Comments Elsewhere

Anonymous,

Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually read anything by Nozick or by Rothbard from beginning to end?

Rothbard does not conclude that children are chattel of their parents. See The Ethics of Liberty, chapter 14: “We must therefore state that, even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a ‘trustee’ or guardianship kind. In short, every baby as soon as it is born and is therefore no longer contained within his [sic] mother’s body possesses the right of self-ownership by virtue of being a separate entity and a potential adult.” Rothbard concludes that children have enforceable rights not to be physically abused, or coerced by their parents in certain ways. He also holds that children and adolescents have an inalienable right to emancipate themselves from their parents at their pleasure, and either grant custody to any other adults who will take them in, or else assume self-ownership by making a living independently. (Since his position both rules out the use of physical coercion to force children to work, and demands that children be allowed to leave neglectful or callous parents at any time, the comments on his position on child labor are simply irrelevant; there is no way under Rothbard’s system that parents can legitimately enforce a demand that a child work for pay.)

On the inalienability of the will, see Ethics of Liberty, chapter 19. Rothbard does not claim that workers can alienate their liberty even in part, or for the number of hours on the schedule. He denies that enforceable labor contracts are based on alienation of liberty at all. He explicitly argues that anyone who signs a labor contract can legitimately stop working at any time — because a mere promise to work is not an enforceable contract; and no-one can transfer title over their body and will — and cannot be forced to pay damages for the lost services that their employer expected. They can only be required to pay back (1) any advance wages they received for services that they did not end up performing, and (2) any “performance bond” that the worker agreed to put up as a conditional substitute if they declined to perform the service. On Rothbard’s theory workers alienate labor power at the moment of actual labor (by using their body and will to transform goods), but not liberty; they retain the right at any time to refuse to do any work, even if they earlier promised that they would do the work, and the boss has no enforceable claims on them whatever beyond the recovery of any money that was conditional on performance of the undone work.

Does the unconditional right to strike or quit guarantee that work will be meaningful, humane, rewarding, etc.? No, of course not, and particularly not under the conditions imposed by State-backed monopolies and anti-worker labor controls. But a bad job that you’re better off not leaving is not the same thing as enforceable slavery, and even if you do think it amounts to something you could call “slavery,” Rothbard makes it quite clear that he’s referring to the latter and not to the former when he discusses slavery and inalienability. Rothbard is clear about his target and adduces reasons, coherent with his thoroughgoing revision of contract theory, for his position. The claim that he is being muddy, inconsistent, or dishonest here is simply not defensible in light of the text.

You may think that some of his positions are wrong (I, for one, certainly do think that some of them are). You may even think that they are crazy. But you do have an obligation to honestly represent what his positions are, not to distort them beyond recognition in order to score polemical points against the top-hatted and monocled cartoons of your ideological opponents. The chief reason I view the Anarchist FAQ negatively is precisely because it engages in this kind of polemical misrepresentation in the frankly pointless attempt to write anarcho-capitalism out of the extension of the word “anarchism.” They would be on much stronger ground if their criticisms were based on a careful attempt to delineate the position and a systematic understanding of the arguments, rather than on the attempt to provide a set of social anarchist talking points against anarcho-capitalists.