14 posts tagged “chodorov”
Abraham Lincoln, one of the messiahs and saints of U.S. politics, purged the idea of secession as a noble and acceptable thing. Why celebrate Independence Day then, given that it is a holiday that commemorates (or is meant to commemorate) an act of secession? Moreover, and more importantly, why celebrate a holiday of independence if today there is no genuine independence from a massive federal government? A federal government that is many times over the size of King George III's. And one that is much more oppressive and intrusive in our lives-----not to mention the lives of men outside America. A government that is nothing but a caldron in its relationship to liberty and independence. A government-empire that is the world's largest in history. That's independence? . . . That's liberty?
In October I typed a Paleo Blog post asking: "Does Freedom Come From The State?" My answer was that it does not. Those that believe so, or believe that freedom is a positivistic thing, only invite tyranny and have no rational means to stop the development of tyranny. This is why the Declaration spoke of men having "unalienable Rights." Government does not create the idea or meaning of justice. Government, says the Declaration, gets its "foundation on such principles" and organizes "its powers in such form."
No doubt our view of government has come a very long way from how some of our ancestors viewed this institution.
Butler Shaffer, in a new essay, notes one irony about the Fourth of July in today's day and age:
Just how far we have contorted our thinking about "independence day" is reflected in most people's thinking about fireworks. Like private gun-ownership, our personal use of fireworks represents too much power in the hands of individuals. And so, we confine ourselves to the absurdity of having the state celebrate our liberty and independence for us!
In this 2001 essay, Thomas DiLorenzo requests that we put Independence Day in perspective; to take a look at the "train of abuses" from the King.
Frank Chodorov, one of the "Old Right" who enjoyed the fun of saying that no one was to the right of him, in One is a Crowd wrote that if "the disposition of the current crop of Americans [was] comparable to that of their forebears" a new revolution would be happening. Patricide, it could be argued, has occurred.
In the mind of Chodorov, the death of freedom resulted from the Sixteenth Amendment. Government then went from being the servant of man to being the master. The income tax brought about the centralization of power, opened the door to numerous abuses, and fed the growth of the government's increasing interventions into civil society. It denied the only real human right there is, i.e., private property:
The government says to the citizen: "Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim to them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide."
This is no exaggeration. Take a look at the income-tax report that you are required by law to make out, and you will see that the government arbitrarily sets down the amount of your income you may have for your living, for your business requirements, for the maintenance of your family, for medical expenses, and so on. After granting these exemptions, with a flourish of generosity, the government decides what percentage of the remainder it will appropriate. The rest you may have.
Although, this transformation from the more-or-less limited government to the Leviathan we have today was, I have come to believe, a natural and unavoidable event. This is because once man accepts the existence of a government, its incentive structure, which cannot be gotten rid of, will only lead to an expansionist trend. Not even "divided" government or a constitution can stop this.
"[I]t is the conservative laissez-fairist," as Murray Rothbard wrote in For a New Liberty, "the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, 'Limit yourself'; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian."
Furthermore, the very nature of government has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom or security. Bringing security and protection is a contradiction since it first violates the very thing it is claimed to do. In the name of "protection," the State first must resort to robbery (a.k.a. taxation). (And who is there to protect us from our "protectors"?)
Hans Hoppe in "On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution" (be sure to read his footnotes) sets forth an analysis that concludes that the death of freedom had its commencement before the Sixteenth Amendment. Creating the institution of government (local and federal), Hoppe says, was the mistake. The government, being an aggressive organization, can't bring freedom or "limit" itself in size. Consequently there needs to be a movement that promotes secession and the development of a free, voluntary market in the service of protection and adjudication.
America, Hoppe writes, has every right to be proud of itself as a country of pioneers. As well we should be proud of the American Revolution. The later adoption of the Constitution*, on the other hand, was a fatal blunder and something we should not be proud about.
*(Many times it is asserted that Fourth of July is a day that celebrates the birth of a nation-state. That the original day was a day that created a nation-state. Nothing of the sort happened, though. The Declaration does not speak of any nation-state. It only speaks of "Free and Independent States," which were individually sovereign. Nor was the Constitution any part of it.).
Think about the idea of limited government this way: Government "limiting" itself is as nonsensical as a business "limiting" itself in its desire to make profit. Both have a desire and incentive to expand. The way they expand, though, is fundamentally different.
You find competition in a free market among countless private businesses. Each business is in competition with all other businesses (if they are in the same industry or not) over consumers and resources (including labor). An individual private enterprise must be pioneering to please the demands of consumers; otherwise these consumers may voluntarily go to one of their competitors who they view as offering a superior good or service in terms of quality and/or price. They thus must thrive at improving quality, in terms of consumer demand, and at lowering costs.* Expansion is hence dependent on these things. This forces, via the "invisible hand," men to work together and to work in the production of things with other people in mind. (So much for capitalism, as some dullards claim, being selfish, nasty, egotistic, etc.! As will be seen below, these words more correctly describe statists.)
*(Compare this to socialized industries. Health care, despite what so many incessantly claim, is in the U.S. an example of fascism and socialism. It is no surprise that we see, because of this, high prices and inefficiency.)
The government is completely different. It is a monopolist and has no direct competition. It does not need to please its so-called "customers" because the relationship between men and the government is not based on voluntarism, like the free market, but the threat of violence. Everyone is uniformly forced into a relationship with the government and its activities. Whereas markets offer choices, states offer forced choices that are uniform. Government's growth is hence not dependent on voluntary individual consumers or their various and complex demands.
Remember, a businessman can only expand in the long-run if he is cost-efficient. He must economize his scarce resources to do this. Debt must be limited. And there is always the possibility of bankruptcy and being driven off the market. Conversely, government does not expand because it is necessarily cost-efficient with little to no debt. In fact it does not matter if government is ballooning with astronomical debt and is completely un-economic! It cannot (directly or immediately in a meaningful sense) go out of business. Growth is hence not dependent on lowering costs to its "customers" or acting in a cost-efficient way. Improving the quality of its goods or services (e.g., adjudication) is not a requisite, either.
When a businessman fails he then suffers a loss and perhaps disappears. He has the guide of profit-and-loss. This promotes correct allocations. However, when the government fails nothing directly happens. There is nothing that helps divert resources into productive uses. So allocations of the government, with no pricing signals, will always have to be arbitrary and wasteful.
This makes the growth of government, which is a restrictor and parasite of liberty, and the growth of a free market enterprise, which is an expression of free man and groups of men voluntarily working together for mutual ends, inversely related. They are antithetical to each other. The growth of a business is a "good," in terms of consumer demand and their interests, but government's growth can only be seen, given the above deductions, as a "bad." Because both have the incentive and interest to expand, starting up a government will set into motion the increasing parasitic allocation of resources, away from civil society and free market enterprises, into "bad" consumptions and (redistributive-parasitic) productions.
It is then no wonder that government is like what it is like today. Man must not see this as an anomaly but see the government itself as the anomaly in society. If there is to be freedom, then there must be a (peaceful) revolution against the state. While, as Dr. Hoppe argues in the above essay, this might not be conceivable on a national level, it is relatively more conceivable seeing local states, districts, cities, and towns peacefully seceding. Even if this act of secession did not lead to areas with no government, this still is a tremendous improvement over the current affairs and a movement that would be working towards (not away) the direction of an anarcho-capitalist society.
Blog Activity Update: Last week I was sick as a dog and couldn't get around to typing up an entry for the next chapter of Hoppe's book. Now that is over, I have a cold. Ah, such is life. But, on a positive note, I have been given the opportunity to type up some extensive blog entries. The studyblog will be posted above, along with a few other entires. In the meantime, it is important to comment on the passing of William Buckley.
R.I.P. William F. Buckley, Jr.
(November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008)
Wikipedia Entry | Conservative Encyclopedia (ISI)
National Review Obit | NYT Obit
I might not be the best commentator on the subject since I have not read more than an article or two on the Internet by the man, but it is safe to say that he was a brilliant writer with a very keen mind. The trouble was, was that he corrupted and transformed the Right into what it is today. William Buckley's takeover expelled the Old Right's anti-militaristic outlook and, as a logical and necessary consequence, its anti-statism. The virulence he brought gave life to a Right that, above all else, was for Big Government as long as it was war making.
As the founder of the conservative magazine National Review (1955) the "New Right" was ushered in by Buckley at the helm, with one of the goals being to silence any remaining fragments from the Old Right. Exiling those against an interventionist foreign policy has been a common theme for Buckley.
So as this blog entry will not just have negatives on the just deceased, as I listened to some of the various conversations about Buckley on talk radio, I gather that he had the ability, an ability that Bill Clinton (yes, this is a positive comment) is claimed to have, to truly focus on the people he speaks with and to give them his full attention as if no one else or anything else mattered.
He was an author, novelist, sailor, musician, aristocrat and more. He was a religious man. For good and evil, as I read a mixture of obits, he had an impact, e.g., AntiWar.com columnist Justin Raimondo----see his tribute.
And Buckley, to his credit, did not buy the current Iraq War hook, line, and sinker.
In William Buckley's early years he was influenced by men like Albert Jay Nock, who was a friend to his family. Nock, the author of such books as Our Enemy, the State and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, was libertarian in politics and aristocratic in cultural views, and hardly pro-militaristic. He was also connected with another radical libertarian, Frank Chodorov. With him he helped setup the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, which now is named the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. (Which is a story to itself.)
Not only did Buckley see himself as a libertarian, and still did (erroneously) up to his death, but in his early years he even sometimes referred to himself as an anarchist.
This was a far cry from what he really was, though. His stance, with the Cold War, was that "[W]e have got to accept Big Government for the duration–for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged...except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." (My emphasis.)
(Dean Russell wrote: "Those who advocate the 'temporary loss' of our freedom in order to preserve it permanently are advocating only one thing: the abolition of liberty. . . . However good their intentions may be, those people are enemies of your freedom and my freedom; and I fear them far more than I fear any potential Russian threat to my liberty. These sincere but highly emotional patriots are clear and present threats to freedom; the Russians are still thousands of miles away. . . ." How well it applies today.)
Murray Rothbard therefore aptly described William Buckley as a "totalitarian socialist." And after the Cold War, naturally, no calls for radical decreases of State power were heard from Buckley or his magazine. And anyone who did not repeat the talking points for continued empire, like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran when it came to the first Gulf War, were attacked and rejected from the official and mainstream Right.
Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), according to Lew Rockwell in the audio interview linked below from a revisionist perspective, helped to introduce and promote the idea of political correctness on campuses. It called for the ridding of academic freedoms. As Rockwell suggests, for many, counting radical feminists, this book is considered the founding of the PC movements on campuses today.
With the founding of National Review (NR) and many of the writers and intellectuals of the Old Right getting old and leaving the scene, it was a ripe time for the New Right. The era of big government conservatism and neoconservatism was about to began.
Buckley also worked for the CIA. As a pro-establishment man in Skull and Bones at Yale he was recruited into the CIA and worked under Howard Hunt. (So much for his claim to be a libertarian anarchist.)
I mention this because there is every reason to suspect that NR was started as a CIA operation. The CIA was involved in many anti-communist operations. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA front, for example. And, as will be seen, too many NR guys were connected with it and with the CIA for it to be something to just dismiss. In fact, "fusionist" Frank Meyer, a co-founder of the magazine, himself believed that the magazine was a CIA operation. James Burnham and Willmoore Kendal were with the CIA and were senior editors. William Casey, another CIA man, setup the legal documents for NR. He also turned Human Events away from its anti-war standpoint to where it is today.
As Murray Rothbard wrote in The Betrayal of the American Right:
Whatever the truth about NR's connection with the CIA what is for sure is how it brought in the most appalling warmongering agenda. (Comparable to the kind of talk you hear on talk radio, namely fascists like Michael 'Savage.') To Rothbard, it was as if the senior editors were looking with delighted eagerness for a all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The same kind of rhetoric we hear today on terrorism was being used in the Cold War. But building up the State to defend freedom and kill communism would neither defend freedom at home or kill communism abroad. Rather, it would diminish freedom and encourage the ideology of communism.
In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation. We now know that Bill Buckley, for the two years prior to establishing National Review, was admittedly a CIA agent in Mexico City, and that the sinister E. Howard Hunt was his control. His sister Priscilla, who became managing editor of National Review, was also in the CIA; and other editors James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall had at least been recipients of CIA largesse in the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom. In addition, Burnham has been identified by two reliable sources as a consultant for the CIA in the years after World War II. Moreover, Garry Wills relates in his memoirs of the conservative movement that Frank Meyer, to whom he was close at the time, was convinced that the magazine was a CIA operation. With his Leninist-trained nose for intrigue, Meyer must be considered an important witness.
Furthermore, it was a standard practice in the CIA, at least in those early years, that no one ever resigned from the CIA. A friend of mine who joined the Agency in the early 1950s told me that if, before the age of retirement, he was mentioned as having left the CIA for another job, that I was to disregard it, since it would only be a cover for continuing Agency work. On that testimony, the case for NR being a CIA operation becomes even stronger. Also suggestive is the fact that a character even more sinister than E. Howard Hunt, William J. Casey, appears at key moments of the establishment of the New over the Old Right. It was Casey who, as attorney, presided over the incorporation of National Review and had arranged the details of the ouster of Felix Morley from Human Events.
Buckley and the New Right versus the Old Right
As Frank Chodorov said:
Communism is not a person, it is an idea. But you cannot get rid of the idea that has possessed the communist by killing him, because the idea may have spread and you cannot destroy every carrier of it. It is better, therefore, to attack the idea than to attack the natives. [Quoted from The Economics of Liberty ed. by Rockwell]
It was the idea that sustained communism.
And instead of going on a witch-hunt at home to find communists in government, just get rid of the jobs in government! End of story. As for ordinary citizens, it is within their right to be in possession of ideas---even bad ones. "What is it," asked Chodorov, "that perturbs the inquisitors?"
They do not ask the suspects: Do you believe in Power? Do you adhere to the idea that the individual exists for the glory of the State? . . . Are you against taxes, or would you raise them until they absorbed the entire output of the country? . . . Are you opposed to the principle of conscription? Do you favor more 'social gains' under the aegis of an enlarged bureaucracy? . . . . . Such questions might prove embarrassing, to the investigators. The answers might bring out a similarity between their ideas and purposes and those of the suspected. They too worship Power. [Quoted from Rothbard's book.]
As F. A. Harper wrote, "the ideas" of Karl Marx cannot "be destroyed today by murder or suicide of their leading exponent . . . Least of all can the ideas of Karl Marx be destroyed by murdering innocent victims of the form of slavery he advocated..."
The warmongering New Right failed to grasp Ludwig von Mises' insight into the fundamental economic problems of socialism and communism. The Soviet Union and communism was doomed in the long-run. From the very start the Soviet Union was an economic basket case. If it were not for the fact that, as Sheldon Richman writes in The Economics of Liberty, "Western governments subsidized trade and loans to the communist block [and] [a]t other times . . . provided foreign aid," then it is probable that the system of government would have collapsed earlier than it did.
Provocatively engaging, moreover, in empire building and promoting the Iron Curtain could only limit the spreading of anti-communist ideas to the public and instead spread anti-Western ideas. If any "side" of the Cold War could be described as (relatively) more externally imperialistic, then it would have to be the West. The economic basket case was just that. It is to be expected that the Soviet State would only gain support from "its" people when the U.S. State acted as a an empire and world police.
The New Right, despite this, was at home with big government aboard. Supporting that also requires big government at home. But that, too, they were okay with. All of Old Righist Garet Garrett's five central traits of empire Buckley and the New Right accepted with alacrity.
As Rothbard described in his Betrayal book, the first trait, and one that has become very accepted, is a powerful executive. One that has enough power to send troops and enter conflicts around the world as it pleases, more or less. Garrett's second trait of empire is how domestic policy is relegated to foreign policy. It comes first and foremost over liberty and private property. If need be, it can be squashed to serve foreign policy. A logical third trait would be the development of "the military mind." "Garrett noted," wrote Rothbard, "that the great symbol of the American military mind is the Pentagon Building." It is the "forethought of perpetual war." The fourth trait is that an empire has satellite nations, in some form or another. While the U.S. satellites, in the Cold War, were thought just as "allies," the Soviet Union's were "satellites." The fifth and final feature is an ethos of fear.
Not only is that a good summation of today's U.S. government and the political establishment, it is also a good summation of the conservatism, and the principles it encompasses, that remains today.
John Flynn, another man from the Old Right, said this on what empire (and socialism) brings-----a fascist-economic interest in war and conflict:
We have managed to acquire bases all over the world. . . . There is no part of the world where trouble can break out where we do not have bases of some sort in which, if we wish to use the pretension, we cannot claim that our interests are menaced. Thus menaced there must remain . . . a continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army ready to attack anywhere or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have. Because always the more powerful argument for a huge army maintained for economic reasons is that we have enemies. We must have enemies.
The Future
One can hope that the death of Buckley will open a new chapter. Neoconservatism will be with us a all long time, true. (It will be here as long as empire is here.) But with republished and reprinted works from the Old Right that have flooded the Mises.org Store, seeing Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right in print, Justin Raimondo's Reclaiming the American Right coming back on the market, and the Ron Paul Revolution that has introduced a new generation to the Old Right tradition there is hope that the Old Right will be reborn.
A political philosophy of individualism, private property, and a moral order is irreconcilable to conservative militarism----of patriot acts, preemptive wars, and so forth. The reason much of the New Right and today's conservatism is okay with them without falling into contradictions is that they do not really support said things. Such conservatism cannot be redeemed, only left behind.
***
Scott Horton Interviews Lew Rockwell
Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and proprietor of LewRockwell.com, discusses the life and death of William F. Buckley, his early CIA ties, exile of the antiwar Right from the conservative movement, the centrality of militarism and imperialism to modern conservative thinking, the real political spectrum, paleo-libertarianism, the American complex of fear and vaunting, the reality of red state fascism, the coming National Service Corps, whether or not war is good for the economy and the hope inspired by the Ron Paul Revolution and the New York Philharmonic’s recent visit to the DPRK.
Listen [MP3].
Articles to Read
- William F. Buckley, Jr. R.I.P. by David Gordon
- William Buckley's Permanent Thing by Christopher Westley (Guess What?)
- Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?
- Buckley Revealed by Murray Rothbard
Other Articles
William F. Buckley, Jr., RIP—Sort Of by Peter Brimelow
The End of An Era by John Zmirak
A Great Spirit Gone by Joe Sobran
WFB--A Leader Who Lost His Way by Taki Theodoracopulos
OK, William F. Buckley Helped Create The Modern Conservative Movement—But What Did It Conserve? by Marcus Epstein [...A tangent concerning Buckley & NR is its
transformation itself. As Rockwell argues, NR started as pretty much as
an Old Right publication when it came to domestic issues. However, this
was largely a rhetorical trick to take over the Right. No longer does it promote an Old Right position. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to have gotten where it got without doing this. In addition, NR has also slowly accepted different aspects of Cultural Marxism and political correctness. (No wonder the establishment Left gives praise to Buckley, a politically correct and moderate-establishment man.) ... An amusing feature of this is David
Frum's attack on some "politically incorrect" thinkers who have also been anti-war, which only reveals how little he knows---or admits to know---when it comes to the history of NR's past views on, for example, racial topics----see this article at Amren to understand NR's past views on the subject.]
A Moderately Happy Birthday, Bill Buckley! by Paul Gottfried (2006 article)
Murray Rothbard on 'National Review'
On the Old Right
The Foreign Policy of the Old Right by Murray Rothbard
John T. Flynn: Exemplar of the Old Right by Justin Raimondo
'Reds Are Natives': Frank Chodorov as Cold War Critic by Dan Spielberg
This is another entry to The Paleo Blog which will give partial summaries, or highlight points of interest, of a few articles originating from the Journal of Libertarian Studies. (Subscribe to the journal here.) I encourage you all to download the articles, read them, and study them.
Some of my own comments have been added in parentheses.
Here are the articles we will be looking at:
- “Private Police: A Note” by Patrick Tinsley
- “Order Without Law: Where will Anarchists Keep the Madmen?” by John D. Sheed
- “Anarchism and the Public Goods Issue: Law, Courts, and the Police” by David Osterfeld
- “An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West” by Terry L. Anderson and P. J. Hill
"Incidentally, the factual books on the West underline a fact that the script writers only touch upon: namely, that the West was cleaned up----meaning rid of outlawry----not by officialdom but by private enterprise. The public enforcement agent, even as today, was more interested in keeping his job that in doing it. He was quite averse to risking his life for the good of the community, at the going wage. Far more effective in brining some sort of order to the West was the fact that every man carried his own government with him----in his holster. That was private enterprise with a vengeance.
"Supplementing the private gun were the Pinkerton operative and the railroad police----private enterprise. It was they who did what government is supposed to have some competency at doing, namely, the protection of life and property. Then, even as now, those who had something of value to protect were more likely to entrust the job to a professional policeman than to a political policeman. Which brings up a thought: would not the persons and the property of the citizens of New York be more secure if entrusted to a private police force? And would not the job be done at less cost to the citizenry?"
We will be exploring this below...
“Private Police: A Note” by Patrick Tinsley
Download PDF Here.
Tinsley wrote a short and sweet article. Its shortness is not a weakness, though. There are many good things to learn from it. Here they are (as I understand them)...
Those who say the police can’t be private see “enforcement of law” as “a unique and singular commodity.” But this, he writes, is not true. The author then goes through all the different ways a store secures itself from potential robbery. These methods do not “rely exclusively----or even primarily----on the majesty of the state’s enforcement of that law for its own security.”
Take a jewelry store:
it takes out an insurance policy on its gems, which are kept under a locked glass display case, which can only be opened by an employee, who is under the ever-vigilant eye of video monitoring equipment, and who watches the customers with the aid of convex mirrors, and keeps the store’s cash in a locked vault, which is in a back room, which is in turn locked at closing time, and the store’s alarm activated as the employees leave and the armed night watchmen arrive.
Security, then, is not completely in the hands of the State. Plus it is a ‘something’ that is dividable. It has marginal units.
If private police were to come into being in society, one might wonder how this would affect the poor.
The poor generally rent. They seek to rent from landlords who offer good amenities and keep the place well-maintained. Landlords would also have to have security on their minds as well. To maintain their property they will have to secure it and go to an agent to watch over it. “[O]r else,” Tinsley writes, “he will be quickly out of his property and even quicker out of his tenants.”
When such poor (or non-poor) folks are not at home, they are on other property. Businesses want a secure area. They want their customer to be safe and they want their property to be safe. Just as we get “free” usage of their private restrooms, we would get “free” security/protection at their location. Likewise, private roads, like other businesses, want to attract customers and keep their property safe. Thus, the poor would get “free” security on roads as well. That is, they would not necessarily have to pay (relatively speaking) for their own security at such locations. Loosely speaking, they will be “participants in the so-called free rider problem,” the author notes.
Today we already enjoy the security of being at a shopping mall. We certainly feel safer there than on public property!
To illuminate the difference between the public and the private enforcement of law, simply imagine the rate of criminal activity at Central Park as prevailing at, say, Macy’s.
A third point the article goes into is how a victim of crime “could be rewarded by the (private) courts a claim for damages in an amount which corresponds to the gravity of the crime. Such a claim would be transferable property.” They can sell (part of) that claim to a private agent. This is similar to how lawyers can agree to help a poor man: In a contractual agreement, claims awarded to the plaintiff partially go to the lawyer, so that the poor customer does not have to pay a large up-front bill. Etc.
Another major concern is corruption (as if the State solves that!). It is argued that since market or capitalistic organizations work “within the parameters implied by profit-making, [they] would be susceptible to bribery and corruption.” He replies that this reaction “is manifest in ... a fundamental failure to comprehend the workings of a free market.”
To begin with, a competitive free market of private police companies cannot (versus States) force people to become clients. Agents would have to convince people to become their customers for good protection and good & fair relationships.
It is also likely, Tinsley says, that to ensure this they would insure their customers properties. (That is, they would become insurance agencies.) Thus, they have an incentive to protect those properties, almost as if it were their own.
This is the opposite of the State public police. He writes:
In fact, it is the public police that stands to profit from look-the-other-way law enforcement. After all, arriving at its funding, as it does, from (coerced) tax revenues, the public police will not endure economic hardship if and when it fails to arrest the onslaught of crime. Therefore, it pay for its officers to accept bribes from the perpetrators of crime, offering in exchange clemency.
So we see that bribery is relatively more likely under statist conditions. This point from Patrick Tinsley, for me, has good perception on the State’s collectivism and inferiority to the market. It creates conditions in which manifest corruption and inefficiencies. Now, no one is saying that problems cannot arrive in the free market. (They will.) Problems arise in life. That should be clear to anyone reading this. But problems are exponentially increased as State power takes control over more areas of society. We must understand that society is not a homogeneous robot. It cannot just be programmed and controlled at will without (bad, very bad) consequences.
“Order Without Law: Where Will Anarchists Keep the Madmen?” by John D. Sneed
Download PDF Here.
With true abolition, man and society will be free from the destructive chain of the State. The monopoly of “protection” (so-called protection) would no longer exist in a society without a State. Then the question comes up of how madmen will be dealt with. John Sneed succeeds in answering that question very well.
In anarcho-capitalism, man would be able to purchase “protection services according to his own tastes and preference,” says Sneed. Man will balance his desire for protection services relative to other goods and services on the free market. Some men are more “risk-averse” and will demand much more security and others much less. Like all other industries, it is through specialization in the division of labor which would create a market for the production of security. Demand and technological limitations and/or requirements would help determine the size of companies that offered this service. They would have to, to the best of the defense companies and man’s abilities, provide their service paralleling the market conditions of free acting men (and, consequently, family households, communities and so on).
(Instead of public cops spending much of their finite resources on victimless “crimes,” private cops would have to use their resources on genuine crimes in compliance with the rules of the property owners. More importantly, their finite services would no longer be arbitrary. Where, for example, should the cops be? Should they be patrolling this street or that? Should they stay put at one location or move around, and how exactly? There is no pricing mechanism to determine this. They do not have to comply with actual demand from the public---a public filled with various private property owners with different needs. It is equivalent to food socialism, which results in starvation due to uneconomic allocations. Also, given that their funding is through taxation, neglectance is to be expected. They can get away with less work because they know they have a constant supply of money. In direct comparison a private police agency’s money is through voluntarism. If they had such an attitude, they can be out competed by another agency. Their attitude, in a free society, must result in one that would be seeking to serve customers as best possible. In brief: the disutility of labor applies always, and so you want market conditions because it will lessen man’s disutility, so to speak.)
As a business, the goal of such defense companies would be to “minimize non-productive strife and maximize profit.” [emphasis mine] (The customers, of course, want the lowest cost and the best protection. This is what these companies will have to compete over.) This implies that they want peace between all of their subscribing customers because conflicts that happen between them would be handled by said company. These companies would then work out a “code” in dealing with such cases.
Conflicts can, of course, happen between men of different defense companies. If defense company 1 seeks to arrest or detain man A because, they believe, he in someway violated the property or person of one of their clients, then what would be the response if man A belongs to defense company 2?
Companies would have to anticipate such problems, he says. He reasons that companies would have an interest in complying with such demands from another company (or resolving them in some way). There is little interest in warring it out.
(It should be said that if public opinion is against war-making between agencies, then war-like activity will be decreased. All social systems require public support; otherwise the given social system would collapse. Under statist conditions, it should be expected that war-like activity would be greater for many reasons. This is not to mention that its entire basis is in war-like activity, i.e., coercion of “its” subjects. Tax money is collectivized and State activity is considered “legal.” Money to defense agents, on the other hand, is voluntary. Since war-like activity in a free society would be considered illegal, this would logically affect man to be more conservative with his money. He would have to think on the margin. Relatively speaking, then, agents will tend to be less war-like than States. See chapter one of The Economics and Ethics of Private Property by Hans Hoppe.)
There are several reasons for not warring it out, Sneed writes. (1) Other companies dealings with it would become more and more mute. They would likely refuse to hand over or try to resolve conflict in which an aggressor appears to be part of their company. Thus, the given company would become increasingly “powerless to protect its clients against the opposing companies’ clients.” He continues: “[O]r will be forced into a violent confrontation with other companies.” Publication of such company to the public would make themselves isolated moreover. The risk-averse customers would leave. (2) Criminals, due to the “unstable nature of their ‘trade’,” tend to migrate. Companies would have an incentive to share their information about criminals to each other to minimize costs and maximize profits. It is bad relationships between companies which would eliminate this. [Think of casinos sharing information in regards to those who can count cards.] (3) Such action by a company would attract criminals, and such a company would then become entangled in greater numbers of conflicts leading to its dissolve in bankruptcy.
(A company that did not comply in resolving the conflict would be seen as harboring criminals! People became clients to the given defense company for defense. They would likely question their continued customer relationship. Also, if the person in question is really a criminal, then that criminal is more likely than other clients to aggress against persons in said company. The company, then, would just be shooting itself in the foot. That is, it would be inviting conflict to occur with its own clients. This would be a good policy if the company desired failing.)
Now, if the company feels its client is really innocent, it still has an interest in working with the other company to resolve the situation in a fair manner. Beyond interests in cooperation, with competition, he writes, “refusal will entail risks of a higher order than any risk or loss they might suffer as a result of the guilt of their client.”
Anticipation of such conflicts will generally lead to formal procedures agreed to by most companies in a given area concerning the limits of reciprocal powers of arrest. Similar “treaties” will develop to define procedure in several other areas as well, assuming that the companies possess some small degree of foresight, an assumption implicitly denied by most critics of anarchism.
The author continues: “A profit-maximizing arresting company would usually demand bail which would allow it to make a satisfactory settlement to the victim or his heirs, cover all costs incurred in the case, and provide it with a satisfactory profit.”
Impartiality would be improved. Clients, knowing that they might be accused of wrong doing, would want to find a company that would be efficient at defending them from accusations. Companies, then, would have to employ efficient private investigators. This would lessen convictions of innocent men.
To skip ahead to another topic in Sneed’s article, let’s say the accused is found guilty. Now what? He would pay his debt. If he could not pay, then what? It would depend on the case and the criminal in question. The author answers: “They could allow the convict to work out his judgment at his previous occupation, under varying degrees of security and supervision ranging from probationary to work-release schemes.”
This has several advantages, he says. One being that it would reward good behavior by the convict, monetarily. It would also be in the interest with the agent because costs would go down.
“Anarchism and the Public Goods Issue: Law, Courts, and the Police” by David Osterfeld
Download PDF Here.
A persistent confusion with genuine hard-core libertarianism with many people is that they see it as against all law or enforcement thereof. Condemnations against the anarchy of lawlessness or chaos are, no doubt, justified. As Osterfeld writes in this article, these attacks would be justified against libertarianism if it were not for the fact that “one finds [in] anarchist literature continual references to ‘natural law,’ ‘objective’ law, ‘common law,’ ...” Libertarians are not against law but legislation, the author writes. Thus, the thing to address is if law is possible without legislation. The answer to this first question is yes.
The concept and idea of legislation is a relatively new one. Law (e.g., classical Roman civil law and English common law) was to discover and find; not to impose or create by thin air. Call this good-style conservatism in action, if you will. Common law actually came out via spontaneous order. By no accident, Osterfeld writes, was it largely libertarian.
Circuit judges, pre-Norman England, would travel “from town to town, hold court as they were.” “Individuals,” the author writes, “would submit disputes to these judges, and it was from the growing corpus of these individual judicial decisions that a body of laws, common for the whole realm, gradually emerged.” Cases brought to the judge involved two parties. After all, it is these two sets which are required for crime; unlike a "crime" one commits against oneself----he does not go to a judge(!). With the settling of disputes, the cases will naturally fall into individual property rights. That is where (aggressive) conflict can occur. The tendency, therefore, will be of a libertarian nature.
These decisions were used as the basis to judge future ones (“stare decisis”). Stare decisis gave “certainty to the law, i.e., it made possible a true rule of law.” While there was a static feature to such development of law, it also was able to adapt to various and changing circumstances. There is continuity to such law. Symmetrically, an anarcho-capitalist system could be able to deal with unforeseen and unique circumstances too. Air pollution being an example. Fundamentally, the issue is a property and trespassing issue. (Something, by the way, the great minarchist Ron Paul has been pointing to.)
But does this law contra legislation still need a statist framework?
Osterfeld notes that law “does not operate in a social vacuum.” Any
social system requires support (even if it is passive) from the public.
It depends on its “horizontal” support between men in the given system.
This dependence is greater than “vertically” structured law
enforcement. No system can be maintained---even the current
one---without support.
In such competitive conditions there is the inclination to promote “economies of standardization” due to the high costs of too much “conflicting legal codes.” So while different subscribers to different companies will vary in laws, arbitration between them would promote a unification of law and resolution procedure. (Vigilante justice then would be limited in the free market. The companies would have an incentive to eliminate uncertainty.)What, specifically, would be the process by which laws would be judged and enforced in anarchy? In the absence of government there would be no tax-supported and coercively imposed “protection service.” No one would have to purchase protection if he did not desire it. Yet, law is obviously a good highly valued by most, if not all, of us. In the wake of abolition of the government monopoly in this area it is likely that, just as in other industries, companies would quickly form to supply defense or protection services to those who want them...
He also argues in the article that the absence of public property would reinforce law in the protection of private property. Don’t forget laws concerning the usage of public property would be gone.
This does not, however, mean that “everyone, even nonlibertarians, would be forced to live an unrestrained lifestyle.” “Bilateral law” would develop. It would apply only to those who have voluntarily entered into such relations.
(Now “bilateral law” might require, in many areas, to enter into convent relationships, housing associations, or some such things. In many cases, of course, this would mean people would have to assimilate to more traditional norms of the community.So one better start civilizing oneself with the normal standards of the community. If not, then one would find themselves unwelcome and find themselves living isolated and on the edge of society. Actually, this “bilateral law” probably would be required for most. That is because many people would want to enter into these types of relationships to avoid bad neighbors that, for example, leave trash on their [own respected] property, thus lowering the property values of the area. Also worthy of mention is that this gives much reason for traditional or paleo-conservatives, of the social and cultural variety like myself, to become anarcho-capitalists.Thomas Woods comes to mind. So does Joseph Sobran. See The Paleo Blog’s “Culture, Literature, and Private Communities” and “A Moral Imagination to a Diabolic Imagination.”)
Another error that is often made is that since such law requires one to “enter into it” (so to speak), everyone would be able not to enter any law, resulting in chaos or a “lawless” situation. However, Osterfeld writes, “This freedom presupposes a framework binding on all individuals prohibiting everyone from interfering with the autonomous domains of others, i.e., from initiating violence.”
He then gives focus to how conflicts would be resolved. Now if two parties are part of the same agent, the dispute would be resolved there. Contractual agreements would work out those details. Such contracts are voluntary and would be in competition with other contracts from other companies. The same market superiority would be at play.
Then the question comes up about two different agents. Two different people from two different agents can come into conflict. Then what? As the author argues, it is very likely that both agents would reach the same conclusion: “This is probably not as unlikely as it might seem at first, since no court company could stay in business by rendering biased decisions in order to protect the illicit activities of its clientele.”
Third-party arbitration services would develop. To fight against corruption (e.g., bribery), in advance parties can agree to go to appeal courts. And how would they stay in business? Again, by providing the service they are in business for, i.e., neutral and fair service in deputes.
Here is David Osterfeld in more length:
It is important to realize that this position is not predicated on the naïve belief that all, or even most men, are good or desire justice. It is based, rather, on the simple but realistic proposition that no one desires to be swindled. A might wish to sign a piece of land from B, a transaction that would include an agreement to take any further dispute concerning the land to an agent A knew would favor him. B would desire to have any dispute taken to a company that would favor him. Since, obviously, neither would agree to the other’s terms, the transaction could be consummated only if both agreed to submit to a natural agency. This means that the greater a judge’s reputation for honesty, the more cases he will have submitted to him. And, of course, the more cases submitted to him, the more money he will earn.
An outlaw agent would have problems. It would have to deal with law-abiding ones. Employees working for one would be increasingly costly, as they are pushed off the market. Thus, costs would go up to pay such workers. “Aggression would become less and less profitable and thus less attractive because the higher costs to the aggressor company would compel it to raise its premiums.” [emphasis mine]
Another important point, which is self-evident but easy to overlook, the article makes is from David Friedman (son of the late Milton Friedman). As long as people value their life and property, as most do!, and do not want to be robbed or murdered, they will spend their greater resources to that end versus the small minority of truly evil (criminal) people. Victims of theft out number aggressors, and consequently there is more money in defense than in aggression. Plus, after all, a victim alone values his property and is willing to pay more for protection thereof greater than a crook.
Beyond some of this, the article also addresses the criticism from philosopher Robert Nozick.
“An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West” by Terry L. Anderson and P. J. Hill
Download PDF Here.
Anderson and Hill write in their JLS article that the American Old West, while not one-hundred percent “anarchistic,” was close enough to show the “viability of property rights in the absence of a formal state.” Popular myths, popularized by Hollywood entertainment and fictional literature, have portrayed the Old West as a place of great chaos and perpetual violence. However, crime records and historian research seems to suggest otherwise. For instance, “Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Doge City in 1876, ever had five killings in any one year.” Or take Abilene, considered one of the most “wild” cow towns, they cite that “nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870.” “In fact,” they continue in their citation quote of another author, “nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings.” They refer to sources which show that the crime statistics show no higher crimes in the Old West relative to other areas of the country. Overall, the authors document, the West was not as “Wild” as most think. In fact, overall it was more peaceful.
In polemics about the feasibility of anarcho-capitalism, the Old West provides insights into the potentiality of a stateless society. The Old West appears to conflict with many of the critics’ views of how private security or law enforcement agents would run. Chaos did not dominate; neither did “war” between private agents. Competition kept enterprise in-check and the competing agents did not just come together to form some semi-State. In addition, some critics claim that market anarchy could not get off the the ground floor because, they believe, the question of property rights and how they are derived must come from the top-down or are simply undefinable. This too, while more, as the authors of the article argue, “conceptual than empirical," did not seem to be a problem either with the Old West. There was what is called a “schelling point,” where people had shared views on the “rights to use and control property.” As will be partially summarized in this blog entry, the truth of the matter is that property rights were often seen as “paramount” to society.
Private individuals and enterprises came together in formation to produce law, security, and the protection of private property. War-like conflict was at a minimal between different agencies. It was evident that such conflicts were counterproductive and not in their interests. They saw that it was far less costly to resolve conflicts through private arbitration and courts. The not so Wild, Wild West saw the formation of claims associations, cattlemens’ associations, mining camp law, and plains law for wagon trains. While the article goes into much more detail than I will here, I'll lightly cover a few things here...
Squatters, or frontier settlers, claiming land did so without government/State oversight. So “land clubs” or “claims associations” were formed, according to the article. Different claim associations formed different constitutions and procedures. Anderson and Hill write:
Each claims association adopted its own constitution and by-laws, elected officers for the operation of the organization, established rules for adjudicating disputes, and established the procedure for the registration and protection of claims. . . . The constitution specified the procedure whereby property rights in land would be defined as well as the procedure for arbitrating claims disputes.
Enforcement of decisions sometimes did require (protective) violence, but other methods were used. Open discrimination, isolation, and refusal to trade-with a given offender was used within the subscribers to the association. Another reason these associations were formed was in common defense from any outside aggression.
Cattlemens’ associations were also formed in the Old West. “Frontier law” formed. The authors cite that within two years of settlement of said land “small groups of owners were organizing themselves into protective associations and hiring stock detectives.” These associations were started and developed in much the same way as the claims associations, but were “more violent than the trade sanctions specified by the claims associations. These private protection agencies were quite clearly a market response to existing demands for enforcement of rights.”
Major economies of scale did not seem to exist in either enforcement or crime. Although there are numerous records of gunslingers making themselves available fore hire, we find no record of these gunslingers discovering that it was even more profitable to band together and form a super-defense agency that sold protection and rode roughshod over private property rights. Some of the individuals did drift in and out of a life of crime and sometimes did form loose criminal associations. However, these associations did not seem to be encouraged by the market form of peace keeping, and in fact, seemed to be dealt with more quickly and more severely under private protective associations than under government organization.
The Pinkerton Agency (as mentioned above by Chodorov) and Wells Fargo were “large private organizations,” but “these agencies seemed to serve mainly as adjuncts to government...”
The authors of the article then moves on to mining camps. Finding gold in California in 1848 brought a rush of men. Again, there was no real presence of government; not “not within five hundred miles.” Various companies organized different ways with different rules as it relates to the workers. Voluntary contracts governed the taking care of “the sick and unfortunate, rules for personal conduct including the use of alcoholic spirits, and fines which could be imposed for misconduct, to mention a few.”
“While the mining camps did not have private courts where individuals could take their disputes and pay for arbitration, they did develop a system of justice through the miners’ courts.”
Finally, and they say maybe “the best example of private property anarchy,” deals with the wagon trains. In this section of the article, Anderson and Hill explain that “the wagon trains as they moved across the plains,” were in areas that were “unorganized, unpatrolled, and beyond the jurisdiction of the United States law.” “Plains law” developed with different groups forming different constitutions laying out the rules during their travel.
When crimes against property or person did occur, the judicial system which was specified in the contracts was brought into play. “The rules of a traveling company organized at Kanesville, Iowa, provided: ‘Resolved, that in case of any dispute arising between any members of the Company, they shall be referred to three arbiters, one chosen by each party, and one by the two chosen, whose decision shall be final.’” The methods of settling disputes varied among the companies, but in nearly all cases some means of arbitration were specified to insure “that the rights of each emigrant are protected and enforced.”
For more details, of course, you will have to check out the article.
Frank Chodorov Wrote:
“The right to life, or the right to oneself, must mean the exclusive title to all the faculties which are identifiable with the thing called ‘me’: body, mind, appetites, aspirations, all the factors of personality. This peculiar bundle of flesh and soul is ‘mine,’ first, because it came into existence when ‘I’ was born, an act of God, and will pass out of existence when ‘I’ die; secondly, there is no way of transforming title to that personality to anyone who is not ‘me.’ That is the important point, that neither science nor politics is capable of devising a way of transforming ‘I’ into ‘he’ or ‘we.’ Oneself is oneself throughout life.
“Now, title to life is not merely metaphysical; its reality is the enjoyment of those things which, according to the dictates of nature, make life possible. Without them, ‘me’ disappears. The raw material for those things are all about ‘me,’ put there by the same intelligence that put ‘me’ on this earth. But it so happens that this profusion of life-giving materials serves ‘me’ inadequately until it is transformed into consumable shape. ‘Me’ must go to work on those things so as to make them contributory to life; and though ‘me’ finds labor wearisome and undesirable, so strong is the will to life that this aversion is overcome. Thus, some part of ‘me’ is invested in what ‘I’ wanted to enjoy; it would not have existed and could not be enjoyed unless that investment of labor were made. It is by virtue of this investment of ‘me’ that the desirable thing becomes ‘mine.’ It is ‘mine’ because ‘I’ made it.
“Title to things, or the right to property, enjoys moral validity, therefore, only when it rests on labor. Any other theory of property rights must begin by rejecting the right of the individual to himself and must assume that the successful use of force to separate the producer form his product is title enough. Putting aside moral considerations, title resting on the use of force is transitory, vague, and uncertain, because it must change with every change in the incidence of force. Thus, the salve owner chattel’s property only so long as he can exert force on the slave; when the slave overthrows his master, the title to property reverts to the former slave. The thief becomes an honest man and the honest man a thief according to which is stronger. Whenever we invoke a rule of property that does not recognize the relationship between the producer and his product, we are involved in contradictions; we are on transitory grounds and outside the field of principle.
“When we recognize the employment of force in acquiring property----that is, when our sense of reality has not been dulled by adjustment to its employment----we are quick to put upon it the stamp of inequality; we call it exploitation, confiscation, appropriation, thievery. It is a malum in se, an inherently evil at. In that way we assert the conviction that depriving the producer of the fruits of his efforts is an infringement of his right to life. It is an immoral act. And it is an immoral act even if it is sanctioned by law or is committed by a number of people acting in concert, for there is no multiplier large enough to make a wrong a right. When we consider the consequences of the substitution of a forceful (or legal) for a moral right to property, as we will, we shall see that the violation of principle cannot be done with impunity. But, on principle alone, regardless of consequences, any method, legal or illegal, by which title to property is shifted from producer to nonproducer, is essentially akin to the burglarizing of a house. Under letters of marque issued by the monarch, piracy becomes privateering, but in either case it was stealing; and when I am compelled against my will to support a school or a bureaucracy, under any pretext, I am being deprived of my property.”
See the Frank Chodorov Resource Center
Law and order was not always through government and statism. A difficulty that arrives for libertarians is to try to have people think about other possible social arrangements. Thinking about the possibilities of a stateless order, which is the full expression of libertarianism, is too much for most people to even consider. They cannot see beyond the present social arrangement, as if it were the only one that existed and could ever exist.
Take, for example, Old Rightist Frank Chodorov in his book The Rise and Fall of Society, where he quotes and examines Judges 17:6 where the Bible says; "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Authority and judges were there, though. Law existed. Tradition and custom helped hammer them out. It was a conservative order. But these private authorities did not have the "power of coercion." This order lasted four centuries. As nomads and tribes started to settle down, "sheepherding was giving way to agriculture." The economic order changed. But then, two emergencies, says Chodorov, occurred during this time. First being that the Philistines "beaten them roundly in battle" and the second being people "lost faith in their leadership." According to the Bible, they "turned aside after lucre, and took bribes and perverted judgment."
It was because they had forsaken the rigorous tradition of their forefathers, with its insistence on self-reliance and personal integrity, that they had lost the victorious touch which carried them from Egypt to the outskirts of the Promised Land; the breakdown of the Judge system could be traced to the same lack of self-discipline. Therefore, said Yahweh, give them what they ask for [a king], but as a parting shot you might “shrew them the manner of the king that shall rule over them”; and tell them also that when they realize their mistake it will be too late to regain freedom: “The Lord will not hear you in that day.” This is an interesting comment, seeming to stress the point that when a people put their faith in a State, rather than themselves, there is no way for them to remove the noose from their necks.
So a kingdom was set up. Conscription and (limited) taxation was introduced.
Chodorov continued:
One could go behind the returns and make out a case against these revolutionists: perhaps they constituted a newly arisen landowning class and hoped to solidify their position under a kingship. More likely, fear had entered their hearts, as is usually the case when a people accustomed to success are faced with adversity, and they were quite willing to swap freedom for the promise of subservient security. The search for a demigod is inherent in the human makeup; fear of the problems of life tends to weaken self-reliance and to encourage belief in a deliverer. Faith in political power is a comfortable flight from reality.
The adoption of a government did not help matters...
From the very beginning of the royal establishment the troubles of Israel multiplied. There was the usual spate of wars with the Philistines, with varying degrees of success; internal dissension, heretofore rare in the experience of the tribesmen, became common. Some followed Saul, others revolted against his rule; more exactly, they resisted the establishment of those institutions which Samuel had warned them would come with a king. But, as Samuel said, there was no way of regaining freedom once the State had made its appearance, and the Judge was soon on the lookout for a new deliverer. . . .
Later came the rise of David and Solomon. Chodorov says that one of the lessons to be learned from this is that the acquisition of political power creates the impression for the ruler (or the one seeking to rule) of having "a surpapersonal quality and to become in itself . . . a shine for public worship." The ruler acts and rules as if shielded from the consequences of his actions.
As the king was first adopted here, people still had some concept of freedom. There was some resistance to expansions of power. The propaganda of the king being ever wise and supreme takes time.
As his [the king’s] quest for power reaches beyond his purview, as it always does, he finds it necessary to delegate some of his power to and share his prerogatives with a supporting oligarchy----military, ecclesiastical (or intellectual) and, in time, commercial or industrial groups which lend themselves to his purpose in return for the special privileges he grants them.
This is exactly what Solomon did. He dressed up his temple so that the "kingship [had] an aura of omnipotence" and tied naturally arriving authorities in his pockets. Leviathan needs ideological support, after all.
Rehoboam institutionalized heavy taxation.
The designation of taxation as a yoke is a nice piece of biblical directness. A yoke is worn by an ox, a beast of burden, which by nature is incapable of claiming a property right in the products of its labors. It follows that when a human being is deprived of that right his status approximates that of an ox, and if taxation takes all he produces beyond that needed to sustain life (the wages of an ox), it can rightly be called a yoke.
The Rise and Fall of Society: An Essay on the Economic Forces That Underline Social Institutions by Frank Chodorov is a short and elementary book on statism and society. This is what makes it good for the novice. (To others it might be "old hat," but it is still worth reading.) Mr. Tucker, the man behind the Mises Institute website, says that this book is one to pick out "to give to undergraduates" and will give them "a sound view of society, government, and economics." I agree.
For more information about the great Old Rightist Frank Chodorov, you can see The Paleo Blog's Frank Chodorov Resource Center.
You can freely download the e-book here [PDF] and buy the book (paperback or hardback) at the Mises Institute here. It is a welcome book in my relatively small, but ever growing, Freedom Library.
According to Frank Chodorov (1887 - 1966), collectivism can be described as the key ideological swing in the twentieth century. Education, he says, being "perhaps the most glaring example." Instead of seeing schooling as a way for the individual to develop to excellence, it has been instead changed to see how the child will be molded to serve society----or more accurately the State. Law too has been taken a hold of this philosophy. Here personal responsibility in the conduct of the individual has been deemphasized to instead blame his conditioning on that of "society." Social sciences also have been regimented to viewing "society" as existing on its own with its own characteristics apart from the individuals that compose it. It possesses "a suprahuman character," wrote Chodorov.
It is from this viewing of society that government and society have been linked. They are joined at the hip and are the defining element of all of mankind. Distinctions that separate the State from actual happenings and events in society have been let go. They have become one. As a result, people start to see government debt as just "owing it to ourselves." And the transfer of money from the private sector to the government as just one of changing "money from one pocket to another, of the same pants." Thus, said Chodorov, the individual "is merged into the mass and loses his personality." Democracy is seen to make the people and the government one and the same. Society is the State.
Under the acceptance of democratic government, majoritarianism becomes the thing that defines right and wrong. Under this: "There is no place in this concept for the doctrine of inherent rights."
Through this viewing of society and the state as one, most men have been "so inured to political interventions that he cannot think of the making of a living without them." He has been assimilated to the Borg collective-----one could say using a modern science fiction analogy. So then when one thinks of bettering himself he often thinks of politics as the means of the attainment of that better position in life.
Economics is then transformed into a study of how to &quo