Hayek Would Have Supported Obamacare

Economics Political Theory
21

I hesitated to write “need”, as if the world needed something.

The world itself needs nothing. The world has no problem and needs no solution.

But aggression is an effective tool that real people use to solve real problems..

That has been the case for aeons, much before the human race walked the earth. Violence perhaps is the oldest common denominator among living creatures

In the last tens of thousands of years, among the homo sapiens, there has been an unsteady trend called civilization. A particular trait of such trend is the specialization of military and political classes, which has gradually removed most forms of violence and aggression from the concerns of the everyday people.

Given the institutions of modern civilized society, it is expensive for the common man to solve his problems through violence. He is better served if he works on something else and let the brawls, bravados and so forth to the class of violence specialists.

This specialization has come to such a point that almost nobody, except a few elite specialists, can understand or follow the modern patterns of warfare and large scale political violence anymore.

But that doesn’t mean violent methods are necessarily going extinct. They are still there, whether people are aware or not.

22

@Christophe,

You’ve hardly addressed anything I’ve said.

You’ve accused me of being religious but I’m not trying to sell any faith here.

On the contrary, my position is the most cynical and anti-ideologue possible.

Just to clarify things, I don’t believe in government as a some necessary problem solving tool in a large scale social level.

And I do not rule as impossible a society based on voluntary contracts and market agreements where no governmental unit is discernible.

But I don’t share anymore the libertarian ideology that seems to think that the only thing keeping this utopia from happening is the general misunderstanding and mistrust of free markets among people that have not yet read the gospels of Austrian Economics.

I used to think somewhat like that, I used to be you, but I got over that.

Now I see why politics really exist.

Politics is the byproduct of the economic use of violence.

Violence and aggression have economic uses for economic actors and insofar as the benefits of initiating aggression are greater than the costs of doing so for these very actors, there can be no NAP or anything of the sort.

If one sunny day, we arrive to a civilizational point where the present institutions make it extremely difficult to profit from any sort of aggression, that day politics will cease to exist and people will only operate on voluntary contracts.

We are obviously not there yet. And it is not just a matter of wishful thinking and libertarian good will.

There are trends in society and these trends make some ancient forms of violence obsolete.

One could argue that this could mean that the future is necessarily “less violent” than the past, but these trends are unsteady.

And even if ancient forms of violence disappears, new ones emerge so you cannot entirely predict the pattern of political violence in the future. Someone who looked at the beautiful developments of african colonies before and shortly after World War II could hardly predict the many horrors places like Algeria, Uganda or Nigeria would face after their independences.

And even the West is not out of harmsway. Maybe technology will evolve in a way that allow for large concentration of power in the hands of a small elite. And in that case, it is only natural to expect them to use this power to exploit others.

I’m not saying government is a solution for that concentration of power, government is one of the very patterns of power concentration. What I’m saying is that these things will not cease to exist just because some guy on youtube thinks Bastiat is really cool.

That’s what I was trying to say.

23

@ Meistro,

Well, I didn’t say it is naive to oppose aggression and coercion.

But it is very easy to say, in the abstract sense, that you oppose aggression and coercion, but what does it mean in practice?

Almost every government eventually discovers how much abuse its subjects are willing to suffer quietly, and when this level is reached, insurection start to spread.

But what I said is that the general attitude and expectations of libertarians are, indeed, very naive.

I mean, libertarians usually expect that their social vision will self-fulfill once enough people realize that politicians are more preocupied with their own power agendas than with the well being of the “general public”.

But most people know that, and they always knew that. There’s nothing not even remotely new about that.

That doesn’t mean it makes sense pushing of the removal of the current political class.

A group of people will organize and sustain a revolt against a government only when they perceive the prospective costs and risks of engaging in active disobedience and sabotage as being smaller than the costs and risks of accepting the status quo.

And that’s because the real choice is not between the corrupted world we live in and the utopian vision of a society guided by the superior libertarian ideology where “aggression” and “coercion” no longer exist.

This is perhaps the case in the propaganda but that does not describe any real choice available to anyone.

The real choice is generally between political instability and widespread random violence or the status quo, where violence is being organized and rationed by government and or government-like operations.

And whereas it is true that sometimes insurrection does become an interesting idea (for instance, when government abuse is running amok), it is generally the opposite case that prevails.

So whereas it is not entirely impossible defend the position that government is this “giant scam” that self-perpetrates, it is also important to consider what concrete alternatives are out there.

And you can keep the whole “I believe in honesty” discourse to political junkies addicted to rhetorical cliches.

That kind of statement means nothing out of a context and could be stated with plain face by the most depraved candidate of any party.

In the real world people will act honest whenever they calculate that their gains by keeping their reputations safe overcome their foregone opportunities of profiting by misleading others.

Few people would care about their reputations if the stakes were high enough, say, if they had to lie and deceive to save their own lives or of their children, or if they had to fake some interest on something to get a really juicy reward.

The world is built upon small and big, black, white and grey lies and they play a very important role in keeping the social fabric together.

Other way of putting it, honesty has a price. And sometimes the price is too damn high.

Therefore you expect to observe dishonest behavior in the real world, and it will not change just because you decided to romantically engage in adolescent wishful thinking.

I suspect (and hope) you’re already aware of most of that, so I’m not telling you anything really new, but I also want to point out how this very plain and obvious truth completely obliterates whatever point you tried to make with your objection.