Politics is of its very nature is biased in favor of
intervention and planning. Even in its “minarchist” or “night-watchman”
version, politics is based at root on the idea that some decisions must be
made coercively and imposed on unwilling minorities – or even majorities, as
the case may be. This is contrary to the principle we observe in private life
every day: the consent of both parties is necessary for a transaction to take
place.
The state never stays “limited” in the long or even medium run, as we’ve
seen for ourselves, and before long it worms its way throughout civil
society. Once it becomes entrenched in some area of social life that had
previously been managed by voluntary means, people grow accustomed to the
state’s new role, even coming to view it as indispensable. The spirit of
spontaneous, voluntary cooperation, therefore, atrophies and dies. This, in
turn, is cited as justification for still further state interference, and the
cycle continues.
In the modern state, politics is coupled with government education in a
one-two punch to the voluntary sector. That is, the moral principles and the
unstated assumptions that govern politics have already been drilled into the
heads of the young well before they become eligible to vote. By that time
they have imbibed every comic-book platitude about the selfless public
servants who are just out to improve everyone’s well-being. Were it not for
the indoctrination of the public from a very young age, the state’s racket
would be far more obvious and transparent.
(Incidentally, the first lesson kids in government schools learn is that
if enough people want something – “free” education, for example – you should
get it by having goons seize the funds from your neighbors. Why, how else
could anything get done?)
The best known of the intellectual constructs by which the state seeks to
legitimate itself must be the “social contract.” To evaluate this construct
properly, consider how contracts function in civil society. You and I are
interested in, say, an exchange of services for money. You are going to paint
my house, and I am going to give you a cash payment. We spell out the terms
of our understanding in a contract.
These terms may include the nature of the work, a deadline by which the
task must be completed, and perhaps even the name of an independent
arbitration service we agree to consult if one of us believes the contract is
not being properly honored.
Contrast this with the state’s so-called social contract. Here, nobody
signs anything. You are assumed to consent to the state’s rule because you
happen to live within its territorial jurisdiction. According to this morally
grotesque principle, you have to pack up and leave in order to demonstrate
your lack of consent. The state’s authority over you is simply assumed (or it
takes the form of a contract nobody ever signed), with the burden of proof on
you, rather than – more sensibly – on the institution claiming the right to help
itself to your life and property.
If my cooperation with the system is only under duress, and my repeated
insistence that I do not consent, is insufficient to indicate my lack of
consent, then what kind of crazy moral system is this?
Is there an analogous situation in the private sector? Do we just assume
you intended to buy a car or a house or to enter into a labor agreement, on
the basis of dubious inferences? Do we not instead sign form after form,
drafted in meticulous legal language, to ensure that the nature of the
activity in question is clear to everyone?
Oh, but the state provides services, and you should pay for them! Again,
though, when anyone else provides services, I decide for myself whether I
want to use them (in which case I pay), whether I prefer an alternative
provider of the service, or whether I choose not to avail myself of the
service at all.
Ah, but the services the state provides aren’t the kind that can be
provided competitively on the market, so you must be corralled into paying for
them, like them or not.
But this is a mere assertion. Education is provided on the market and
always has been. Scientific research was funded more copiously per capita
before the state became heavily involved. Poverty relief took place on a vast
scale long before the world’s welfare states amounted to much of anything.
Even security and legal services can be and are quite effectively provided on
the free market.
All right, so the state’s social contract may not amount to a hill of
beans, and in fact is a transparent attempt to legitimize behavior we would
not tolerate from any other actor or institution, but what about written
constitutions? Aren’t these at least partly contractual in nature, and don’t
they restrain government from the worst abuses?
Let’s consider the United States Constitution as a test case since
conservatives and even many libertarians point to it as one of the most
brilliant political documents ever drafted.
The minarchist calls for a “night watchman” state, a state that limits
itself to the production of security and adjudication services. (I shall
leave aside the cognitive dissonance in warning about the dangers and
wickedness of the state on the one hand, while simultaneously proposing the
absolute necessity of the state in providing the most important and
fundamental services of all.)
Interestingly, the US Constitution actually calls for something less than
a night-watchman state, in the sense that most security services are assumed
to rest with lower levels of government, and are not a federal function in
the first place. So this would appear to be an excellent test of the “limited
government” position, for here is a document that begins with such a limited
government that it’s even less government than minarchists themselves would call
for.
Well, how has it worked out?
For the answer to that question, simply look around you.
“The Constitution hasn’t been obeyed,” comes the reply. Well, no kidding.
What reason would politicians have for obeying the Constitution? Once it
is believed that the state may legitimately initiate force and levy taxes,
it’s not much of a leap to consider how those powers might be turned to the
advantage of Industry X or constituency Y. Meanwhile, people who protest this
development as a departure from the Constitution will be an isolated minority
left in the dust, laughed at by the plotters and schemers who can’t believe
anyone seriously expected this institution to remain limited. Where’s the
money in that?
No, the Constitution cannot be exonerated. If it lacks institutional
safeguards to prevent the egregious abuses of our own day, then it is a
failure. Human beings have failed to follow it? Well, did we not realize from
the start that fallible human beings would be in charge?
In Lysander Spooner’s unforgettable formulation: “But whether the
Constitution really be one thing or another, this much is certain – that it
has either authorized such a government as we have had or has been powerless
to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
Strictly speaking, the US Constitution was conceived of as an agreement
among the states, to which the US government, being the creation of that
agreement, was not itself a party. But for the sake of argument, let’s do as
some do, and think of written constitutions as being roughly analogous to an
agreement between the government and the people.
Who gets to adjudicate disputes over whether the terms of this contract
are being violated? An independent third party? Of course not. The state’s
own courts decide. And in the case of the US, those courts are populated by
people trained in US law schools – where, with insignificant exceptions,
students are taught to believe preposterous, ahistorical interpretations of
the Constitution’s most important clauses: commerce, general welfare,
“necessary and proper,” and the Supremacy Clause.
Good luck waving your copy of the Constitution in that setting.
So there is certainly something fishy about the state. We are urged to
apply special rules in our moral evaluation of this institution, rules we
would indignantly reject in any other context.
As for the state’s supposedly indispensable role, once we grow up and
leave behind the scare tactics from our sixth-grade textbooks – without your
public servants you’ll starve, or be poisoned, or drive an exploding car – we
discover how little we need the state after all. The historically
unprecedented explosion in living standards all over the world had everything
in the world to do with market-driven capital accumulation and zero to do
with government spread-the-wealth schemes.
The truth of the matter is this: the only welfare the state is concerned
about, at root, is its own. As Murray N. Rothbard was fond of pointing out,
we can get to the heart of what the state is really all about by considering the
kind of crimes it treats the most severely:
We may test the hypothesis that the state is largely interested in
protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of
crimes does the state pursue and punish most intensely—those against private
citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon
are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but
dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier
to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive
conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the
state as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare
the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with
the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet,
curiously, the state’s openly assigned priority to its own defense against
the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison
d’etre.
If the nature of the state is as I have described it, we should not be
surprised by two related phenomena: (1) the glorification of the state, its
record, its motives, and its nature; and (2) the demonization of the free
market economy, which operates independently of the state. The public must be
led to consent intellectually to its own subjection, to come to believe that
the state’s confiscations and abuses are truly for their own good. What the
state needs is to bring about a society-wide Stockholm Syndrome. It
accomplishes this task through a combination of (1) fear; and (2) persuading
us of its legitimacy.
Libertarians must continue to take direct aim at both of these. First,
fear: many people believe, based on what their formal education taught them,
that under laissez-faire big business would exploit everyone, the environment
would be despoiled, and children would be working in factories. We have
plenty of ammunition to use against these concerns.
But legitimacy is truly the state’s most potent weapon. Legitimacy is what
allows the state to get away with its moral enormities. It is because the
public believes state activity to be legitimate that it tolerates it even for
a moment. This is why the state and its hangers-on are so eager to ensure we
buy into the social contract nonsense and the various other means by which
the state seeks to justify itself. When that legitimacy is cast into doubt,
things happen.
Recall what Ron Paul says when he’s asked what he thinks
about the fact that roughly 50 percent of Americans don’t pay income tax:
“We’re halfway there!”
Libertarians should have thought the same way about
Donald Trump’s threat to undermine the legitimacy of a President Hillary
Clinton: if one major presidential candidate’s legitimacy is undermined, we’re
halfway there!
No matter how the election turns out, libertarians should
be about their proper business: de-bamboozling the masses, exposing the state
for what it really is, and defending liberty as the root of everything we
cherish.
