[quote=“[Michael J Green in the Why Capitalism? thread]
(Why Capitalism? - #95 by MJGreen)”]De Jasay’s great metaphor - that the state’s interventions cause the muscles of voluntary capabilities of society to atrophy - supports Danny’s point that people are largely interested in increasing their material wealth. Without the state, this requires cooperation, possibly a strong family structure, etc. With a welfare state, (non-political) voluntary associations become less important, the family structure is less useful, etc., because people believe they can profit more through the redistributive arm of the state. Without the state, a mother is incentivized to marry a man for financial assistance; with the state providing assistance to single mothers, this incentive is diminished and the traditional family structure offers less utility.
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To me this suggests that the state is most usefully viewed as a disease of society, not as something external to it. Under this conception, we analyze society as a doctor or epidemiologist, seeing that the individual cells (people) are each more and less unhealthy (have misguided views and bad incentives, partly due to the continuing effects of the disease as de Jasay mentions), leading to a more or less advanced case of statism.
The extent of capitalism as clarified by Danny Sanchez in Why Capitalism? is the extent of society’s health, and fully unhampered capitalism would be full recovery from the disease. As someone said recently, even the Soviet Union was capitalist insofar as it functioned at all; likewise a person can only live at all insofar as his bodily systems are at least minimally functional.
Taking this disease metaphor further, the LvMI is like a nutrient supplement or holistic treatment, attempting to nourish as many cells as possible (curing their misguided conception of how to serve their own interests) so that the disease condition is alleviated and eventually disappears. Actually it’s more like a DNA information war or something, because the nourished cells can go on and nourish other cells and so on without additional “vitamins.” (There’s more about this in the link in my sig.)
Hayekian spontaneous order and Hasnasian conceptions of common/customary law are like biological analysis of effectively running bodily systems and explain why, for instance, the immune system fights disease so well all by itself, without any drugs needed. It says the cancer of the state is not a benefit but a harm, not an improvement by a worsening of the natural order of the cells in their associations and interconnections.
Also with this understanding we can see that it makes no real sense to place blame and get morally righteous about things, as we are all part of this. None of us can help but to feed the disease even as we work to cure it, as we all pay taxes at least. This is not alarming, and it does not mean we cannot do far more to cure the disease than to worsen it; it is simply something one must acknowledge if one wishes to avoid pitfalls that make libertarian arguments fall easy prey to attack.
This last part is ranting, but: to see the state as a mere “gang of bandits” as is sometimes fashionable among libertarians is again something of a noble lie, I would say. It is not quite accurate. It is an indulgence I might allow myself in a moment of ire, but in the political conversation such feel-good denunciations become weaknesses that state apologists will gleefully exploit.
NOTE: This post is in no way meant to imply anything about society as a collective, as socialists might have it. The action is at the individual cell level, although the disease can and does pervade the whole system.