Micha,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.

I agree with you that worker ownership of the means of production wouldn’t instantly solve all the problems of labor, and that — for all I’ve said in the King Ludd post — there might be other reasons why it turns out not to be viable, or at least not universally practicable. My main point was just to show that one alleged problem with unionism, presented by De Coster and others as if it were intrinsic to unionism as such, was actually only a problem with the particular model of union organizing that both anti-union business types and the establishmentarian union bosses fetishize, and which the Wagner/Taft-Hartley system actively subsidizes and protects in the name of “industrial peace,” at the expense of competing organizing models — like, for example, the worker-ownership model of the IWW. Those other organizing models may have problems of their own, but they don’t have the problems that De Coster treats as intrinsic to unionism.

After all, one of the myriad justifications for profits going to the capitalist is that the capitalist takes on the most risks, using her own money as an entrepreneur to start an uncertain business, with a high failure rate, and also extending in time when she will get recompensated, assuming the business becomes successful. Whereas a poor laborer just scratching by may not have the wherewithal to take such a large risk, nor be willing or able to withhold present consumption for the chance at a bigger future payoff – the poor laborer just wants a certain payoff now, in the form of wages.

Well, O.K., sure, but two things.

First, insofar as this argument works, it seems like it’s an argument for capitalists to take a role and get a cut in the high-risk start-up period for a firm; not necessarily much of an argument for capitalists remaining as residual profit recipients after the firm is already well established. It’s perfectly possible to have both an infusion of working capital during the start-up period and a worker co-op at the end (either because the capitalist agrees to those terms, going in, or because the workers organize after a while and use their stronger bargaining position to convince her to disentangle herself and find a new entrepreneurial opportunity). The question is why that sort of thing doesn’t happen now. Maybe it’s because there’s some other reason why it’s not viable, but I’d suggest that a lot of the reason has to do with the way in which prevalent business models and prevalent union organizing models are supported and rigidified by government economic regimentation (as well as the establishmentarian business and union culture that that regimentation promotes).

Second, it’s true that, especially for very low-paid wage workers, a lot of their economic decisions are going to be made as a reaction to the extremely precarious economic situation that they are in. This will naturally tend to make people more risk-averse and more interested in certain and quick pay-offs than they might otherwise be. But the precarity isn’t a fixed natural fact; it’s largely the product of specific government policies which ratchet up fixed costs of living while ratcheting down opportunities for homesteading and labor, with workers’ livelihoods caught in the squeeze. Eliminate those policies and you’ll begin to see workers with more of their costs of living safely covered and with more in the way of back-up options should their current arrangement fail.

But becoming an investor and a risk-taker generally presupposes some level of acquired wealth, where you have taken care of basic needs and have some money left over to risk and save. Poor laborers aren’t generally going to have access to that sort of capital, and they are the ones who seem to benefit from organizing their labor the most.

Well, organizing your labor and providing a cushion of wealth to fall back on aren’t mutually exclusive options. Unions themselves can (and, in the past, often did) provide an institutional vehicle for helping cushion workers from economic falls — by improving wages, but, more importantly by providing institutions that help workers on the bum to find new work (e.g. union hiring halls, now illegal under Taft-Hartley) or for workers to help each other provide for themselves and their families during lean times (e.g. mutual aid societies, now partly illegal, or heavily regulated — if they do anything that might be construed by the government as selling insurance — and in any case crowded out by government welfare).

If it turns out that one aspect of radical labor solidarity (worker ownership of the means of production) works out best when accompanied by another aspect of radical labor solidarity (a vibrant network of mutual aid), well, I’m happy enough with that conclusion.

Matt Simpson:

I’m a conventionalist when it comes to property.* A cursory glance at the current convention in the geographic region we call Israel shows that the Israeli government does, in fact, have the right to be there.

Whose conventions show that?

Last I checked, a lot of Palestinians, for example, do not accept the property conventions in question (e.g. they reject the colonialist conventions behind the Mandate and Balfour, accept property conventions that would allow for a right of return after forcible exile from traditionally-held lands, etc.). So what then gives the Israeli government the right to force Palestinians to act according to the boundaries set by its own property conventions, as opposed to the property conventions that they themselves accept?

(Note that you can’t answer by appealing either to conventions that allow for that kind of imposition, or to the alleged legitimate authority of the Israeli state to fix property conventions, without crassly begging the question.)

Micha,

I’m not sure I’ve succeeded in making my point clear to you.

Sure, and that’s an argument against the government being selective in how it sells/promotes/distributes the technology.

(1) My primary concern about this scheme is not with the actions issuing government (the U.S.). If the U.S. government started issuing some form of international biometric ID, it might very well do something fucked up with that (like incorporating that into its border-Stasi system). But the primary concern I was expressing has to do with how the issuing government would be facilitating more intensive government surveillance by other governments in the name of “security.” The point is that the more or less inevitable outcome of the U.S. government providing this kind of ID according to the political and state-security incentives that it faces is that other governments would take advantage of it by beefing up their surveillance regime and forcing their own citizens to become unwilling clients for state-security purposes.

(2) I’m baffled by your suggestion that you could somehow prevent the government from being selective in how it sells/promotes/distributes these ID cards. How? No government “service” in the world is like that. And now government “service” is ever likely to be. Especially not a government service that most directly impacts the fortune of this governments primary allies, beneficiaries, and partners in crime — viz., other governments.

But the technology itself is not objectionable,

I didn’t say that the technology was objectionable. I said that having the U.S. federal government promote and distribute it is objectionable. If some private company were issuing IDs like these, I probably wouldn’t buy one (I don’t need that kind of ID for anything that I currently do, and I’m very impatient with paperwork), but I wouldn’t be lodging the same complaints against it.

Of course, government abuse is a serious and very plausible worry. But that’s true with anything the government does.

Sure, I agree with that. There’s a simple solution: don’t propose for the government to do anything at all.

Government “services” are never going to be anything but corrupt, stupid, inefficient, selective, tilted to political advantage, and often quite dangerous. Why waste one’s breath on proposing new ones, or let government off the hook by pretending that they could somehow be done “right” this time?

If you want biometric ID cards, start trying to sell your idea to entrepreneurs or start designing your own. Nobody’s stopping you. What possible benefit is there to pushing the idea of having the U.S. federal government do it instead?

In any future system of fully private, fully free-market law and contract enforcement, technological and social advances in identification, reputation, and security will all be a boon for liberty.

Sure. But the first clause of that sentence is the most important part, and it’s precisely the part that’s dropped in the proposal I’m objecting to.

Technological and social advances are, as a rule, only broadly beneficial when people are free to accept them, reject them, modify them, or adapt to them on their own terms and at their own pace. The uptake of cell phones in impoverished areas is a good example. The emergence of signature-confirmed credit cards in the U.S. and Europe is another. New ID schemes pushed by the government and implemented for their “positive security implications” are not. The “security implications” for which these IDs would be have nothing to do with ordinary people’s uncoerced choices or everyday needs, and everything to do with new surveillance and new requirements imposed on them by a government “security” apparatus.

Micha:

And it often seems like these kinds of advances in reputation verification move us closer from a statist world of contract enforcement to a free, market-based world. Government policemen have less to do (well, less legitimate things to do) …

Like that’s ever stopped them.

Anyway, the proposal wasn’t a proposal for giving government agencies fewer things to do. It was for giving a government agency more things to do (viz. designing and issuing biometric ID for absolutely anybody in the world).

Micha:

The author explicitly structures his scenario as voluntary.

I hear that you don’t, legally speaking, have to sign up for a Social Security Number, either. The problem is just that, if you refuse to, there are a lot of things that the government will just happen to keep you from doing.

Suppose that the U.S. government gets into the business of producing biometric identification cards aimed (as the author explicitly suggests) especially at developing countries where the local regime doesn’t really have the resources to issue those kind of “hard” identification papers without help from richer and more efficiently organized states.

Who do you suppose would be the primary “customers” for a “service” like that? (1) Willing customers who just happen to want an absurdly detailed ID card for “security” in their day-to-day business, or (2) unwilling customers who are either directly or indirectly forced to get that absurdly detailed ID card because the regime in the country where they live now requires everybody to get this biometric ID card as part of its coercively imposed “security” procedures?

A “service” like this is sure to have “positive security implications” for the primary consumers of “security” technology today. But those are governments, not ordinary citizens, and the degree to which they are able to carry out their “security” schemes has little or no connection with positive outcomes for ordinary citizens’ safety or quality of life.

Simply replace “U.S. government” with “trusted third party institution”, like Visa or Mastercard.

Oh, come on, you know better than that. I may as well argue that government welfare is a great idea, because, hey, if you replace “U.S. government” with “voluntary mutual-aid societies,” then I’d be describing a voluntary and potentially valuable service.

Governments don’t have the same incentives, the same structure, or the same partners and allies as private organizations. Not surprisingly, even though Visa or Mastercard could in principle already be issuing “hard” global biometric identity cards like this, they aren’t, because it doesn’t pay to do so, if your incentives depend on voluntary customers, and are based on making money rather than on geopolitical power and “security.”

Either way, I don’t see how better identification is necessarily inimical to liberty.

It’s not. However, more relentless government surveillance is. And that’s the primary thing that any government-issued biometric ID scheme being put into effect for its “security implications” is going to facilitate.

Micha:

I have never heard it claimed that the terms “hard-working” and “law-abiding” are Southern strategy code words,

They are. They’re especially closely associated with Nixon- and Reagan-era efforts to pull in working-class, often unionized white men (“hardhats,” “Reagan Democrats,” et al.) for the Southern Strategists’ racially-charged anti-welfare and Law-n-Order kicks.

Try thinking about it in reverse, if that helps. “Hard-working” and “law-abiding” are deliberate contrast terms for “lazy,” “shiftless,” and “criminal.” These terms were all deployed with pretty clear racial dimensions during the political debates in question.

(Personally, I’m all for an anti-welfare kick; but the Law-n-Order kick has been one of the single most politically toxic positions in mainstream American politics for the past several decades. And in either case the deliberate use of racial resentments for political ends is a nasty business.)

In other words, “right but I want to quibble”.

“Right” about what? It’s true that Micha was using the term “naturalistic fallacy” in a sense other than the sense in which Moore used it. (Specifically, he used it to refer to arguments that infer something about the moral status of something from its naturalness.) But I don’t have any basic problem with that kind of loose usage as long as it doesn’t interfere with accurately understanding what Moore meant by the term when he used it. The “quibble,” such as it is, is aimed to clarify how Moore himself used the term. Which is not an issue that Micha raised, or one that’s particularly important to assessing his argument; it’s an issue that you raised in the course of a reply to him.

It’s certainly true that the issue of what Moore coined the term “naturalistic fallacy” to mean is tangential to this conversation. But misrepresentations of his view, especially those that are very common and very misleading, are worth correcting anyway, in the interest of accuracy.

I read him right without the benefit of seeing his later explanation

Well, no; what he said is that by “natural” he means those things which arise from a “spontaneous order.” But that explanation is itself ambiguous, depending on whether he means strictly a “voluntary order” (which may very well be designed), or instead an “undesigned order” (which may very well be involuntary), or both. Libertarian writers have often used the term “spontaneous order” to refer to either, or both, or have simply equivocated between the two different meanings from one use to the next.

If he means the former, you read him right; but then the claim is unresponsive to what it was supposed to respond to. And, since that interpretation is unresponsive, it made sense for Micha to suggest, out of motives of charity, a more responsive reading.

If he means the latter, you read him wrongly, and the claim is somewhat more responsive to Francois; but then it is underargued and almost surely false.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that your reading of him is “off the wall;” I’m not even claiming that it’s wrong. My point is that whether you read his claim rightly or read it wrongly, the claim doesn’t get Arthur very far either way vis-a-vis his interlocutors.

Micha,

Point taken; but I’d say that the issue here really just turns on what verb “thin conception of libertarianism” is supposed to be the object of. You can follow a thin conception of libertarianism without ever promoting libertarianism (of any kind), but you can’t advocate or promote a thin conception of libertarianism. But presumably someone who follows a thin conception may want to promote it, too, for reasons which they may think of as having to do with libertarianism (in which case I guess we’re talking about some slight thickening, at least in the strategic dimension, away from the degenerate case of thinness), or which may not have anything to do with libertarianism, but rather be for the sake of other reasons (which puts us back in the degenerate case, and may seem quite weird, but is in the end a conceivable option).

Of course, the real upshot here may be that it may be somewhat misleading to speak of “thick” and “thin” conceptions as if they involved a distinction of kind. Really the debate is between thickerer conceptions, with variations in degree along several different axes. Certainly, you could characterize my own position, in part, by saying that it’s much thinner than that of, say, orthodox Objectivsts — in the sense that my ideas about what would constitute the proper context and preconditions for a flourishing free society are much broader and less detailed — but much thicker than that of, say, Walter Block.

Mark,

Micha never claimed that exercising the rights of nonviolent association and dissociation might itself “involve coercion.” He said that doing so foolishly or viciously might causally contribute to the emergence of a social environment in which certain kinds of coercion are widely practiced. That’s a distinct claim, and one which is, I think, obviously true.

Micha: I fail to see how the issue of immigration could be seen as complex, rather than for what it is ….

I think the short answer is this: calling border laws and internal immigration policing a complex issue for libertarians primarily serves a social function, not an intellectual one, in the Mises Institute / LewRockwell.com circle.

The issue is actually, obviously, extremely simple, and Hoppe’s and Ron Paul’s positions are actually, obviously, completely wrong. I suspect that most of those who criticize their positions but pass off the issue as a complex one realize this, but also reckon that it wouldn’t go over well in mixed company to say so in as many words.

Micha,

Oh come on.

Isn’t it obvious?