+1 Graham
@Graham
I agree completely. Thanks for pointing out the flaw in my reasoning. I’m not sure why I didn’t notice it myself.
I had realized that there were many other things that legitimize the state in the eyes of the masses, but for some reason I thought I could just ignore them all and focus just on voting in isolation. But, of course I can’t. “You have analysed the act of voting in isolation, and yet you’ve used your conclusion to answer a wider question, a question which necessarily requires consideration of the bigger picture.” Somehow I didn’t notice this.
I no longer believe that voting is counterproductive to the cause of a free society. The benefits that Ron Paul (for example) can bring by introducing a very large audience to liberty definitely do outweigh the counterproductive aspects of participation in the electoral process.
Interestingly, I still think the following passage from McElroy’s “Why I Would Not Vote Against Hitler” essay is completely accurate:
The power of the state does not rest on its size – the number of laws on the books or the extent of the territory it claims. A state’s power rests on social conditions, such as whether people will obey its laws and how many resources it can command to enforce obedience. A key social condition is how legitimate the state is seen to be. For without the veil of legitimate authority, the people will not obey the state, and it will not long command the resources, such as taxes and manpower, that it needs to live.
In other words, freedom does not depend so much on repealing laws as weakening the state’s authority. It does not depend – as political strategists expediently claim on persuading enough people to vote “properly” so that libertarians can occupy seats of political power and roll back legislation. Unfortunately, this process strengthens the institutional framework that produced the unjust laws in the first place: it strengthens the structure of state power by accepting its authority as a tool of change.
This is all true. What McElroy (and I before 10 minutes ago) is missing though is that there are other things contributing to peoples’ support of government other than the fact that people making up government are voted for (duh! I feel stupid now). And so voting for people like Ron Paul, while possibly counterproductive when viewed in isolation, can thus be said to be productive in the larger context due to how much the benefits of Ron Paul spreading the message of liberty outweigh the counterproductive aspects of voting that I talked about in my blog post. Wow, this seems so obvious now, but for some reason I was blind to it just a few minutes ago. Thanks again Graham.
The State’s power ultimately rests on the chain of obedience:
Clayton -
33 seconds into the video the narrator says “The command is inconsequential.” Using his meaning of “inconsequential” I agree with you that voting is inconsequential. Earlier I was using a different definition, perhaps an uncommon one, which is why I disagreed with you. Good video.
Clayton, I present to you the hitherto never earned by anyone “I Just Changed Someone-On-The-Internet’s Mind” Award.
It had to happen once. Once. I don’t foresee any other such miracles anytime soon. 
@Wheylous: Haha, thanks, but I think it’s entirely undeserved given PRA’s nic.
Voting isn’t aggression…
Why is this so? I agreed with it initially, but what’s the reason? If hiring a hitman is a crime then can’t a vote for someone like Hitler similarly be construed as an act of aggression? Hitler and his obedient law enforcers could be viewed as agents to voters’ acts of aggression. What’s wrong with this?
I actually also noticed some discrepancies in the two…
I’ll look into it later.
if that is your criterea, that is your critere. Nothing can relly be done to refute it.
It isn’t so much an argument as it is a type of “virtue ethic”
Voting is a mere statement of preference, nothing more.
So when Obama commands soldiers to go attack others and blow things up, is he merely stating a preference rather than committing an act of aggression? Which of Obama’s actions are in violation of libertarian principles? If voting for Obama to tell another person to commit an act of aggression does not count as aggression, then why would Obama’s act of telling others to commit aggression count as aggression? Can only the law enforcement people be held liable for the aggression that they commit or can their superiors whose orders that they obey also be considered responsible?
@PRA: You falsely assume that the President is doing what the public “commands” him to do in the same way that the Joint Chiefs of Staff do what the President commands them to do. Of course, this is what you are taught in any high school civics course, that democracy “holds leaders accountable” and expresses “the will of the people” and other such theological nonsense.
Please re-read my first post: voting is like praying for God to destroy your enemies. It is an inconsequential act. Voting for Obama has no more causal connection to the deaths of Afghan villagers by US bombing raids than praying to God for their deaths would have. Both voting for a warmonger and praying to God to murder your enemies are despicable acts of bigotry. But they have no causal connection whatever to the eventual outcome.
Note that, in Rothbardian legal theory, the mafia lord that orders his guys to shoot is not liable for the deaths - he merely gave instructions, it was the trigger-men who caused the deaths. On first glance, this might seem to be a license to mafiosos but it is quite the opposite. Sure, you can organize a mafia and issue commands to kill scot-free, but you’re going to have a hard time finding people to follow your silly commands when they are the ones who will be held liable for following them and when you can be held liable for whatever extortionate threats you used against your underlings in order to induce them to follow your commands.
Obama is not legally liable for the deaths of innocents in Afghanistan in my reading of Rothbardian legal theory. What he is liable for are the orders which he gives which are all backed with aggressive threats: obey this order or go to jail (e.g. court martial or whatever). That aggressive threat is propagated, layer-by-layer, rank-by-rank, all the way down to the foot-soldier who pulls the trigger.
The root cause of the problem (bombing of innocents) is the limitation of liability for all these criminal acts up and down the entire chain of command. And democracy - far from being a liability enforcement mechanism - is precisely a form of liability-limitation. “Well, Obama can’t be held legally liable for the aggressive threats he makes to his inferiors because the people voted for him and so that makes Obama’s criminal threats… not criminal.” This is the crux of the issue - taking an opinion poll doesn’t change your liability. It’s like someone being charged with murder who calls for a show of hands whether he’s innocent or not. “Well, judge, I’m sorry, but the majority of people here don’t think I’m guilty, so, that means I’m not guilty.” What a bunch of bullshit.
Clayton -
“What he is liable for are the orders which he gives which are all backed with aggressive threats: obey this order or go to jail (e.g. court martial or whatever). That aggressive threat is propagated, layer-by-layer, rank-by-rank, all the way down to the foot-soldier who pulls the trigger.”
I was under the impression that Obama’s inferiors voluntarily obey his commands. If they were to disobey the instructions then perhaps they would lose their jobs, but would they really go to prison? Is he really threatening his inferiors in government with violence?
Yes.
Clayton -
Identifying specific actions in the real world and saying ‘this is aggression’ and ‘this isn’t aggression’ is technically out of scope to the libertarian qua libertarian. In any specific given case, it is up to courts/judges to decide whether aggression was committed, based on the general principles laid out by libertarian philosophy. The same goes for applying words like ‘homesteading’ and ‘threat’ and ‘consent’ to the real world.
The libertarian can give a general idea of what is meant by these words and can give idealized examples, but when asked ‘is this aggression?’ the libertarian is technically answering not as a libertarian, but as a judge interpreting/applying libertarian principles. So ‘is X aggression?’ means ‘do you think a judge applying libertarian principles would consider X to be aggression?’
Take the idealized hiring-a-hitman example. At the one extreme you could reduce the hitman to a mere tool and say he’s entirely innocent (i.e. the Nuremberg defense). At the other extreme, you could say all the responsibility lies with the hitman, because he was the one who carried out the physical act. Now, we as libertarians cannot say in a given case where this responsibility lies; we do so only as judges. The task of a judge is to try to find out who is guilty of a crime (that is, who is responsible for a crime), and in most cases responsibility will probably lie between the two extremes, where both the hirer and hitman bear some responsibility for the aggressive act that occurred. They played different roles, and whether the hirer or the hitman should get the heavier punishment depends on the specifics of the case.
So put yourself in the role of a judge, at a hypothetical Nuremberg trial the day after a libertarian revolution, where people are charged with all the various crimes committed by the state before the revolution. Who is guilty? Who bears responsibility for all the many acts of aggression that have been committed by the state? One answer could be ‘all government employees and no one else’, but that is both too broad (because it includes all ‘public workers’ like schoolteachers, admin assistants at the local council office, etc) and too narrow (because it leaves out people who work in nominally private organizations but who are highly influential over state activities).
The answer must be that there is a particular group of people, whom we may call ‘the ruling class,’ who bear responsibility for the actions of the state, along with the ‘hitmen’ (maybe tax collectors, police, soldiers, etc). The difficult task of the judge is to identify who these people are and how much responsibility they each ought to bear.
So is voting aggression? If the answer is to be yes, then what we are saying is that voters are a member of this ruling class, which a judge at a “libertarian Nuremberg” should find guilty of bearing at least some responsibility for the crimes of the state. We can’t say for sure, but is this likely? I don’t think so. The connection between somebody who put an X in a box next to Obama’s name, and the actual crimes being committed now by the US government is so remote, so tenous, that no reasonable judge would consider any responsibility to lie with the voter. There’s just no chain of causation there, and this makes it totally unlike if the voter hired Obama as a hitman. There’s no contract, only vague promises. There’s not even any implied endorsement, since there are other reasons why one might vote for Obama than they endorse him, or they may only endorse part of what he promises. These are all relevant things for the judge to take into account, when he’s deciding whether voters bear responsibility for specific crimes carried out by the state.
@Graham: But I think there is something conceptually wrong with your “libertarian Nuremberg trials” - most of the people who presently work in the State order in an aggressive capacity simply would not be in their current line of work if libertarian law had sway all along. I don’t mean this merely as a descriptive statement of fact but as an exoneration of a large part of their actual culpability.
This is why the role of law is so damned important. Without just law, morality itself is actually perverted. Many police officers are very upright individuals. In fact, the scum bullies are able to get away with what they do by leeching off the upright image which is the result of the genuine uprights within police forces. But - on a libertarian analysis - most of what even the upright officers are doing is inherently aggressive. If the law were otherwise, I do not believe that these same individuals would pursue the same career choice, “the law be damned”. They’re police officers precisely because the law is what it is.
So, morality itself is perverted by bad law and I don’t think even those who hold positions that are in violation of hypothetical libertarian law can be held legally or even morally responsible ex post facto for their actions under a non-libertarian legal order.
I think the “ruling class” is extremely difficult to precisely define. I think a certain degree of “knowingness” - a purely subjective quality - is required. I think that those who engage in thuggery in the State must also have a mens rea regarding it in order to be truly a part of the ruling Elite (in my view). They have to not only engage in aggression but know that that’s what they are doing.
Clayton -
This seems to conflict with your view of strict unlimited liability. Could you explain a little more?
Well, strict liability is “the way things oughtta be” but things aren’t this way and I think that fundamentally alters the balance of culpability.
For example, consider a slaveowner who inherited his property from his father, who had inherited it from his father before him, and so on. In a society where slave ownership is legal, is this slaveowner really a “criminal” who needs to be tried once the laws are changed to abolish slavery? I think the answer is no and I think that, in general, we should not seek ex post facto liability for crimes committed under a corrupt legal order. Instead, we should seek to set the law straight (by opening up competition in the market for arbitrated resolution of disputes) and then hold people accountable to the law as it is/was when they committed the act in question. All forms of ex post facto evaluation of actions smacks of statism and inquisitionism.
I’m not saying slaves should be prohibited from suing their former slaveholders but I don’t think that free-market law arbitrators are going to think that it makes sense to hold people liable for violation of the law as it is in 2012 for things that were not torts under the law as it was in 2011.
I also think this principle is important in reducing the resistance of a move towards liberty - a great deal of the resistance is generated by people who fear they could actually be held legally liable for the acts they committed under the old legal regime. Consider the many - obviously politicized - threats of war crimes charges against George Bush, for example - this illustrates the nature of the resistance. But introspecting on the past won’t fix the only thing that we can change: the future. We shouldn’t offer amnesty but neither should we promise a witch-hunt.
Clayton -
I agree with this statement.
I like this idea, but your following statement seems to contradict it:
The conflict that I see here is that you say that slaves should be allowed to sue in order to set the law straight, but that arbitrators would not hold the slave owners responsible. Am I misunderstanding you?
I agree with everything here except for the first sentence. I don’t think there are actually that many people who could be held legally liable for their actions. Most people in society today are not aggressors, even those who work for the state. However, I think it shouldn’t matter what the aggressors think - after all, they are benefitting under the system, why would they want to change it even if they were not going to be found liable? In other words, why would a slave owner support freedom for slaves even if he weren’t going to be held legally liable? He benefits from the current system. And if he truly felt that slaves should be free, then he would have set his slaves free. So, why should we care what the slave owners think? They aren’t going to change anything. We should care about what the victims and the rest of society think. They far outnumber the aggressors.
Thanks for the comments everybody; they are educational.