@Ethan,

There are many definitions of socialism on offer. (Some common definitions get little beyond a kindergarden-level praise of “sharing”; others include everything from “opposition to monopolistic corporatism,” to “centralized state planning for its own sake,” from “the abolition of private property in the means of production” to “all-encompassing gift economies for most or all goods and services” to “systems of production which ensure that a worker receives the equivalent of the full marginal productivity of her labor” (with this last goal usually to be achieved by abolishing of government-backed monopolies over land and capital), etc. Some are for global-scale top-down “rational” planning and “expert” management in all things; some are for abolishing all forms of coercive planning and relying on the spontaneous harmonization of interests. If you’re curious as to what this wealth of conceptions all have in common, I’d say that the concept they are all riffing on is the concept of opposition to actually-existing monopolistic big business, because of a sense that it rigs the system in favor of a class of idlers who live off of a skim from the work of common workers, and a desire to adopt new forms of living which better serve the material and social needs of those common workers. The vast differences amongst conceptions of socialism have to do with the analysis of how the rigging and skimming happen, and what ought to be done about it.

Those who couch their understanding in terms of ownership of the means of production generally do not have in mind “public” (if that means “governmental”) ownership of the means of production; rather, the proposal is typically either for worker ownership of the means of production (among mutualists, syndicalists, and autonomists), or else for common ownership of the means of production (among communists). “Common ownership” may mean ownership managed by a political apparatus, supposedly at the direction of “the people” or “the proletariat” — ha, ha, ha. But it may also mean, as in Bakunin or Kropotkin — genuine common ownership by everyone within the community, with some sort of agreed-on joint decision-making process and backed by common consent, rather than a professionalized political body with coercive powers.

In the worker-ownership and the anarcho-common-ownership versions, I think it ought to be easy to see how these things can come about without coercion. These are just different ways of arranging what laissez-faire economics would call a “firm.” Firms can be owned jointly among many shareholders, and there’s no requirement that those shareholders be absentee investors; as with existing co-ops, the joint owners might be the workers in the firm; or they might be the regular consumers of the firm’s goods and services, or might be a very broad class of community “stakeholders,” etc. Firms can also be run more or less directly by their owners; although most very large firms have a significant separation of ownership from management (that is, the shareholders hire on an agent or a handful of agents to make executive decisions on their behalf), worker-owned or community-owned co-ops are different sorts of beasts, and might well opt for more participatory, hands-on management by the worker or community owners themselves. Hence, worker-ownership or common-ownership of the means of production within a freed market and without coercion.

@aaronman:

This suggests it is a matter of principle,

No doubt. But what’s the principle?

If it’s something like “The U.S. government should be as efficient as possible in spending what it steals from innocent victims,” I can’t see why that principle is worth defending or acting on. The primary problem isn’t profligacy; it’s the stealing.

The money he sends back only delays the theft and destruction that has to occur for the government to continue

No, it doesn’t. It is not as if the IRS is going to collect $100,000 less in taxes or the Treasury is going to issue $100,000 less in government bonds thanks to the windfall. It’s not as if government returns surpluses back to taxpayers when they have surpluses; they just look around for new things to spend the extra money on.

Well I didn’t see this was just for his office budget, but if he inflated the value of staff labor just because he had extra money lying around he would be abandoning his market principles.

What market principles? In my view, there is no way whatsoever to live up to “market principles” when you are distributing stolen loot. All government spending is by definition a command economy, not a market economy, and no price that Paul chose to pay for labor or goods in his office budget, whether small or large, would be a “market” price, because (as Mises teaches us) there’s no way for a command economy to approximate market outcomes.

but you’re acting like what the Fed spends money on is worse than what Paul would spend money on locally

The money went to Treasury, not to the Federal Reserve. In any case, what the U.S. government spends money on is definitely worse than what Paul would have spent it on locally. Paul’s spending would merely be wasteful. The U.S. government’s spending is actively evil and destructive; it goes towards imprisoning, surveilling, hurting, maiming, and killing innocent people, both within the United States and abroad.

Paul spending money that is neither his nor should be spent is central planning as well.

Yes, I agree. There’s no way around central planning when government allocates money. All you can do is get the money away from government as quickly as possible — and, preferably, try to get it into the hands of some those net taxpayers it was originally stolen from. But that’s precisely why Paul shouldn’t give the money back to Treasury for more government allocation.

But I get what you’re saying and it’s not a bad thought, he could have paid himself the $100,000 and spent it at every business in town or something…

I think that would be better than giving it back to Treasury, but the best thing for him to do would be to just give it away directly to randomly selected net taxpayers without demanding any consideration in return.

@Sir Elliot:

He can’t keep the money. If he doesn’t use it, it must be returned to whatever general office staff budget is in place, since the books have to be balanced out.

I’m aware. What I’m suggesting is that it would be better for Ron Paul to use it on something wasteful but non-destructive, rather than giving it back to the U.S. government, which will use it for something both wasteful and destructive.

Maybe if the featherbedding gets too egregious, it would make it difficult for Ron Paul to keep his government job. But then, I’m not especially interested in figuring out ways to help Ron Paul keep his government job.

Maybe I’m not understanding OP’s point?

Maybe not. If it helps, my primary point is that it’s misleading (and indeed stupid, if not dishonest) to describe paying $100,000 back to the U.S. Treasury as “paying back the American people.” What it is, is paying back the American government, which is a different entity, and one which happens to be antagonistic towards, and parasitic on, the “people” it claims to rule.

@Kylesa:

That’s a pretty massive leap in logic to suggest that Ron Paul’s fiscal conservatism is aiding bankers.

I didn’t say it’s aiding bankers. I said it’s aiding the U.S. government. (The U.S. government, of course, does aid bankers — hence my mention of them — but it also does lots of other things. Like blowing up Afghan children.)

So in an essence, you’re faulting Ron Paul for sticking to his ‘guns’ (Being an honest politician).

No; I’m faulting those who claim that giving stolen money back to the pirate who originally stole it is a form of “honesty.” There is no “honest” way for any politician to spend tax monies; the only thing to do is to get them out of political hands.

... A group of insurrectionary Anarchists, active in the US, who were inspired by the Italian immigrant Luigi Galleani. They carried out a large-scale campaign

I can’t speak for Chaohinon, who kindly reposted my article here; but I am the author of the article that was reposted, and in what follows, I do speak for myself.

@aaronman,

First, the Federal government doesn’t need money, they can print it or steal it.

There are lots of things the government can’t do without money ready to hand (like pay salaries or build expensive war materiel), and the government’s capacity to tax and to inflate is finite. (Specifically, tax seizures are limited by declining productivity and by increasing compliance costs; the ability to raise money through inflation is self-limiting due to declining international credit, and eventually the collapse of purchasing power under conditions of hyperinflation.) Admittedly, the federal government is nowhere near either limit right now: they’ve got a long ways that they could hike taxes or inflate money before these mechanisms broke down. But how’s that an argument for just giving them more money to work with?

He’s doing a favor for his constituents by not distorting their economy.

I have no idea what you are talking about here. How does putting putting stolen tax money back into the hands of the U.S. Treasury “not distorting their economy”? The economy has already been distorted by the seizure of the money in taxes; it will be even further distorted by whatever purposes the Treasury decides to put it towards.

Second, government spending itself is just as bad as the violence used to finance it.

Could you say a bit more about what standards of badness you are using to judge that spending is just as bad as the violence used to finance it?

Speaking as a libertarian, when I measure the badness of things, one of the things that I look at first is whether it is coercive or not coercive — whether any individual person’s rights are being violated. Of course, there are many bad things that aren’t coercive — things that are stupid, or foolish, or otherwise oughtn’t be done. But I tend to think that things that are directly coercive — that involve not only doing dumb or silly things, but involve hurting people, stealing from them, beating them, bombing them, locking them in cages, etc. — are, on the whole, much worse than follies or errors that aren’t forced on people against their will.

He obviously doesn’t know why austrian economists oppose central planning.

Well, most Austrian economists oppose central planning because they advocate one version or another of the calculation problem — either the version spelled out by Mises in “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (which has to do with the lack of meaningful factor prices in a planned economy) or the somewhat different, but also very interesting, version developed by Hayek in “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (which has to do with the inability of centrally planned economies to make use of dispersed, often tacit, localized knowledge). Those Austrians (like Rothbard) who believe in a strong version of natural rights also oppose government central planning because they believe that economic intervention by the state is not only economically destructive, but in fact morally criminal.

What I don’t know is what any of this has to do with whether or not Ron Paul ought to return money to the U.S. Treasury. The money that goes in there comes back out in central planning; so if your aim is to get rid of or minimize central planning, then you ought to do your best to keep money from going back in to the extent that you can.

@lord chronic:

I don’t see what the real criticism of him here is, would you have prefered if he had just kept it?

Yes, I think it would be better if Ron Paul put it straight into his pocket and used it to buy beer than if he gave it back to the Treasury. What I’d most prefer is that he pick some taxpayers at random and split it up amongst them, since they (unlike him) aren’t drawing a tax funded salary, and this would represent actually “paying back the American people,” and specifically people who would be getting back something of what the government robbed from them. Certainly, what he sends to Treasury is not going to be paid back to anybody, except perhaps for Goldman Sachs or Bank of America.

And if you don’t agree with fiscal conservatism what exactly are you advocating?

Anarchism.

The reason I don’t want the government to get back $100,000 is because, ultimately, I want them not to get any money at all.

@Gary Chartier:

I agree that Rothbard gets Tucker’s stance on land wrong here. I think the stuff on money is even worse, though. Apparently he imagines that Tucker and Spooner want the universal use of personal fiat currencies backed by nothing (?!) and the Mutual Bank as a credit vouchsafing clearing-house, and an issuer of secured credit, doesn’t so much as make an appearance. As far as I can tell, he seems to have gotten to the suggestion that interest rates would be radically lower, stopped reading there before he could get to any of the details about how that might actually work in the absence of government money monopoly, and gone on a tear instead about how he doesn’t like 20th century inflationist economics. Which he’s right not to like; but heaven only knows what it has to do with Tucker. Or Spooner.

@Dave Martin:

“Rothbard was referring specifically to undeveloped nations, where the state essentially owns everything and doles out some of it to the politically connected.”

You mean “undeveloped nations” like the city of Las Vegas? (http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/04/04/the_state/)

Rothbard asserts in a couple of places, without any real argument, that land is not politically allocated in the U.S. the way it was in, e.g., the formation of Latin American latifundias. But I think a quick glimpse at reality (whether the way that land titles and “real estate development” constantly work in the West, or the slavery-and-politics land grant jobbery of the Old South, or the mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, and government “Development” giveaways of “Urban Renewal” [sic]) should show that this is, to put it mildly, a lapse in his application of principles.

... Well, OK, whatever. If you have some particular case in mind where my choice to use the descriptively accurate term "slave driver" is making my analysis

... Um. Point of order. As the terms are usually used in philosophy, utilitarians *are* moral realists -- that is, they believe that statements of moral

... Right; usually passed just about the same time. The Wobs were usually more or less the intended target of both kinds of laws (although on the Criminal

... No, there's not, and it's certainly true that if enough people value oppression strongly enough to be willing to pay the cost of inflicting it, then you

... Many if not most states have similar laws. Oklahoma's law is a bit unusual, in that you don't usually see examples with any legislative history at all as