I’ve browsed revleft for a few weeks now and there is a rather tiring pattern that keeps emerging. However one question thats bothered me is this, and I will give a brief setup scenario to illustrate before I ask.
Communist: People need to work to survive, they are being coerced into working for next-to-nothing wages.
Libertarian: They do not need to work, they can always choose to die. So they are not being forced, it is voluntary.
This happens a lot, if you’ve ever been on the website. My question is this: if you apply the same logic to government and taxes, you don’t technically need to pay taxes, you could go to jail if you didn’t want to pay taxes. You have a choice. So what is the difference?
The difference is that the government is taking what we do have, they are initiating force. The employer doesn’t necessarily want anything to to do with the starving man, the government wants you to do thing whatever they say you do.
The employer demands nothing for nothing, and demands something for something. The government demands something for nothing.
An individual chooses to work and can switch jobs. The individual doesn’t need to move to a non-threatening place to find such a job. The individual could always work for himself. And wages are not next to nothing. Sure communist may say yes and provide a next to nothing job wage, but the individual is working there because they are getting a higher standard of living working there compared to anything else or maybe they simply need to look for another job. In gov’ts today wages are lowered because of gov’t intervention lowering the purchasing power of the dollar, sometimes this happens because workers via union action or minimum wage, etc… get what they ask for because this depletes capital and thereby lowers the real wage that the worker gets so they are lowering the standard of living by asking the gov’t to intervene. the communist might want their own non-gov’t commune and as long as they are not violent towards anybody else then who cares, they can have their commune. But economically without a price system of individual’s having private property and the supply and demand mechanism, the commune will not rise in their standard of living and will collapse. The private property and the individual human action being axiomatic can’t be rid of and an effort at complete communism is therefore impossible and only works against the individual trying to live.
Substitute that for gov’t:
An individual chooses a gov’t and can switch gov’ts and the individual can therefore move from threatening place to threatening place to find their gov’t but while they spend their time doing this how are they getting the money? The individual could always be their own gov’t, but then that would be no gov’t and no communist society because the individual being their own gov’t entails their own private property, etc…
Take a look what happened in Rome when their currency was inflated away and the state imposed draconian price controls and taxation… People just up and left the cities to live in the countryside and farm for themselves. See, they got a better quality of life expending their labour for subsistence compared with their prospects in urban areas. We are in similar times.
The mere fact that the man chooses to work for the Capitalist for a wage because it improves his well being is proof that there is no coercion on the part of the Capitalist.
The communists never seize to think in terms of a fixed pie or a zero-sum game. As if the Capitalist robbed the laborer of his wealth and then offered to give some of it back in exchange for his labor. In reality, the capitalist has simply saved some of his productive output, and offers it as a wage for exchange for labor.
Well, I take issue with this, the alternative to working is not dying, it is mooching one way or another.
Well, “involuntary unemployment” only exists in an artificial market, never in the free market.
Yeah, I ran into this argument from a leftist some time back and it was puzzling to me, at first. The right approach is to treat it as an opportunity to put forward the central axiom of praxeology, that man is an acting being, that the human will is inalienable as a matter of physical fact. Even the introduction of a threat into your circumstances (“give me your wallet, or die”) does not actually deprive you of your will, it just changes the set of available choices which you are facing.
Since the heart of libertarian philosophy is the factually inalienable freedom of will (see Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty), the leftist is opening the whole subject for discussion by noting that even in the most extreme circumstances (when faced with the use of deadly force), the human will never ceases operating. Social engineering projects built on the idea that the human will can be guided or “nudged” and that humanity is like clay, are not just immoral, they are impossible. As Rothbard argues in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, they are immoral because they are impossible, so that, forcibly diverting resources to such projects is no different than outright property destruction.
This whole line of reasoning equivocates of the definition of “force.” The Communist is using it to mean that people are “forced” by scarcity to work for their survival, whereas the Libertarian is using it to mean that people are being physically forced by other people to do something against their will (or the threat thereof).
The communist can be deceiving and tricky. They seem to turn an obvious part of human nature into a negative, that humans will work to remove uneasiness. Also claiming that people are coerced to work or coerced to conform to society’s rules is another card they play. You can’t name anyone (in this country) that works without reason. All of them work to gain something. Their productivity will raise their overall wealth. People don’t work because they are forced to without something in return. No one is coerced to work, but for human survival you must work to substain your self. It’s an integral part of nature, but we don’t see the communist rushing to the aid of a hungry lion that must work for possibly days to weeks for his catch.
Communist also often fail to reply to the fact that wages rise. They say we work for “next-to-nothing wages”, but can’t seem to comprehend that people make above the state fixed wage (that can’t possibly happen with greedy capitalist).
They can’t comprehend that life isn’t already filled with “uneasiness”. If that was the case, we wouldn’t need to work. Everything we need would already be there. People have been working for thousands of years to advance their lives. In the past couple there’s been a growing group of people who seem to think that working to continue your survival is barbaric and exploitive.
When it comes to taxes, we’re coerced to pay them. It’s not like if I don’t work that’s of my own accord and the consequences reflect my choices. The taxes placed on us are not of our approval. If I don’t pay taxes I’ll suffer the consequences, but the consequences are coming from someone else, not from my own actions. If I didn’t have to pay taxes I wouldn’t, but they are placed on me from a governing group. Paying taxes isn’t a natural part of living (like working for your own survival).
Not to be rude, but it doesn’t help especially. The government takes taxes to fund its monopoly on roads/security/legislation, so you are getting all of these things from government for paying taxes. The major difference is you can’t choose to not take part in these services, you either pay or go to jail.
Don’t some individuals need to move to find jobs, especially if their job market is full? Mexican immigration to America is one illustration of this. And can everyone work for themselves? Isn’t there a scarcity of both arable land and capital that makes this impossible?. The rest of your first paragraph I agree with.
As for your second, you didn’t exactly point out any differences between moving for the job market and moving for the government. How are you making money while you’re moving from job to job? Seems to me they are about the exact same thing.
Whats your point? I don’t see what you’re trying to say.
And can you even choose to not pay taxes? They eliminate money (or at least thats what most of them advocate) and so you’re issued ration tickets that are “yours” and you have no chance/choice to avoid taxes.
Besides, everyone, in a socialist community, would want to pay taxes just like if your neighbor asks for help you want to help him[:P].
Interesting point, I’ve never thought of it that way. In a free market there may well be a market for people who are homeless, a kind of “do-one-good-deed-a-day” thing where you give a homeless man a dollar or what not. This reminds me of this time my girlfriend and I were walking through DC and there was an obviously homeless man playing the “drums” (they were empty buckets, those orange/white traffic barriers that were normally full of water, and trashcans). I don’t make a habit of carrying spare change, but in this case I was willing to donate a dollar to him because I found his drum playing to be entertaining. The bucket I was dropping money into was about 1/4th full of bills and I saw at least one 10 dollar bill. I almost wanted to turn to my girlfriend and say that I donated to this guy because he has a marketable skill that I wanted to support, but she has rather socialistic leanings and would probably think less of me for it.
Again, another point I didn’t think of. They twist logic so much I find myself trying to refute them upon their own lines of reasoning.
I guess you still leave my question unanswered. If coercive governments exist in all countries in the world (which they generally do, correct me if I’m wrong) how is it different to have to move to a different country to satisfy your want of personal liberty than move to a different job? Upon further inspection, my question might not really have a point…
Lol, I like how you say “the communist” as if you’re talking about an animal: "the mongoose can be a tricky prey, often ‘playing-dead’ to fool potential predators. But, seriously, isn’t the whole communist belief built up around the fact that human nature isn’t fixed? I always seem to run into those who say “band-level societies are not selfish, they are communistic” and use this as evidence that human nature is malleable.
Its sad, really, they can’t seem to understand that supply and demand applies to labor markets as it does with any scarce resource.
I think the communists’ primary beef is that some people do not have to “labor” (I use labor as it implies manual, work can be anything) for their sustenance, but others do. They see this as unfair and cannot conceive the profits directly correlate with how much an individual/an individual’s idea has benefited society.
But I guess what you’re saying is that voluntary joblessness means that the consequences are solely yours to bear because you made the choice by yourself under conditions of scarcity (something all humans face), but taxes are not something that all humans face/have faced and so it is wrong to coerce people to pay them?
Again, they are tricky. I seldom come across one who actually makes a valid point, or sense. I’ve heard communist contradict themselves in the same paragraph (I think it’s common for them). Human action is not fixed (we can chose our goals, and how we obtain them), but human nature? If human nature is not fixed than what is human nature? It would make sense for them to say that human nature is malleable and something you can mold into any image, it fits perfectly for them when they want to mold groups of individuals into single entities.
It’s hard to wrap my mind around why they don’t understand this. It’s as they claim the reason why the resource is scarce is due to private ownership, and not to the fact that’s it’s just scarce. (As if everything was owned and used in common, nothing would be scarce.)
Communist will go on about inequality and what’s unfair, about how that goes against human nature (this makes it easy for them to make people malleable). Few weeks ago I had one claim I was exploited by my managers, even though I voluntarily applied to the job, and I signed a contract that was a mutual agreement between me and my management (or the owners). Again, it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around their assertions.
I could have worded that paragraph better about taxes. I didn’t think about it til after I posted it, but wanted to offer a different perspective. No one forces you to work, or coerce you to do anything, but you are coerced into paying taxes. Your property is taken from you without your consent, you know about it, but their was no agreement with you, and the people taking away your property. There was no voluntariy arangement or contract that group X will take a percentage of your earnings for whatever reason. It just so happens that they do this, and it’s legal.
I think both communists and libertarians would agree that if I snatch away your food whenever you try to eat, and offer to stop only if you would be my servant, then I have “forced” you to work for me. It’s just that libertarians and communists disagree on what qualifies as “your” food. Libertarians say that property is acquired by first-appropriation, whereas communists define property by “To each according to his need” (and so, to this end, the government has a right to tax). So the essential disagreement is about property rights. From this follows the disagreement about what constitutes “force.”
Its sad, really, they can’t seem to understand that supply and demand applies to labor markets as it does with any scarce resource.