Comments Elsewhere

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

Roderick: … would you run a headline saying that the find “challenges the law of gravity”?

We are talking about the O-A News here. Don’t give them any ideas.

... Because states are by definition territorial monopolies of authority over the use of force. Where you don't have centralized authority, you don't have a

... Huh? Why would he need to believe that there are historical examples of what he wants in order to believe that it ought to be brought about in the future?