Radgeek, since you’re willing to be here doing Left Libertarian 101 for us, I hope you won’t mind answering a couple of questions: Do you think there should be a government at all? And if so, how should that government be financed?

Amp, I’m an anarchist, so the answers are “No,” and “N/A.”

Minarchist libertarians do exist, usually either (a) favor some very low level of taxation and try to come up with an excuse for it, or else (b) favor various kinds of schemes for voluntary government funding (donations, lotteries, voluntary “contract fees,” etc.). I think that (a) simply means being inconsistent (because there aren’t any good excuses under consistent libertarian principles), and (b) solves one problem with governments but not others (it makes the funding non-coercive, but not the activities that are being funded; the governments imagined by minarchists still exercise a coercive monopoly over the legal authority to exercise defensive force). In principle there could be minarchist left libertarians (I guess the folks at Freedom Democrats qualify), but as it happens most of the other left libertarians I know (Roderick, Kevin Carson, MDM, et al.) happen to be anarchists too. I’m not entirely sure what the reasons for the disproportionate anarchist tilt is, although I suspect it has something to do with the Left’s greater historical willingness to turn its skepticism towards the cops, the military, and other supposed forces of Law & Order, which means knocking the last leg out from under the minarchist state.

Robert:

… Taxpayers, as part of doing their return, put down the departments they wish to fund with their taxes that year, on a percentage basis.

Well, that would be better than what we have, in that it gives people more power over how their money is used and would serve as a powerful roadblock to sustaining unpopular and expensive programs. I think that the standard moral objections would still apply: people have a moral right to refuse to have any of their money committed to any government project, if they want, because the government hasn’t got the right to take it. But if there were a realistic political proposal on the table for moving from our current system to one like this, which is less invasive and lets people choose less destructive uses for their money, then I’d support that as a provisional step along the way towards freedom. (I feel the same way about other reformist measures that give people more control over the gov’t, such as term limits, voter initiatives, etc.)

Brandon:

I don’t like theft any more than you do, but we both know they don’t take that coin here.

My reason for stressing the moral illegitimacy of theft over arguments based on judgments about the recipients, is that it’s true, not that it’s agreed-upon. That said, if you’re really interested in strategically attuning your argument to the audience, I think you’re mistaken if you suppose that you’re going to have an easier time convincing people here to share your views about the poor than you would just trying to convince them that they shouldn’t force people to support their poverty relief programs — even if those programs are noble and valuable. Moreover, the rewards are greater: if you can make a case there, you’ll also have made a case for libertarian politics as a whole; whereas if you make your case based on the qualities of the recipients you haven’t made any case against other forms of forced redistribution, most of which are just as bad if not worse.

As far as the statistical wonkery goes, you cited federal entitlement programs as a reason to believe that “monied interests” aren’t exercising a heavy influence over politics. But you can’t count Social Security and Medicare spending as examples of the greater influence of the poor and middle class over the government unless they actually tend to financially benefit the poor and middle class at the expense of “monied interests.” But they don’t; if anything fact they are paid out disproportionately to the rich. Of course middle class people are most of the recipients, because nearly everyone is a recipient and most people are middle class. But the higher your annual income (up to the cap, currently about $90,000 / year) the more money is paid out to you, and richer people tend to live longer than poorer people, so the money ends up being disproportionately paid out to well-off people as compared with the elderly paupers the system was allegedly designed to serve. In any case, since the program is a more-or-less universal entitlement program, it can’t be passed off as a class redistribution scheme; the main redistribution of wealth involved is (1) from young people to old people, and (2) from ordinary people to the government.

Jake Squid:

I trust the government more than the unfettered free market to allocate resources for the poor because there can be laws requiring allocating resources to the poor in a government whereas, by definition, you can’t have those laws in an unfettered free market.

Why do you trust the people in the government to make the right laws for tackling poverty, if you don’t trust people outside of the government to make the right decisions of their own accord? Is there any evidence that elected politicians have some kind of special knowledge or virtue that the rest of us don’t when it comes to poverty and the people facing it?

Also, government spending is not decided by individuals. Senator X can’t decide that he is putting his percentage of the budget towards building a spaceport on his own. He needs approval of the rest of the Senate & the House to get that done. In Libertarian utopia, Senator X (who would determine only how he spends his own money) could decide to use all his capital towards building Senator X spaceport.

I consider this a virtue of libertarianism, not a vice. If somebody wants to sink their own money into a spaceport, I see no reason why he or she shouldn’t. What I object to is my money being sunk into foolish and destructive projects — or even noble and constructive ones — without my permission.

As a practical matter, Senators and Representatives get funding for all kinds of outrageous pet projects all the time; most of their colleagues don’t care about the projects that the tax money is going to, but they don’t see any reason to object, since it’s not their money that’s being wasted, and since by logrolling you can get support for your own pet projects in return. If you think that individual people are inclined to do all kinds of stupid things with their own money, why would you think that they are going to be more responsible with other people’s money, when they need only the approval of a few score of like-minded and similarly self-interested colleagues to sink it into any damnfool project they dream up?

Brandon Berg:

Whether poverty is the result of bad luck or bad behavior is a very important factor in deciding how to deal with it.

Of course it’s true that how you should treat poor people depends partly on the reasons that they are poor — just as the way you should treat anyone depends partly on their virutes and vices. What I deny is (1) that there’s any reason why, if people are poor because they are foolish or bad or failures, we shouldn’t try to provide for some forms of relief for them anyway (because I don’t think that anyone deserves to suffer like that); and (2) that believing (1) or not believing (1) has any bearing at all on the libertarian arguments against the legitimacy of Social Security, TANF, etc.

If the poor aren’t responsible for their lot—if the only difference between them and us is luck—then maybe income redistribution isn’t such a bad idea. On the moral side, it’s not their fault. And on the practical side, there’s not much moral hazard. It’s not as though subsidizing bad luck is going to encourage people to be less lucky.

Brandon, this only follows if you think that moral hazard, incentive structures, moral desert, etc. are the only reasons that you shouldn’t rob one person in order to help out another. But I don’t think that: I think that robbing one person in order to help out another is immoral. Not because I have any opinion at all about the virtues or vices or the right way to treat the recipient, but rather because of the way that treats the victim. That’s the essential libertarian case against government “welfare” programs. The rest, whether true or false, is a bunch of policy wonkery, and secondary to the moral question of whether or not you can legitimately force people to go along with your favorite social programs. Isn’t it?

First, if everything is controlled by moneyed interests, then why do we still have a corporate income tax, and why do the rich still pay the highest personal tax rates?

Brandon, you are aware that there are forms of taxes other than the personal income tax, aren’t you?

Why does something like 70% of the Federal budget go towards giving money away to the lower and middle classes?

… It doesn’t.

About 19% of the broader budget goes directly to military spending (not counting legacy spending such as veterans’ benefits) and about 9% to repayment of interest on the federal debt. Unless you intend to claim that the rest of the broader budget not devoted to “giving money away to the lower and middle classes” constitutes 2% of the broader budget, it’s not mathematically possible for the Feds to be spending 70% on that.

It’s worth noting here that the two (by far) largest entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare, at 21% and 14%) that the government maintains are not means-tested and are funded by the regressive FICA tax. Characterizing either program as “giving money away to the lower and middle classes” would be a serious error.

Jake Squid:

Brandon Berg is a perfect example about why I fear (even more than currently) for the poor under a free market system. People can’t avoid making moral judgements about others and inevitably people will want to see the poor as at fault for their own poverty (we don’t like to believe that it could happen to us, therefore the poor are morally bad or stupid or whatever). That being the case, you wind up with far fewer resources dedicated to alleviating poverty.

Jake, if you think “people” (I’m not sure whom or how many you intend to include) “can’t avoid making moral judgments about others,” and that “inevitably,” “people” “will want to see the poor as at fault for their own poverty,” then why do you trust the government to responsibly and adequately provide for respectful, helpful poverty relief?

The government’s made of people, too, isn’t it?

Jake Squid: Have there been any real world examples of this?

I’m not sure what you’re asking for. Real world examples of government intervention and ossified structural poverty hurting poor people and aiding the rich? Sure, lots. Kleptocratic government is a pretty well-known phenomenon, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Or real world examples of the benefits of free markets for the worst-off? Well, sure; but it’s harder here because there are so many different cases to consider and because there isn’t any way to quantitatively compare actual state-distorted markets with counterfactual free markets under otherwise equivalent circumstances, or actual free markets with counterfactual state-distorted markets under otherwise equivalent circumstances. But here are some examples of ways in which freer markets would help the worst-off more than the better off: by ending the “War on Drugs” (which imprisons and destroys the lives of lots of people, usually the worst-off people, because the best-off people rarely take the fall); by stopping police harassment of women in prostitution; by ending agricultural subsidies that systematically subsidize huge planters and agribusiness to the detriment of the rural poor; by drastically reducing food prices currently inflated by those same agriculture subsidies and price floors (which matter more to the worst-off than to the best-off); by repealing the (regressive) payroll tax, thus directly increasing poor people’s income by a greater percentage than rich people’s; by removing regulations and red tape that systematically constrain small competitors against established corporate players; etc. There’s a lot of different ways in which government intervention harms the poor, and a lot of different ways in which prosperous free markets tend to help the worst-off most of all (N.B.: as opposed to pseudo-prosperous mercantilist markets of the sort that bond traders and politicians like to promote). I realize this hasn’t clarified very much but I’d really probably need a more specific question to give a better illustration or explanation.

Brandon Berg:

If you do, you’ve failed. You had your chance, and you blew it. Then you had another chance, and you blew that one, too. And almost certainly several more. It may take magic powers to save adequately for retirement on minimum wage, but it doesn’t take magic powers to get a job that pays more.

Whether this is true or false, it’s irrelevant.

There is some population, greater than zero, of people who, whether for reasons that are culpable or reasons that are blameless or a mixture of the two, will make wages at or not very much above minimum wage their whole lives. Whether or not this makes them “failures,” whether or not it makes them bad people or foolish people or contemptible people or pitiful people, they are going to get old and they are going to reach a point in their lives where it will be very hard for them to continue working, and if they have neither accumulated savings nor a pension (gov’t issued or private), then they are going to suffer a lot in their old age.

But that doesn’t mean that they deserve to suffer, or to suffer that badly, whatever you may think of how they have lived their lives. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that a free society could — indeed ought to — include things like mutual aid for health, retirement, etc. needs in old age, charity for people facing extreme poverty, and so on. The only requirement is that people can’t legitimately be forced to turn over money for it. That’s what’s wrong with government “welfare” programs, not whatever vices or failings you might think the proposed recipients might have.

Moralistic contempt for poor people forms no essential part of the libertarian argument against the moral legitimacy of Social Security or other government “welfare” programs. In fact free market economics suggest that an end to government interventionism will help out the people with the worst economic prospects the most, since government intervention and ossified structural poverty systematically hurt poor people and aid the rich. The idea that libertarian theory is the body of economic thought of, by, and for Ebenezeer Scrooge has just got to die.

“Freedom,” as libertarians use the word, never seems to mean anything other than freedom from government intrusion. Real freedom, however, means having a wide range of attractive options. When someone’s options are eliminated by the marketplace, by illness, or by lack of available assistance, that is as real a threat to their freedom as government intrusion.

This is a common misunderstanding (and there are a number of libertarians, even, who encourage it by their practice). “Freedom” in the political sense that libertarians use it doesn’t mean “freedom from government intrusion;” it means “freedom from violent coercion” (hence the “non-initiation of force principle”). Government comes into the picture only when libertarians go on to suggest that government officials don’t have any special prerogatives to violently coerce peaceful people any more than ordinary civilians do. (But this entails — though vulgar libertarians don’t tend to recognize it — that systematic violence such as lynch law in the Jim Crow South, or union-busting gang violence, or pervasive male violence against women, are just as much matters for libertarian concern as invasive government is.

Nor do most libertarians claim that this is the only thing that can be intelligibly described as “freedom,” or that it’s the only valuable form of freedom, or even that it’s the most important form of freedom to any particular person at any particular time. What libertarian theory does demand is that you not try to promote other forms of freedom at the expense of freedom from violent coercion, because forcing people against their will to be “free” in other senses is (1) unlikely to work well, or (2) immoral, or (3) both. (Which one of these options the libertarian appeals to will vary depending on what kind of libertarian she is.)

(More to say, but it’ll have to wait until after work…)

Someone working for $5.15 an hour is not free to save for retirement; they’re spending their whole income on rent and don’t have enough left over for food and heat, let alone savings.

I don’t understand this argument.

People who make $5.15/hour are already forced to turn over 6.2% of their wages to FICA and another chunk to the state and federal government in tax withholding. The FICA withholding is, according to the government’s accounting fictions, “saving for retirement” in the form of funding Social Security and Medicare. So presumably if there were no FICA (or better, no tax withholding at all) they could voluntarily put aside up to 6.2% of their wages for savings in an IRA and be no worse off than they were before.

You might say, “Oh, but if they wouldn’t put aside that money if they’re not forced to, because they have all these other pressing costs that they need to pay now.” There are certainly cases where that’s true, but it doesn’t follow from that that being forced to put the money aside is the best thing for them. Having lived on around $5,000 a year myself (due to a combination of low-paying jobs and long-term unemployment), I can tell you that when you don’t have enough money to spare for savings, being forced to put the money aside anyway has a direct consequence: debt. If (ex hypothesi) I’m being forced to put aside money that otherwise could have paid off current bills, then those bills still have to be paid off somehow, and when I don’t have the money now, that means they have to go on the card. And the debt accumulates a lot quicker than whatever “returns” I’m supposedly getting on my “investment” in Social Security and Medicare.

Maia:

I didn’t use the phrase ‘collective responsibility’, and I wouldn’t. The only way I would refer to childcare as a collective responsibility is in the sense that I think that the resources required to raise children (and by that I mean all the things La Lubu mentions, but also things like food and stretch and grows, and bikes, and toys and high charis) and also the resources to support those raising children, should be provided by people collectively, not just by the parents.

Right; that was beachcomber who used the phrase. Sorry for not making that clear.

I still do have some concerns about the phrase “collectively,” actually, because it tends to have some of the same ambiguities as “responsibility” (does it mean a burden everyone has to bear together, or does it just mean something that a bunch of people can choose to co-operatively take on?). I guess in your case the question I would ask is: suppose that I’m the aforementioned curmudgeon, and I don’t want to contribute either labor or material resources to child-raising, and I deliberately choose the work that I’m going to do and the transactions I’m going to make in such a way that I don’t. Can I be forced to go along with the child-raising scheme, and forced to support child-raising whether I want to or not?

If so, why?

If not, I have no problem with the arrangement (indeed, I think it’s a very good suggestion), but I think maybe “co-operative” (or one of the other phrases I mentioned above) might be a clearer way of putting the nature of child-raising as you see it than “collective.”

Grace:

Barbara Kingsolver (I think) made the argument that even if you’re child-free by choice, you still have a vested interest in the way kids in society in general are raised. Because when you’re old and sick, who’s going to be providing your medical care, repairing your house, doing your taxes, cooking your food, making the laws that affect you, and so on? … (The context of this was her argument against people who didn’t want to pay taxes that supported schools.)

Whether she’s right about this or not, I don’t think that the argument supports the claim that people who are “child-free by choice” should be forced to pay for schools.

Provided that she’s correct, all that she’s proven is that it may be foolish or imprudent for people who are “child-free by choice” not to contribute money to schools because they run the risk of losing out on some future benefit (just as it may be foolish of me to spend all my money buying DVDs and potato chips when I could be putting down money for a vacation that I’ll enjoy a lot more than the DVDs and the chips). But the suggestion here is not that childless people be encouraged or exhorted to contribute money to schools; it’s that they be forced to do so, whether they want to or not.

Merely showing that it would be foolish not to do something isn’t the same as showing that the government should make you do it against your will, unless you are employing a further premise that it’s the government’s job to force you and me not to be foolish. (I don’t think that it is.)

Maybe there’s some other reason why the government should make you pay for government-run schools, but I don’t think that this is enough reason as it stands.

mythago, this doesn’t have to do with my personal preferences. As it happens I like kids a lot and I’d be glad to help out; that’s why I framed it as a hypothetical to be supposed. What I’m concerned with is how we ought to treat people who don’t happen to be interested in volunteering.

That said:

Unfortunately, Rad Geek, you live in a society that has a minimal level of communal support—you know, tax breaks for charity, funding for soup kitchens, and so on.

I can’t see how this appeal cuts any ice at all. I was also born into a society where heterosexual marriage is widespread, where homophobia is widespread, where a minimal level of sexist jokes, are widespread, etc., but that’s not an argument for sexist jokes or homophobia, and it’s not an argument for forcing me to get heterosexually hitched either. Why should the fact that I was born into a society where people carry on a certain way affect whether or not (1) I ought to support them carrying on that way, or (2) I ought to be forced to carry on that way myself?

Even if you think all poor people should curl up and die, you still have to pay taxes that go to feed poor people.

I’m aware that I am. I’m questioning whether forcing people to contribute to causes they don’t support is right, not whether it is done.

You might say that if I’m taking advantage of communal support that I’m unwilling to contribute to later, then that’s at least a vice on my part. Perhaps that I’m, say, selfish or ungrateful. Maybe so, but I don’t think that just pointing this out:

If this makes you curmudgeonly, do consider that you’ve been the benefit of ‘public good’ projects—if not directly, then indirectly.

… proves that to be the case. I wasn’t asked whether or not whether I wanted to benefit from various cooperative or tax-funded projects, so I don’t see how I have even any prima facie moral obligation to support them now. Let alone an enforceable debt to them.

Robert:

I would suggest that. Although I don’t much like the communal child-raising pipedream, if that were the mechanism we selected as a society, you would owe it support and fealty. … Otherwise, get out. If you won’t support society’s requirement to transmit itself through time, then you don’t deserve to participate in the side benefits that such societies tend to provide. Go live in the woods and be a lonely hermit.

If you want to voluntarily dissociate from childless people who don’t support the raising of other people’s children (by whatever means is prevalent in a given community), then you are of course free to do so. I don’t see, however, where you think you get the right to tell me whether or not I can live on my own land (which happens to be in the middle of a city, not in the woods), or whether or not I can interact with and trade with other people who happen not to share your views (most shopkeeps don’t care very much whether or not their paying customers are sufficiently child-friendly, and while I happen not to be a child-hating curmudgeon, I know plenty of people who wouldn’t hold it against me if I were).

If you’re just suggesting that I have a right to be a sour child-hating curmudgeon, and you have a right to ostracize me and encourage your neighbors to do the same, then we’re in agreement (although I think the reasons you’re suggesting for the ostracism are rather silly). But if you’re suggesting that you have a right to force me to move out, or to force other people not to interact with me, then I have to wonder what you think gives you the right to treat me and them that way.

Maia:

Just for the record under my red nightmare no-one would be required to work doing child raising. It would just be one of the many forms of work that people would do.

Well, that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with it, then. I think it sounds pretty nice, in point of fact.

My concern is with the phrase “collective responsibility.” People sometimes use “responsibility” to mean something that you can choose or not choose to take on; sometimes they use it to mean something that you are required to do, and can be forced to do, whether you like it or not. And when they start talking about how X or Y is a “collective responsibility” a lot of times they mean the latter rather than the former (since it suggests that you’re talking about a burden for everyone to bear, instead of something that they willingly choose to take on because they want to do it). Why not talk about child-rearing being something “open to all,” or something “everyone can help out with,” instead of a “collective responsibility”?

La Lubu:

I don’t know what Maia is envisioning when she refers to the collectiveness of child-rearing, but I’d like to see some acknowledgement of the necessity of certain institutions needed to simultaneously raise children and keep a roof over one’s head

I would too, and I happen to dislike sour child-hating curmudgeons on both an individual and societal level (although not because I think they’re somehow ungrateful; the problem with them is that they’re generally petty and mean).

My question isn’t about the ends to be achieved; it’s about the means used to achieve them.

beachcomber:

I agree that there should be some collective responsibility for raising and nurturing children. I think society would benefit hugely from abandoning the unworkable nuclear family model and moving towards something more communal in terms of child care.

Let’s suppose that I’m a sour old curmudgeon and I’ve decided that I don’t want to have any kids of my own, or to play any role in helping to raise other people’s kids.

Are you suggesting that I should be forced to support your communal child-raising collabo?