The god of statists
Political, Theology ·Wednesday August 25, 2010 @ 22:26 EDT (link)
Statists and voluntaryists
First, "What's a statist?" Well, it's not a term I invented; see statism: "the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty." Effectively, anyone who places anything above individual rights to life, liberty, and property would generally fit, although there might be some gaps (e.g., a serial killer does not respect life, but wouldn't necessarily want centralized control either), although we are not concerned with those gaps here. The term also does not only include the obviously violent states of the past (Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and so on), but anyone that endorses the power (never the right) of a state to infringe on those rights. If you're for involuntary taxation (is there any other kind?) you're a statist, for example, because taxation is theft, either direct or through extortion ("Give us your money or we will kidnap you and lock you up").
The opposite of statist is voluntaryist. Voluntaryists believe in natural (or, God-given, or, objective) rights to life, liberty, and property. These rights are not handed out by anyone and cannot be taken by anyone, although they can be infringed by individuals and states. Taxation infringes on the right to property; regulating victimless acts (use of illegal or unapproved drugs) and the arrests that result when violations of these regulations are found, violate your right to liberty; and when the state murders people, either through "collateral damage" (various wars) or sheer bloodymindedness (Waco, Ruby Ridge), it violates the right to life. All people still deserve liberty—have the abstract right—but it can be infringed by the state confining someone into a locked cell. Since individuals have the right to liberty, though, there is nothing immoral about attempting escape (or, if you have the necessary force, stopping the agents of the state that attempt to kidnap you). (Now, it is a bad idea to use many drugs, and the consequences, largely of dependence and crimes done to obtain funds, can be deleterious to families, but that's a problem of particular use, not in the drugs themselves, just as killing someone with a car isn't the car's fault.)
You always have rights. Slaves had natural rights to life, liberty and property; but they could not exercise those rights as they were infringed and denied by evil individuals and governments. I'm not trying to claim that they really were free (they were clearly not) or that freedom is in the mind (that may be true in part; but it's hard to mentally overcome an iron collar around the neck and forced hard labor); just that their right to liberty is innate, not owned by others. As such, they would be morally right to escape—to claim their rightful freedom—by almost any means necessary (I say 'almost' because, for example, it wouldn't be right to kill other slaves not hindering your escape, even if somehow their deaths would promote said escape).
So, what was that about a god of statists?
I'm still hoping that someday statists will find some justification for the theft called "taxes" that doesn't involve mysticism (or at least one that survives universal application). Many of them claim to be atheists, but you're not much of an atheist if you can't justify your actions without a god. But their theft and coercion always ends up involving arbitrary imposition of random involuntary obligations. (One of those being the hand-waving unsigned mystical social contract, for example. There are other myths too, such as the US constitution.) I understand that it's not going to happen, because it cannot. I can't impose involuntary obligations on you, nor you on me; and there is no rational method that lets any other entity do so morally. You can't get there from here without a theological jump. The only difference is that my god doesn't (modulo the Old Testament, perhaps) impose himself on those that don't want him (although I'll concede his followers can sometimes be a little pushy… the Crusades, not a fun time for a lot of middle easterners).
This "god"—mystical entity that must be used to explain why what is immoral for everyone else is moral for the state's agents—is also called a "null zone" by Molyneux, concealed by "middle truths" such as the various statist myths enumerated earlier. The priests of this god are those such as Krugman and Keynes, providing Machiavellian justification for anything the state does, and it offers worshipers salvation in exchange for blind devotion and ignore the man behind the curtain saying theft is not justified either by the divine "right" of kings or will of a majority.
So what does God think about all this?
Absent an actual theocracy (with God in charge personally, not people claiming to speak for him), God would seem to prefer anarcho-capitalism. The Bible allows for property (or equivalently, individual stewardship), and condemns theft and initiations of force. That doesn't really leave much wiggle room. It does not condone taxation. I can understand how one might confuse oneself into thinking that, since, e.g. Jesus paid a tax, but giving in to threat of violence doesn't mean one condones it. Jesus wasn't, as some hoped at the time, planning on driving out the Romans. Giving in to their extortion helped illustrate that. "Render unto Caesar", as a general principle (vs. applying strictly to Caesar), is then "Give to those you owe, what you owe them" (or "what is theirs"; same idea). One could substitute, for example, the Washington state governor: "Render unto Christine Gregoire, what is Christine Gregoire's" (or to the President). But that includes absolutely nothing that I own, none of my income or my labor.
Collectivism
A major part of these myths involve collectivism or collectivist behavior: attribution of volition to a group, where no such volition can ever exist. Evil acts are "for the good of the state"; they are by "us"; the rights of the group trump those of the individual; and so on; Rothbard does it excellent justice in The Anatomy of the State. Statists will call for "balance" of the group will against the individual, but see past it to the call for violence to benefit the "chosen oligarchs of god"—the state-worshipers and those that can help the state gain power and influence. There is no such thing as a group will, any more than a flock of birds does anything outside the acts of individual birds.
Theft is immoral; initiating force is immoral. Raping someone isn't merely a disagreement of values, a quirk or pecadillo, it's objectively and universally an immoral act. There are universally preferable behaviors, and wrongs. (By "immoral", I mean a violation of the principle of non-aggression, rather than something more subjectively defined, such as using presently-illegal drugs which does not involve initiating force.)
If I washed someone's car and held a gun to their head and told them to pay me a vastly inflated price or I'd imprison them, they would consider that wrong. If the state did it for one of their services, a statist considers it a divine pronouncement that must be obeyed; the statist is inconsistent at best. Using violence on people to steal from them is immoral. It's not "contribution" to "society", it's theft for the doomed projects of the chosen oligarchs of god. Sometimes the claim is that people that don't want to be extorted are "freeloading"; but examine the definition and one sees there's nothing morally wrong with "freeloading" since it involves others voluntarily giving without obliging the recipient to any sort of return. Taking samples at the grocery store doesn't oblige repayment. Similarly, if one generation is robbed to build a bridge, future generations are in no wise obligated to repay them or anyone else for that bridge. (The only obligation incurred by robbery is to return the stolen property. The state did the stealing, not the future generations, who had no choice in the matter.) Furthermore nobody is even claiming that taxes go to "pay back" past generations. Voluntaryists would love to pay for services they wanted and used in a free market, rather than one in which violence is used to suppress competition.
Voluntaryists, then, ask statists: Put down the gun, and then we'll talk. But once a statist stops relying on violence as a means, it is over, for they are statist no longer.
Books finished: Crossroads of Twilight.
