Democracy

[an8150]

trish, "Of course coercion is coercion. I wouldn't deny a tautology [Stavros' post does; he says in some circumstances coercion is not coercion] , though I will deny that you can prove anything of significance from one so simple [E=MC2 = E=MC2. Aren't all tautologies simple?]. The point is you are not being coerced to perform an acton when when your motivation excludes fear of penalty for not doing it [I agree].

But you already conceded your point when you praised Stavros's intelligent post. [I did? you mean I threw the towel in at that point? Who knew? There was me thinking it was gratifying to see some red meat and education]

The capacity to make yourself understood to almost any citizen through the medium of the written word has been provided largely by Federal, State and municipal tax dollars [you mean people couldn't read and right before the federal government came along?] or do you mean that literacy rates are higher now? if the latter, you may, as far as the UK at least is concerned be on sticky ground]. Nevermind if you personally were home schooled or attended only private schools, those who are reading your words on this thread (available to you because of a worldwide collective effort known as the internet [wasn't the internet created in fact by the US military? and the www by either Al Gore or Berners Lee, depending on how credulous you are?]) learned to read because society at large paid to have them taught [no it didn't; tapxayers, and their unborn children, did that, through the medium of a government which passed laws requiring them to do so]. In my town taxes are not levied by an all powerful King. We vote on whether we should or shouldn’t grant our local school system more taxing authority [now that bit I like, it sounds encouraging, we don't have anything like that degree of freedom here]. Those of us who pay our taxes pay proudly without coericion (if even it hurts) because we’re proud of our teachers, our students and our schools. People who refuse to pay their taxes are freeloaders. You want to make a case for freeloading be my guest. But penalties against freeloading do not attain the level of coercion." [you're on even stickier ground there, trish. as I've already point out re. anybody who gets out more than they pay in. put another way, freeloading is freeloading... so tell me more about those penalties...?].

[Stavros]

The point that I was making, in my post, was that historians have agreed that taxation has been a central element in the creation of state power in territories, and that because it occasioned violent reactions, the settlement of disputes with superior fire-power owned in greater volume and sophistication by monarchs, also created a more centralised form of power that benefited the monarch and those barons who susbscribed to it -and of course some then wanted the crown for themselves and wars were fought to achieve/defeat these aims. Tilly and others see monarchies and the modern state as a protection racket, but as I said, there was more to the rise of the modern state than taxation, and as you follow through the story, you reach a point in the American Colonies, when 'No Taxation Without Representation' becomes a Revolutionary call. Magna Carta may have clipped the wings of the Monarch, the English Revolution did away with the head of Charles I, but in this country universal suffrage, defined as offering men and women the equal right to vote, did not arrive until the General Election of 1928 (it was 1920 in the USA). Women over 30 were allowed to vote in the UK in 1918.
The growth of science and technological change through the industrial revolution, which began in the late 18th century, can be seen as part of a capitalist revolution that began in piecemeal fashion across Europe between the 12th and the 15th centuries; it has gone through various phases, mercantile, industrial, and shows no sign of being eclipsed by an alternative which is why the collapse of Communism was called 'The End of History' in a well-known, but badly written book by Francis Fukuyama.

Ayn Rand sees her objectivist philosophy as part of trend that accepts the basic tenets of capitalism but argues that it becomes deformed when it is taken over, or interfered in by the state, much as Adam Smith limited the role of national government to the protection of the realm, the rule of law, and provision of those things which the market cannot provide (whatever that means). The horizontal growth of the state in the 20th century is thus seen as a trend that should be reversed -the initial policies on social welfare that were introduced into the UK by the Liberal Government of 1910 are seen as the beginning of a system in which the state took over charitable deeds, funding them from taxation rather than voluntary donations. Total war in 1914-18 while it may have been an industrial necessity, thus fed into the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, and this totalizing impulse -it is alleged- carried on after 1945 in the UK with the creation of state enterprises, the nationalisation of water, gas, electricity, transport, education, and health.

The obvious problem that Ayn Rand and her supporters cannot face up to, is that the days when states coerced people into paying taxes are gone. Not only do I not object to paying taxes, and pay them willingly, I was one of the people who would gladly have paid extra taxes to fund education -as the Liberal Democrats claimed some years ago, although I would not have voted for them. The real issue is that people are concerned that their taxes are not being spent properly, or are being used to pay excessive administrative fees. And if the majority in an election support a policy that uses their taxes to fund education and health, the minority cannot complain, or can campaign against a change in the law, or mount a revolution to overthrow a government that doesn't give them what they want, or better still, do away with representative democracy.

The response from some Libertarians, like Jamie Redford, is to claim we are saps, we've been had -the joke is on us because this protection racket called the modern state is run by a privileged few for a privileged few, mostly Freemasons, Jews, the Bilderberg Group, and so on: thus, Our Prime Minister David Cameron went to a school called Eton; the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson went to a school called Eton; the second in line to the throne, Prince William went to a school called Eton, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the operational boss of the Church of England in a Christian state, went to a school called Eton, and so on: in this context, Ayn Rand and the Libertarians are the new Revolutionaries whose goal is to take capitalism either into a new era of individual responsibility, or back to where it was in the American Colonies in the 1770s before the growth of the Federal state.

Either way it is a utopian project based on huge assumptions about the benefits of replacing government with associations of self-interested people.
It assumes that it is not only a good thing for associations of people to replace the state, it is always a good thing. But then you have those associations which have indeed filled the gap left by the absence of state power: the collapse of the Kingdon of Naples and Sicily in 1860 and the 'Unification of Italy' was a primary cause of the creation of 'this thing of ours' among some Sicilians, also known as Cosa Nostra. Creating a mode of power and an exchange system based on Omerta and violence does not seem to me to be fulfillment a community of self-interested individuals when too many of the people drawn into it have no choice in the matter, and will end up dead in a ditch if they object.

What happens when an association of self-interested individuals somewhere in Nebraska decide that being a particular kind of Christian is essential to being part of their community? Rand and most of her followers were/are atheists, so are they going to send their children to a school they part-fund if it means Little Johnny comes home convinced that whatever happens in life is in fact the Will of God not his personal choice?

What happens when the neighborhood watch replaces the police and the army, when, one night a member of the Watch sees a suspicious person and, after an altercation and maybe a struggle, shoots him dead, only to find he had a right to be where he was?

The philosophy of objectivism is no more perfect than the Marxism which also believes the state should 'wither away'; it does not guarantee that there will be free enterprise or freedom of the individual from overbearing controls -be they imposed by the state, or when it goes, by the Church, or some local charismatic preacher or the husbands of the Stepford Wives, because Rand cannot guarantee democracy, or liberty, or life itself. It relies on fear, the fear that the state is controlling you, the fear that the state is preventing you from realising your full potential, just as Nietszche argued that Christianity had prevented man from realising his full potential by forcing him to be charitable, humble, and thus a slave to an illusion. It uses taxes as a wedge because it refuses to believe that people pay taxes willingly, and as Trish has pointed out, doesn't care or want to know what taxes are actually used for, and how we all benefit from the roads and railways, from the schools and the laboratories, and can also hold our legislators to account for what they do with out taxes.

Ultimately, Ayn Rand cannot even agree with Adam Smith, a Scot whose promotion of capitalism as a revolutionary force was consonant with his times (the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776), we have moved on since then. The modern state can no more be un-invented than nuclear weapons; and where the state has collapsed, yes, individuals have survived through their own wits, self-interest and endeavour, but often in a climate of violence, lawlessness and fear.

If you want to live on the frontier, go ahead, and fight it out with your rivals. I prefer life where I am thank you.

[Prospero]

Bravo Stavros. A fine and sustained piece of argument.

[trish]

[E=MC2 = E=MC2. Aren't all tautologies simple?]

The equivalence of mass and energy is an empirical law of science, not a tautology, that can be derived from a number of postulates (including the constancy of the speed of light, also an empirical claim-not a tautology) which constitute the theory of relativity. It's not so simple either. Moreover, there are formal tautologies that would take reams of paper to write down. So no, not all tautologies are simple. But you digress.

Your claim is that no state action is anything other than coercive.

...I refute the suggestion that there is not by reference to those people on this forum who demand coercive state action (there is of course no other kind of state action)...

Many pages and dozens of counterexamples later you still insist on your claim, never dispensing with a single counterexample. “Coercion is coercion” is not a proof no matter how many times you repeat it. It’s just a tautology___unless like Stavros you equivocate between the subject “Coercion” and the object “coercion.” If you’re doing that, then like Stavros you are obliged to explain the two different senses of the word in use.

Yes freeloading is freeloading. Are you equivocating or stating boring tautologies again. I already stated that it’s the agreement that defines the terms of a contract not who gets more out of the terms. Besides, you never gave us a quantitative input-output analysis to support your presumed claim that you have put more in than you’ve gotten out. You take part in elections, use the infrastructure, have a home protected against thieves and fraud by the law of land, you partake of the benefits of government, then you willingly or unwitting incur a debt and it is your obligation to pay it or be labeled what you are, a freeloader. Tax evaders are freeloaders.

[Stavros]

The concept of coercion is a tricky one; looked at historically I think the age when taxes were coerced out of people has been replaced by the collective understanding that taxes are used to maintain the apparatus of the state and a range of policies that legislators have agreed on, with the assumption that they are voted for democratically.

Where this concept of coercion seems to be used, it is in the Randian sense with people who object to funding services that they want to buy for themselves: typically with health and education. It is possible to buy your own health protection in the UK, your own pension plan, and pay the fees to send your children to a private school, like Eton, or the Dragon School or any of hundreds of such schools. But you cannot then reduce your tax payments because you claim to have opted out of the NHS and the education system, they will be taken from your wage packet each month whether you like it or not. This I assume is what they mean by coercion, even though it has been democratically agreed -although of course the more extreme libertarians claim that we do not live in a democracy, that the parties are all the same, the results are fixed, the decisions are made by the bankers, the Rothschilds and so on.

Some years ago in the UK some people refused to pay taxes because they said they were used to fund nuclear weapons, and as they were pacifist, they could not condone the producution, let alone the use of such weapons, but they failed to convince the courts their argument had validity. I think the Randians want a pick 'n mix approach to tax -you pay the ones you like, and opt out of the ones you don't -a recipe for fiscal and administrative chaos. Suppose half the population claims to be pacifist and decides not to pay taxes for the military? Does that mean that in the event of Canada invading the USA, the ones who didn't pay their military taxes will not be able to flee their state capital on the last helicopter to freedom? They will end up defeated, slaves to the land of Ice Hockey, the Queen, and Beaver.

[trish]

What Randians don't understand is that they receive the benefit of having an educated populace even if they (the Randians) obtained and paid for a private education. It not enough that you can read, but for communication to succeed you have to be read by people capable of reading. Taxes don't pay for your individual education, they pay for the general education of the citizenry. The same goes for other services provided by government. Because of this failure in general understanding of benefits and cost, pick'n mix probably is unworkable.

[an8150]

I see that your latest tagline, Prospero, comes from Kant. It probably won't interest you to know that Rand despised Kant.

Incidentally, you accused me a day or two ago of having contempt for the world. I don't know what part of that you supposed to include humanity, but if your citation of this quote from Kant is intended as an endorsement by you, it is indeed you who holds mankind in contempt.

[an8150]

Stavros, "...of course the more extreme libertarians claim that we do not live in a democracy, that the parties are all the same [indeed, they bicker over who is best-suited to running the status quo, which is the flip side to my question last night: what do the self-styled progressives and social democrats and assorted socialists on this thread think we should be voting about, if it's all settled and people like me should just shut up and go away?], the results are fixed, the decisions are made by the bankers [come on, that's more of a leftie trope], the Rothschilds and so on."

[an8150]

"The obvious problem that Ayn Rand and her supporters cannot face up to, is that the days when states coerced people into paying taxes are gone"

Were that true, Stavros, there'd be no need for laws to punish tax evaders. However, I agree, as I have already done, that most people are committed to the sacred cows of the social democratic state. I'd say it's a matter of faith, in many cases, as well as a rational exercise in self-interest.

[an8150]

Stavros, "And if the majority in an election support a policy that uses their taxes to fund education and health, the minority cannot complain, or can campaign against a change in the law, or mount a revolution to overthrow a government that doesn't give them what they want, or better still, do away with representative democracy."

And on that last point, I give you (depending on whom you believe) either Tytler or de Tocqueville:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."

The difficulty most libertarians have with revolution is that, unlike our ideological opponents, we are a peaceable bunch. Indeed, ideologically, we have to be.