As kids, many of us baby boomers were often told by well meaning adults, “The policeman is your friend.” In the era of (relative) political innocence prior to the Vietnam War and Watergate, these adults could be forgiven their surpassing naiveté. But now “mere libertarian” (his term) economist Dan Klein goes these adults one better and counsels us: “Sometimes coercion is our friend.” Dan’s rationale is summed up in a PowerPoint slide bullet point: ”It is possible that a reform that increases initiation of direct coercion will in the long run reduce coercion.”
Dan’s interesting take on Mere Libertarianism can be seen here. His statement about coercion occurs about 13:38 into the video.
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His list of possible reforms which increase direct coercion while supposedly reducing “long term coercion” (6:44) is shocking considering he claims to have studied men like Mises and Rothbard. His presentation is pure apologia for State sanctioned “liberalism/libertarianism”
This analysis is deceptive because it includes references to ethics and then uses these references to come to conclusions that are contrary to ethics. This is what hermeneutics does to economic science and this is what hermeneutics does to ethics.
Rothbard favors coercive imposition of particular property rights, not just any forcible standard labeled “proper” but specific property rights emerging from the liberal tradition, like an individual’s right to govern his own person and the fruits of his labor subject to voluntary, contractual arrangements with other individuals.
These rights are not “natural” in any meaningful sense of the word, i.e. they do not exist in the natural world without artificial, systematic forces imposed uniformly across a region; therefore, Rothbard agrees with Klein on the general principle even if he would dispute Klein on every specific instance addressed in this video.
Both men are minarchists rather than anarchists, but Rothbard essentially adopts the governing principles of his minarchy as moral absolutes and claims that any application of these principles in any combination under any circumstances has a moral outcome definitively.
I would dispute most if not all of the specific, coercive practices that Klein cites as possibly justifiable, so I’m probably closer to Rothbard than to Klein in practice; however, I advocate a slightly different minarchy, including checks on forcible propriety that Smith and other classical liberals advocated, like a progressive consumption tax and title expiration.
These checks, as I imagine them, do not empower a more central authority over less central proprietors. The checks instead empower the proprietor’s peers, on a jury, to exercise some influence over the proprietor’s organization of the means of production that he governs, by discouraging him from organizing vast means to produce for his exclusive consumption for example.
By favoring a rule that Adam Smith also favored, am I a wiser ruler than Rothbard? That’s not for me to say, but it’s not for Rothbard or Rothbardians to say either.
Natural in the sense that they stem directly from man’s nature.
The only one who can control an individual’s body, barring the use of coercive force, is that individual his or herself. From this we can logically conclude that we own our bodies. Not only does this exist in nature, but it is the nature of every human being in existence.
Enforcement of this right to our bodies, and any other honest right, is a separate matter from the existence of the rights themselves. However, I believe that this enforcement — as you and I have been through at least briefly in past discussion — does not have to include the unjust use of force.
What Klein is essentially telling us is that you can be “too consistent” a libertarian, and for the good of society we ought to “loosen up”. It’s a classic case of The Leader playing into Hector and Iago’s hands and it’s particularly damaging because it looks ostensibly like infighting while, in fact, it’s simply Statist thought in classically liberal/libertarian clothing.
Governing one’s own body is natural enough, but “any other honest right” is hopelessly vague, and anyone with a six year old child knows that honesty is not natural among humanity. Anyone listening to a political speech knows it for that matter.
“Unjust use of force” is also hopelessly vague. Every statist asserts the “justice” of the force he advocates.
Klein is saying that you can be too consistent a Rothbardian. He rejects the assumption that “Rothbardian” and “libertarian” are synonyms.
I might agree with Klein on nothing else, but I must agree that Adam Smith merits the “classically liberal” and “libertarian” labels at least as much as Rothbard, and Smith certainly would have rejected some of the conclusions that Rothbard deduces from his anarcho-capitalist assumptions.
I wouldn’t place Milton Friedman in Smith’s category, in terms of historical import, but Friedman and Hayek also merit the labels.
Klein doesn’t want you to loosen up for the good of society. He wants you to loosen for the sake of other libertarians who broadly share your goals but don’t share your reverence for a particular formulation.
‘“Unjust use of force” is also hopelessly vague. Every statist asserts the “justice” of the force he advocates.’
Then it’s up to them to prove why the presumption that one’s exercise of their freedom needs to be interrupted. The burden of proof is on them, not us.
“Klein is saying that you can be too consistent a Rothbardian”
Hopelessly vague too.
[...] ActivismDaniel Klein’s critique of RothbardBy Patrick McEwen | Published: March 31, 2012 Joseph Salerno links to a YouTube video of GMU Professor Daniel Klein’s presentation on a paper he wrote in 2004 [...]
I used the phrase ‘any other honest right’ simply to shorten the post, but my point was to show how Rothbard came to this conclusion. As Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes in the introduction to The Ethics of Liberty , Rothbard wasn’t “suggesting, hypothesizing, pondering, or puzzling…” but “offered axiomatic-deductive arguments and proofs”. Rothbard used this axiomatic-deductive method to reason out not only self ownership, but a justification for all property rights.
All natural rights are property rights, and as such I don’t see how any natural human right can be hopelessly vague; I own my body and anything which I’ve appropriated from nature, acquired through voluntary exchange, or received as a legitimate gift. No one else may rightfully dispose of anything I own without my consent, and to attempt as much is the initiation of force, the definition of the “unjust use of force”. There’s no need for “honesty” in discovering the natural rights of man, as they can be deduced by any of us through our innate ability to reason.
It’s not an ambiguity inherent to rights that statists prey on when they claim their faux justice, but upon honest ignorance. Using the aforementioned definition of “unjust force” anyone, given some knowledge of the politician’s subject matter, can immediately judge his intentions. Is he looking to set a minimum wage? This is clearly the initiation of force against employers, as employee salaries are theirs to set. This is an injustice. Is he looking to freeze the price of bread? To do so would be to initiate force against bread producers, whose prices are theirs to set. This is an injustice. Our politician, while campaigning for such “just acts”, can also declare that the sky is green and that 2 + 2 = 5. The truth itself will never change, despite any support the politician may garner.
My understanding has always been that libertarianism demands only adherence to the Non-Aggression Principle. Klein, who spent twenty odd minutes advocating coercive force, is not a libertarian; in fact, judging from his list of “good” assaults on the property of innocent people, along with your own reaction, I wonder if he’s even a genuine classical liberal. Classical liberals and libertarians can, have and will almost certainly continue to, work together on an incredibly large host of issues; there’s plenty of ground to cover before practical conflicts arise between them. However, this cooperation doesn’t necessitate any compromise on the part of either camp, let alone the adoption of Klein’s bastardized “libertarianism”.
This summary of “property” is also vague, because it does not define “appropriate” and “legitimate” for example. Defining “property” in terms of “appropriation” is circular. You might as well say that a law is a law because it is lawful.
Classically liberal property rights are not natural, i.e. they do not exist in the state of nature. Natural territoriality protects neither the fruits of labor nor gifts, and nominal “property” has never been limited to fruits of labor and gives anyway.
In nature, a cheetah eats a gazelle, because the cheetah is faster, regardless of any nominal “right” of the gazelle. Hyenas eat the same gazelle, after the cheetah has labored to kill it, because they are better organized than cheetahs, regardless of any other “right”.
Whether or not I share your sense of “rightful ownership”, I cannot deny that you initiate force or the threat of force when you declare it. Denying this force is antithetical to classical liberalism. A liberal does not deny what little forcible propriety he advocates.
There are scarce resources in nature (unowned) and an individual may come along and recognize these resources as such. After physically utilizing one or more of these scarce resources, the good(s) become(s) his or her property through this process of appropriation. I’m not sure I see where you find ambiguity in the term ‘appropriation’, or why you find the definition of property to be circular. I should mention that I’ve left production, as a means of creating property, unclear in pretty much every previous post and for that I apologize.
I feel like we’re once again speaking past each other on this point. Cheetahs, hyenas and gazelles are not men, and they each have their own natures to follow. However, what separates human beings from all three, as I’m sure you’re fully aware, is that free will and rational thought are the foundations of our own nature. As the ‘rational animal’ we don’t run simply on instinct, unlike our cheetah buddy who will kill the gazelle because hunger and opportunity demand it, or the hyenas who may scare the cheetah off. It’s through our free wills and rational minds that we own our bodies, and as the exclusive owners of our bodies — and as such the labor we produce with them — it logically follows that we own the natural resources with which we “mix our labor” in order to achieve desired ends. Animals, lacking free will and rational minds, don’t ‘own’ themselves, any supposed ‘labor’, and as such any ‘property’. They make a poor stand in for human beings when proposing a hypothetical for human phenomena.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here, would you elaborate this point?
@ConsentWithdrawn April 1, 2012
You might find this interesting.
Here is the link: http://mises.org/journals/jls/18_2/18_2_2.pdf
You might also check out this, from Kathleen Touchstone: http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2010/lp-2-18.pdf
The point it that Rothbard’s theory of natural rights as the exclusive source of liberty and property rights is inadequate.
Instead, of Rothbard, why not check out Mises instead?
Here is his link: http://mises.org/libprop/lpsec5.asp
(emphasis added)
If you understand what these three authors are saying, then I think you are prepared to understand the ultimately simple point Klien’s presentation makes, regardless of what you think of his other work.
I would be interested in your defense of natural law as the ONLY source of property rights, according to the NAP. It completely falls apart at the margins.
Now, there’s a classical liberal. Beautifully put.
And property is theft too, however ironically.
“But the fact remains that government is repression not freedom. Freedom is to be found only in the sphere in which government does not interfere. ”
Indeeed, let us take a leaf out of Mises.
“I would be interested in your defense of natural law as the ONLY source of property rights, according to the NAP. It completely falls apart at the margins.”
Vague. Specify.
Only a dishonest hack would pull out of context the only the sentence that supports your lopsided views, while ignoring the rest of the context that Mises carefully crafts.
Other than that, thank you for your meaningful comment.
Exactly. I was going to point out that Wildberry highlighted the wrong sentence, but you already did it. Perhaps Mises wasn’t so fanatically minarchist as some would make him out to be.
Excellent insights above.
As Dr. Hoppe points out in Democracy: The God That Failed (pg 79-80):
and in Mises own words:
Nothing I have ever read of Mises’s — though I admittedly have much to read — has ever given me the impression that he was anything less than a consistent classical liberal; as such, his one hang up seems to have been that he couldn’t envision a society in which security and law were provided for through the market.
However, support for individual secession is a highly libertarian sentiment.
@macsnafu,
I would like to point out that Mises was describing the two sides of a single coin, and you are simply saying that you prefer heads to tails.
I think you missed the essential point.
Kathleen Touchstone wrote, “Unlike Rothbard (1998), I believe that children do have the positive right to care from their parents. Positive rights are also at risk under anarchy if children (or those with diminished capacity) are neglected or abandoned by caregivers and have no alternative means of care. I think government is responsible in cases such as these because of the issue of rights …”
Children ought to have positive rights to care from their parents, and furthermore supportive parents ought to have rights to commensurate support from their children in old age. The former rights follow from principles of personal responsibility, natural proximity and natural attraction. The latter follows from a principle of reciprocity. These principles and many others are essential to the liberal tradition and do not follow logically from a few Rothbardian axioms.
I differ slightly, if only semantically, with “government is responsible in cases such as these”, because this formulation seems to distinguish “government” from parents abusing or neglecting their children. Parents are the natural governors of their children.
When a parent abuses a child, government is responsible. Government has abused the child. When forcible governance is abusive, we can only hope for some countervailing force to check the abuse, but of course, this countervailing force can also be abusive.
@ConsentWithdrawn April 6, 2012
(I’ve bolded just a few of the elements that I find highly suspect)
I don’t intend to get into an endless debate with you while you trot out interpretations of Mises by your anarchist heroes to support your point. I will merely point out the obvious in your selection here. This is Hoppe’s view of what Mises thinks. It is a favorite technique to equivocate on terms, as is done here between “self-government’, say, and “voluntary membership organization’. This is quite a stretch, and comports with nothing I know about government or Misses. Every bolded term is highly subject to debate and interpretation. Unfortunately, I think I somewhat understand Hoppe’s view, and utterly reject it.
I prefer to turn to Mises himself, who seems pretty skilled at telling us what he thinks. Here is an example from HA (pg 718):
Therefore, I assert that your passage from Hoppe, as nothing more than his brand of political “science”, has little or nothing to contribute to the conversation.
As for the selection from Mises (which you don’t cite: http://mises.org/liberal/ch3sec2.asp)
To fully illustrate your (and Hoppe’s) intellectual dishonesty, I quote as follows from the very next paragraph from that which you provide:
Your job, if you want to be honest about understanding Mises and not merely to rely on your political mentors to interpret him for you, is to understand how the great mind of Mises could make these statements on the very same page. He is trying to teach you something. You should listen.
This admission is a good place to take a do-over.
Since you have read little of him, I’m not sure you are qualified to discuss his “hang ups”. This seems especially true when one observes that his message is exactly this; government is a function of the market. Like human action, it is a human device. As for its form, he consistently points you back to praxeology and economic analysis; his particular areas of expertise.
Perhaps Mises is a bit too subtle for you? I think they key words you read over were:
I wonder why he would say that, instead of simply asking you to assume, as does Hoppe, that it is not only possible, but preferable to prevent free, cooperating individuals from making the self-determination that Mises describes?
Hang-ups?