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 | Friday, April 10, 2009 at 0:04:41 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Man o' Steele
E-mail: steeleky(at)gmail.com
I'm no ethicist, but it seems that there is a similarity between the alleged issue of public works and the lifeboat situations discussed in your recent post "The Obligation to Render Assistance," if not at the ethical level, then perhaps at the psychological level. Both arguments purport to describe a situation where man pursuing his self-interest will treat other innocent men poorly. The "cold, calculating bastard" straw man of rational self-interest would never donate to a worthwhile non-profit institution or help someone in an emergency. The cost-benefit analysis doesn't add up, so the argument goes.
The same thing unravels the public works argument as unravels the lifeboat argument. Rational self-interest is not solely a matter of applying cost-benefit analysis to each choice you make. Rather, a rational man adopts certain "attitudes and dispositions toward other people required to live and live well among other men." One of these, in a prosperous and free society, is a disposition for generosity â€" the kind of generosity that supports museums and parks and the like. What's the rational reason for adopting this disposition? It leads to nice things like museums and parks! |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 0:06:52 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Paul
E-mail: prt2000(at)gmx.net
I was always skeptical about voluntary payment for government sevices. I suspect many people will just freeride on the necessary functions of government like law, courts and security. I think there still has to be some taxation. But maybe...it has never been really tried. If most people had the necessary understanding of paying for certain government services...they might just do that.
For todays world. I wish ballots would say something like: "If you vote YES, this measure will cost every citizen appr. $250 a year." Or why not register the votes and make only those pay who voted "yes". |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 6:03:01 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
Voluntary financing of government, AFAIK, is an idea that hasn't been developed much at all beyond Ayn Ran'd suggestion of contract "premiums". Were I an opponent, I would zero in on that one and attack it from the "it's never been tried" and "how the hell would that work?" attacks, with plenty of "free rider problem" references too.
This is one of the points of the Objectivist politics that is hard to defend, because the very notion is patently alien to the experience of everyone -- even Objectivists like myself. I have not seen any effort made to flesh this point out, and I have no ideas of my own about how a voluntary system might work. The usual answer to that problem is that voluntary financing is going to be one of the last details of implementation, and that it's not a problem we need to solve now -- but face it: from an argumentation standpoint, the path from "initating force is wrong" to "taxation is theft" to "how would you fund your laissez-faire government?" is a short one.
I suspect that the problem of voluntary government financing is similar to the challenge of "monetizing" certain products or services. An example: when radio was invented, there was no technical means available to know who was using the service, nor to restrict who could receive broadcasts. How to make radio pay? The solution: commercial ads.
How do we "monetize" government services? Do we attempt to curtail service to non-paying "customers"? Ayn Rand's suggestion indicates this; uninsured contracts would be unenforceable by government. There could be a compromise here; certain basic services (such as police) are available to everyone, while some services must be paid for (e.g. enforcement of contracts over a certain dollar figure). |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 6:03:04 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Klaus Nordby
E-mail: artistgeek(at)klausnordby.com
URL: http://www.klausnordby.com
@Dinah: "then citizens voluntarily contributing their part in taxes is hardly far-fetched." I don't believe we should use the word "taxes" at all when speaking of *voluntary* financing of the government's legitimate functions: the concept is inextricable tied to *enforced* payments. Therefore "voluntary taxation" sounds rather absurd to most people, understandably, and it will undermine all discussions of proper, voluntary government financing. Some other word should be used, though I don't know offhand what might be a good substitute (but my broader point doesn't stand or fall on us having a suitable word right now). |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 6:04:44 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: PMB
"I suspect many people will just freeride on the necessary functions of government like law, courts and security."
Would Thomas Jefferson? Would Ayn Rand? Men in a better culture do not generally want the unearned. That is *not* an inherent human desire. Sure, some will free ride, but not enough to make a difference in my opinion. |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 7:43:57 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: C Andrew
E-mail: ca4papen(at)mindspring.com
Diana's post brings to mind a lecture I attended by Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan. It was about the growth of government and how dangerous it is; particularly the corruption attendant upon using the political process to fund special interests. He then stated that America's political system today (this was in 2004) was more corrupt than it had been in any time in history.
In the Q&A after the lecture one of the students asked, "Dr. Buchanan, how can you say that our political system today is the most corrupt it has ever been, especially given such historical examples as Tammany Hall during the Tweed years."
Buchanan replied, "What is the essence of political corruption? It is the granting of political favors such as contracts, subsidies, and advantageous legislation in return for monetary gain or other quid pro quo. And far from being the incidental historical instances one saw in the 19th century, our entire political system is implicitly based on that corrupt behaviour."
I should note that these are not exact quotes but what I could remember long enough to write down afterwards. However, it did strike me that what was called corruption in the 19th century is now so embedded in the system that we don't even think about it like that anymore. Or, at least, I hadn't. And I think Dr. Buchanan is right. What we call politics today is corruption. |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 8:38:28 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Wayne
You can see how the idea of public works gets expanded.
In the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8 gave Congress the power "to establish post offices and post roads." The earlier Articles of Confederation only authorized post offices not post roads. An 1838 law designated all existing and future railroads as post roads.
Individual rights are being railroaded! |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 9:51:12 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
PMB: I think the trouble with your view of free riding is that certain institutional setups allow free riding of a kind that brings out the worst in people.
Take, for example, the Starnes heirs' plan for the Twentieth Century Motor Factory. You could say, I suppose, that an Ayn Rand or a Thomas Jefferson, within such a plan, would not slack off on their effort, or magnify their needs; that they would take pride in productive effort and scorn benefits provided at others' expense. And from that, you could say that if the whole factory had been staff by John Galts, there would have been no problem. But that level of virtue is not reasonable to expect. And in fact, by adopting that plan, the Starnes heirs guaranteed that they would not have such virtuous workers: for most of their workers, because they were corrupted by years of gaining benefits from being needy and useless, and being punished for being productive; for John Galt, because he saw where things were headed and declined to go there.
This problem doesn't arise for all cases that economists call "free riding." And there are ways to set things up so that free riding does not arise; see for example Coase's paper on privately funded lighthouses. But it's necessary to take thought so that your laws and institutions don't give benefits to the evil at the expense of the good. In fact I'd say that's the basic transition from moral philosophy to legal philosophy.
I think that "voluntary taxes" suggests to most people that you have the government ask people for contributions to support its activities, but with no penalties for failing to contribute. And I think most people suspect that outside of emergencies, a lot of people would let such payments go when they became inconvenient, leaving government chronically short of funds to perform its legitimate functions. Because people are not used to thinking of "taxes" as payments that are tied to specific services, where nonpayment means losing those services. Rather, taxes are paid into a general fund that is used to provide benefits to people in general. And that's the kind of situation where "free riding" in the bad sense arises.
I suggest that a better term is "user fees": amounts collected by the government as payments for the provision of specific services. Rand herself offers one such proposal: contract insurance. But I can suggest a couple of others. Copyright registration fees are voluntary, but if you don't pay them, you can only collect limited damages from a copyright violation. And what about land title registration? De Soto's studies make it clear that explicit, well defined land title is an incredibly powerful engine of wealth creation; title search is indispensible to transactions in a capitalist or semicapitalist nation. What if government charged an annual fee for title registration, like a property tax, but with no "penalty" for nonpaymentâ€"except that the courts would not help you to evict a squatter from unregistered property, or allow you to throw them off by direct physical force. Hardly anyone would choose not to pay such feesâ€"and it would be workable to use them to fund general law enforcement on the same property. (For this reason, I consider property taxes to be less unjust than most other taxes; they could be turned into user fees without huge changes.) |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 10:04:55 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Aquinas Heard
E-mail: aquinas23(at)aol.com
Taxation is definitely immoral.
One thing to keep in mind is when we get close to the point of realistically implementing voluntary funding of government, the general American’s mindset will be very different from today. At that time people will find tremendous value in making sure there rights are protected, causing funding to not really be a problem.
But for arguments sake let’s look at some numbers.
The following amounts are supplied by The Tax Foundation and Wikipedia for 2006:
$600,000,000,000 = defense and justice related expenses
200,000,000 = approximate population age 18+ in US
So the cost per person to fund the proper functions of government at most would be $3,000 per year. Personally, I would assume even our current defense and justice related expenses are at least half waste. That assumption would drop the cost to $1500 per person per year.
I think all Americans would have no problem voluntarily contributing that amount.
For people that are worried about the free-loader possibility let’s try another scenario.
The people I think who would be most willing to protect their individual rights, especially property rights, would be the wealthy.
$5,500,000,000,000 = Income of the top 25%; they make $65,000 +, there are 34 million of them
If they were to be the only group that decided to voluntary pay for government it would cost 11% of their income if the defense and justice budget stayed at $600 billion. Again if you take my assumption that at least half of that budget is waste, then they would only need to contribute 5.5% of their income. Do you think they would do it? I do
In fact I think those at the very top of the income pyramid would be proud to contribute an even bigger % of their income to a just government in the same way that Andrew Carnegie was very proud to fund libraries.
Funding government in a truly capitalistic society would not be a problem, getting there is way more difficult.
* Another thing I forgot to mention is as we became a freer nation, more people would immigrate here. The additional population would cause the "costs" of government to be more dispersed, subsequently lower those "costs" per person.
Aquinas Heard
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 10:22:47 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: JT
E-mail: JT30014(at)hotmail.com
I agree with the above comment about "voluntary taxation" sounding absurd. In fact, I think it's a flat-out contradiction. Taxation means *involuntary* payment to government. Contributions or donations are the words best used to describe voluntary payment to government.
As far as the so-called free-rider problem, my initial response is, so what? Let's say, unscientifically, that only one-third of Americans would contribute for a military. They do so not out of duty, but out of rational concern for their own lives and property. Yet it's obvious that for that military to protect those people from foreign attack, it must also protect the majority of people who didn't contribute. Okay, so? If the U.S. military is properly limited to protecting American people and property, there's no danger of free-riders depleting the resource for their own benefit at the expense of the financiers, which is what the free-rider problem is about, isn't it? |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 11:58:16 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Katrina
Diana,
I'm not sure you made a complete argument as regards the original question. You basically said "it's wrong to force people to pay for things," which is true, but misses the point. Smith says infrastructure is a valid purpose of government. Ignoring the question of how government is funded (or assuming that it's funded on a voluntary basis), is the creation of infrastructure a legitimate function of government? The short answer is no, because infrastructure has nothing to do with rights protection, not because of how it's funded. |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 14:31:08 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: KPO'M
E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net
From a practical perspective, I can easily see how fees for using the court services, or 911 police services could work. National defense is a bit more difficult. I know Rand addressed it in her article about voluntary government financing, but given that governments of every type have been taxing for 5000 years or so, it is difficult to conceive how to get there.
In this context, what is your view of tax evasion (as distinguished from tax avoidance)? Since we have an imperfect government with an imperfect system of funding, are we obligated to fund it in the current method? If so, what is the rational limit of government's authority in enforcing tax laws? US laws are particularly harsh in this regard. There is no statute of limitations for tax fraud, and it is a criminal matter, while in other countries tax evasion is often a civil matter. |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 15:55:24 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Alan Brown
E-mail: classified(at)yahoo.com
My feeling is that there should be 2 houses of the legislature, both of which must approve measures resulting in expense for the treasury.
One should be proportional representation and should set the tax policy. Representation in the other house should be how much tax you paid last year. So if you pay .004% of the taxes, that's how much representation you get. If you paid 10% of the taxes, you get 10% of the vote.
No taxation without representation and no representation in the second house without corresponding taxation.
Under our current system, the average homeless person has the exact amount of influence that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet do on policy.
Proportional representation will make it easier for the people to get their way, but they should not have it so easy spending other people's money. |
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| Friday, April 10, 2009 at 23:09:18 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
KPO'M: I don't think user fees for national defense would be workable. You can't very well defend one house against an invading army and leave the house next door exposed. User fees would have to be charged for government services that directly benefit individuals: recognition and protection of property and enforcement of contracts, for example (perhaps the only examples).
But if the government is going to record the boundaries of the land you own, and enforce your right to occupy it, protecting you against crimes committed on your property would be a natural corollary. And property owners could not be permitted to turn their property into havens for outlawry; so even if an owner did not choose to pay "property taxes" and register his title, the government would be entitled to send law enforcement officers in to apprehend criminals. I think that general law enforcement and military defense could be covered as a sort of "overhead protection."
As to whether people would pay for this - how many people will buy real estate without verifying that the owner has good title? Certainly no large business would do so, and no one investing large amounts of money in a house. So people who hoped to sell their houses or businesses would have a strong incentive to register their title, and thus to pay the necessary fees. Much as, in Rand's suggestion about contracts, people would have a strong incentive to register their contracts legally.
I think that both "taxation" (you pay for government or bad things will happen to you) and "voluntary taxation" or "voluntary donations" (you pay for government or nothing bad will happen to you directly) are both undesirable. "User fees" (you pay for government or do without this service that directly benefits you) strike me as the ethical alternative. Not that voluntary donations wouldn't be legitimate as a supplement source of funding for government. |
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| Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 9:56:22 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: RT
Paul:"I suspect many people will just freeride on the necessary functions of government like law, courts and security."
PMB: "Would Thomas Jefferson? Would Ayn Rand? Men in a better culture do not generally want the unearned. That is *not* an inherent human desire. Sure, some will free ride, but not enough to make a difference in my opinion."
PMB's answer is exactly right.
For those concerned that not enough people will contribute voluntarily for government: Americans *already* give tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars to charities every year. And that's even *on top of* paying significant fractions of their incomes to the government in taxes. Paul and others who are skeptical -- how do you explain why people do this? And wouldn't they be even *more* selfishly motivated to contribute to a cause that very directly impacts them, like police security?
In 2005 I moved to a suburb of Philadelphia, and was stunned to learn (I am not American) how local services worked. Ambulance service? Volunteer. Firefighters? All-volunteer. Doesn't it seem impossible that it could work that way? And yet it has, for over a hundred years. I was of course very happy to contribute a small voluntary donation to both services, as I value their continued existence for my own selfish benefit -- as did thousands of my neighbours. Why did we do that?
As PMB states, rational men don't want the unearned. In fact, rational men *enjoy* taking full responsibility for their lives and they *want* to pay for whatever they receive, they *embrace* the trader principle in *every* aspect of their lives.
In fact, as I read the history of the volunteer fire service, I learned that when it was founded in the 19th century it was the *leading* citizens of the town who founded it and served as the volunteer firefighters -- i.e. the wealthiest businessmen, etc. People who you would think would have the most to lose from accidentally dying in a fire. But -- also the people who, as demonstrated by their achievements, practiced self-responsibility to the highest degree in their professional lives, and carried it over to all aspects of their lives.
The American sense of self-responsibility is legendary and towers over any other culture. Unfortunately, it has become progressively eroded as the mixed economy increasingly entrenches the "entitlement mentality". That is in part why abolishing taxation has to be one of the last, not the first, measures. As the society moves back to capitalism, it will once again reward self-responsibility and punish irresponsibility, which progressively elevates the character of average men to higher and higher moral heights. |
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| Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 10:22:11 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: RT
"If some project is truly of great benefit to humanity..." Careful there! :-)
I think it's important for questions like this to strictly "decompose" any notion of "common good" (which AR does to great effect in "What is Capitalism?", the lead essay in Capitalism the Unknown Ideal).
The only rationally usable sense of "common good" or "benefit to humanity" is that it is good for every single member of society without exception. If a project really does benefit everyone, and they know it, but for transaction cost reasons it's unworkable to contact and collect money from everyone, then too bad -- the project doesn't get done. And it's no great loss if the value is so marginal that it's overwhelmed by the cost of collecting money. If the project really does benefit everyone but say 50% of the population don't understand that it's to their benefit, then it violates the nature of "objective value" to force them to pay for it -- Ayn Rand's proverbial giving them a picture gallery at the price of cutting out their eyes.
More often the 'common good' means that it's good for *some* people, at the expense of others. Forcing everyone to pay for it means sacrificing some for the benefit of others. And that is the morality of cannibalism. Moreover, not only does it not benefit the minority sacrificed, it doesn't even benefit the majority, since as AR puts it, to violate the rights of one is to violate the rights of all, ultimately leading to the destruction of all. |
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| Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 11:04:15 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: Park Jennings
E-mail: ceasar911(at)yahoo.com
William H Stoddard , post #8:
What if government charged an annual fee for title registration, like a property tax, but with no "penalty" for nonpayment" except that the courts would not help you to evict a squatter from unregistered property, or allow you to throw them off by direct physical force. Hardly anyone would choose not to pay such feesďż˝"and it would be workable to use them to fund general law enforcement on the same property. (For this reason, I consider property taxes to be less unjust than most other taxes; they could be turned into user fees without huge changes.)
I would say that the government qua law enforcement must enforce everyone's human rights, including the right to property. Society cannot function if people's rights may be violated willy-nilly. Also, those who pay for the law enforcement have an interest in arresting those who wish to violate people's rights.
Furthermore, they could *Never* morally ban someone from "molliter manus imposuit" or forcibly evicting trespassers; any human has the absolute moral right to defend their lives and property against unlawful violation. The existence of a person's human rights, i.e. the conditions of existence in society, are not dependent on paying a fee. You always have the right to defend yourself against attack (i.e. the initiation of force), including trespassers.
On a practical point, property taxes are horrible as they are almost always used to fund education, something entirely outside of the proper scope of government.
Ok, now for my take.
We already charge fees for title registration, court filings, etc. It's just that we don't charge nearly enough to cover their expenses out of concern for "the poor." Fire departments and ambulance services today work by donations or by charging per use, or contract fees with a hospital. Insurance companies, back in the 1800's, would fund and maintain fire departments, and would likely do so now.
I definitely think that a court system could support a system of domestic law and order by charging a percentage on contracts. We have what, a $15 TRILLION economy? A 4% fee would cover all current law enforcement and military costs. Since some 2/3 of all crime today is drug related (which would, of course, not be criminal in a moral society), we would see a *substantial* reduction in criminal enforcement costs. Also, we could probably do without the Army; I'd be in favor of a citizens' militia for the purposes of actual "homeland defense," such as invasion. We would only need the Marines, and their delivery personnel/cooks/nurses (the Navy) to deal with foreign problems such as middle-eastern Islamofascists, Somalian pirates, or the french. Also, the (ch)Air Force should be folded into the Marines; not only do the leathernecks do it better, they look better doing it. Besides that drastic re-organization step (but I think massive re-organization would be called for in a moral society's military; I think the army/AF/Navy/Marines split is out-dated and wasteful), there is a lot to be said for re-orienting military spending and doing reality checks on a lot of their projects. Fewer tanks, more nukes.
One last point (sorry for the length), re Katrina #11. Interstate highways of some sort are a military necessity in order to link military bases, naval yards, and air bases. It's impractical to rely on air or sea transport alone for strategic repositioning of our assets in case of attack or deployment. I mean, 2nd day UPS delivery for a 30-ton Abrams M-1A1 must run in the millions of dollars, right? :) |
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| Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 12:40:47 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: Aquinas Heard
E-mail: aquinas23(at)aol.com
RT, your comment #15 was very nicely and thoroughly explained. I especially agree with:
"In fact, rational men *enjoy* taking full responsibility for their lives and they *want* to pay for whatever they receive, they *embrace* the trader principle in *every* aspect of their lives."
Aquinas Heard |
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| Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 15:52:03 mst
Comment ID: #19
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
#15 RT:
I do like your answer. It fits with this sentiment expressed by John Adams:
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other."
Shorn of the non-essential error about religion as the source of morality, Adams understood that a free society requires sufficient numbers of its citizens to be moral.
The trick is: how do we sell this to non-Objectivists? From a marketing standpoint, I have two difficulties:
The first, is that this argument -- that free riders would not matter because of the prevalance of moral men in society -- is simply an impossible sale in the current context. It sounds like one of the frequent arguments deployed against the Objectivist politics -- that it is a "idealistic" politics which relies on everyone agreeing with and following a certain ethical outlook, with no further checks on such -- "the honor system".
Now, I already know where that argument comes from. From one direction, it is premised on the conservative principle that human nature is inherently flawed, that human beings cannot be trusted to behave when left to their own devices. That is the "original sin" premise.
The second direction from whence it comes, is from those who are cynical about human beings because of their lifetime observations of how people act today. In fact, I would predict that honor-system government funding would probably fail miserably given the current culture.
Overall, I do not see the honor system as a complete solution. I think that there could be a diversity of solutions; for example, user fees where pay-per-use-per-person is easily tracked and enforced (court costs). Things like police and the military do not work that way -- neither can be selective in how they work w/r/t the citizens. A.R.'s contract premium might fund these.
Ironically, thinking about how local fundraising works for volunteer firefighters, I suddenly thought of those bumper stickers that talk about the military holding a bake sale to buy a new bomber :) |
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| Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 16:56:32 mst
Comment ID: #20
Name: RT
Jim: "In fact, I would predict that honor-system government funding would probably fail miserably given the current culture."
I would agree there could be a lot of free riders in the current culture, but I'm less pessimistic than you that it would 'fail miserably'. Again, given how much Americans already give to charities, and how many volunteer municipal services there are already, I think that's a pretty good indiction of the level of support that would voluntarily be given to funding government in general -- *even in today's culture* -- at least in the U.S. And again, eliminating taxation would be the last step -- not the first.
Granted, I agree with you that it almost certainly would not work in almost any other culture apart from the U.S., in the present world. I've spent a lot of time in Brazil, and the level of honesty and morality is just so much lower. To a large extent the general attitude seems to be "if you can get away with it, go for it" (and I think this is common to most third-world cultures; which is why they're third-world.) Whether it's cheating on personal relationships, or engaging in corrupt business or political practices, the general attitude seems to be: "acceptance". You may not personally "like" it if someone screws you over, or if a corrupt politician embezzles tax-money; but you also grudgingly accept that "that's the way it is" and that the person was acting on the "if you can get away with it go for it" principle, which you don't dispute (and probably you would have tried the same thing in the same position). That's why they never succeed in making any headway against political corruption. When the "unearned" is widely and generally considered to be a value in the culture, then widespread corruption is inescapable.
Re marketing and convincing people who think voluntary financing of government is too "idealistic" -- if that's their view, I suspect they have much bigger issues; they're almost certain then to think that capitalism in general and in fact the whole philosophy of Objectivism is "too idealistic". (And Jim, you allude to this with your comment on the conservatives and "original sin".) In which case, it's pointless to focus on such a narrow concrete as taxation. Instead, they first need to understand and accept the Objectivist view of man's nature and man's potentialities -- of what's 'normal' and 'realistic' and expectable. If their view is that a Howard Roark or a John Galt is "completely unrealistic" and "people aren't and could never be that way" and "no one can live that way" -- then yes, voluntary government financing will always seem totally "idealistic". |
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| Sunday, April 12, 2009 at 8:55:00 mst
Comment ID: #21
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Park: If you and I make a contract, under which I provide you with consideration in the form of advance payment, and you then fail to deliver what I paid for, you are using physical force (your physical possession of the thing in question) to withhold my rightful property from me (either the thing you promised to deliver, or the money I paid you for it). And I have a right to my property, and hence to the enforcement of my contract through the courts. But Ayn Rand suggested that the courts could legitimately refuse to enforce that right for people who had not paid for contract "insurance." So there is the principle that charging for the enforcement of legitimate rights is itself legitimate.
Rand's formulation is that if the government is a servant, it must be a *paid* servant. The government is not an independently wealthy king, lord, or other aristocrat who can graciously confer the boon of protection on his humble subjects at his own expense. And if you don't want to have such a lord, you have to be ready to come up with the money to pay for the real costs of protecting your own rights. If you are not prepared to accept the unearned, then you should not want the government to defend your contracts or your property for free - and thus you should not object to paying a fee for the official recognition of your contracts or the recording of your title to property.
The question of how best to implement this principle is more complex. Some defensive functions can be assigned to specified beneficiaries who can be asked to pay user fees; some, such as military defense, really can't, and need to be paid for partly by overhead charges on the former (your title to your house isn't going to be much good if an invading army takes over the region where you live, so military defense against invasions is an overhead cost of enforcing land title), and partly by donations under extraordinary circumstances. And there may be other reasons that some functions are best provided to everyone, as an overhead of rights enforcement; for example, I think a society where everyone's life and liberty are protected, rather than some people being subject to murder and enslavement, is clearly safer to live in, and so it would be more prudent to treat basic police functions as a generally protected right.
As for the universality of rights, this can be met by requiring the government to defend the title or the contracts of anyone who paid the fees, rather than picking and choosing. In this limited sphere, the old "common carrier" concept is valid - because, unlike a railroad or a telephone network, the government really is a monopoly, and someone it refuses to serve really does have no recourse. |
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| Friday, June 26, 2009 at 13:11:18 mst
Comment ID: #22
Name: Alan Brown
E-mail: classified(at)yahoo.com
URL: http://reinventdemocracy.org
In a libertarian system, the actual costs of government's legitimate functions would be so much lower than what we now pay in taxes and they would be worth paying for if you want the benefits.
If we had private streets instead of public ones, the cost of policing would be much lower. And a private policing market could evolve.
And the actual costs of defending the United States from attack are a fraction of what we now spend. Any neighborhood, city or state that doesn't want to contribute to the common defense, we can just tax trade with them as we do with any foreign country. Just don't expect us to come running when you get invaded. Oh, we'll get around to it eventually, but missile defense ain't free. |
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| Friday, June 26, 2009 at 13:26:35 mst
Comment ID: #23
Name: Alan Brown
E-mail: classified(at)yahoo.com
URL: http://reinventdemocracy.org
Just some more thoughts on this. In a free society, there would still be substantial community cooperation and voluntary aggregation of demand. In other words, people living in a particular would band together voluntarily to get services implemented or continued. Heck, we already have that in condo associations.
If you want cable tv, such an association would itself have leverage in the market place when dealing with vendors and switch to satellite with far less cost than the members could individually because they could keep using the same wires. This could happen for water, electricity, security and other things. This sort of thing does happen in other countries were government is not involved.
At some point and on the type of endeavor, the benefits from aggregating are outweighed by the hassles of managing it and in a free market this is where aggregation would stop.
So, a lot of things currently handled by government can be handled just fine in a free society. |
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