Isn't it time to start calling BS at some of the Libertarian arguments?

Great Debates
161

Renob, Your offer to give up your vote in exchange for a government that promised not to interfere with your money is, IMO, an unworkable attempt to reimagine the social contract.

Since government will still need to protect private property it will need to tax you for certain things such as police and defense of the realm. Once government is enabled to tax you it’s, in effect, telling you how how to spend your money (by depriving you of some of it) and you’d be crazy (IMHO) to give up your vote.

No argument there.

Well maybe not but there’s a limited value to a debate in which liberals and libertarians agree that that there is a failure in the market (let’s call it X); liberals propose a government solution to address the problem (let’s call it Y); and libertarians, instead of proposing a non-government solution (Z), simply say that Y would be bad because it’s a government solution. After you get to that point the discussion is over, no?

You’ve anticipated my point about the market’s predication on force. But let me go a bit further in explaining it.

Once you have a status quo that entails the unequal distribution of property you’re going to have to rely on force to maintain that status quo (and quite a lot of it I might add in a society in which, right now, a very significant percentage of people are incarcerated and an even larger percentage are in the net of the criminal justice system in some way).

Imagine that you went back to an imaginary state of nature and had, say, Bill Gates having the wealth that he has (is it still something like the equivalent of the GDP of Spain???) and a lot of very strong, very canny people without wealth angling to get some share. Exactly how long would Bill maintain what he’s gotten without, say, hiring his own private police force. In a “free” market system government takes the place of that private force, limiting the freedom of those who would like a bigger piece of the pie by threatening and exerting police action against those who have an incentive to break the rules. In addition, government force (or the threat of it) is used abroad to protect corporate interests outside US borders–included through devices such as transnational treaties. And this in addition to other kinds of government-sponsored compulsion (e.g., loans, aid) which are milder forms of coercion.

To put it crudely you’ve got two main kinds of coercion in a market system: extra-economic coercion (basically force such as the threat/use of arrest/incarceration) and economic coercion (whereby if I want buy stuff without risk of arrest I get a job and do what I can to keep it). The capitalist ideal is to make economic coercion so pervasive and all-embracing that no one ever dreams of breaking the rules in ways that require force either inside or outside national borders. That’s capitalism’s dream of freedom: a so-called free market in which freedom consists of making choices within certain pre-determined parameters (what job I can get, what products I can buy, what air I can breathe, what healthcare I have access to, what schools I can send my kids to).

In actuality, as liberals have recognized since about the mid nineteenth century, the latter system has a lot of flaws: capitalism is itself unstable, it produces too many have-nots. When excercised well government reduces the need for force by redistributing a certain amount of wealth in such a way as to expand the freedoms and capabilities of those who might otherwise have no choice but to break the law in order to survive or thrive. At the same time, government keeps capitalism going by regulating it’s most excessive vicissitutdes (bailing out its corrupt banks, policing fraud, etc.)

To wit, there is no stability without government. Government is therefore a necessary mechanism of good–notwithstanding the obvious fact that there are bad forms of government.

Although there’s much to be argued about in terms of which programs work and which don’t, the idea that government is just, on the face of it, bad because it alone constitutes force while the market constitutes freedom is, IMO, simplistic and self-deluding.
Varlosz, I’m still hopting that tomndebb is going to answer my question. Otherwise I’ll work out the issue of the user name with TubaDiva.

162

Well, ideally the libertarian would be able to explain clearly and (more or less) convincingly why Y would have bad consequences (in many cases there is no appropriate Z for the libertarian to support, and he’s merely arguing that Y would be less desirable than doing nothing). Just as, ideally, the liberal would come to the debate with a full appreciation of the possible consequences of Y, in particular the unintended ones. (Sadly, neither scenario is especially common.) Just due to ideological demographics, for every libertarian who says, “Y is a government program, therefore it’s bad,” there are 10 liberals who say “X is bad, therefore a law that says X isn’t allowed to happen is good.”

That is the corresponding liberal error: perceiving a problem, be it real or imagined, and automatically assuming that addressing it directly with state action will help.
Anyway, I don’t have a problem with the bulk of your post, though of course I’d differ on just how much government intervention is desirable. What I would suggest, however, is that in future discussions along these lines you argue that the concept of private property involves force, not the concept of the free market. The former gets right to the heart of issue, while the latter is likely to lead to a long debate, mostly about semantics, which in the end will wind up where we are now.

163

I’m not sure why you brought prison statistics, unless you want to allude to the fact that people are naturally bent to stealing. There will always be an unequal distribution of property. Is that why there are criminals?

This is actually an argument against anarcho-capitalism, which no one here is arguing for. There will always be a need for a rule of law.

And this is where you are failing to see the other side of the argument, and in my opinion, playing silly semantic games. Everyone arguing against you is basically saying that coercion or force is when an actor’s only two choices are literally: a) do what is being asked of you, even if you didn’t want to be part of the transaction in the first place; or b) some third party to the transaction (i.e. government) will take your life/freedom. You claim to understand this, but if you really did, you would not be making the argument of a lesser form of coercion. Because in those lesser cases, one can simply decline it (e.g. the aid, the incentives, whatever). Those lesser cases are not forcing anyone to do it.

This situation does not apply to your Bill Gates example. Bill Gates does not want to be robbed, nor does he want to give his money away. Yes, he can hire his own police force, but that ultimately leads to feudalism.

Not only is this crude, but it is wrong. What you have in a market system is choices. Any choice made will result in a different set of alternatives, or results of that choice made. You can either buy Product A and use it for your job; or, b) you can choose not to buy it, and risk losing your job, and finding some other job instead.

If this is true, what then is the alternative? Life is about choices. One choice will lead to another which will lead to another which will lead to another. We are not gods. We cannot provide for everyone. There is a scarcity of resources out there. Anything else will be an exercise in inefficiency and waste.

So, basically, you’re saying that humanity is evil and without rule of law or government, it will basically steal and rob from each other or worse. Is this classical liberal thought? You’re also seem to be saying that the role of government is to quite literally steal from those people who have and redistribute to those who have not so that the have nots won’t resort to crime.

The only real problem with capitalism (apart from any other economic ideology) is that is produces excess pollution (an aside: modern theory allows for excess pollution to be handled by government mandate which then cuts into the operating efficiencies and comparative advantage of the polluter). There will always be market corrections because there will always be incomplete/asymetric information. There will always be have nots. There will always be free-riders. There will always be a scarcity of resources. The question we should be asking is how can we efficiently use these scarce resources? How can we be more efficient as a society? What system best deals with these issues? In short, any answer that allows the government to actively monkey with the economy and distort price and markets will be an increasingly wrong answer in direction relation to the power given to such government to monkey with the economy and distort price and markets.

This is not “keeps capitalism going” but at best an attempt to force a market correction, but in reality, a massive, inefficient use of resources.

164

Hey, something just occurred to me.

Does Der Trihs think that I’m evil? I’m not a hard-core libertarian, but I’m pretty close. Der, do you think that I’m sociopathic? That I want government out of the way so I can do harm to my fellow man for my own economic benefit without being hassled by the law? That I “oppose compassion for others”?

I’d really like to know. If there’s an issue about the rules granting protection from personal insults in GD, I’ll gladly waive them in this instance: in this thread, Der Trihs can say whatever he wants about my character and my libertarianism, and what one implies about the other.
And, while we’re at it, I still think it would be enlightening for Der Trihs to address my previous question: “Why is it that other people’s errors are driven by spite or greed, while yours are in good faith?” The answer could help clarify a world-view which is frankly baffling to myself and many others here. It’s an opportunity to fight ignorance.

165

That isn’t “coercion”; that’s simply the nature of reality. The goods and services people want aren’t magically delivered by magic pixies; people have to create them. In most cases, that takes work (i.e. people have to do things they’d rather not be doing). The only known ways to get large numbers* of people to do work are to use (real) coercion or to offer a reward sufficient to overcome their preference for not working. Totalitarian socialism uses the former method; free-market capitalism uses the latter.

*For small groups, culture and peer pressure are effective at getting people to do their share of the work. This has proven not to scale up very far, however.

166

To be fair, I don’t think that liberals are all that eager to pass authoritarian laws. An educational or social program perhaps, but an actual ban is not usually the preferred liberal method unless there’s real harm to others (in which case libertarians would also presumably agree with the law).

Probably the main difference between you and me but not some others.

Well I’m willing to be very clear about the private property being the intermediate step just for the sake of clarity. But since the “free” market involves the exchange of private property, if the latter involves force as we both agree it does then the former does as well.

167

My point isn’t that people need to work in order to produce goods and services (though that’s certainly true). My point is that the conditions under which people live and labor are relatively limited insofar as they’re determined by what are called market forces and by socio-economic status.

If you grow up in a middle-class home with access to educational resources you have many more choices than someone brought up without these advantages. If you’re working overtime at a very low wage just to get by your leisure choices and living conditions are going to be very different than someone with much more earning power. And then there are all of the ways that we feel the impact of powerful corporations and elites for whom we don’t work. I’ve already mentioned some examples in my previous posts (as have other posters): pollution that we can’t stop, a political process that excludes us, the difficulty of opting out of the whole way of life that expects us to work in order to consume.

These are real forms of coercion even though they’re quite different from what I’ve called extra-economic coercion (the actual use or threat of force–as in violence).

168

Again, that’s life. Even Bill Gate’s options are limited by things such as time and opportunity. To try and use the fact that life involves trade-offs to condemn the free market is to argue against the nature of reality.

No, they are not forms of coercion. They may be unfortunate but they do not involve force. That is what “coercion” means – the use of force or the threat of force to make people behave in a certain way. Not having access to good education may be unfortunate and it may be something that leads to bad outcomes, but it certainly isn’t “coercion.” Working a crappy job because you don’t have the skill or the will to work a better job is a bad situation, but no one is forcing you to do that. There is no coercion involved. In fact, there is the opposite of coercion – two people voluntarily agree to the situation. Yes, the trade-off for the worker who doesn’t take the job may be starvation, but that isn’t coercion.

You can try and stretch the definition of “coercion” all you want, but that doesn’t make it true. Just as I can say that a chicken is a cow all I want, that doesn’t alter the fact that a chicken is, indeed, a chicken.

169

mazinger_z, this is a somewhat logically overcharged paragraph. For one thing the word coercion really does have multiple meanings–at the strong end a synonym for force (in the sense of violence) at the weaker end more like compulsion. To invoke these different meanings is only a “silly semantic game” if one finds dictionaries silly.

Second, you are assuming that only governments have the power to compel people to do what’s being asked of them when they don’t want to be part of the transaction (as you put it). This simply isn’t true. While it’s true that governments have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (in the sense of violence or incarceration) it’s simply not true that only the threat violence or incarcerations compels people to do things even when they would rather not.

Let me ask you something: if there weren’t these non-violent meanings to words such as coercion or force and if the market were utterly free of of coercion/force, how did the phrase “market forces” come into being?

Finally, yes, in lesser cases (where there is no threat of violence or incarceration) one has more power to decline (although the exception would be where one is unaware as when one’s poverty forces one to live in an area in which there is toxic waste or some other harmful environmental feature). But people rarely have the ability to spend their lives resisting the grain; it’s too tiring; and they need to many things for themselves or their families; and they may simply lack the ability to resist. For example, if, say, I lack healthcare and really need it I may, in theory, have the ability to look for a job with better coverage (no government will prevent me from doing so). But what if I lack the skills? What if the economy is bad and there is no job for me? What if most employers aren’t offering healthcare?

I think I’ve lost you there.

I’d continue with this lovely to and fro but there’s something I need to do for tomorrow that I get paid for. :wink:

170

Yes, every decision people make involves a trade-off. It involves giving up something to gain something. So what? That isn’t coercion. That is giving up something you value less than the thing you are gaining. To say that involves force is ridiculous.

Really? You think discussing homonyms proves something?

Yes, that situation is bad, but where is the coercion? If you have nothing to offer someone in return for something that you want, that doesn’t mean anyone is using force against you. It simply means you aren’t offering them anything of value. That may suck for you but the problem lies with you, not with them. Trying to say that the person who wants nothing from you is doing you a wrong or somehow using violence against you is pretty far-fetched.

171

But I specifically offered this example as a case of coercion where there was no violence. And as to “persons” doing me a “wrong” (in the case of a market for jobs that offers me no healthcare because the economy is bad or I lack the skills to get that kind of job), of course it’s not a question of an individual wrong done by employer X against employee Y.

I find it rather odd that people so eager to confirm the market as a realm of freedom want also (when the market fails to provide a crucial human need) to claim that the market is too much of an abstraction to have forces which sometimes compel people to live in ways that make them miserable and deprived.

This is actually very interesting to me. So the market is an abstraction, composed of the individual transactions which are its parts. But when the transactions fail to provide thereby leaving people to make choices they wish they didn’t have to make (such as working for a subsistence wage) and/or doing without crucial needs (healthcare, etc.) then the abstraction simply dissolves? Those compelled transactions simply don’t count? The opportunities that one absolutely requires to survive but which the market fails to provide aren’t meaningful?

But if government stepped in as a democratic mechanism to fill the gap by, say, offering subsidized health insurance to those who lack it, there would–for the first time ever-- be a situation that entails force?

What homonym?

172

I am not condemning the free market. I am saying 1) that the market as it exists is not free (because it relies on all sorts of government intervention, including the protection of private property) and 2) that the market’s failures (for example, to provide healthcare for all who need it) may require action on the part of government. Action to which voters consent and which improves peoples lives.

This is circular logic Renob. There are non-violent forms of coercion. Period.

To help you out here, here, from an online dictionary is a definition of “coercion”:

“Coercion is the practice of compelling a person to behave in an involuntary way (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation or some other form of pressure or force.”

If your point is only that you’re only willing to recognize forms of coercion that entail violence then fine. But that’s a rather arbitrary definition on your part.
Perhaps if I came at this a different way you’d see the light.

Let’s say that the market fails to provide healthcare for a group of people and so people vote for representatives who enact a plan that provides subsidized healthcare for those who lack it.

Where is the force (in the sense of violence) in that action on the part of governnment to which you object?

173

Government officials most certainly do have a profit motive – the most obvious examples can be found in the records of major Swiss banks.

Last chance: do you, or do you not, want to compare the number of people most assuredly starved by governments to the number supposedly starved by corporations?

174

When has anyone ever claimed this? The free market is merely an abstract way to describe the situation where people are free to interact with each other without government stepping in (unless the government is stepping in to prevent someone from using coercion). The “market” doesn’t “compel” anyone. In a free market, in fact, no one is compelled. Yes, it will likely end up that some people will lilve in ways that mean they are miserable and deprived. If you don’t have the skills or products that people want to buy, then you won’t be able to entice people to give you things you want. So what? How is that “compelling” anyone?

This makes no sense. The market isn’t the government. There is no one sitting and directing the market. There are no “compelled transactions.” If people cannot make enough to afford health care, for instance, that is not the case of someone forcing someone else to go without health care. It is the case of the person who lacks health care not being able to sell enough goods or services to afford something he desires. He is not a victim of anyone.

No, not for the first time ever. As you point out, in a libertarian world there is a certain amount of force that the government must use. All libertarians recognize the fact that you need government to protect life, liberty, and property. It is proper to use force against people who themselves are using force to deprive someone else of these things. Libertarians, in fact, think that only government should be able to initiate force. Individuals can only properly use force to defend themselves.

However, it is improper for government to use force in order to take something from someone to give it to someone else. If government provides health care the money to pay for that must come from somewhere. The government takes money from one person to spend it on another. That’s force. And, depending on the health care system, if the government cannot entice a doctor to treat someone (or insurance to cover him) the government will force that doctor to do so. That’s force, too.

“Force” meaning “violence” is not the same as when it’s used in the context of “market force.” Two words that look and sound the same but have different meanings are homonyms.

No, because you fail to understand that someone who doesn’t want to interact with me is not “coercing” me to do anything. Coercion, as your definition points out, is me using violence, the threat of violence, pressure, or force to compell someone to do something he or she does not want to do. Me going over to my neighbor’s house and taking his money is coercion. Me going over to his house and trying to sell him my car and him refusing to buy it is not coercion. Even if his refusal to purchase that car means I can’t pay my health insurance premium, that’s not coercion.

Please explain how someone who, in your example, needs health care but cannot find a job because of his lack of skills entails coercion.

175

Well, since he thinks that corporations were behind such things as the Great Leap Forward, the liquidation of the kulaks under Stalin, and the murders of Pol Pot, I’m sure he can find a way to blame anything on the evil corporations.

176

This, ultimately, is why some people like statism – it’s a perfect way to shed their personal moral obligations by dumping them onto some abstraction.

Naturally, this elicits frothing-at-the-mouth fury when they get called on it.

177

Whoa whoa whoa . . . you’re semantically mixed up here. First of all, you’re implying that in all cases “force” and “coercion” are synonyms, but they are not. So long as you’re talking about human beings, “coercion” always implies violence, or threats, or intimidation. “Force” can refer to those things, or, as in the case of “market forces,” it can have the more neutral meaning of “something which affects or acts upon something else.”

Second, is that really the kind of “force” or “coercion” you’re arguing exists in the market? If so, that’s not a statement about capitalism, that’s just a statement about life. Everything we do is compelled by circumstance. I was forced into brushing my teeth by social mores against bad breath. I was coerced by my stomach into eating a bowl of cereal. Again, you can use the words this way if you want, but it’s going to get confusing, and if you do you don’t have an excuse for not being consistent. Seriously, why are you forcing orphans to live without a family? Why are you coercing poor Africans into forgoing antibiotics?

The government is composed, in part, of actual people who are actually saying “give us this money or we’ll put you in jail.” There are no doctors who tell poor people “don’t seek medical treatment or I’ll inject you with botulism.”

It’s largely a semantic argument you’ve been making. Now, if you want you can define “coercion” backwards as well as forwards and say that it means to refuse to give something you have (rather than just to demand something you want). And you can describe all the circumstances of a person’s life with the phrase “the free market.” And you can anthropomorphize those circumstances and say that they “coerce” people into doing things. And you can take all those semantic conventions together and form the phrase: “the free market coerces poor people into living without health care.”

And that’s all fine, in my opinion. Really, I think you’ll find that I’m much more accepting of unusual definitions and usages than most other people. However, if you want the pejorative, rhetorical force that comes with that phrase, you ought to be consistent in your usage. Unfortunately, to be consistent with those usages is to sound like a crazy person.
Alternately, you can still make the substantive part of your argument while sticking to traditional usages. Point out that there are restrictions on behavior which are borne out of coercion, and there are those which are borne out of circumstance. Argue that, sometimes, restricting certain behaviors through coercion can remove a greater total volume of restrictions through circumstance, and that doing so can therefore lead to an increase in practical freedom. Depending on what specific act of coercion you’re referring to you’ll likely get lots of disagreement, but then, hopefully, you’d at least be talking about things instead of words.

178

To be precise, I’m pointing out an actual fact about the meaning of these words: the definition of “coercion” implies a continuum from non-physical to physical forms of compulsion.

VarlosZ although you seem like a very reasonable person I don’t think there’s any point in debating further because we can’t agree on terms. Where markets compel, you want to say “just life” and where governments do, even where the postulated government action is a voter-approved healthcare measure that uses the same redistributive mechanisms used to tax people for the protection of private property, you want to say “force” (as in the threat of violence or incarceration).

I can’t accept those terms as having anything like a sufficient grasp of the facts as they exist.

Note the arbirtary distinctions on your part. Coercion always implies violence, or threats, or intimidation in regard to human beings? Not so: check the dictionary definition posted earlier. More importantly, market forces always mean something as innocuously neutral as mere action or effect? But what if the effect is quite pernicious? As in depriving people of crucial human needs? Hardly neutral and not "just life–deal with it "–especially when a government program might well be able to rectify the matter.

Earlier IIRC correctly you said you were a utilitarian. I fail to see the utilitarian logic at work in these distinctions–quite the contrary, the distinctions have the effect of obfuscating so that the libertarian posters never reach the point of a utilitarian analysis that would involve the question of whether it is more ethical, rational or constructive for a society at the very least to experiment with subsidized healthcare than it is to tolerate the existence of a glaring market failure about which the majority of citizens is very concerned.

Well I’d prefer to say that the government-sponsored and thus not actually “free” market as it exists today in the US coerces poor people into living without health care.

Perhaps if we used a term like “unfreedom” instead of “coercion” we’d be able to get past this disagreement about terms.

But I don’t actually think it’s worth it because the bottom line for me occurred several posts ago when you said that libertarians were under no obligation to propose non-government solutions to problems caused by market failures even as they rejected government solutions as somehow prima facie bad.

For me this really proves the OP’s point.

But it has been edifying and enjoyable taking part in this exchange. :slight_smile:

179

Not for nothing, but you didn’t get that from an online dictionary, did you? You got it from Wikipedia, an open-source encyclopedia. I looked on at least a half dozen actual online dictionaries (including Wiktionary), and none of them imply the existence of coercion through inaction. On Wikipedia, however, the fact that “coercion” is a libertarian buzz-word that plays a starring role in every single debate such as this one is a factor; there’s a never-ending disagreement on that discussion page about how to define coercion, some of it echoing the ideas present in this thread.

Of course, that fact would tend to belie the authoritativeness of your claim (“There are non-violent forms of coercion. Period.”), so you seem to have literally covered it up by disguising and misrepresenting the source of your preferred definition, which is not to be found anywhere else. You’re cherry-picking definitions from non-dictionaries – this is a sure sign that you may want to change course in the debate.
And, on preview, I note that you’re still referring to that “dictionary” definition to bolster your point. I’ll post more later.

180

You can’t argue against superior logic. :slight_smile:

Is English not your native language? Everyone arguing against you in this thread, like Renob, SteveMB and VarlosZ on this page of the thread seem to use the same meaning as I. Why don’t you see it? Why are you conflating terms that others have managed to agree on?

Renob and VarlosZ have already addressed this. I see no reason to pile on when there comments are equally, if not more so, efficient.

Sucks to be you. Thankfully, we have a government that we can elect to provide us with those things, if we as a people choose to do so. However, there is no reason to compel the economy to provide such things. Let people be free to bargain for their own transactions. Let the government provide healthcare or whathaveyou and let the market be free to operate on its own. It’s better (with a grain of salt) to give people resources directly than to add them (i.e. subsidies, required benefits, etc.) to a transaction. For example, let the government give people a subsidy (basically cash or maybe if technology gets better, a card or bracelet) to go get healthcare, and not require it out of employers.

You seem to think that free markets/capitalism/libertarianism equals no rule of law. Only anarcho-capitalists desire this. See the link I posted earlier. All government systems except maybe communism and anarchism fundamentally need a rule of law. Without it, without a government to enforce the law, everything leads to feudalism, where even money might not have any value, and land becomes the only thing left that is valuable.