Yes, I don’t understand it. But my father says that you are always coerced by society unless you are isolated from it. Also, he says that liberterians, by not wanting to participate in community (government) makes them outcasts from the community. Because liberterians use government services, they must pay for them. According to my dad, they are just people that don’t want anyone to tell them what to do, then they invent a whole smokescreen of economics and politics to justify it.
Any takers?
Your dad is just someone who wants to coerce others into conforming with “society”, inventing a smokescreen of politics to justify it. I’d recommend Hoppe’s essay on public goods to refute the nonsense he’s peddling here. Ask him, if his neighbour, uninvitedly plants some incredibly rare, expensive flowers in his yard, may he coerce him into paying for them? If not, why can government do it? If so, based on what?
-Jon
That’s completely misguided and sounds like a last ditch losing argument. Since when have libertarians not been a part of their communities? Libertarians aren’t opposed to being good members of their communities, they’re opposed to government forcing them to do certain things - i.e. pay taxes for services they don’t want or preventing them from doing victimless crimes like smoking dope or marrying people of the same sex.
Governments compel you do do what they want at the barrel of a gun. Communities look down on you if you act immorally. So the answer is no.
This is still one of the best descriptions of the difference between community and government in practice that I know of:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/central-katrina.html
From the article:
Perhaps the most astounding case of incompetence has received the least attention. It relates to a 500-boat flotilla stretching over 5 miles that left for New Orleans from Acadiana Mall in Lafayette. It involved 1,000 people who had hoped to rescue hospital patients and take them to safety. It consisted of private boaters, fishermen, hunters, and others who had spent their entire lives navigating Louisiana waterways.
Once this caravan arrived, they were turned away by the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which was now being run by FEMA. All five hundred boats were turned away and ordered out.
Community is the 500-boat floatilla. Government is FEMA.
I’ve seen the same argument many times, and it fails because people who make it are assuming the equivalence of two things which in fact are very different. Free people will naturally set conditions upon their interactions with you. This certainly does affect the range of actions open to you within the context of society, but it is absolutely and emphatically NOT the same as committing aggressions against you or your property. My neighbor may loathe me and refuse to interact with me if he dislikes the decor I display in my yard. He may refuse to invite me to his backyard barbecue, and use that as leverage to induce me to redecorate my yard to a style more in line with his preferences. He may attempt to persuade others to do similarly. That is the type of “coercion” I understand society to exert upon the individual. It is in no way the same thing as if my neighbor were to threaten me with violence, or to surreptitiously or forcibly remove my offending decor himself. Society is quite possible without the latter (and truer) form of coercion.
Remind him about community when he is looking through the chain link fence at the detainment camp.
Sounds like communitarianism and an inability to distinguish between the use of physical force and other forms of coercion (social oppression, e.g., from systematic social problems like racism and patriarchy).
As for using govt services. Well, in most cases, we don’t have a choice. It’s forced on us. In general, see Lysander Spooner’s No Treason for a sound refutation of social contract theory, the idea that voting and the like count as evidence of consent, etc.
Strangely no one says the slave eating a dinner justifies forced labour for the next.
Here I am.
The big difference between “community” and “government” is that one voluntarily participates in a “community” because one is rewarded for their time and effort, whereas government is coerced cooperation. The “rewards” derived from voluntary association can be money, or they can be education, recreation, the satisfaction of conscience, or social admiration–but the rewards are there. Government, on the other hand, is backed by sheer force.
Communities operate far more efficiently than government for many reasons. Communities have every incentive to conserve resources, whereas government tends to waste resources. Communities obtain resources from producing a market good, whereas government obtains resources by confiscation. Communities respect the opinions of their members, whereas government imposes its opinions on others. Disliked minorities in government tend to be oppressed by the majority, whereas disliked minorities in communities tend to secede and create their own communities.
The idea individuals are obligated to conform to their surrounding or else, the idea that “you are either coerced by society or isolated from it”, dates back to the stone age, to a period of slavery, tribal warfare, and stoning of heretics. For centuries it was feared that the abolishion of slavery, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and free elections would lead to social discord and disarray, and a complete breakdown of society, but the American Experiment proved that those concepts would create a society more successful than anything any empire could dream of. Hopefully, now that mankind is more advanced, we will wise up and dispense with the last relics of tribalism, communalism, and monarchy.
No. You can have a fully or quasi-anarchical community that is quite prosperous; see Irish tuaths, Anglo-Saxon hundreds, Iceland under the godi chieftains, or Russian peasant communes. The state, at best, is internally contradictory as it regards community because it has its roots in natural authority among one group of people, and thus a recognition of the superiority of voluntary cooperation, but this same principle of voluntarism is disregarded in dealing with other people thus leading to aggression (such as Anglo-Saxon freemen choosing their king voluntarily but then helping him to invade other people.) At worst, it obliterates community in the form of families, churches, and other social arrangements so that it can isolate and alienate individuals so as to coerce them with one hand while offering means to that same individual to coerce a large mass of people from whom he is disconnected.
Yeah, people who don’t want to participate with thieves and robbers really are outcasts (as if we’re given a choice). But I’d love to pay for ONLY the services I use, assuming government opened those services up to competition instead of monopolizing them. Health care, education, roads, utilities, etc.–let there be a free market, and then we can see how much people really want government’s ‘services’.
Wow! I read this article and it was great! Question, why do people continue to support government when it epic fails? Why does my family, that values helping the poor, continue to support a government that harms the poor when it appears to help it?
Apparently he has a very muddled understanding of the term ‘coercion’, or at least of how libertarians use it. The term does not mean “inducing an inhospitable environment for an individual” but simply “violating an individual’s property rights”. A community can clearly do the first of these but not the second.
Because the state has created a sophisticated scheme, from education, to advertising, to forced dependency.
Because Obama’s going to bring “change” and save the system.