An accident of birth

I’m gonna write about something that I’m not really clear on myself, so bear with me if I come across a little strained: It seems to me that it is stupid to be “proud of your country of birth”, purely because you were born there.

And yet, it looks like this is exactly what people commonly do. Isn’t being born into “your country” an accident of birth? If you’re going to claim that your country is the best, then it really only makes sense to say this in a universal sense. I mean this in a way that everyone would see the value in coming from this particular country regardless of where they were born/grew up. But it never works out like this does it?

All I see is everybody claiming that their country is the best, but if they had been born in some other country, I doubt they would still say the same thing. So it doesn’t feel like some kind of universally recognised thing to me, which makes it look false in my eyes. It just doesn’t seem like many people get born into an Australian family, grow up in an Australian community and end up saying “China is the best nation in the world”.

Another thing that feels false about this whole issue of nationalism, is that I don’t really know what is being worshipped or valued. Is it the people from that country? Is it the things they do that make them better? Where is the actual universally acknowledgeable value?

If it is identifiable, why not just praise that actual value, rather than the nationality of the person with that value? For example, intellgence is something valued by people in a broad sense, it doesn’t really matter what country you come from, being smart is just something that holds value.

At best, nationalism appears to be a completely unnecessary burden since whatever is valuable should still be valuable regardless of the country of origin of the person. At its worst, nationalism becomes the justification for theft and violent threats. (“Because you love our nation so much, you need to be violently coerced into paying money to support it”)

The haves and the have nots

I think it would be true to say that as a general rule, for the things that are ‘valuable’, they tend to be those things that are in shorter supply. So for example, money is valued by virtually everyone, but there are generally less rich people than there are poor people.

So what is the point of this talk? I’m going to elaborate on what I was saying in my previous post, “Competition in ‘bads’“. It’s to demonstrate what democracy’s natural tendency is. That tendency is towards redistribution of property by force. When the “have nots” have access to this system that will allow them to steal from other people, of course the immoral ones among them will choose the easy and violent path of stealing the money, rather than the virtuous path of actually earning it.

Politicians make their entire careers from this fact, it seems to me that their entire campaigns are just a huge exercise in calculation about playing to the largest possible audience. Given this fact that they want to acheive as many votes as possible, it makes sense that they would not play to the “haves”, rather, it makes more sense for them to play to the “have nots”, since there are generally more “have nots” than “haves”.

Since when did a politician maintain popularity for saying “I’m going to keep the government out of your life?” (mini-tangent: Ron Paul doesn’t count because he failed). Rather, you will find that the politicians who get in are generally idiots who claim to be “For free health care for all citizens”/some other type of government intervention, conveniently forgetting to mention the necessary violence that has to be used to fund/carry out the program.

This simple reason is also one of the reasons minarchism is inconsistent and will never work. As long as this ‘easy out’ of government exists for some people to push their own costs onto other people, they’ll just use their “democratic right” to violently get themselves whatever they want.

Competition in ‘bads’

I’ve been listening to a few of Hoppe’s lectures recently and he makes a good point that I’d just like to reiterate here in this post: It’s important to note that when you talk about competition’s beneficial effects, to ensure that we’re talking about things that are desired. We want competition in good things, but we don’t want competition in the production of bad things.

Commonly, you will hear that it is one of democracy’s strong points that the role of the elected leader(s) is ‘open to all’, rather than it being a birthright in a monarchical system. Hoppe’s point is that the “service” the government provides should not be considered a good, but rather, a ‘bad’. People don’t want to pay to be enslaved and the money is not voluntarily given, but taken by force.

Dave from No Third Solution in the article ”Taxation is theft” poses some good questions here:

1. Would you, under any circumstances, voluntarily purchase the services of a group of men whose jobs it would be to kill or kidnap you when you refuse to continue providing for their armaments and training?

2. Would you, under any circumstances, voluntarily purchase the services of an organization which states in no uncertain terms that in the event you decide to stop buying from them, you will forfeit your house?

3. What if an organization like one of the above tried to assert a claim against you? Would you submit your dispute for arbitration to an organization owned or operated by the very same individuals?

Proposing government by democracy is like saying ”Let’s have a competition to find out who’s the best at whipping the slaves! And the winner gets to be the slavemaster”. This is precisely what we don’t want.

“But there aren’t any real world examples!”

“But there aren’t any real world examples of anarchy working”

This criticism is largely missing the point of all that I talk about here. The primary argument for anarchism is the moral one, the one that deals with whether or not it is just to enslave other people via government. The argument from efficiency is secondary.

There are lots of things that might be considered ‘efficient’, but it doesn’t matter unless that solution is also just. If your grand governance scheme necessarily involved murdering 20% of society, it would be wrong no matter how ‘efficient’ your scheme is at governance. Likewise, if government by democracy means holding guns to everybodys’ heads and saying “Do this or we’ll lock you up”, then it is wrong. Even if those people don’t end up being shot/locked up, it is still wrong! Why? Because armed robbery is still robbery even if you never actually hit the other guy. The threat was still there, so clearly its wrong. Why don’t people get this?

It does not matter that I can’t name some universally preferred and better alternative to armed robbery (government), all that matters is: armed robbery is wrong, so don’t do it. Rulership of other people without their consent is wrong, so don’t do it.

“But I prefer democracy to anarchy”

It doesn’t matter what you prefer, since whether other people consent to it is not up to you. Nobody can own another person, so clearly its wrong to impose that choice on another person.

The free market is only a suggested (but highly probable) alternative to government, it doesn’t really matter what happens after government collapses, so long as self-ownership rights are respected. You can go and live in a socialist commune, you can go and start your own business, you can go off and live in the mountains. Just don’t impose democracy and governance on other people without their prior consent.

Why governments can’t be accepted as lawmakers

Generally when you make laws/rules, its only a just set of rules if the law maker also follow these rules. The government doesn’t follow it’s own rules, so there’s no way it could legitimately be allowed to call itself a law maker. The government only follows some of its own rules in a procedural sense, and disobeys many of them in a principal sense. It claims to respect certain rules (like laws about evidence etc), but disrespects others, which it enforces on us. eg. if person A wanted to go and steal money from person B, the government would not allow this. On the other hand, if the government wanted to go and take money from person B without consent, this is supposedly justified. This is inconsistent and the government cannot claim to legitimately enforce property rights while at the same time taking property rights away.

Under government, law supposedly only works in a vertical way, with the government speaking ‘down’ to the rest of us. Anarchic law could be said to be more horizontal, because rights stem from the self-ownership rights of all people, rather than just coming down to us from gods and governments. If anything, governments should be accountable to their citizens, not the other way around. Too bad no government today is accountable to its citizens, given their monopoly power over the use of force.

It looks as though some people argue for the existence of a government to adjudicate between the people in their disputes. In reality, this is only part of what the government actually does. Not only does the government become the arbitrator and ultimate judge in matters between private individuals, it becomes the ultimate judge in disputes between itself and private individuals. We have an unchecked entity, using violence to first of all rule over the individual, and then when he disputes whether or not he has broken the rule, the government gets to decide his guilt. Not just this, but he is forced to pay for the entire process out of his own pocket, guilty or not of breaking a rule that he never agreed to obey in the first place.