It's hard for most people, Americans, to imagine a country without government and/or politics. That isn't what you're advocating, is it?Tex said she was reading this book. How do you find it, Tex? That's the kind of proposition I like to hear, although I have some concerns about it. If the model for 'what right looks like' is the iPhone, I wonder if this dissolution of the state won't just leave us with corporate masters instead. There's nothing wrong with corporations per se, but they aren't organized around the principles of human liberty. What would a declaration of independence for a post-state world look like? If you lay down citizenship to become a consumer, isn't there a severe cost -- the kind of cost that we see when the interests of rich and powerful organizations are brought to bear against an individual or a poor community?
Is it really so unthinkable? Politics killed 160 million people in the wars and genocides of the 20th century alone — improving on that record does not seem to me like an impossibly lofty goal. There is a negative aspect to what I’m advocating and a positive aspect. The negative aspect will be to some extent familiar to many people: radically limiting the government’s monopoly powers, reducing the number of opportunities it has to interfere with our lives, etc. But I think the more interesting aspect is the positive one: We can do a much, much better job taking care of the poor, the sick and the aged using the social and economic tools we already have at our disposal. Looking after the vulnerable is, in theory, the moral reason for having a coercive welfare state, but in fact politics does very little for them.
Does he have an answer for that problem?
40 comments:
I don't understood the theory by which your average powerful corporation coerces anyone. If it doesn't have a monopoly, no one need deal with it unless he chooses. The worst you can say about the most rapacious merchant is that you wish he'd give you stuff for free, which he has the effrontery to offer only at a price. There's almost no comparison between him and a state. It's pretty much the whole point behind the libertarian enthusiasm for private enterprise: that people should deal with each other voluntarily, which is to say, come to mutually agreeable terms, failing which, each does without what the other has to offer.
I'm still enjoying Williamson's book, but I haven't gotten very far in it. I'm think I'm suffering from brain burn as a result of a month-long research project. I find that I want to read escapist fiction, or else weed the garden, or (when the heat gets to me) crochet while watching reruns of "House."
Well, a good example might be the work of Monsanto in India. They don't have a formal monopoly, but they do engineer seeds that are resistant to certain kinds of pesticides, but which don't produce plants with seeds on them. Then, they spray those pesticides widely, getting them into the groundwater.
The result is that, if you don't want to deal with them, your crops will probably die from the pesticides -- after all, your crops aren't resistant. But if you do deal with them, you have to keep coming back to buy more seeds every year, whatever they choose to charge.
The way to break that kind of corporate power is -- at least currently -- via a state. If you had a non-corrupt government (which you don't in these parts of India), you could sue to get them to stop causing you harm. Of course, they employ far greater wealth, which means they can hire a whole bevy of lawyers... you poor Indian peasants will be lucky to come up with even basic representation, even if you had a non-corrupt system.
The sensitivity of state power to corruption by wealth is, of course, another reason to be suspicious of rich corporations -- even non-monopolies. But at least the state in theory provides the potential for a check on power arising from amassed wealth.
Note, by the way, that what Monsanto is doing is based on purely voluntary interactions! It's spraying crops where it is asked to do; it's selling only to people who choose to buy; and if you don't want to buy their seeds, you don't have to.
Even so, a very great deal of harm is being done by them to the people who don't choose to work with them -- and even to those who do.
A similar situation occurred with New York banks in the South after the Civil War. That's how the sharecropper system came to dominate, and reduce to near slavery, all sorts of agriculture in the South. Technically it was voluntary; you could elect to walk away, if you were willing to lose everything you and your family had ever had, and leave the place you grew up and everything you'd ever known.
You could. Many did. But that you could leave doesn't make it right for them to destroy the lives of everyone in a whole region for personal profit.
We've had this discussion so often that by now you ought to be able to predict my response verbatim. The problems you describe result from excessive force, not excessive market freedom.
Money is a kind of force, though, a moral force. Sufficient money is an ability to provide every good sort of thing to anyone -- and just what they like best -- if only they will do what you want them to do. That's how it corrupts political figures.
The idea seems to be that if we could do away with state-style forces, like policemen and armies, we'd be free of force in general. But corporations often hire security services that look exactly like armies, especially in countries where the government is weak (i.e., where there isn't a political force). The concern is that we end up with concentrated wealth and concentrated power; even a corrupt government at least divides power and compels the powerful to spend a lot of their time focused on the threats posed by each to the other.
T99, for those of us who haven't been around this block with you, how are the problems Grim describes problems of excessive force?
Tom: Monsanto invades its neighbors property with its poison without their consent. That's a law and order issue. If Monsanto bargained with its neighbors to accept its poison for a price, that would be a free market issue.
The sharecroppers got into their jam by losing a war. The victors demolished their economy and were temporarily in a position to be able to dangle food in front of their relatively helpless vanquished foes, and get them to do nearly anything rather than starve. In a free market, that kind of advantage can't go on for long. In a state-dominated market, it can go on almost indefinitely.
Grim: money is not a kind of force. Money is a promise: a way to signifying that someone has delivered goods or services in the past and didn't expect an immediate return in the form of simultaneous barter. The promise is enforceable only between people who find the system of currency valuable enough to honor it and keep it alive. The alternative to money is not universal charity combined with a spontaneous explosion of prosperity that insulates everyone from want. The alternative to money is a barter system and universal poverty. Money is a system of keeping track of obligations. You're confusing the abolition of money with an imaginary system in which everyone simply shares without keeping track, without crashing production. There is no such system, and if there were, the mere existence of money would be no hindrance to it.
I think it's a mistake to conflate real force with the pressure people feel to find a way to get what they want or need when they can see it, just beyond their reach. No economic or political system, however benign, will relieve people of that kind of pressure. The difference between a free market and a state is not that people have to make painful choices in one while in the other all their needs are supplied without tradeoffs. The difference is that in one, people will make the tradeoffs for themselves, while in the other the state (or whoever's wielding the guns in a stateless anarchy) will dictate the tradeoffs.
What's more, all our experience with free and unfree economic systems tells us that the free ones will create more prosperity and therefore minimize the most agonizing of choices. But choices will always be there, as long as people are capable of wanting and needing more than can be found growing from trees.
Grim: money is not a kind of force. Money is a promise...
So is this: "If you don't do what I want, I'll break your arm."
And so is this: "If you do what I want, you'll eat just whatever you want, and own all the things you wish for, and dress just as you wish."
We were talking about C. S. Lewis not long ago. Money is Turkish Delight. It's a terrible force. It's everything you desire, just as you want it, if only you'll give in.
That's seduction, not force.
That said, I think the cited paragraph is beyond dumb. Especially this part:
We can do a much, much better job taking care of the poor, the sick and the aged using the social and economic tools we already have at our disposal.
He makes exactly the same mistake progressives make: blaming problems in human society on "the system" instead of human nature.
In our case, "the system" actually does a better job of taking care of the weak than pretty much any system since the beginning of time. The idea that there's a better system out there and all we have to do is get rid of government and unicorns will make (force?) people magically want to take care of complete strangers deserves considerable skepticism.
That's seduction, not force.
A fine distinction, except when I'm seducing someone else to use force against you. That could be direct, by hiring security forces to do what I ask; or it could be indirect, by bribing politicians to pass laws that favor my interests (and enforce them with police powers).
Just as in Iraq, conducting operations to pacify the populace, sometimes we applied kinetic forces and sometimes nonkinetic ones, especially money. Sometimes it's the most effective tool in the arsenal. As General Lynch used to say, "Money is a munition."
If we can no longer tell the difference between seduction and force, we've got a LOT bigger problems than government.
But then we're pretty much at the point where "choices we don't like" = "no choice". Using words that mean distinctly different things as though they were interchangeable doesn't help anyone understand what we're really talking about.
We're not talking about one or the other, but both. If you won't take my bribes, someone else will; and if I need them to beat you, they'll do it for me. So am I using force against you, or just seduction against them? There's no distinction worth making.
You have a choice when force is applied, whether it's punitive or seductive -- sticks or carrots -- kinetic or nonkinetic. You can resist. You don't have to accept the dictates of force. You don't have to take a bribe. The path of honor is to resist, but I think it's a truth of human nature that carrots are often the most effective force.
Take money out of the equation, and how have you changed the problem? Anyone who has something of value can use it to bribe someone to do evil. Can we fashion a world in which no one has anything of value to give? Even if it's not possible to store up valuable things, we still have the power to do and make things that other people want. To get at the problem you're identifying, you have to look at what makes people do the right thing when the wrong thing offers rewards. Money is not the issue.
Charity can ameliorate a problem of the imbalance of power implied by the unequal distribution of money. If you see a poor someone forced to desperate choices because a richer someone is tempting him with money, you can give the poor man money instead, with no strings attached. That's a fine thing to do as long as it's your money to give, though you should be sure that relieving him of the choice really is a good thing on balance. If you've just persuaded him to sit tight rather than to move somewhere where a better life is possible, you may not have done him any favors.
Well, money is immediately capable of being exchanged for things you want; it's obviously a bit better than being paid in rutabagas. :)
But the permanence of the problem was my point. The reason we can't do without the political sphere seems to me to be that we need it to serve as a partial counterbalance to the power accumulation associated with control of wealth or resources. What he ultimately wants -- a world without politics and governance -- is a world I'd like to believe in, but can't.
Money is more convenient than rutabagas. Do we really want a world in which we make it extremely inconvenient to transfer value, just so we're less likely to have trouble with temptation? If everyone is extremely poor (which is what will happen if we're restricted to barter), hardly anyone will be an effective tempter. Is that good?
I would like to think that political control over decisions would "counterbalance" the harm that can be done by people willing to use their control of wealth or resources to tempt other people to do bad things. The problem is that political power is just as likely to use its power to force or tempt people to do bad things, and it is often harder to control. At least the individual bad guys can be circumvented. It is much more difficult to circumvent a powerful state. You have to rely on democratic processes, like voters throwing the rascals out. How well is that working? It works less and less well the bigger and more pervasive the state gets.
States that concentrate on breaking up gangs of bad guys who engage in fraud, theft, and violence are doing good work. They get in trouble when they move far beyond that task.
Right. We agree about all that. You and I do -- not Mr. K. Williamson.
How ya figure?
He says he wants to advocate 'a country without government and/or politics.' And I'd like that very much, but everything you just said are reasons why we can't do it. They're also reasons why we have to try to force that government we do permit to be small, small, small, and of limited power and authority.
I think if you'll read his comments in context, you'll find he's not advocating a complete absence of government. He's asking the reader to begin the process of imagining much less government, and to question their assumptions about what minimum government looks like.
Could be. You've read more of him than I have -- for me it's just this article.
I don't read this article as Williamson advocating "a country without government and/or politics". That was the interviewer's question. The first sentence of his response to that question can be read as advocating just that if one wants but the entire answer doesn't advocate that: he talks about "limiting" and "reducing". Also, in answer to another question, Williamson says:
Politics is a pretty blunt instrument, and it is good only for certain things. The most important aspects of modern life are too complex to manage through politics.
As for who takes care of the weak, as I understand it, a big part of Williamson's argument is that we're not doing that great a job right now. I've just finished a section early in the book where he talks about the homeless and how many of them are mentally ill. "Government" isn't taking care of them. Similarly, "government" education isn't doing a much for a lot of poor children. He believes we can do better through other means.
What those other means are, I haven't yet read, but Williamson is not someone advocating every man for himself and the Devil take the hindmost. I've just finished a section on the natural inclination of humans to co-operate. And the epigraph to his book is from T. S. Eliot:
When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
Again, you could be right; I've only read the one interview, so if you've been reading the book you have greater insight into his position. In which case, there's little with which to disagree -- as long as adequate thought has been given to the way in which we would want to use even this limited, rump state to counterbalance the power of groups he takes to be the model for the future (like Apple and other multinational corporations). The multinational part is as problematic as the corporate part: there's a danger of losing what was special and important about the American project in conceding to systems designed for an entirely different purpose (to whit, to make a profit rather than to defend liberty).
Of course, we're losing the American project to the government now; it may make little difference whether we lose it to them or to someone else. But if we are going to reform, I'd like to reform with that good in mind. Or some better good, if one is to be had.
I think defending liberty is far more about the citizens than about the institutions. The American project cannot survive without a populace dedicated to preserving it, regardless of government or corporations.
And, as your own Monsanto example shows, having a government - even one as overbearing as India's government seems to be - does not guarantee as counterweight to corporations (or unions or any other special interest) bent on wrong-doing.
"'a country without government and/or politics." That's not really what I'm talking about at all.
Also, having spent a great deal of time in India, a good deal of it writing about agriculture, I'm not sure that you're right about what Monsanto is up to there.
Best,
Kevin
In that case, you have some supporters in this corner -- potentially including me, if you have an answer to the problem of how we counterbalance these effective organizations (like Apple) in the interest of liberty.
As for Monsanto, I haven't been to India. My time outside the country has been spent chiefly in China, the Philippines, and Iraq. I rely on the work of journalists and academics here, rather than first-hand knowledge. It is a favorite example of some of my scholarly friends, especially in the field of ethics and political philosophy. In order to discuss it with them I've read a bit about it, but of course there's the chance that the reports could have all been tendentious in the same direction -- journalism and academia often share a tendency.
The special & important part of the American project is that it has a primary value of defending liberty…
I am not sure with that assertion. The American revolution should be viewed as a separate act from the Constitutional convention. The American revolution placed primary value on asserting liberties that already existed. It increased individual freedom and individual responsibility. The establishment of a stronger central government with more authority and power (as happened during the Constitutional convention) is patently anti-liberty.
Mr. Williamson, I'm pleased to see you commenting here. Your book is generating huge discussion -- I see it linked everywhere -- and several of us here are reading it. These are ideas I like to see in more general circulation.
I've been giving a lot of thought to how true it is that politics is an institution peculiarly unable to learn from its mistakes. Clearly democratic politics is subject to penalties if the voters think it got something wrong, but the problem is, I suppose, that there's a mismatch between the harm from the mistakes and the penalties imposed by voters.
The establishment of a stronger central government with more authority and power (as happened during the Constitutional convention) is patently anti-liberty.
Let's not forget *why* there was a Constitutional Convention in the first place - the Articles of Confederation were too weak to govern even a loosely allied group of former colonies: a relatively primitive society.
We keep pointing to the Founders, but eliding the inconvenient parts of our history -- like the rule of secrecy, under which the Constitutional Convention operated. That would never fly nowadays :p
But then I don't think we could pull off anything remotely like the Constitutional Convention nowadays.
the Articles of Confederation were too weak to govern even a loosely allied group of former colonies...
It's probably worth a second look at this thumbnail description. I think we often simplify this situation more than is wise, as a way of simply legitimizing the order we ended up with -- "the articles were 'too weak,' so we needed something 'stronger.'"
The particular ways in which the Articles failed I take to be these:
1) They had only a legislature, with no executive nor courts, which means they could propose laws but not apply them.
2) They had no standing military infrastructure, and relied upon the states for most of their military force including logistics in the case that they should raise an army. This was a weakness shared by the Confederate States of America, and is often argued to have been at the root of why they lost the war, so it's a real liability.
3) They had no capacity to pay the debts they incurred, as their ability to tax was extremely limited.
Now if you solve those three problems, that may be all you need. You certainly don't need the apparatus we have now, but you may not even need the Federal apparatus we had in 1800. You do need some ability to ensure that laws in the government's legitimate competence are enforceable, and you need to make sure it can remain solvent (without granting it the broad and destructive taxing powers we have done).
And of course you need an ability to provide for defense. That's just the point I started with about the function of the state. The thing we used to want the state to protect against -- and still do, though we think of it less now -- was other similar powers, who would view us as subjects or colonies instead of citizens. That's really exactly the same problem we have with the possibility of ceding to corporate influence: that we will lose the citizenship relation, instead being viewed much as colonists were, i.e. as a source of exploitable wealth.
Do we need the rest of it? Not obviously.
Now if you solve those three problems, that may be all you need. You certainly don't need the apparatus we have now...
Do we need the rest of it? Not obviously.
It's not at all obvious to me that we don't need it, either. There are many, many aspects of the system we have in place now that I don't like or even loathe. But it's not at all obvious to me (assertions to the contrary) that there's no reason for them either.
I regard this as something to be established rather than something that has been proven beyond all doubt by people simply not liking the current system. Honestly Grim, I can't stand Obama and don't trust him as far as I can throw him. But we weren't having this discussion during the Bu$Hitler years, were we?
I'm not sure which discussion you mean. Examining the Articles of Confederation is new; concerns that the system has become too powerful and needs to be cut back hard is not new. The suggestion that lawlessness might sometimes be preferable to ever-increasing, ever-constricting law is not new.
That the states can be the right location for much legitimate authority is not new either. I've been arguing for a renewed Federalism -- one that strictly limits Federal authority in exchange for state autonomy -- since at least the 2004 elections, with renewed focus every time we've had an election. Breaking up the centralized government's power and returning it to the states or the People is something I've long thought was right precisely because there are such deep disagreements among Americans about these moral and political issues.
But in the Bush days, too, we didn't have the government taking over our lives in the intimate way that the health care reform threatens to do; nor did we have the IRS and NSA scandals. Though we had a premonition of them with the OSI scandal, at least in public 'Total Information' got shot down, and if we trusted public statements we had reason to believe it really was. Now, of course, we can see that it was simply shifted deeper into the secrecy apparatus.
So if the discussions have become more urgent, I think they are from the same original principles. It's just that things are accelerating.
...if the discussions have become more urgent, I think they are from the same original principles. It's just that things are accelerating.
We absolutely did have an NSA scandal during the Bush years. I remember, because I wrote about it extensively.
Are things really accelerating, or are you just more aware of/upset about them because you don't trust Obama?
They are in fact accelerating. More laws and regulations are passed every year, already beyond the point at which you can plausibly know that you are obeying the law. The health care law will create a very intimate new relationship between the Federal government and how we manage our personal lives. The IRS has been exposed as having willfully chosen to be a political weapon, and under the new health care law we will be required to submit vast new amounts of private, personal information beyond what it already claims the right to know about us.
There comes a point at which trust isn't the issue. You have to stop it, or you'll surrender the power you'd need to ever stop it.
Now let me turn the question around, because you've been riding hard against the anti-government instinct. What makes you think you can trust anyone -- not Bush or Obama, but anyone -- with this level of control and access? Your point about the dangers of human nature holds here as elsewhere, does it not? The record of humans who gain overwhelming power over each other is long and baleful.
baleful...
Nice... leave it to a horse owner to work a hay sounding word into a political discussion.
Let's not forget *why* there was a Constitutional Convention in the first place - the Articles of Confederation were too weak to govern even a loosely allied group of former colonies: a relatively primitive society.
Right - the "firm league of friendship with each other" the states formed in the Articles had its problems, but the solution the Constitutional framers came up with is to point more guns at people?
Now, as a former infantryman it pains me to say this, but I am just now starting to fully get it through my head that violence is not the answer to almost everything. There can be a less gun-pointing way.
What makes you think you can trust anyone -- not Bush or Obama, but anyone -- with this level of control and access? Your point about the dangers of human nature holds here as elsewhere, does it not? The record of humans who gain overwhelming power over each other is long and baleful.
I don't trust them. But then I don't trust my fellow citizens, either.
Other than selected anecdotes, Grim, tell me all the list of "overwhelming" abuses of power that affect ordinary citizens, perpetrated by government. Because from where I'm sitting, I'm not seeing all that much of a difference from the "overwhelming" abuses of power American history is littered with, including murder and other acts aided and abetted by local, state, and even national government.
Abuses of power are nothing new, and I don't take it as an article of faith that local abuses of power have a less deleterious effect on people's lives than national ones.
... the "firm league of friendship with each other" the states formed in the Articles had its problems, but the solution the Constitutional framers came up with is to point more guns at people?
Now, as a former infantryman it pains me to say this, but I am just now starting to fully get it through my head that violence is not the answer to almost everything. There can be a less gun-pointing way
:)
The single best course I took in college was on the Constitution. Sadly, I audited the class so I only got the benefit of reading the two texts on the Constitutional Convention. I really, really need to re-read those books.
A recurring question Grim keeps asking is, "What does 'right' look like"? So far as I'm aware, no one has reached agreement on that subject, and I don't believe there has EVER been a general agreement on that subject. That's the single biggest insight I've gotten from the discussion so far: we really don't know, or agree.
If you look at things in that light, government looks more like an ongoing debate in which we alternately try out and discard various answers. IOW, like most of life there is a lot of trial and error involved. Now, the debate is much more "inclusive" (whatever that means). Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing? I'm not sure.
Other than selected anecdotes, Grim, tell me all the list of "overwhelming" abuses of power that affect ordinary citizens, perpetrated by government.
The systems themselves are overwhelmingly abusive, regardless of how they're used. We can't know, because the data is classified for the most part, just how extensive the abuses are. The parts I may know about, because of my nondisclosure agreements, I couldn't discuss; the rest we can't discuss in the literal sense of "can't," because we are kept from knowing they exist.
But we can assume they are there, because of the human nature you yourself have cited so often lately. Amassed power leads to corruption and abuse, if one set of human beings has the power over the others.
The IRS case is emblematic, but there's no reason to doubt it happens all the time. If you wanted to set up a political organization to contest Federal intrusions, hey, we'll just need to see enough information that we can push approval past the election you were hoping to affect. Also, total coincidence, but we need to audit you this year. And your husband. And your business.
But if you want to affect elections in ways designed to aid the expansion of Federal authority, the Federal bureaucracy suddenly becomes all kinds of helpful. Of course they do. It's in their interest: power plus human nature.
...baleful...
Heh. Only good thing about all this rain is that I won't need any hay this summer!
A recurring question Grim keeps asking is, "What does 'right' look like"? So far as I'm aware, no one has reached agreement on that subject, and I don't believe there has EVER been a general agreement on that subject. That's the single biggest insight I've gotten from the discussion so far: we really don't know, or agree.
That's the main reason I've been forever an advocate of breaking up the concentration of power in the Federal government, and returning it to the states where (according to the 10th Amendment) it belongs. Or to the People.
We don't need to agree, if we can let others go their own way. It's only if we insist on one rule for everybody that we run into problems.
Case in point: I have a good friend, progressive and feminist, who is utterly upset by this stuff going on in Texas. She says it makes her feel like a second class citizen.
"In point of fact," I want to reply, "you're not a citizen of Texas at all. You're a citizen of Maryland, where the law is exactly what you want it to be."
For some reason Americans, and especially on the left, can't stand the idea that there are states where people do things differently. It's our way or destruction!
In Georgia we have a law quite similar to the law Texas is considering, although different in important ways I think wise. For one thing, it includes a health exception, but not a 'mental health' exception -- important because health is a serious consideration, but 'mental health' is untestable; to allow 'stress' or something to serve as an exception is to void the restriction entirely.
Now you can disagree with that both ways. You could take the Texas line, or the Ohio line; or you could take the Maryland line. Different states can come to these different standards, and people can live where they like the law best.
What they've done instead is file a Federal lawsuit, which currently has the law held up with an injunction. The hope is to enforce one single, progressive standard across every state in the union. No objections or alternative views may be tolerated.
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