in utopian engineering known as the Great Leap Forward, to the state-sponsored terror of the Cultural Revolution, to the Draconian one-child policy of today, China’s communist rulers have visited disaster after disaster upon the Chinese people. While much is known about these and other political campaigns gone awry, there is one man-made disaster of monumental proportions that has been kept carefully under wraps.
From 1958 to 1962 Chinese people starved to death by the tens of millions. But the “three difficult years,” as the Beijing regime still daintily refers to this atrocity, saw not merely death from famine on a massive scale. It was also a period of state terror, during which Party officials ransacked villages, torturing and murdering peasants for refusing to hand over secret stores of grain that did not exist.
Hungry Ghosts is the first full account of what is arguably the worst famine in all of human history. Jasper Becker, a BBC journalist who lived for several years in China, spent years in painstaking detective work to piece together both the cause of this tragedy, and its final cost in human lives. Although he strays from the truth in ascribing the famine, in part, to a lack of population control, his book is an otherwise solid indictment of central planning and Maoist hubris.
As soon as the People’s Republic of China was established in October 1949, Mao Zedong wanted to move as quickly as possible to create agricultural collectives. This culminated in 1958 with the formation of the “People’s Communes,” huge, cumbersome agricultural cooperatives with tens of thousands of members.
To make matters worse, Mao insisted that the communes adopt agricultural techniques from the Soviet Union, which was reporting triple-digit increases in food production. Such techniques as deep plowing, close planting, and increased irrigation, based as they were on Marxist-Leninist pseudoscience, turned out to be disasters in practice. Deep plowing, for instance, effectively destroyed the fertility of the soil for years to come, as peasants trenched the ground to depths of four or five feet. Seedlings planted in extremely high densities died, while the irrigation projects—mostly small reservoirs—were so ill-conceived and executed that they were later dismissed by the Ministry of Agriculture as “completely worthless.”
Mao, in his great vanity, was oblivious to all this. Instead, he believed the reports of sycophantic officials that food production had skyrocketed under the commune system and his other innovations. When Mao visited the model commune of Xushui in 1958, he saw piles of vegetables, turnips, cabbages, and carrots strategically placed along the main road. As Becker writes, “Officials told him that the peasants had dumped the vegetables because they had grown so much food they did not know what to do with it.”
Buoyed by a flood of such false reports, the Beijing regime encouraged peasants to eat grain. It doubled its grain exports, even giving away grain gratis to its friends in North Korea, North Vietnam, and Albania. Although no one knew it at the time, every ship that left the docks condemned additional thousands to die.
By the winter of 1958-59 the commune granaries were bare, but Mao refused to believe that there was a food shortage. Instead, egged on by officials still boasting of record crops, he became convinced that the peasants were hiding their grain. In places like Henan, where the provincial leadership was fanatically devoted to Mao and his illusions, this led to mass murders that the Party would later describe as “a holocaust.”
As Becker writes, “The great terror began in the autumn of 1959 . . . when the prefectural Party committee declared war on the peasants . . . launch[ing] a brutal anti-hiding campaign. . . . ‘It is not that there is no food [one local official said]. There is plenty of grain, but 90 percent of the people have ideological problems.’” Virtually all of the grain harvested was collected by officials who used arrest and torture to achieve their ends.
“By the start of winter,” Becker continues, “it was clear that the peasants had nothing to eat but tree bark, wild grass seeds and wild vegetables. [Local officials] declared that this was merely ‘a ruse of rich peasants’ and ordered the search for grain to be redoubled. Party cadres were also incited to smash the cooking pots in every household to prevent them from being used at home to cook grass soup.”
Becker concludes that Mao’s famine was “a deliberate act of inhumanity” and asserts that, as a mass murderer, Mao should be ranked higher than Hitler and Stalin. After all, Hitler’s concentration camps were responsible for 12 million deaths, while Stalin’s gulags devoured some 20 million souls. Stalin’s own famine, which raged in the Ukraine during the early 1930s, cost only 11 million lives. “Mao,” Becker writes, “exceeded even these ghastly totals.” Far, far exceeded.”
http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=3917
As you can see, tha mass starvation in the Societ Union and China were a direct result of economic policy.
“It’s entirely possible to be pacifist and for the welfare state.”
No it its not. The welfare state exists through forced taxation and labour. There is nothing pacifist about holding a gun to a persons head and stealing from them and forcing them to work to suppport others.
“I don’t understand how you can claim one moment that ‘Private property is the only defense against the abuse of power’ (of course it’s not) and the next moment that property isn’t power of any sort.”
I didint say it was not power of any sort, I was challenging you to explain what KIND of power. There are diferent forms of power, some good some bad. Your statement that property was power was not in and of istself wrong, but you failed to explain what kind of power and why this power was not good.
“the opposite of absolutism and totalitarianism is not private property but the diffusion of power and the inculcation of a respect for other human beings’ needs.”
Like most apoligists for the welfare state your very good at using slogans without saying what they mean in practice. What does “diffusion of power” mean in practice? What does “inculcation” mean in practice and how does “inculcating a respect for others needs” differ from using the power of the state to enforce your ideology? And do people need such inculcation in the first place?
“Some random examples: rights over by land have been created by violence (this is true of US – grabbed by the Europeans; this is true of Englamd – grabbed by the Saxons, then by the Normans).”
None of this makes current ownership of the land or property invalid. Moreover, the whole point of libertarianism is to creatye a society based on the VOLUNTARY exchange of goods.
” Are you denying that the history of employer cartels and the (sometimes violent) repression of trade unions? ”
No, but what of it?
“An example of unfair profits today might be the modern use of agricultural subsidies in the First World and pushing free trade on the Third World, thus undermining native agrarian subsidies”
All subsidies are wrong. A libertarian free market would end the rpoblem you speak of by ending all subsidies and all trade barriers, and by restoring the right of people to trade freely with whom they choose.
“What I am saying is that it is perfectly possible to adopt an essentially positive attitude to the welfare state and engage in a collective enterprise of helping other people, ‘an association where the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.’ The great thing about the social contract and democracy is it allows us to choose that association.”
No it doesnt. Democratic social contract is a fraud. It merely justifies the use of force by the state to steal from people and to enslave people in forced labour. You cannot have a welfare state based on compulsory taxation that is in any way based on free choice.
Please excuse the poor spelling in my last post. In my defence I’m only on my first coffee of the day.
Shawn,
Good answers.
Don’t the Ten Commandments legitimate slavery as a type of property (a cheap point, but there we are)?
Doesn’t protecting private property depend on force just as much as extorting taxation?
‘Someone is always going to disagree.’ That’s why the first thing to do is agree to abide by the decision of the majority. It’s often a good idea to put some limits on this, for example through a constitution protecting rights to life, free speech, due judicial process, etc. I happen not to think absolute property rights should be among those limits, because I think they’re a very bad idea.
Now I suppose it’s true that there will be odd people who refuse to sign up to such a contract, even if it’s a rational thing to do if you want to live in a modern society.
But as I don’t think that such people have property rights before the contract is made, this doesn’t affect my view that the contract sanctions taxation. Living with other human beings involves compromise, i.e. not always getting your own way.
‘Admitting that people have free will gets in the way of using them as slaves.’ I think my view on free will is logical not ideological.
Don’t Calvinists and Lutherans count as ‘[m]any Christians’?
‘Christians are not benevolent out of their “character”, they are because they choose freely to be so.’ How could you prove that it isn’t part of their character to overcome other, negative aspects of their character? The souls of human beings are maelstroms not highways.
‘There have been major stuidies done in Britain America and New Zealand proving this.’ I am not even sure that its susceptible of proof. But I’d be glad to look at a study for Britain.
‘A direct result of living in a capitalist system.’ Not necessarily; certainly not if run-away capitalism tends to concentrate wealth and produce a proletariat.
‘[B]irth control’ is ‘a social evil’. It may offend God (if it does I think less of Him/Her/It), but it’s a social good on Earth.
‘This is a result in the improvements of heath care etchnology and science which are the result not of the welfare state but primarily of the private health care industry.’ But the NHS is a major market for new health technology. And anyway, public hygiene sponsored and inculcated by welfare states has probably done more than drug and surgical advances.
I think it’s worth separating (A) mass graves resulting of political persecution from (B) deaths caused directly by economic policy involving the extraction of food from the starving, and again from (C) deaths indirectly caused by economic policy. (I admit these categories aren’t necessarily distinct in real situations.)
I would argue that obviously in case A and partially in case B, the key factor is the willingness to kill rather than economic policy per se. You’re right to draw attention to case C, of course. However, I would point out that state welfare played a crucial, if rather confused, role in preventing mortality crises in early modern Western Europe (e.g. by building roads, fixing prices, etc.). I would maintain that the main problem in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China was not lack of respect for private property but lack of respect for human life.
‘None of this makes current ownership of the land or property invalid.’ Why not?
‘All subsidies are wrong.’ Debatable. They may help nascent industries.
Both Perry de Havilland and Shawn asked what I meant by diffusion of power. I suppose I mean things like human rights legislation, bicameral legislatures, a free media, separation of powers, accountability of officals, libraries, multiple political parties, etc.
‘It’s entirely possible to be pacifist and for the welfare state.
‘ Both Perry and Shawn objected to this. (I should point out that (1) I probably wouldn’t call myself a pacifist, and (2) that people who call themselves pacifists don’t necessarily oppose all use of force, but I’ll try and argue the strong version of my statement anyway.) It’s entirely possible to be pacifist and for the welfare state, and to attempt to get people to sign up to the welfare state project as a voluntary contractual action by persuasion and incentives, rather than by force. Just as it’s possible to be a pacifist and believe in property rights, and try to make people respect them by persuasion and incentives, rather by force. What’s true is that people tend to act selfishly, so persuasion and incentives often don’t get us very far in either case. But, as I’ve tried to explain, this isn’t a big problem for me, as I don’t think property rights exist outside of society anyway.
Perhaps I’m missing something…
Perhaps I’m missing something…
Yeah, rather a lot.
Only if you think a woman using violence to fight off a rapist is the same as a man using violence to rape a woman. The ‘why’ for is being used is rather important.
And if the majority support slavery, or voted for Hitler, is that ok with you?
Straw man. No one ever said otherwise, just that giving a political entity broad powers to supercede voluntary social interactions was wrong. What bit is that is so hard to see?
Might I suggest you read The Fabric of Reality before stating a disbelief in free will is either logical or rational. It ain’t.
Huh? Are you seriously going to suggest that a system in which markets unfettered by state regulations will produce more concentration of wealth when it should be obvious that reducing barriers to new market entry, globalising the scope for entrants and freeing capital flows (i.e. less, not more, regulatin) has produced mass affluence over vast areas of the world as never before? Yet even if your remark was true, provided it provides more wealth to more people, who cares if wealth is concentrated? And are you going to suggest that the old industrial working class (which is what I assume you mean by ‘proletariat’) which developed after the industrial revolution were worse off than the peasant farming class which proceeded it in pre-capitalist times? With all due respect, I would avoid economic and historical statements like that.
Sure. Just as if I rob you, it helps me. Does that make it ok then? And does my use of force make the economy better overall? To tax and give as a subsidy means some other use for that capital is prevented. You see what benefits (if any) the subsidy brings but you do not see where that capital would have gone if it had not be forcibly appropriated. Again, basic economics.
As for you definition of diffusion of power, sure, diffused compared to, say, North Korea I suppose… but really that is nothing of the sort. Creating Leviathan, a vast complex edifice of state, gives power to a political class and makes the subjects of that system (which means you) into nothing more than a subordinate and largely powerless political units. Do you seriously think a big business cannot buy more favours from the state, however legitimised, than you can, regardless of how many times you kid yourself that voting gives you power? The problem is not that businesses buy power but that the power is there to be bought in the first place. That is why only a minimal state gives any hope of making the purchase of political power moot.
Sorry, but that is exactly what being a pacifist means… a person who does not ever support the use of force. If you do not mean pacifist, do not use the word.
Then it is not a welfare state at all but some sort of pension fund or mutual society or kibbutz or club they are signing up for…. which is fine by me.
Certainly it is possible to be a pacifist and support property rights, just not to use force to defend them (which as a non-pacifist seems daft to me). But that does not prove your broader point at all. Your views are riddled with inconsistency and error.
Shawn
If you’re still looking – can I draw your attention to my review of “Hungry Ghosts” by Jasper Becker, now in the Author Archive filed as “Mao’s unnatural disaster”?
But it is such a horrifying account that I hardly feel like pressing anyone to read it. I’m glad, though, that it’s being publicised independently.
Findlay,
Thankyou, yes I will be interested to read it. Its a source of annoyance to me that the mass starvations that happenned under Stalin and Mao do not get more widespread attention and publicity in the mainstrwam media. Gee, I wonder why that is?
Perry,
Thanks for observing some errors. Sorry this reply is so long.
‘Only if you think a woman using violence to fight off a rapist is the same as a man using violence to rape a woman.’ I don’t: a woman’s body is her own; the earth is ours in common. ‘The ‘why’ for is being used is rather important.’ Indeed it’s crucial, but my point is it that we can’t say that state taxation is wrong just because it might involve force, since that is also true of keeping property to oneself (and I have suggested even gaining the property in the first place is a process stained with blood) and of self-defence. Rather, the question is: whose is the property in the first place? And my answer is that it is society’s if it is anyone’s; and your answer is that it is the individual’s.
‘And if the majority support slavery, or voted for Hitler, is that ok with you?’ No: Nazi policies and slavery are evil. If a democratic majority choose a repulsive course of action, I think the disgusted individual is beholden to stop and re-analyze her views. If, having done that, she still thinks that the majority decision is incompatible with her participation in society, then she must do as her conscience tells her. But I also recommended bills of rights and the diffusion of power, which I believe go a long way towards curbing majoritarianism’s excesses. It’s one reason I believe in state provision of critical, informed, secular education, which seems to make people less right-wing (hurrah!). Where the state neglects this duty, the ideological dregs of our society, the Islamo-totalitarianists and BNP, will doubtless will be waiting in the wings (witness their recent leafleting of schools).
‘[G]iving a political entity broad powers to supercede voluntary social interactions was wrong. What bit is that is so hard to see?’ I don’t think a society runs on ‘voluntary social interactions’, unfortunately.
I read some of David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality when I was younger (I liked his descriptions of space-time). Deutsch signs up to a multiverse theory of free will. While this may offer a plausible (if disputed) account of the role human agency plays in events, I’m not sure that it overcomes more basic psychological problems with free will. OTOH it’s obviously a better starting point than human-divine relations (as even Catholic debate from Augustine to the Jansenists might suggest).
‘Are you seriously going to suggest that a system in which markets unfettered by state regulations will produce more concentration of wealth …?’. If you could create a stateless global free market (which I doubt), I certainly think that would be a possibility. Such a market would be perhaps undermined by transnational employer cartels employing their greater economic power to squash unions with mercenaries and make even greater profits.
‘who cares if wealth is concentrated?’ Negative implications include: exploitation of workers, status anxiety, class war, missing out on benefiting from what other people might do with the some of the plutocrats’ resources if they had the chance, the corruption of the powers that be by money, watching your fellow human beings starve to death on telly (a favourite occupation of Western nations, it sometimes seems), etc.
‘And are you going to suggest that the old industrial working class … which developed after the industrial revolution were worse off than the peasant farming class which proceeded it in pre-capitalist times?’ This is actually debatable, although as a city-dweller I would tend to agree. However, their improved circumstances came at a terrible human cost during the industrial revolution. If only the state had intervened to make better working conditions and a minimum wage! As it was, their better circumstances were are also inseperable from the workers interfering with the ‘free’ market in order to secure better wages, etc. BTW one interpretation of the French economy is that it went down the route of peasant proprietorship rather than industrial revolution, and that people were happier because of it.
‘To tax and give as a subsidy means some other use for that capital is prevented.’ Yes, but the use to which it is allocated by the state might be better. Note also that the capital would be invested within the society, with the aim of bringing profits within the society, thus increasing the society’s store of capital.
‘subordinate and largely powerless political units’. Living with people involves compromise. Living with lots of people involves lots of compromise, i.e. little power. That said, I think people’s de facto political apathy is a result of a choice to devote their energies to non-political things, with the result that politics is deeply unsatisfactory (a self-fulfilling prophecy). As for the ‘political class’, well that’s why the state should make darn sure that everybody has a good education and equal opportunities.
Big business vs. voting. Corruption is a cost of any system. There are ways of reducing it. (Holding electoral candidates to their manifesto commitments & rejecting them for flagrant corruption is one method.) I think the disadvantages of a minimal state outweigh the disadvantages of corruption in a less minimal state.
‘Sorry, but that is exactly what being a pacifist means… a person who does not ever support the use of force.’ The OED defines it less forcefully than that: ‘A proponent or advocate of pacifism; one who believes in resort to peaceful alternatives to war as means of settling disputes.’ But see for example the work on British peace movements by the historian Martin Ceadel for its even more loose usage in practice. ‘Pacifism is used in both a broad and a narrow
sense because many people do not realise that there are in the peace movement two
fundamentally different approaches to war prevention: an absolutist and a reformist one’. Ceadel suggests the term ‘pacific-ism’ to describe the majority of the peace movement, ‘which is and has always been pacific but not pacifist in the strict sense’; pacifism, in his formulation, is limited to those who take the view that participation in and support for war are always
wrong.’ (These are second-hand quotations from Ceadel, Why People Disagree about War Prevention (1989), 1-5). But I take your point.
I think we disagree about the following points: (1) Do private property ‘rights’ exist independently from society? (2) Do ‘free’ markets make people happier? (3) Can a ‘free’ market be created without state intervention? These are legitimate disagreements for advocates of freedom.
Three questions. (1) Do you place any limits on the amount of property that someone can lay claim to? (2) Given that so much property originates in ‘theft’ and exploitation, is it possession that gives people their right to property in a modern commercial society? If so, if the state seizes property, would it be wrong to seize it back? If it would be right to seize it back, why can’t exploited workers seize back capitalists’ profits? (3) You say you’re in favour of a minimal state, but surely there is no state so minimal that it doesn’t rely (in your terms) on some level of ‘force’ and ‘slavery’ to function? How then do you justify any state whatsoever?
Shawn,
‘ Its a source of annoyance to me that the mass starvations that happenned under Stalin and Mao do not get more widespread attention and publicity in the mainstrwam media. Gee, I wonder why that is?’ Yes, especially in comparison to the Nazi atrocities. Some possible factors (speaking about the British media here), by no means comprehensive:
1. Britain didn’t actually fight WWII against the Soviets or Maoist China, whereas it did fight about Nazi Germany.
2. Parts of the Marxist left didn’t trust news reports about the depravity of the Soviet regime, and indeed, despite ritual denunciations of their predecessors by Soviet premiers, the full extent of Soviet horrors didn’t become clear to historians until more recently. Free historians have been working much longer on the Nazi archives than the Soviet archives; I doubt China allows much archival snooping.
4. Our major media is television; I suspect we have more footage of the Nazi concentration camps than of starving Russian/Chinese peasants and the gulags.
5. Mass starvation sells less media than genocide.
6. The Nazis were so hopelessly eccentric that watching endless documentaries on their atrocities helps perpetuate a British delusion that evil is ‘other’ and that we are not at risk from it.
7. By contrast, the Soviet leaders seem to have been dull bureaucrats – just as dangerous, but less effective documentary material. The Nazi is a much more common comic stereotype than the Soviet or the Maoist.
8. Germany is in Europe, Russia is sort of in Europe, China isn’t in Europe at all. The British are more interested in the West than the East (except when they’re blowing us up).
9. Once the Nazis became familar in the media, they started to sell because they are familiar.
Ben argues that my main value is property is property rather than liberty – and Ben is correct. I am really a “propertarian” in that I do not believe in the liberty to rob, rape of murder other people.
Now writers (going back to John Locke and before him -indeed Cicero in Rome and Lycophron{the Lycophon who is attacked by Aristotle in the Politics) have argued that to violate the persons and possessions of others is not “true liberty” and that people are entitled to show force to defend themselves OR OTHERS against such violation – HOWEVER one can argue that human liberty is the freedom to do whatever one desides to do, in which case most of the people on Samizata are really “propertarians” not libertarians at all.
Having made that concession.
No the French Revolution did not go rotten under the stress of war and other such – it was rotten from the start.
There were libertarian bits (such as the getting rid of certain taxes and regulations on, if I remember correctly, August 4th 1789), but the whole thing was founded on lies and murder and heavy with the influence of collectivist writers (one of whom Ben mentions).
From the murder of the Governor of the Bastille (in which there were about a dozen prisoners – none of whom were there for political reasons) – after he had been given a safe conduct in return for handing over the fortress (the so called “storming”) it was clear what the revolutionaries were like. And the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people killed all over France were mostly not artistocrats (or big landowners).
First church property was looted and then anybody (big or small) who fell out with the ruling factions was fair game to be robbed and murdered.
Economically the introduction of fiat money in 1790 showed the nature of the new regime.
In their defence it is POSSIBLE than some of the revolutionaries believed their own lies about the financial problems of France being caused by the luxuary of the Royal Court (in which case I accept that they were not technically telling lies – they were just in error). So when they found at that, in reality, luxuary spending was only a very small proportion of government spending in France all their economic thinking went down the drain.
As for administrative spending – that went up and up under the new regime.
For the French Rev see the works of William Doyle (not a libertarian) or Florin Aftalin.
As for the communal Middle Ages where people did not think in terms of individual property. Well for England this is false – see Alan Macfarlane “The Origins of English Indivdualism” (Oxford, 1978), M.M. Postan (very far from a libertarian) “Medieval Economy and Society” (London, 1972).
I suspect that for Continental Europe also ideas of the “just price” and “communal property” are also far from universal. Just as guilds were in fact not universal till the 17th century – and then only with government enforcing them.
Paul,
Thank-you for the admission that ‘liberty’ is a word subject to multiple interpretations (in the early modern era, they used to distinguish between ‘liberty’ and ‘licence’).
Even if there was such a thing as natural as opposed to socially constructed private property, I would hesitate before equating robbery with rape and murder. It seems wierd to me to argue from the wrongness of violating people to disputes about property rights.
Re: French Revolution. Only some of what you say supports your interpretation that Paine should have recognized the French Revolution ‘was rotten from the start’. If you’re saying Paine was wrong for supporting the welfare state then you can’t convict him of inconsistency over the fact that some of the revolutionaries had a ‘collectivist’ ideology.
Your analysis consistently fails to recognise that there were different factions and individuals in the Revolution: it was chaos. Thus for you the murder of the Governor of the Bastille defines ‘what revolutionaries were like’, as if they only came in one flavour. Important distinctions need to be drawn between the actions of the Parisian crowd, the elected assemblies, and the actions of bureaucrats and ‘representatives’ in the provinces; and between different ideological factions (e.g. collectivist Jacobins vs. liberal Girondins).
The command economy model of the revolution only well characterizes 1793-5, and it’s worth remembering they were fighting a war at the time. Describing the demolition of the Ancien Regime corporate state as ‘libertarian bits … getting rid of certain taxes and regulations’ is ridiculously understated. It also illustrates the ‘propertarian’ pretence that ‘private property’ is a simple idea. The pre-revolutionary period saw a new distinction being drawn between ‘privilege’ and ‘property’: in the eyes of the counter-revolutionary émigrés most of these regulations and tax-gathering powers were property. Bureaucratic jobs were property; noble rights were property; manorial jurisdiction over peasants was property; serfs were property. This is a direct illustration of what I was talking about vis-a-vis the middle ages, which I apparently failed to make clear. Of course, medieval people has an idea of ‘private property’, but in fact it was a much more complicated business (even more than private property now) then ‘propertarians’ like to pretend. What we now think of a public powers (justice, taxation, ‘defence’) were often private property; people frequently had rights in other people’s lands; lands were sometimes owned by kin-group but donated to the church in order to get them leased back to the person of one’s choice – in short, medieval property rights were extremely complex and intrinsically involved agreements, arbitrations, and judgements between people, i.e. they were social not natural. No doubt people had the idea of ‘individual property’ (the ‘propertarian’ debate, as we both indicated, is an old one); but the realities were not so simple and their idea of what could justly be called ‘property’ (serfs, justice, etc.) were wider than ours.
You suspect that the ‘just price’ and ‘communal property’ weren’t ‘universal’ ideas. Very few ideas are ‘universal’, but these ideas were clearly commonplace. People found nothing hard to grasp about ‘common pasture’, which was a key part of the peasant economy, or about the ‘wrongness’ of a merchant making a profit out of people’s starving. Taxation populaire was a common part of food riots.
I am not generalizing about the middle ages, which is what you seem to thin: I am saying they were complex. You are over-simplifying the French Revolution though.
Shawn
Still there before this drops off the blog? Why communist crimes get comparatively little attention is indeed maddening (no pictures to put on TV is one suggestion, I see). The widespread tolerance of ideological communism by academics and media persons is treated (though not explained) in Mona Charen’s “Useful Idiots” (Regnery, 2003), of which I am trying to prepare a review to go on the blog I hope sometime soon, if accepted. Paul Hollander’s “Political Pilgrims” (Oxford 1981) treats much the same subject just as it was more than 20 years ago. But you may know these books.
I see from one of your comments that you are a Christian. You put your finger very properly on the point that welfare to be truly compassionate must be voluntary, a concept that has been ignored by (Christian ) socialists, let alone Liberation theologians. If you are interested in China, you may have seen and/or read “Jesus in Beijing” by Robert Aikman. Again, you will find my review of it in the Author Archive, under the file “Christianity in China”.
Well I try and deal with some to the history here.
Notions of the “just price” and “fair wage” and so on sometimes meant a free contract (as opposed to either serfdom or slavery or a forced sale) and sometimes did indeed mean a higher price or wage or a lower price or wage that would otherwise come about via civil interaction between buyers and sellors.
Even in the middle ages things were far from settled and some works (such as “Christians for Freedom”) even claim that free market scholastics were in the majority (although they non free market thinking did seem to dominate scholastic thought on the question of lending money for interest – see Saint Thomas Aquinas on this point).
However, what really mattered (as is oftent the case) is not what men wrote, but what they were prepared to use violence about. For example some Popes seem to have been hostile to compulsory guilds and some less hostile – but guids only gained a monopoly in France when Henry IV enforced one inth 17th century – he got a revolt in Lyon against his policy, but he defeated it.
In Germany Nurenburg was famous as a city that did not enforce guild monopoly – an artist guild would have not tolerated Durer.
Yes the French Revolution did get rid of guilds – and I should have mentioned that (I apologise). However, guilds had declined in importance by Louis XVI’s day (many old laws were either repealed or not enforced long before 1789 – and to call prerevolutionary France a “corporate state” is streatching things).
The French Revolutionaries split into various factions – yes, but many of these factions (not just one or two) were full of oath breakers and murderers.
French Rev just corrupted by the wars – no not even the socialist historian Simon S. believes this, see his book “Citizens”.
I note that the last post was full of my bad typing – oh well on I go.
Ben also made a couple of point of political philosophy.
One was that property is produced by society – well if one defines society as the civil interactions of human beings (see M.J. Oakeshott’s “On Human Conduct” 1975) I do not have a big problem with that.
For example the Norse farmer lands on Iceland – he builds up a farm, he trades with other people (and so on)
It is only when society is defined as some sort of collective entity that has the right to steal the farm or tax it (steal some of the production – which was first done, in Iceland by the tithe of the 1080’s) that I have a problem with the notion.
Of course a man can have property even if he is on his own (shipwreaked on a island or planet), but that need not concern us here.
The other point was that robbery was not as bad as rape or murder – true I agree. However, the distinction tends to fall apart.
For example Ben goes to steal (or “redistribute” if he prefers) someone else’s goods. Now this person (and others who may come to help him) resist – in this situation either Ben (and what friends he may have with him) die or the people on the other side die.
Yes Archbishop Romero – if you preach that people should help the poor we will call you a saint, but if you call upon a public power to act (in the way you and your friends wish it to act) then we will call you a communist.
However, I agree with the defence that calling upon people to do something (and in unclear language at that) is not the same thing as doing it oneself.
I would not have shot Romero – until he had acted himself.