Matt McIntosh:

Has anyone else noticed that the larger and more diverse a firm gets, the more it starts to resemble a state in some ways?

Yes.

The answer can be obtained by referring to chapter 9, pp. 612ff above, where we saw that the free market placed definite limits on the size of the firm, i.e., the limits of calculability on the market. In order to calculate the profits and losses of each branch, a firm must be able to refer its internal operations to external markets for each of the various factors and intermediate products. When any of these external markets disappears, because all are absorbed within the province of a single firm, calculability disappears, and there is no way for the firm rationally to allocate factors to that specific area. The more these limits are encroached upon, the greater and greater will be the sphere of irrationality, and the more difficult it will be to avoid losses. One big cartel would not be able rationally to allocate producers’ goods at all and hence could not avoid severe losses. Consequently, it could never really be established, and, if tried, would quickly break asunder.

In the production sphere, socialism is equivalent to One Big Cartel, compulsorily organized and controlled by the State. Those who advocate socialist “central planning” as the more efficient method of production for consumer wants must answer the question: If this central planning is really more efficient, why has it not been established by profit-seeking individuals on the free market? The fact that One Big Cartel has never been formed voluntarily and that it needs the coercive might of the State to be formed demonstrates that it could not possibly be the most efficient method of satisfying consumer desires.

— Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State Chapter 10, section 2-F

Part of the point here being that calculational chaos is not limited to states; it’s just that the organized force of the state is the only way in which calculational chaos above a certain level can reliably be sustained.

Of course Sony, as a beneficiary of government-granted and government-enforced monopolies on its gargantuan copyright and patent portfolio, is as good an example as any.

Brandon Berg:

Wal-Mart and Microsoft aren’t angels by libertarian standards, but government has arguably hindered their growth as much as helped it, unless you count copyright enforcement in the case of Microsoft.

And extensive use of “eminent domain” theft in the case of Wal-Mart. I’m not sure I understand the “unless” in regard to Microsoft, though; I mean, unless you count an annual budget appropriated out of tax funds, the government has arguably hindered Amtrak more than they’ve supported it. But why wouldn’t you count that?

Here’s a few limitations on the prerogatives of the several states that the federal Constitution clearly imposes based on any reasonable reading of the original text:

Article I, Section 10, Clause 1: No State shall … grant any Title of Nobility.

Article IV, Section 4. The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, …

If the legislature of Alabama convened and duly voted to make Roy Moore the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of Alabama and to dissolve itself as a legislative body, granting all legislative power to Lord Moore’s edict, then the federal government would stop them from doing that, probably by means of the Court, on the grounds that states have don’t have the right to grant titles of nobility or create non-republican forms of government. I imagine that you probably wouldn’t like Roy Moore being made Lord Protector (I know that I certainly wouldn’t); but does your support for “states’ rights” commit you to defending their right to do so against federal interference?

If it does, then what has your support for “states’ rights” got to do with federalism anyway, as opposed to outright dissolution of the federal government?

If it doesn’t, then don’t you have to revise your test for “states’ rights,” since you would then be supporting some kinds of federal interference with state prerogatives but not other kinds? And what makes the difference between the kinds that you support and the kinds that you don’t?

One more note. The following:

Again, not to be too picky, but actually, you didn’t say this earlier. Your post simply says that the work that the federal government does is not beneficial without actually specifying whether or not you thought that none of it was beneficial or that it was on balance not beneficial. That’s why I prefaced the claim you quote with ‘if’. It was an invitation to, you know, clarify your position.

is disingenuous. Firstly, because putting an “if” in front of an uncharitable reading of an interlocutor’s position is still setting up a strawman if you at no point mention obvious and more charitable alternative readings of the claim. But secondly, and more directly, because you flatly stated, shortly thereafter: “Your claim was that none of the work of the federal government is morally legitimate,” asserting a reading of my claim which was not only uncharitable but in fact incorrect.

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.

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.)

Scott:

That position may well be absurd. It, arguably, does not bode well for the stability of the system. I assume stability to be generally a positive thing.

A “stable” federal government is only a positive thing if the work that the federal government is doing is both (1) morally legitimate and (2) beneficial. Since the “work” that the federal government does is, in fact, neither — it is founded in naked usurpation, funded by massive robbery, and consists in senseless cruelty and destruction, there’s precious little reason to hold out for the virtues of stability in the post of capo di tutti capi.

Charlie (Colorado):

If every president had to resign every time the federal government wasn’t as effective at something as its critics think it should have been, they’d have to take official portraits with a polaroid camera.

You say that as if it were a bad thing.

So some scheme or another means that Presidents would have to resign often. This means that we wouldn’t have any one President for a very long period of time. And then… what?

(In order to have a successful reductio ad absurdum, you have to point out at least one consequence of a position that is actually absurd…)

Kennedy: “I’d also note that if a male teacher had been having sex with a thirteen year old student he might well do hard time instead of nine months.”

I agree. The difference in treatment is indefensible. The crime ought to be punished equally severely, or equally leniently, whatever the gender of the older and younger “partners.”

Lopez: “Arguments for ‘age difference’ alone don’t hold water.”

Indeed. Which is why both age difference and the youth of one of the “partners” was mentioned above. A substantial age difference is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for what I said to apply. (It’s necessary because there’s an awful lot less reason to think that another 13 year old is sleazy for sleeping with a 13 year old than to think that a 28 year old is.)

Ghertner: “If the teen has the capacity to give meaningful consent, then how is it vice, sleazy, or exploitive?”

Because there are more vices than there are crimes, in sexual ethics as in all other kinds of ethics. Fulfilling your obligation not to rape anybody is important, but why would you think that there aren’t any other moral obligations that you have? If you think (as, indeed, you should) that sexual relationships ought to take place within something at least vaguely resembling a context of equality, reciprocity, and mutual responsibility, then there are plenty of good prima facie reasons to think that 28 year olds who sleep with 13 year olds are pretty sleazy.

N.B.: I don’t think that it’s usually true that a 13 year old has the capacity to give meaningful consent to a sexual encounter with an adult twice their age. But you can apply the above at whatever age you like, depending on where you think the age of meaningful consent is and where you think the age is at which sexual encounters with much older adults stop being sketchy.

Ghertner: “Is it exploitive for college professors to sleep with college students?”

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking.

If you’re asking about students who they encounter in an academic setting (e.g. in their classes or in their departments), then yes, of course it’s unethical for professors to sleep with those students. If this isn’t obvious, it ought to be.

If you’re asking about students and professors who happen to meet each other without having any particular academic relationship to one another, then I don’t know whether it’s sleazy for the professor to sleep with the student or not. I imagine that it depends on the specifics of the case.

Kennedy:

If anything it’s vice. Scbools should be free to ban her as the see fit and that’s about the end of it.

Well, it’s clear that wildly unethical sexual conduct with students is, by itself, just a vice, not a crime. It’s not nearly so clear that adults sleeping with 8th graders ought to be considered merely a vice; if you think that the youth of one of the “partners” and the age difference between them substantially undermines the ability to give consent, then the adult would be guilty of rape.

I happen to think that it ought to be considered criminal, but there are understandable arguments to the contrary; questions of consent, childhood, and adolescence are usually pretty vexed. The point, though, is there are good reasons to consider it vicious no matter what answer you give to the question of whether or not it ought to be considered criminal (because it’s sleazy and exploitative).

Compared to the sort of reliability in the administration of criminal justice that would be needed for the criminal justice system to be trusted with the sort of penalties that it currently administers, I expect.

Is there supposed to be some sort of logical problem with Stevens’s statement? If so, what?