Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
30 Percent a Slave
Let’s suppose you own a slave, and this slave of yours is very bright. (Automatically you might be imagining that we are back in the antebellum South, but that is incorrect. We are in modern times, so there’s not as much plantation work as there once was.) If you’ve got an intelligent, conscientious slave, it wouldn’t make sense to put him to manual labor, or have him just do random tasks for you around your house.
How do you get the most value out of this slave of yours? You could have him trained as a doctor or lawyer, and then rent him out. But what if he’s not really into the thing you’ve spent a bunch of resources to train him in? And how motivated do you think he’ll be to work hard for the employer he’s rented out to? You’ll also still be spending money to provide him with food and shelter, presumably. This is not a recipe for maximizing the value of your slave’s labor.
So instead of deciding for him what type of work he should do, or for whom he should work, you give him a significant amount of latitude in these decisions, and–this is the important part–you let him keep something like 70% of his earnings (obviously you can see where I’m going with this). Basically, you allow him to own property, start a family, choose where he works, and so on. Now, you could keep more than 30%, but as a savvy slavemaster, you are keenly aware of the Laffer Curve, so you don’t want to get too greedy. I guess you could use a progressive system of exploitation, whereby you don’t keep as much when he’s just starting out.
The first model of slavery that I described, where you use the labor yourself or rent it out, and must provide the basics for living, is the classic model–the normal way people would do slavery in the past. I think it is arguable that, in a modern, post-industrial economy, the old way of exploiting slave labor would be inefficient, especially for slaves with higher than average intelligence. The value to you of slaves with higher intelligence would be maximized by allowing them a good bit of autonomy. In this model, you could even bestow on your slave certain basic human rights. For example, when you take your 30% cut, your slave would have the right to complain about it.
So far we have been examining two models of private slavery. After private slavery was largely abolished in the 19th century, the State began to turn its attention to strengthening its grip on its public slaves–so-called citizens. (Abraham Lincoln, for instance, simultaneously ended private slavery and strengthened public slavery by waging an aggressive ideological war against secessionism.) In the 20th century, the Soviets and other communists took the “classic model” approach to public slavery. The second model, where significant autonomy is granted, we might call the “Capitalist” approach. The good news is, this was the variety of public slavery adopted by liberal democracies. The bad news is that we’re inching inexorably to the version that the Soviets favored.
I suspect that most people would take this “public slavery” talk as just a silly analogy. I do not mean it that way. I am dead serious when I imply that democracy is a form of slavery. I mean quite literally that the State owns you. For the definition of slave, Google gives me “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.” Merriam-Webster tells me it is “a person held in servitude as the chattel of another.” For example, tax livestock. Like any other slavemaster, the State will punish you if you disobey it and/or do not provide it with some portion of your labor. I will grant that the two definitions use the words “another,” implying another individual (and thus private slavery). But you would be functionally no less a slave if you were owned by a collection of individuals, as would be the case with a corporation or a state.
The big takeaway here is that slavery, whether private or public, is immoral. And any form that it takes, whether communism or liberal democracy, should be opposed by all people of good conscience. Don’t you good people agree?
Published in Politics
Saying “period” isn’t much of an argument. If people are “no damn good” why would you want to give some people a monopoly on aggression? I’ve noticed a pattern with the types of people who are attracted to this endeavor. Have you not noticed?
I don’t have much of a problem with you calling it a “government.” As long as the firm isn’t a monopoly, and as long as it uses force defensively, it can “govern” its customer’s property. But they too would be governed, by contract, by their customers, and probably by a board of directors or charter or something. If one firm becomes a monopoly, becomes aggressive, and force everyone within a given territory to become a subject, then sure you would have a State. But I don’t understand what would be the business incentive for them to start oppressing their customers. Private security firms already exist, by the way. They really don’t seem all that sinister to me. They would also be very limited in scope because they would rely on voluntary payments, and a good number of people wouldn’t really need their services. For many people, security services, when needed, would be provided through their insurance.
Ah yes, but that assumes that in the absence of our governmental institutions the burglary rate would remain the same. Also one can argue in economic terms that a burglar has no incentive to really leave me anything. Because I have say in the administration of the government through the political process I can gurantee that my level of taxation never rises to levels that would leave me economically crippled.
Ideally we would all be angels and no one would need to worry about being stolen from. But that isn’t the world we live in or have ever lived in.
I think you can point out inefficiencies in the current system all day, I’m not going to dispute that they exist, but I think it is clear from the historical record that you have never had an anarchical society of any substantive size or accomplishment. It seems to me given the length of human history that if this were a viable model outside of hunter gatherers we would have seen at least on historical example. It is very clear I think looking back at history that centralizing forces are needed to maintain any society seeking to have a conglomeration of human larger than a few hundred.
To paraphrase a “Man for all Seasons” this land is planted thick with laws, because without them we would not be able to stand in the wind that would blow. The current governmental order (for all of its faults) is the product of hundreds of years of lived experience, experimentation, and free will. And the American, and Western Liberal Government works about as well as anything else we know of and probably a whole lot better than most things.
Dammit! This is not, not, not a libertarian argument that CJ is making. Anarchy is not, not, not libertarian. I’m a libertarian, and I am laughing my butt off at this anarchist nonsense. Stop calling it libertarian!
I agree with your main points, but would like to point out that there have been viable societies within North American historical memory that had no central government, and which operated with systems of private justice. And they were not strictly hunter-gatherers. I.e. they also did some agriculture — not just subsistence agriculture, but commercial agriculture as well. But they were not completely anarchic. They conducted foreign policy through a system of consensus — and did it effectively.
I’m currently reading about such a society in Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael McDonnell (2015).
At first I thought the author was going to overstate the level of agency exercised by the Great Lakes Anishinabeg in dealing with Europeans, and that I was going to be in for a lot of eye-rolling. I thought it might be another fable like the “U.S. Constitution is based on the Iroquois Confederacy” nonsense. But it isn’t. I am familiar enough with the history that he recounts, and have some acquaintance with the primary sources that he uses as well as having read some of the secondary sources, that I can say this is good stuff. (Kindle says I’ve read 19% of it so far, but it’s probably a lot more than that, when you allow for the endnotes.)
That doesn’t mean I recommend we adopt that type of system. Despite its attractions it’s not the way I’d care to live. And in the end, despite its successes, it was defeated.
Late edit: Fixed the book link.
Neither you nor I know what would happen to the burglary rate without the State. It’s pure speculation. What is not speculation is that it is immoral for you to sacrifice my liberty for the sake of your personal convenience or your perceived sense of marginal security.
Furthermore, unless you’re stashing your live savings under your mattress, I’m not understanding how a burglar would have access to the vast majority of your assets. I also don’t understand what you imagine the government is currently doing to prevent burglaries. Already people are taking measures into their own hands: ADT, the Ring app, hiring housesitters for long trips, living in gated communities, using safes, owning firearms, owning dogs. For the vast majority of crimes, people already do not depend on the government to prevent them. Most of the infrastructure for a free society is all around you right now as we speak.
I’m laughing too that someone claiming to be libertarian does not seem a good bit more sympathetic to these ideas. Comedy all around!
To be fair, I’d never even heard of Murray Rothbard until last year, so I am kind of new to these ideas. Would you say Rothbard is not a libertarian?
Yes I would, and not much of an economist or political theorist either. And if you know of anyone else who made a point of attacking Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Milton Friedman, among others, I would say the same about them. This is my pet peeve. Libertarianism is a serious philosophical endeavor, but the word gets corrupted by every lunatic who wants to pursue some tin-foil hat theory. And I include the entire so-called Libertarian Party in that group. It is like those socialists who like to call themselves “liberals,” when everything they believe is the exact opposite of true liberalism.
[Edit: Oh, and I should not leave the subject without mentioning that Rothbard was an Antisemite and a big fan of some of the most awful people of his time, including Malcolm X. Oh, yeah, and he favored a parental right to commit infanticide. You really ought to think twice about expressing admiration for him in public.]
Based on your earlier criterion, I am not a subject as long as I don’t want to fire them. I’m just not following your criterion for slavery very clearly (or it’s just not very clear).
Yes, there’s definitely something deeply wrong about this.
Sentiment? I think this is about one third legal philosophy, and the rest is pure logic.
Let’s start with the basics.
I get sentimental about my kids, my wife, Sanyati Baptist Mission in Zimbabwe where I used to live, puppies and guinea pigs, and Lord of the Rings. I’m no utopian: Heaven is a real place, and when Jesus comes back He’ll bring Heaven with him (Romans 8 and Revelation 20-something). Until then, we’re all such rotten sinners that I expect no end of sin on earth.
I’m a Baptist.
I’m also a philosopher and a logician.
The main point I’ve been getting at in this particular exchange is that the American people still have power over their laws. If we have bad laws, blame Congress. If we have a bad Congress, a good chunk of the blame goes to the people who voted for them–to the polluted humanity they sprung from, to the corrupted culture that helped to corrupt them.
The minor point I’ve been getting at in this particular exchange is that we’d have a better Congress if we have better laws and better systems of government. As a general rule, returning to the Constitution (not counting a couple of exceptions like the 17th Amendment–direct election of Senators–I prefer the Constitution we have, not the original) would help immensely, removing all sorts of corrupting influences on Congress.
I presume the statement “that government is best which governs least” would merit approval from 95% of the members of Ricochet. The real debate would arise when it comes to defining the details.
And, by the by, I think what I pay for trash collection is reasonable. I think it would less if we didn’t have recycling. But I have no objection to the city outsourcing it.
Amen to that! I will admit that “sentiment” was a poor word choice. At the heart of my philosophy, like yours, is that there is no king but Christ. I realize that anarchy is pretty radical, but I figured I would be vocal about it and maybe in some small way contribute to shifting the Overton Window in the right direction.
Rothbard was a Jew. I’ve read the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Interesting guy. I think Rothbard, like Smith, Mills, and Friedman, is not above criticism. He was wrong to believe abortion is morally justifiable. I don’t particularly care to appeal to his authority. I am more interested in testing his arguments.
You want to test these anarchist arguments, do you? There are examples you could look at – places where there was no meaningful government. Somalia during the 90’s. Syria right now. And more recently, Venezuela. Take a look at those places, and tell me how your Utopia works out in practice.
Yes I have noticed. That is the whole point. But, people like you seem to live in some sort of fantasy world where if you just put in the right system, there won’t be bad people in charge. People are no damn good. That is a given. We have to have systems, that are designed to limit their power. The people around me, not in government, they are bad too. Libertarians seem to miss that point all the time. All people are no good. We have to assume that from the get go. Then, we build a system that contains that to different degrees of success.
What is the business incentive for companies to diss 50% of their customers? Please don’t lecture me on business incentives. That is proven false by the actions of facebook and google.
I know private security firms exist. I am not stupid. But, they are not like the proposed private police ever floated by libertarians. But, hey, live in your fantasy world.
I think Somalia is actually not too bad an example, once you account for the aftershocks of a collapsed socialist government, Cold War meddling, and the fact that the average IQ is in the low 70s. I have a friend who works as a missionary in the Sudan. He was telling me about a village he’d visit that is a mix of Christians and Muslims. There was a Muslim guy there whose daughter had married a Christian, which, under their customs, required him to expel her from his home. So he had a separate house for the newlyweds built on his property. The real enemy to these folks was the radical Islamists trying to impose a sharia-based central government on them.
I don’t understand how a country in the throes of civil war, and one that is a collapsing socialist state, are examples of anarchy.
I make no claims that anarchy is a perfect system. It is simply the free market, letting people choose their own system (so it’s more of a meta-system, maybe). It doesn’t solve people’s problems. It gives people the liberty to choose how they solve their own problems. None of those systems will be perfect. Many of them will fail. The ones that work best will be more popular. You let people choose their own jobs, their own schools, their own doctors, their own neighborhoods, their own modes of transportation, etc, etc, etc.
You may do that, but other people may not let them do that. People like to control things, including other people. So people need to band together to stop that from happening. And we know where that leads.
If I haven’t been clear already, I apologize. I completely agree that all people have sin nature/are corruptible. AS far as I understand it, a key feature of the free market is that it forces people to serve other people’s interest in order to be successful (at least long term). Of course, the free market doesn’t make people good. Some will still swindle you or defraud you, but you at least have recourse to fire them, stop sending them your business, ostracize them, or ding their reputation. Not much recourse for people using British or Canadian healthcare, for instance.
When you say “we build a system,” who is the “we” that designs this monopoly of force, other than corruptible people? It seems that you have more faith in humanity than I do!
I am sorry if I sounded lecturing. Anyway, this part I am not sure what you are referring to. I agree with you that it would be bad business to diss (insult? default on?) half of your customers.
Your really are not understanding me.
1. There are several examples of companies like Google who do things to piss off conservatives. Companies are willing to “Get Woke” and “Go Broke” as the saying goes. The idea that profit will trump ideology is daft. Virtue is often more important to people than money.
2. The “We” is as in “We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice and insure domestic tranquility. Provide for the Common Defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty for Ourselves and the citizens to come.” That is what I mean by “we”. At some point, the imperfect people that we are have to build an imperfect system. There has never been, nor can their ever be, a system of no government to allow people to get along past the point of being a tribe. We do the best we can.
Utopian, libertarian fantasies about private polices forces, and voluntary associations are silly. They will not work. The moment we have nothing but private police, the people with the strongest police will dominate the others. That is how it always, always works.
Taxes are not theft. We do not work for the government. We pay taxes to support things the government does, in theory, on our behalf, like fund a military. Is the current setup corrupt? Yes. Do we do things I don’t think we should? Yes. Do I want to burn it all down in the hopes that this time in history, when it gets burnt down, something better takes its place. Not on your life.
What I will say is one of my favorite movie quotes from the Movie Spartacus from Gracchus:
No dictators please. No mob rule, either. Let’s stick with republican forms of government.
1 ) Slavery is not an apt description. Slaves, even by your own self submitted definition, are not to be granted freedom to leave their so-called master. Yet Americans can leave and become citizens of any other state on the Earth and US citizens can have legal representation to challenge their own state, hardly something a master would grant a slave (which means that at some level the citizen and the state are treated as equals and slavery by definition does not allow equality).
So slavery, whether modern or not, fails to accurately describe modern life.
2 ) Anarchy, as others have mentioned, is not a system that has ever really been witnessed in recorded history. The closest one gets to anarchy is to what was observed with hunter gatherers several ten thousand years ago and that was only because of the poverty, both materially and information-wise, that mankind lived in at the time.
Anarchy, a world of pure cooperation with no aggression between parties, cannot really be formed because of our nature. If one looks at the language of the species, regardless of nation and time, domination, aggression and order are integral. From what we can tell of our physiology humans were originally predators, the features being forward looking eyes, our canine teeth, and our rather refined hands and feet.
Even more important, evolutionarily speaking, was the interaction of the sexes. Humans developed, from what we can tell of our genome, through polygyny. In polygynous species there is intense male competition for sexual access to females and that means violence. Now the degree of violence can vary with environment. For example imagine a male runs across a harem that lost their previous male because of disease and there are no other competing males for many miles. In that scenario the male would be able to acquire the harem for no competition cost. Compare that to one with multiple harems in close proximity and multiple single males. There would probably be some violence and therefore a high cost to sexual access.
Now environmental factors have obviously changed since then, at some point sexual access had to have been so costly that serial monogamy became a viable strategy for most males, but sexual selection has a winnowing effect. Only the winner’s from the start have their genes in us today. So that ability to use violence to further one’s goals will always be there. Unless one is going to advocate for altering human DNA, to make it actually monogamous like the small sliver of species that are, intraspecies violence will never be gone. To be fair though that will incur its own heavy costs and it may not be worth it in terms of material gain, but it is an option.
At the same time the ability to cooperate is also in our DNA, as archaeology can testify to with evidence of trading from 10,000 BC. So both violence and cooperation are human through and through. Government is a natural extension of that DNA. Governments not only serve to deter and use violence but to also establish order, and in some cases dominance also (as evidenced by titles of nobility). And because of that cooperation and sexual competition humans will consolidate into larger and larger groups to attain success for themselves in times of war.
Hence why states have only increased in size and military might over time. It is under those auspices of might that much of current civilization has grown. That is not to say that I think civilization could only grow under government but rather that government establishes a relative peace that enables growth at a faster and more stable rate than in a state approximating anarchy. If one looks at history this is the case. Less organized peoples get conquered and/or displaced by more organized peoples. Also more economic activity occurs in those more organized societies. The Romans were more economically developed than those Germanic Tribes along the Rhine. The USA was more economically advanced than the Native American Tribes along the Great Plains that were quite decentralized.
3 ) Now you might argue that private contractors or some other private organization could meet those requirements and that some conspiracy has kept people enslaved to states across the world but I doubt such a conspiracy could be formed and a key issue of your theory is that it presupposes something contradictory to it. That contradictory notion is that the private organization would have the same set of incentives within both scenarios. The private contractor has no other organization to answer to for its own failures, except for the consumer, in your anarchy. In our current world the contractor would have to deal with not only the consumer but also the government and its laws on contracts.
So if a breach of contract happens in anarchy the contractor does not have to pay the cost it would in our world. Assume for example that there were multiple contractors who competed for customers and that certain customers had grudges with other customers and would hire a contractor to attack another customer. The other customer’s company may not even know that the attack was happening or it may be bribed off or decide that it is not economic to defend the customer at that time. What then to do about that breach of contract? Most likely the person is dead or, if they were lucky to survive, will not have any means of recourse with the contractor who broke their word. He cannot take the contractor to court because there isn’t one.
Incentives matter and there are people today who would act as I just described, like gangs. Sheer economic growth is not all that humans care about.
I think this fundamentally mischaracterizes anarchy. It would not be a world of pure cooperation, and there would be aggression. The point is that aggression should not be centralized in a monopoly. We in fact live now in a state of anarchy–between nation-states. Obviously, there is aggression between nation-states. Do you agree we ought to centralize the whole world, in the name of peace?
I get that humans are aggressive and that is why it is that we have states. I’m trying to get people to explain to me their ethical/philosophical justifications for why we ought to have states. Why is it sometime morally right to initiate the use of force?
CJ,
Your anarchy will last until a state marches in an army and kills you all. Anarchists are great at destroying civilization, not so good at anything else. Across history, that is all they have accomplished – along with killing people.
If you insist on a government that’s morally right, you’re going to be stuck with a lot of immorality.
Because I am for government, I must be for centralizing the whole world in the name of peace? That is not a stolen base, that is a whole stolen field. Or two. Typical of libertarians though, who think anyone for more government than they are is, for all intents, a tyrant at heart, just waiting to take it all over.
Invoking the state of affairs between nations is naive to say the least. The whole of human history is one that shows nations constantly fighting other nations. If you want to point to the last 60 years of peace, well, thank The Bomb for that.
But, since you want to take our arguments to some absurd extreme, let me do you one: Since you want society to be like the world, then what you want is a few big players to have the capacity to wipe each other out, so they leave each other alone on big stuff, and fight proxy wars using other people, whether those other people like it or not. And said little people, well, they get eaten up all the time.
1 ) You didn’t respond to my other points. Have you conceded on those?
2 ) If by anarchy you mean a world without a single overarching authority then yes. But anarchy has been used in multiple meanings during this thread and I was referring what you had described before.
3 ) What is your beef necessarily then with the current world if anarchy already exists? No one has a monopoly so market pressures are at work.
4 ) I already answered why the state exists. It is a logical progression from human nature. Human males seek means by which to acquire sexual access to females and that usually means violence. In that competition humans form bands together in order to compete with other groups. The state becomes the apparatus by which the group establishes its territory, possibly expands it, and defends it from other groups.
The state acts therefore as means by which people can deter or oppose domestic and foreign threats to each individual and their property. In addition to that the state also becomes the means of arbitration since it is supposed to represent the group that formed it.
But, and this is important, humans in the same group will compete with each other. That will cause tension within the group and it makes the state’s ability to represent everyone impossible. That will exist in any set up unless the human genome is altered.
5 ) The considerations about moral uses of force come from universal ideals about humans and the idea that governments, anywhere, should be bound by rules that restrict their impact on human individuals. Those rules are substantive in that the characteristics of a human, rights, should not be infringed.
Those being life, liberty, belief, (etc.). If a government, or some other organization for that matter, impinges upon that then other states have the right to engage in warfare to remove that organization from power so that those humans may no longer have their rights impinged upon. Think defeating the Nazis or defeating the South in the Civil War. Both groups allowed for gross injustices against certain groups of humans and so became targets of just war.
Do you do it on purpose, Bryan? Or is it that you just can’t help yourself?
Amen to that!
Interestingly, I know a libertarian who said something like that about SoCons.
Not comparable at all. What would be comparable would be to toss out a couple of quotes from the Westboro Baptist Church, and say “Typical of conservative Christians…” That’s what Bryan does all the time. Of course, in neither case is it at all typical.
In other words, Bryan made a mistake (because he was generalizing about libertarians), I did not make a comparable mistake (because I only mentioned you), and you did make a comparable mistake (because you were generalizing about SoCons).
Or are you telling me that you were only talking about me at the time? You might have mentioned it before now, since at the time I was obviously not talking only about me.
In any case, I would think that your generalization at the time about libertarians was at least as significant as Bryan’s. You stated that libertarian are the same as tyrants except for their narrow definition of harm.
Auggie, I have learned from long experience that you have a tendency to grab ahold of some comment that was made long ago, take it out of context, and use it to insist that I was saying something that I wasn’t saying. And when I tell you that you got me wrong, you ignore that and keep insisting that I believe something I don’t. So I’m going to explain my position, but I don’t have much hope that you will pay attention.
Most libertarians adhere to some version of the “harm principle” as the limitation on when government action (aka “use of force”) is legitimate. But “harm” is a slippery word. If “harm” means causing direct and immediate injury to another individual, then the harm principle leads to fairly limited and respectful government. But if you stretch the definition of “harm” to include behaviors which someone (SoCons, socialists, or whoever) think will indirectly have harmful consequences to society as a whole, then you get a very expansive and aggressive government. In the case of SoCons a common example of this is to support government actions designed to preserve traditional families. And yes, that is a generalization. Now if you think I am wrong about that generalization, the way that I think Bryan is wrong about characterizing all libertarians as being anarchists, just tell me and we can discuss it. But in the various threads about SSM, I saw a consistent pattern of SoCons arguing that it is a legitimate function of government to organize society such that traditional families will flourish. Do you disagree that such a pattern existed in those discussions?
Bryan’s mistake is not that he generalizes about libertarians. It is that his generalization is wrong. It is not “typical” that libertarians are anarchists. In fact, those two philosophies are entirely incompatible. And the problem with anarchists is not that they favor limited government. It is that they favor something that is indistinguishable from tyrannical government, so long as they can call it by some name other than “government.” “Private security companies,” for example. My criticism of Bryan is not that all generalizations are wrong. It is that his generalization is wrong. (A few more thoughts to follow.)