This is interesting stuff, and I think that the shift from taking Moorean facts, as it were, one at a time, to looking at “Moorean situations,” may very well be an extremely fruitful one. (In particular, I think it may help a great deal in thinking about the twist on Moore that you get in On Certainty.) But I’m a bit puzzled by the way you try to motivate backing off from Moorean situations to the (intentionally) epistemically much weaker “quasi-Moorean situations.” It seems that you are trying to do this motivational work at the beginning, when you say:

‘A Moorean fact, roughly, is any proposition of which I am more certain than the premises of any argument to the contrary (I ignore for simplicty the implicit category error). So construed, I suppose I don’t believe that there are any Moorean facts; there just are no individual propositions (or at least very, very few) that I am willing to hold onto “come what may”.’

Now, as Moore himself might say, so far as this is intended as an arbitrary verbal definition of the phrase “Moorean fact,” I have no quarrel with it. But if you are intending to provide an interpretation of Moore, I think you’ve got something importantly wrong; and it seems to me that what you’ve gotten wrong is important, since it points to a possibility that you seem to have neglected in this post.

Specifically, Moore does not hold that deliverances of Common Sense — such as “Here is one hand,” “I ate my breakfast before I ate my lunch,” “there are many other people like myself who know that they have hands and that they ate their breakfast before they ate their lunch,” et cetera — are irrefutable, or that we must hold on to them “come what may.” On the contrary, he is quite clear (see, for example, “What Is Philosophy?” in Some Main Problems of Philosophy) that Common Sense propositions can be, and have in the past actually been, refuted by careful empirical investigation (exploration in a literal sense, astronomy, physics, etc.). But empirical investigation and philosophical analysis are notoriously not the same thing; and what Moore does argue is that “Moorean propositions” are more certain than any purely philosophical that might contradict them. The idea here is not that there can’t ever be reasons to (say) decide that you don’t have a hand in front of your face after all; it’s that the reasons you have had better be better than your “metaphysical intuitions.” (For some provocative discussion on this and related points, see Bill Lycan’s Moore Against the New Skeptics.)

But if we take “Moorean situations” to mean what Moore means by it, rather than the way that you glossed it here — that is, not as stuff we oughtn’t ever abandon on any grounds, but rather stuff we oughn’t abandon on purely philosophical grounds — then I’m much less clear on why I should want to retreat from full-blown Moorean situations to “quasi-Moorean” situations as an epistemic tool. Why not hold out for all the constituent propositions in the situation rather than a good many, when all that you have to stare down to stick to all of them is a bunch of “metaphysical intuitions”? I think there are many situations that I’d be willing to trash any purely philosophical premises in order to hold on to; for example, exactly the situations that Moore describes in “Proof of an External World,” “The Defence of Common Sense,” “Four Types of Scepticism,” etc.

Thanks for these posts, Jason. It’s fascinating stuff. I have a prickly and tangential note, and then a more serious question.

Here’s the prickliness: you worry, inter alia “What, for example, is to be done with the ill-gotten gains of the nobility and the clergy, when these make up the vast majority of the nation’s wealth? … And, as we all know, land reform on the Chinese model was a horrific disaster.” But why in the world would you have to have land reform on the Chinese model (which of course did not exist at the time, anyway) in order to have some kind of serious land reform? Why not (for example) expropriate land acquired illegitimately (e.g. through feudal entitlements) and devolve ownership to individual peasants, thus creating a new class of small freeholders?

Now, here’s the more serious question. Here and in the previous post you’ve made several intriguing comments about the faith of the revolutionaries in central government power and how this led to projects of audacious social engineering and — as those failed to produce the desired effects — the violence of the Terror. Here though you also mention, apparently with favor, the theory of at least four separate and concurrent revolutions. Do you think that there are noticeable differences among each of these revolutionary movements when it comes to constructivist faith in the State? I.E. do you think that all of the revolutions shared the attitudes and conceits that produced the intellectual conditions for the centralized State and eventually the Terror, or do you think that these developments were the result of one tendency within the revolution winning out over the others?

geniusNZ: “If everyone owned the road infront of their house Can you imagine having a toll on EVERY section of road as well as signs every 10 meters telling you how much you are going to pay and if you dont want to pay that you need to do a handbreak turn.”

I can imagine any number of things. The question is why in the world you think people would do something that silly. I mean, many people currently own the driveway that leads up to their house, but very few of them place tollbooths on it. Before government got involved in the building of roads, what typically happened was that smaller residential and city roads, and some trails through the wilderness, were built either (1) by cooperative labor or (2) funded by local businesspeople, and then left open for public use; turnpikes were usually limited to large highways. I suspect that much the same thing would happen if roads were privately provided today. Of course, it’s possible that people in some neighborhood or another could be so silly, or hate traffic passing through their neighborhood so much, that they’d put up all kinds of onerous blocks to traffic. But then why bother driving through their neighborhood if they are so uptight about you doing so?

geniusNZ: “The point is that in reality the process of making a market may cost more than operating without it. this may result from the type of good or the way it is used or the externalities etc.”

If your argument is an economic one then I don’t think it’s a very strong one. Roads are not public goods (they are both rivalrous and excludable); it is easy to seek money from anyone who benefits from positive externalities (e.g. asking businesspeople along the road to help with maintenance costs, with the payoff being a better road in front of their business); owners of roads will typically have strong incentives to avoid congestion, and if a patchwork of ownership ends up somehow causing congestion problems then that will just mean that there is an entrepreneurial opportunity for anyone willing to buy up or build a less congested network of roads in the area. (In fact the problems that you mention above are not even problems with externalities at all; they’re alleged problems with transaction costs. But the fact that you transfer control to the government doesn’t mean that transaction costs disappear; it just means that they are shifted from up-front costs to costs hidden within the tax bureaucracy. In fact, given that roads are especially notorious as a source of pork-barrel projects for enterprising legislators, and notoriously unresponsive to commuters’ needs (as opposed to senior legislators’ political priorities), it’s quite likely that road-building and road-maintenance are among the worst examples of the inefficiency created by transferring enterprises from the voluntary sector to the government sector.

“The constraint-theorist must take these constraints as being more important than human wellbeing. After all, if they really just valued human wellbeing, they would be maximizers instead.”

This line of argument presupposes that you can spell out what “human well-being” is without ever mentioning (say) justice or respect for persons as a constitutive part of the account. (If you can’t, then saying that someone who just cares about human well-being should try to maximize it even if it means violating the side-constraints or not is rather like saying that someone who just cares about singing the Ode to Joy should sing it even if it means singing “and so say all of us” instead of “Tochter aus Elysium.”)

But why should you believe that? And why should you expect someone who is not already a consequentialist to accept the doctrine?

Richard: “Yes, many libertarians take (e.g. property) rights as fundamental, rather than freedom. They’re not the kind of libertarian I was discussing in this post.”

I think this is a confusion. Libertarians do not, generally, regard liberty (in the sense that is relevant to a theory of political legitimacy) and individual rights as two concepts that you can spell out quite independently of each other and then ask about the boundary conditions or prerequisites that the one imposes on the other. Rather they generally take the two notions to be analytically connected to one another in such a way that you have to understand each in order to understand the other. (How do you know whether you are free? By looking at whether your property rights are being respected. How do you know what property rights you have? By looking at what sorts of actions would infringe on your liberty.) There are exceptions — the official position of Stinerite egoists, for example, requires a claim that freedom is more fundamental than individual rights, which are merely instrumentally valuable insofar, and only insofar, as the social truce they produce tends to maximize freedom for the agent. But there’s good reason to say that these exceptions, where they happen, tend to undermine the libertarianism of the person holding them to the degree that they are treated seriously (e.g. Benjamin Tucker’s egoist polemics involved him in assertions that it would be right to do unlibertarian things under certain specifiable conditions), so it’s unclear that this constitutes any avenue for attack on libertarianism; at most it just constitutes an avenue for criticising some libertarians as inconsistent.

Richard: ‘But as I suggest here, your ‘moralized’ conception of freedom has some absurd consequences. If you hold that a person is “free” so long as their rights are not being violated (or “aggressed” against), then you must hold that a justly imprisoned criminal is not thereby deprived of his liberty. Clearly this is mistaken — prison is the paradigm case of unfreedom!’

I don’t think this actually does the work you think it does. “Liberty” and “freedom” are words with many different senses; I think it is clearly false that there is a univocal notion of “unfreedom” that you can use to determine whether a justly imprisoned criminal is free or unfree. Certainly there is a sense of freedom in which any constraint on action whatsoever constitutes a constraint on freedom; i.e. in which “free” and “unfree” line up roughly with “voluntary” and “involuntary.” If that’s all you mean then a justly imprisoned criminal is indeed unfree; but then so what? That’s not the sense of freedom that libertarians consider relevant to their theory of political legitimacy. There’s another sense of the term “freedom” in which you are free if you are being treated according to a full set of human rights and unfree if you are not; here “free” and “unfree” line up only with “voluntary” and “involuntary” only when the actions are non-aggressive, and being prevented from rape, pillage, murder, et cetera is not to be considered a limitation on what you might call “political freedom,” since there is no human right to rape, pillage, or murder.

You might think that this still offends against common sense; that we ought to consider a prisoner, even a justly imprisoned one, a paradigm case of unfreedom in the political sense as well as in the volitional sense. I agree that people often are inclined to say (1) that prisoners aren’t free in a political sense, and (2) that this is justifiable if they are justly convicted criminals. But I’d suggest that people tend to believe both (1) and (2) together only because it’s very common to mistakenly believe (3) that we’re entitled to treat criminals according to less than a full set of human rights in punishment for their crimes. If (3) were true, it would follow that you can justifiably do things to criminals that would limit their freedom, and incarceration under such-and-such conditions might be among those things. But if (3) is false (as I think it is), then either (a) you can justifiably incarcerate someone for such-and-such a crime, as a defensive measure against imminent danger to others — in which case it is just as false to claim (1) as to claim that a would-be rapist’s political freedoms are being infringed when you push him away; or (b) incarcerating someone under such-and-such conditions for such-and-such a crime would be an infringement of political freedom, in which case you shouldn’t imprison people like that for such-and-such a crime, and that any justifiable action on the part of the criminal justice system would have to be limited to things like fines or ordering the payment of damages. (I think, incidentally, that (a) is clearly the case for certain crimes, but that (b) is clearly the case for many crimes for which people are typically imprisoned today.)

In other words, prison is the paradigm case of one kind of unfreedom. But that’s not the kind of unfreedom that libertarians primarily care about. (The paradigm case of the kind of unfreedom that they do primarily care about is not prison, but rather slavery.)

Richard: “Anyway, it still fails the well example, because the person stuck down the well is not being aggressed against. Rather, he is being ignored. Aggression is a subset of intervention, after all.”

Not so. My point above is precisely that one kind of inaction (specifically, negligent inaction) is a form of aggression, in the sense that libertarians use the word. If knowingly leaving someone to suffer and die in a well, or leaving someone to perish in a structure fire, when you could save them without further danger to yourself and when it’s likely that nobody else could or would, does not amount to an act of aggression, then what does it amount to? That seems aggressive to me, but if you don’t like using the word with that signification then feel free to suggest some different name for it — coercion? rights-violation? tort? injustice? — and I’ll use that name for the purposes of this discussion. My point will be served so long as there exists any ethical category Epsilon such that (1) Epsilon is plausibly connected with a conception of political freedom; and (2) Epsilon covers (i) all acts of non-defensive violence (including extortion by credible threat), (ii) all acts of fraud, and (iii) all cases of harm from negligence, but does not cover other kinds of wrongs or vices. Whatever it is you call Epsilon, libertarians think that that is the only ethical category such that you can rightly force people not to engage in the acts that come under it; and non-libertarians think that there are some further kinds of actions that people can be rightly forced not to do. The important thing to note is that it’s quite possible to be a libertarian, and to admit (iii) to membership in Epsilon (aggression/rights-violation/tort/whatever) without also being compelled to admit the sorts of things that you think your well example ought to force people to admit (e.g. not giving enough money to some specific program designed to alleviate systemic poverty or provide disaster relief, etc.).

Richard: “As an aside, trying to ground morality on inviolable ‘rights’ is rather silly and fetishistic”

Maybe so, but I’m not at all clear on what you mean by the phrase “trying to ground morality”. Certainly libertarians do not need to claim (and most do not claim) that all legitimate moral claims are reducible to claims about inviolable rights. (Libertarians may very well think that intemperance, miserliness, cowardice, bigotry, foolishness, et cetera are wrong and should be condemned; to remain libertarians they need only hold that they should not be stopped by violence.) If you mean to suggest that any inclusion of inviolable rights in a moral theory makes it silly (which is what you suggest in the post you link to) then the response is twofold/ First, that libertarians who emphasize rights don’t need to hold that it is never justifiable to violate those rights in order to defend a libertarian political programme; they just need to hold that it is not justifiable to violate those rights systematically (if it is justifiable to murder one person in order to save many under extraordinary circumstances, it does not necessarily follow from that that it’s justifiable to establish a political order that routinely violates rights in order to achieve this or that putative benefit). Second, that there are just as many and as serious objections against theories that suggest that you can legitimately violate rights in order to maximize some good that does not include considerations of justice in it (e.g., scapegoat cases, Williams’ objections against impersonal calculation, etc.), and it seems to me that if you think the choice is obvious or that one of the alternatives is just silly, you probably need to think about the problem harder. (Certainly your post on side-constraints doesn’t fully make the case; among other things it requires that we share your intuition that you can give any kind of account of what the good for human beings is that doesn’t refer to things like justice and respect as constitutive parts of it. I think that this is a fallacy, exposed and probably decisively refuted by Socrates. In any case, there is quite a bit of debate over it, and it is for precisely this reason that side constraints are supposed to constrain the way that they do, so dismissing the idea as silly seems to me at best overly hasty.)

Richard: “Finally, the traffic example doesn’t depend upon physical risks. Suppose that without traffic laws, people would just drive very very slowly and carefully, and so it would be no more dangerous than our current system.”

Where this is true I don’t see what possible justification there is for government-imposed traffic laws. I can see good reasons to legally punish people who endanger others on the road. Whatever laws are adopted to that end could justifiably be enforced on anybody who uses any road.

I can also see good reasons for the owners of road to establish utilitarian rules of the road, which aim at making the use of the road as smooth and convenient for travellers as possible. But I have no idea why rules adopted under this second justification should have the force of law or why they should have to be the same on all comparable roads. Why not let the owner of each road decide what the rules for their road will be, and letting travelers decide which road they prefer to take? (Of course, someone who refused to obey the rules of the road could be evicted from the road by the owner, and if they refused to go voluntarily they could be arrested for trespassing. But that’s different from legally enforcing uniform traffic laws on all roads.)

At this point you might say, “Ah, but wait. Who owns the roads? The government, of course, so that’s why the government should be making and enforcing the rules of the road even when they don’t have an immediate safety justification.” But why should the government own roads?

Richard: “Imagine you find yourself stuck down a well. Libertarians claim that you are perfectly free so long as everybody else leaves you alone, since that way you suffer no interference. But surely we can see that this is mistaken. If left alone, you would dwindle and die. That’s not any sort of freedom worth having.”

As has been pointed out, the idea that libertarians analyze freedom as “non-interference” is a serious mistake; libertarians in fact analyze freedom as “non-aggression”. This is important to your intuition-pump, though, because it is quite certain that endangering other people through reckless driving is an act of aggression, and there is also a good case to be made that refusing to rescue someone in an emergency can, in some cases, constitute an act of aggression. This, however, depends on a lot of circumstantial factors — such as the nature and urgency of the emergency, the role (if any) you played in creating the emergency, the means at your disposal for making some individual contribution to the rescue, the means at others’ (including the victim’s) disposal for the rescue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. (This is important, because you’ll need some pretty burly argument to generalize, as you want to, from your intuitions about the case of a person in dire emergency from having fallen down a remote well, to circumstances that are quite different along all of these axes, such as systemic poverty or the damage from natural disasters or ….)

Of course, I note your objection above that the very institution of private property requires “aggressive interference,” and so (you claim) contradicts the non-aggression account of freedom. But that is just begging the question, in a particularly crass way, against the libertarian; libertarians hold that the concept of aggression is analytically connected with violations of property rights. Thus enforcement of property titles (up to and including the use of violence) is considered by libertarians to be a defensive, rather than aggressive, use of force. While some libertarians (William Lloyd Garrison, Leo Tolstoy, Robert LeFevre) have been principled pacifists, most are not, and there is nothing in the concept of libertarian freedom that demands complete non-resistance; it demands only the abandonment of aggressive force. Maybe you think that this distinction is unjustified or does not do the work that libertarians want it to do; but if so you ought to mention that, and give some argument for it, not just obliterate the distinction and speak as though libertarians have not addressed it.

In a similar vein, your attempt to treat taxes and traffic laws as of a piece with one another is no less question-begging. Libertarians have a perfectly good reason, if you accept the distinction between aggressive and defensive uses of force, to sanction the enforcement of traffic laws but not the enforcement of tax laws. To wit: people who defy traffic laws are putting other people in imminent danger, and threatening to destroy their property or their lives; people who refuse to pay tax are doing nothing of the sort, and are threatening only to keep their own stuff. Of course, again, you might find this argument suspect; but if so the burden is on you to acknowledge that it’s out there and show what’s wrong with it.

Jason: “As a practicing (but moderate) libertarian, I would suggest that winning the permanent gratitude of one other person is easily worth the effort spent in extricating him from a well.”

This may be true for all I know, but it’s certainly not the right reason to rescue people from wells. The right reason is that leaving people to suffer and die is cruel (and perhaps in some cases unjust, i.e. a violation of their rights).

David: “Forget personal feelings … could anyone explain the precise point which cause them to treat ‘freedom’ ( to do anything you like I presume?) as more important than society enforced rules.”

The libertarian conception of freedom is not freedom “to do anything you like”; it is freedom “to do anything you like” without violating other people’s rights (the set of rights being derived from the non-aggression principle; i.e. no slavery, assault, extortion, theft, fraud, or vandalism allowed). The reason for treating it as more important than “society enforced rules” is that vices are not crimes, and slavery is wrong.

One more note. The following:

Again, not to be too picky, but actually, you didn’t say this earlier. Your post simply says that the work that the federal government does is not beneficial without actually specifying whether or not you thought that none of it was beneficial or that it was on balance not beneficial. That’s why I prefaced the claim you quote with ‘if’. It was an invitation to, you know, clarify your position.

is disingenuous. Firstly, because putting an “if” in front of an uncharitable reading of an interlocutor’s position is still setting up a strawman if you at no point mention obvious and more charitable alternative readings of the claim. But secondly, and more directly, because you flatly stated, shortly thereafter: “Your claim was that none of the work of the federal government is morally legitimate,” asserting a reading of my claim which was not only uncharitable but in fact incorrect.

Joe:

I, for instance, pay some of those dollars, and I’m happy to do so. I can hardly be robbed when I pay up willingly, no?

Of course you can. If I put a knife to your throat and demand the money in your wallet, then I am robbing you of your money, even if it is true that you would have given the money willingly (say I’m homeless and desperate, and you’re a generous sort). Similarly the background threat of violence exists in every dollar that the government lays its hands on, and whether or not you would willingly give the same amount of money in some remote possible world where the agency you’re giving money to doesn’t have the power to take it against your will.

Even if this counterfactual test were a good test for whether robbery is going on or not, though, the following would still be a non sequitur:

There really aren’t that many people who think that governments are illegitimate and that all taxes are theft. That means that much of the money spent isn’t stolen at all. So the issue is not whether good things are being done with stolen money. The issue really is whether good things are being done at all.

… since “the issue” of robbery and the use of stolen funds would remain if there were anyone who was forced to pay more money in taxes than they would have given voluntarily in a possible world where the government could not force them to pay up. If there were not a substantial mismatch between the amount that people were willing to pay voluntarily and the amount that can be extracted by confiscatory taxation, then there would hardly be any reason for the government to engage in it, would there? Even if you believe (as you should not) that robbery stops being robbery when the victim would have consented to pay had she been asked, it is still quite safe to assume that there is a very large portion of tax “revenues” that would not have been turned over without the threat of force, and thus a substantial portion (taken from non-libertarians as well as libertarians) that is robbed.

In either case there is no justification in trying to morally evaluate government “services” in abstraction from the robbery that is their necessary condition.

I must admit that I’m pretty surprised that you would think that preventing Soviet (or for that matter Nazi) domination of the West isn’t really all that good a thing.

You’re changing the target here. What you mentioned earlier was “active opposition to the Soviets” and “Winning WWII” (among several other martial feats), both of which are far more complex phenomena, in terms of both ends and means than simply “preventing Soviet domination of the West” and “preventing Nazi domination of the West.” They were at the most one among many goals that people in the federal government wanted to achieve, some of them noble and others quite obviously not; and, since the federal government does not have a supply of magic wands with which to achieve its goals, they were necessarily tied to specific and brutal acts of violence in order to achieve them. Maybe some subset of those acts of violence were justified by the ends that were achieved, and maybe they weren’t; but when the policies you have in mind were accomplished by means of (among other things) the draft, an active military alliance with Stalin’s terror-empire, the incineration of millions of people and hundreds of cities with napalm and atomic bombing, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the threat of global nuclear holocaust prolonged over decades, et cetera, et cetera, it is frankly grotesque to describe the consequentialist case for the policies, without any qualification and without any supporting evidence, as “sure.”

I’m not especially opposed to nuclear deterrence, though. I fail to see anything all that immoral about threatening to launch nuclear weapons in the event that you do it first. Actually launching them might be immoral, but the threat? Why is that so terrible?

Because terrorism is wrong. Other people’s lives are theirs, not yours, and you have no right at all to use them as bargaining chips.

Also because being willing to carry out a threat of a massacre is vicious, and being unwilling to carry out a threat of a massacre makes the threat empty.

Scott:

I disagree. I believe it was Mancur Olson who showed that government is preferable to roving bandit gangs. Something to do with the security of property rights, tragedies of the commons, et al, I imagine.

Even if this claim is true, it is not an answer to my objection. The AIDS pandemic is not, as of yet, as bad as the Black Death of the 14th century; that does not, by itself, make an argument in favor of a stable AIDS pandemic. Your claim compares two different types of rights-violations; that comparison may be accurate, but my original claim was not comparative in the first place.

An appeal to comparative benefits only cuts ice against my consequentialist objections, and in favor of a “stable” federal government, if you have some further lemmas to demonstrate that (1) the nearest possible worlds in which there isn’t a stable federal government have a corresponding increase in “roving bandit gangs,” and (2) the increase would be destructive enough to outweigh the benefits of a paralyzed federal government. But why the hell would you believe either (1) or (2)?

Further, an appeal to comparative benefits cuts no ice at all against the moral argument unless you have some further lemma to demonstrate that all moral arguments reduce to consequentialist arguments. Of course, that is no doubt a debate that lies beyond the scope of this comments thread, but it’s there nevertheless.

Joe Miller:

Not to be overly picky, but nothing that you say here actually provides any evidence for the claim that the work of the federal government is morally illegitimate. You assert that the existence of the federal government is morally illegitimate (that’s what the ‘founded in naked usurpation, funded by massive robbery’ part is doing). But that, if true, shows only that the federal government ought not exist. That, however, is a very different claim from the one that says that the work the federal government does is illegitimate.

There are two separate claims here: (1) that the federal government was founded in naked usurpation (cf. Spooner), and (2) that the federal government’s work is all funded by massive robbery (cf. any libertarian at all, really). You’re right to distinguish (a) the legitimacy of the federal government’s existencefrom (b) the legitimacy of the work it does, and to point out that (1) bears mainly on (a) rather than (b). But I think you’re quite wrong to suggest that (2) bears mainly on (a) rather than (b); the fact, as an ongoing condition, that every single dollar that goes into government work must be robbed, gives very good reason to say that the work the government does is, as an ongoing condition, morally illegitimate. (Why? Because giving people stolen loot is morally different from giving people stuff that you or they have a legitimate claim to. The latter is either generous or just; the former is predatory, and any “charity” or “generosity” involved is amoral sentimentality at best. I’ll add that I think this is exactly the right understanding of your mafia case; the syndicate’s “charitable” contributions are morally illegitimate, for precisely this reason. Whether they’re “beneficial” on balance or not depends on whether or not you think morally illegitimate actions can ever be beneficial, and — if you do — whether the effects of the charity actually outweigh the effects of the robbery that is its necessary condition.)

It strikes me as pretty much just false if your claim is that the federal government has never done anything beneficial.

But I didn’t claim that. I claimed that the “work” the federal government does is, on the whole, not beneficial (which is after all all I need claim to justify the claim that a paralyzed federal government wouldn’t be a bad thing). There are many destructive enterprises that also do some little good or another, and many beneficial enterprises that also do some little harm or another, but all the same the destructive enterprises should be halted and the beneficial ones encouraged. On the other hand, I’m not nearly as sure as you are that the paradigm cases you cite are actually good examples of the federal government having done some good. (When evaluating consequences, for example, you seem much more sanguine than I am about the threat and practice of incinerating hundreds of thousands or millions of people with napalm and nuclear weapons. In any case the “Surely” in your conclusion has not by any means been earned.)

Scott:

That position may well be absurd. It, arguably, does not bode well for the stability of the system. I assume stability to be generally a positive thing.

A “stable” federal government is only a positive thing if the work that the federal government is doing is both (1) morally legitimate and (2) beneficial. Since the “work” that the federal government does is, in fact, neither — it is founded in naked usurpation, funded by massive robbery, and consists in senseless cruelty and destruction, there’s precious little reason to hold out for the virtues of stability in the post of capo di tutti capi.