From time to time, I’ve wondered if you could write a fiery speech that a Marxist could deliver to an audience of Marxists — railing against a parasitic class that’s clearly a net drain on the society it doesn’t contribute to — and word it such that an extreme right-winger could deliver the same speech to a primed right-wing audience that would (a) be exactly as receptive to that message, but would of course (b) think you were talking about a different group entirely.
I see a parallel between Randian philosophy and Nietzsche’s “tyranny of the weak”:
Nietzsche’s concept of the “tyranny of the weak” refers to how the weak, through resentment (ressentiment), morality, and a reliance on argument/reason (dialectics) and pity, subvert the strong, preventing greatness and asserting power by making their own limitations and values seem universal and morally superior, ultimately leading to cultural decay and herd mentality, as seen in democracy, socialism, and modern ‘wokeness’.
The other flaw with “what about roads” is that toll roads are a thing. Private companies could build roads and collect tolls, and this generalizes to a list of increasingly outlandish ways to privatize things.
So if the aim is to establish one beachhead where we can establish that it’s OK for the government to collect taxes, then roads don’t really work. Nothing does.
Everybody likes to joke about government inefficiency as a foregone conclusion, but in reality the government is far more efficient given that there are things society needs that no private entity will touch. Yes, the first nuclear reactor could’ve probably been built a lot more cheaply by a private company. But as of 1942, the score of built nuclear reactors was government 1, private industry 0. Winner: the US government.
So there’s the argument that government is simply better at some things, and then the other argument is the proper role of government in a democracy is whatever voters say it is. If most people want a society where a medical emergency doesn’t wipe you out financially, then we can have it, and “Objective Reality” can get fucked. Randians can stomp off and start their own isolated society if they want, but the fact that they haven’t is that the “producers” aren’t nearly as productive or independent as they think they are.
I am reminded of the writings of another great author and their thoughts on power:
“I would use this Ring from a desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine,”
I think the same applies to economic power. If the government can redistribute Elon Musk’s wealth to help the poor then it can just as easily redistribute everyone’s wealth to help whoever is on power think “needs” it the most. And it’s almost worse if they think they are doing in in the name of “doing good” because what sort of monster would stop the spread of goodness? Such a person would be, by definition, “evil”.
A society that values the individual above the state (such as that proposed by Rand) would at least have economic power distributed and would respond to the collective will of the people through the market as opposed to being dictated by the whims of central bureaucracy.
Of course, the irony is you then have a society that can create billionaires like Elon Musk whose political and economic influence and power then extends beyond simple management of their corporations.
2 unpersuasive things here:
- “If the government can do this to Elon Musk, they can do it to you too!” Yes, this is how the law is supposed to work. The real problem is that both Elon Musk and the government can currently do things to me that I can’t do to them.
- “And it’s almost worse if they think they are doing in in the name of ‘doing good’”. This is an argument that people deride as virtue signaling, but it’s really not the only argument, or the most important argument, or even the most common argument.
To be fair, the redistributionist arguments have never been terribly well formed. There is a much better case to be made around things like:
- Wealth confers power, and nobody in a society should be a trillion times more powerful than anyone else. We can argue about the “right” amount of power, but the current situation is just broken.
- A government needs money to operate. It’s best to skim it off the margins (i.e. a progressive income tax) because this is less impactful. People with the most marginal income are the wealthiest. They can spare it, and as in item #1, they have too much power anyway.
- Economic inequality is inefficient for a number of different reasons.
All of these are separate from the argument of what the taxes should actually be used for, once collected.
Yes. The choice is really a three-way:
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A governmental democracy where the government answers to the people and commerce answers to the government.
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A government tyranny where the government answers to its most powerful tyrant and commerce answers to the government. Which is to say to the tyrant.
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A corporate tyranny where commerce answers to the richest tycoon and government answers to commerce. Which is to say to commerce’s richest tycoon.
As said so often, freedom for sheep and freedom for wolves look very different. The failure of randian and libertarian and frankly a lot of RW thought is in millions of people mistakenly thinking they’re wolves. Nope. Compared to the real wolves they’re spaniel puppies. Yes, carnivorous. But no, not fierce. Not nearly fierce enough.
So design your society to deliver freedom for sheep and 99.9% of the populace will be well-served. And screw the most rabid predators who’re the other 0.1%
Ruben Bolling’s take:
I don’t disagree with any of this. The challenge IMHO is the actual mechanism by which we establish a government and/or economic system that balances the needs of the many with the needs of the one. The Founding Fathers at least had the foresight to recognize this and attempted to set up a series of checks and balances to limit government power. In the past, labor unions served as a hedge against excessive corporate power.
Two quotations: Rand—
None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had any doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut – because they made it sound like anyone who’d oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being.
and C.S. Lewis—
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Which is where libertarianism has always hung up: how do you stop the emergence of proto-warlords who use their amassed power to violate the principle of non-coercion?
Roads though bring up another problem: the conflict between right-of-way versus private property. A road cuts through and divides property; there have been innumerable conflicts over that, such as Landlocked Parcels and the "Freedom to Roam". In general, the private property that an-caps champion becomes problematic when that becomes onerously exclusive to the rest of humanity. The creation of railroads in the 19th century– parcels of land fifty feet wide and hundreds of miles long– created vast property and access rights headaches that had to be mediated by government statute.
I don’t see even the most anarchist imaginable society not needing some very strong tradition– even an authority– to resolve the inevitable conflicts that would arise over property disputes.
Though that’s not really a problem because courts and police are, even more than roads, something you aren’t going to have without forcing your poor oppressed citizens to pay evil nasty taxes. So the road builder can build the road where ever they want as long as they have enough armed men to convince the people who’s house is being demolished they shouldn’t complain.
At that point you’re not even pretending to not be a de facto government.
I think people are trying to refute the philosophy of the premise through specific edge cases.
Specifically regarding eminent domain.
If the government needs to build a highway through your yard, the options in a society that respects the rights of the individual over the state range from providing you fair compensation for the land to making an offer and hoping you accept it.
In a society where the state is supreme, they just move you (preferably before they start building).
It’s the same thing with taxes. No one likes takes. But the question is really about what services the government should provided and to what extent they should be trying to solve everyone’s problems. Keeping in mind that there is always the threat of conflicts of interests where the “problems” that the government or factions of the government try to solve are based on politics rather than true need.
There’s also the issue that technically nobody really “owns” land; in theory all land holding is a fiefdom from the government, which as sovereign is the ultimate guarantor of territory, and which can demand tribute in the form of land taxes in return. What we commonly think of as owning land is really what property law calls a Freehold or “Fee Simple” tenure. That is, the current holder of the land may use or dispose of the property as they see fit without encumbrance, except as provided for by law.
Why are the warnings around this moral hazard always directed around individual problems and not stuff like Pentagon boondoggles? Few people bat an eye about the eye-watering waste around a failed littoral combat ship, but there’s so much hand-wringing over the idea that preventing a child from starvation might give them the wrong idea about their place in the world. Concern of the latter is dismissable as virtue signaling, the former barely registers.
I do agree it’s probably better to make the economic case for what we usually call charity. Starving, uneducated kids typically don’t make very good workers, producers, or taxpayers, so we should support them. A farm can’t easily be put back in production in times of need if it’s covered with subdivisions, so we should subsidize farmers, etc. There are all kinds of sound economic reasons for what’s often filed under “welfare” or “charity” or “virtue signaling”.
Humans like charity for various emotional reasons, but these emotional reasons probably emerged in evolution because they encouraged behaviors that actually helped the community survive. But the median voter won’t resonate with the intellectualized version. And why should they, when in a sane world it would be enough to say “it’s what decent, flourishing societies do.”
The thing is about arguments that “taxes are theft” and so forth is that they mesh poorly with all the arguments in favor of selfishness. Wealthy people who believe that selfishness and a lack of compassion are virtues depend on the majority of people not buying into their arguments, because if they did they’d kill those wealthy people and take their stuff.
Because despite any noble-sounding rhetoric, it’s all about the powerful crushing and exploiting the less powerful. Children are one of the weakest and most helpless things out there, therefore they “deserve” no rights and it’s virtuous to abuse and exploit them. If they deserved not to suffer they’d be able to fight you off.
That’s brilliant!
Anarchist:“What private property?”.
That’s why it’s good argument. The Randians are meant to be the rational ones, who believe in objectivism, unlike those dumb collectivists who are convinced by their subjective moral frameworks to believe in all sorts of crazy impractical fantasies that will never work in practice. Which they would know if they actually took the objectivist approach of those smart Randians,.
But the outlandish fantasies Randians need to come true to provide basic societal needs like, roads, courts, police, sewage, etc. without taxes are way more impractical.
Nitpick, but you linked to an article about the Zumwalt class destroyer, not the LCS program. Different, much larger IMHO boondoggle.
The short answer to your question is “politics”. Defense contractors and farmers have powerful lobbies and their industries employ lots of voters. Starving children don’t.
I think that’s more of an argument FOR Ayn Rand, Libertarianism, and Small Government, isn’t it?
The theory as I understand it is that the more power you give government to tax and spend, the more they are going to throw money at large programs in the name of what they believe is “doing good” largely driven by political expediency. A million to an organization that will conduct a ten year study on feeding children. A billion to a strategically important industry (that several congressmen are heavily invested in). Eight billion for a stealth destroyer to keep our country safe and employ thousands of workers.
In any case, it doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” thing IMHO. You can support ideals of free markets, low taxes, minimal government, and spirit of the individual without saying “taxes are theft”.