Comments Elsewhere

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.)