Comments Elsewhere

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.