I see her point about the coercer living in defiance of reality, trying to "bend" another's will as one might try to "bend" the world to one's advantage. But isn't all life lived in defiance of reality? Reality keeps trying to turn us into dust, and we keep stubbornly refusing.
That is not the same kind of defiance of reality. Rand is talking about ignoring what is real. But you can "defy" reality in the sense of accepting what is while determining to change what will be. (If that sounded vaguely like Kamala Harris, I apologize.)
Just based on the quotes in the essay, she seems to have the idea of a natural order that dictates (or at least constrains) what one ought to do. It sounds very Aristotelean. But then she also has the Nietzschean idea that the true hero defies the natural order and bends it to his will. So, like the rest of us, she's a bundle of contradictions.
I had a bout of Randianism in my youth. I think it lasted about a year in my teens in which I devoured her books and argued fiercely with libertarian friends. Even at my most enthusiastic I was clear that Rand got things wrong. Her view of free will was one problem area. Another was her epistemology which went down the tired and failed track of looking for certainty. I also could see that her principle clearly led to anarchism. I'm pretty sure I already thought that before reading Roy Child's pellucid essay (probably from talking with Chris Tame who ran the UK's Libertarian Alliance and Alternative Bookshop.
In "Morality and Capitalism: A Dialogue on Freedom," The Moral Imperative is this: "do not compel unjustly." Compulsion is force, threat of force, or fraud. Half the book argues the logical case for The Moral Imperative; obviously the argument cannot be made here.
But if it is granted that The Moral Imperative is right human behavior, then all mandatory taxation is theft, because theft is obviously compelling another rational being. I offer a reasonable and workable means to finance a limited state that does not require the state to compel unjustly. All taxation could and should be strictly voluntary, accomplished by voluntary contribution or voluntary subscription.
Any number of people will assert that voluntary taxation is impractical and unworkable due to the "free rider" problem. I have never once seen anyone asserting the free rider problem produce a scintilla of evidence that the assertion is anything but an assertion. Some economists asserted that no one would ever build a lighthouse privately due to the free rider problem; and yet, lighthouses were in fact built privately. Some people assert that police protection and national defense and courts are public goods in just the same way as lighthouses, and hence, must be financed by mandatory taxation enforced by compulsion of people unjustly. Again, I've never seen evidence of any kind that supports the assertion that without mandatory taxation, we cannot have and would not have police protection, national defense, and courts. Interested reader should read Robert Heinlein's classic novel, "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" for details.
On the other side of the argument, we do have ample evidence that people have contribute to finance such public goods frequently, and we have good reason to believe that most people would not be free riders. I'll offer two examples although a bit of research will turn up legions more. Roads were paved in early Philadelphia financed by voluntary subscription. Volunteer fire departments are the financing a public good in kind.
Mandatory taxation is neither advisable, necessary, or moral for a well functioning society. In fact, society would function better for a host of reasons with strictly voluntary financing of limited government. The case is made a greater length in my little book, for readers interested in the whole argument.
With regard to funding government, Georgist taxation is a form of "charging a fee to enforce a contract" - the contract being one of exclusive right to land, enforced against everybody else.
And as for not taking other people's stuff, there's a whole lot of argument around that point that is being neglected here. The arguments there are that your possessions, as an extension of yourself, should embody your virtues (they should embody you); they significantly apply as much to winning the lottery as stealing somebody else's stuff. The point relies on your relationship with your property as an extension of self, and the ideal, in a sense, is that all of your possessions carry the same personal meaning to you that a sweatshirt you knit yourself might.
Like, you can see that somebody might value a sweatshirt they knit themselves more than they value a sweatshirt they bought; you can see how somebody stealing one versus the other might be the bigger loss. The ideal is, in a sense, that -all- of your possessions so embody yourself. "I spent four hours shoveling coal that I might have this sweatshirt."
A lot of us, meanwhile, are considerably disassociated from the product of our labors; we live surrounded by things we have no personal investment in, which hours or weeks or months or years of our lives were spent in order to acquire. Rand's point relies, in part, on stepping back and appreciating how much we do for ourselves, how much of ourselves we have put into the world, and taking a moment to savor the product of our labor - that the things we enjoy, we enjoy not because of impersonal forces beyond our control, but because we are beings of creation, and we have created. Glory in that this sweatshirt was the product of creation, and that you are a part of that vast creative process.
Without this appreciation, sure, an apple stolen tastes the same as an apple paid for.
"With regard to funding government, Georgist taxation is a form of "charging a fee to enforce a contract" - the contract being one of exclusive right to land, enforced against everybody else."
Wouldn't that logic imply that the government can tax everything you own, as part of the contract for your exclusive right to use it?
It doesn't, but that gets into the weeds of the logic of natural rights.
Very roughly speaking, we can assert a right to a tomato that you have planted, watered, fertilized, and otherwise grown yourself; you have in substantive part created the tomato (mixed your labor with it).
Likewise, we can extend this to an entire field of crops.
But property ownership is a bit broader than this - now you own the rocks a hundred feet below the soil, and can prevent somebody else mining down to get them? That seems a bit odd.
You decide you're going to build a house where your field of crops was. Joe says he wants a house there, too. There's a bit of oddness there, as well - why do you have a prior right over Joe, based on a field of crops that in any case won't exist there anymore?
Georgist taxation is acknowledging the oddness in all of this, and taxes the opportunity cost imposed by land ownership directly; it doesn't tax the tomato, or the field of crops, or the house. It taxes only the opportunity costs - that is, the costs to everyone else that your ownership of the land imposes.
It does not universalize to "all property can be taxed", or even "all opportunity costs can be taxed" - if I grow a tomato, the continual process resulting in my ownership of the tomato does not impose an opportunity cost on you, excepting only that you might have grown a tomato there instead - it is a specific tax on a specific unjustifiable opportunity cost imposed on other people from a very particular philosophical perspective on the natural origin of property rights.
The question of mineral rights is a red herring. How much land you own, how deep, and how far up into the sky, all that is a different question irrelevant to this conversation.
So the issue with the house gets to the issue of Georgist taxation: the house is not entirely separable from the land it is built into. Likewise the land is not separate from the crop currently growing on it. In neither case can you just pick up the house and the crop and move it somewhere else and still leave that value intact. So your claim that the system is taxing the opportunity costs of the land (which are not the costs to everyone else, by the way) that is incorrect on the face, and implies that the taxation is limited to just those costs.
"Oh! We are not taxing your crop, we are just taxing the opportunity costs of the land under it!" says the taxman as he charges you 100x the normal tax rate one month before your crop is to be harvested.
Georgists consistently claim that their taxation scheme is limited, both in scope and scale, but in fact there is no limiting factor on what is being taxed.
Taxation is the moral equivalent of extortion. I would prefer that government--if it is to exist--be financed by voluntary means, such as user fees and freely chosen contributions, just as are businesses and charitable organizations in the private sector. That way we'd get the government people are willing to pay for. An objection is that there are certain public goods, such as national defense, that can't be voluntarily financed because of the free rider problem. So some taxation is a necessary evil. As a general rule, if you subsidize something, you get more of it; if you tax something you get less of it. In my opinion, the worst tax is a tax on labor because (1) it results in there being less unconcealed productive labor and (2) it presupposes that, like a slave, your labor doesn't belong entirely to yourself. Nearly as bad is a tax on capital, which reduces the amount of capital, making labor less productive and low-paying. The least harmful tax seems to be a single tax on land because (1) the tax wouldn't significantly reduce the quantity of land, (2) exclusive ownership of land is harder to justify than almost any other type of property, (3) material wealth originates from land, (4) government already claims ultimate ownership of land through both its powers of taxation and eminent domain, and (5) that would encourage government officials to increase revenues and reduce spending by selling public lands to private individuals, businesses, and charitable organizations (e.g., the Sierra Club), who would be those who value it the most, thus benefiting the general public. Severance and pollution taxes could be imposed to avoid a reduction of the land's value.
"It implies that you should be a prudent predator, only violate other people’s rights on those occasions, perhaps rare, when it is in your interest to do so."
Although I think "your interest to do so" has an unmeant hint of deliberate intent, it certainly matches my philosophy. It is why I find the arguments about hanging from the 9th floor balcony and stealing the 25 cent rocket part so annoying. Life is seldom about absolutes. Even walking down a crowded sidewalk makes "hurried" hard to distinguish from "aggressive". I based my anarchy-lite on resolving self-ownership disputes, not violations of some purist absolute NAP.
I know I haven't worded this particularly well. Apoligies.
One possible way to pay for defense is to take up a collection from the original group members, invest it, and pay out of the proceeds. It works for retirees, why not the government?
Thank you, David, for mentioning and linking to Roy Childs letter to Ayn Rand pointing out her logical errors regarding government. I just finished reading it and found his refutation of her arguments very impressive.
The reading of Rand's ethical argument as primarily one of practical consequences is erroneous, though some inconsistencies in her presentation may suggest it. Her position is that personal integrity is one of the highest values, and that any breach in it is harmful to one's self-interest, even if it brings material gains. Her characters illustrate this point. If you cheat and steal, you violate people's rights, and this means you can't support the principle of rights without tying yourself in mental knots. You must increasingly evade the implications of your thinking, or else decide that there's no principle of action beyond what you can get away with. This takes you down the road to viewing the world as dog-eat-dog.
You can offer arguments against this, but it's a far more subtle point than the notion that crime never pays.
1. I was in those discussions in the late 90s, mostly on the IOS (not ARI) side.
2. David Schmidtz does a better job with the Randian argument than Rand does, and aligns with Public choice thinking as well. D.S. -- If I want goal X, then in order to pursue goal X, I also have to preserve my life. Preserving my life is this a necessary precursor goal ... and you can get roughly all Rand's self-choosing goals from that. Kinda like "in order to accomplish my political goals, I have to be elected/re-elected". Cleaner, better solution.
3. The central logical failure is an equivocation regarding LIFE. Rand (or Schmidtz) goes a long way towards "Life as a standard of Value" -- but in those cases, she's using "MY life as a standard of value" -- and then she jumps to Life itself, mine or others. Not properly justified anywhere. English makes it easy to switch meanings mid-argument.
4. I hung out with George Smith, and read the Childs letter, but your Machinery of Freedom was the key shift for me. The smartest objectivists I hung out with in the 90s had reached: "We all agree on what direction we should be heading in today ... let's finish the argument when the government is small enough to drown in a bathtub"
Of the people I argued this with online in Humanities.Philosophy.Objectivism on Usenet, the smartest, indeed the only one who followed the argument for AC and offered a relevant criticism, was Jimbo Wales, later of Wikipedia. I don't know if he still considers himself an Objectivist.
I love Jimbo/ now Jimmy, and was on MDOP. Paul Hsieh, and close friend of Jimmy, now occasionally wiring guest pieces for Glenn Reynolds and volokh. Always insightful, less combative than the rest of us.
It would be interesting to know where the participants in the H.P.O threads I spent time in all are now. I'm pretty sure Jimbo's then girlfriend is still an orthodox Objectivist. I think I recognize Paul Hsieh as a name from those arguments. I don't know how much Jimmy's political views have changed — Wikipedia as an organization is pretty left-wing at present, whether because of or in spite of his influence.
Someone with free time should go back over those threads and research what became of the participants for an article, even, if sufficiently ambitious, a book. An odd angle on the intellectual history of the past forty or fifty years.
MDOP was dominated by folks who eventually worked with IOS / David Kelley's Objectivist splinter group that then spawned the Atlas Society, which Robert Bidinotto was running for a long time.
HPO was a much broader mix of ARI doctrinaire Peikoff / Brooks Objectivists with the MDOP'ers.
Jimbo's then Girlfriend Diana (Mertz-Brickell) Hsieh dated a few folks, including Joshua Zader, then married the Paul Hsieh I was referencing. In the last 5-10 years, Diana and Paul split up, and Diana maybe moved back to California? Paul is near me in Colorado, where he's been for the better part of 20 years.
With IOS fading, more serious Objectivist types went back to the ARI/Peikoff/Brooks side of the world, while a lot of others went in different directions.
A large number of the younger generation of Oists of that generation spent time in LA with first Nathaniel Branden, and then with Brandyn Webb and his sifter folks. Many of them went in the direction of Meditation/Buddhist/Circling/more aggressive "philosophy for living". Spiral Dynamics popped up a bit as well.
The biggest groups I was familiar with were FROG -- Front Range Objectivist Group and the Chicagoland groups that the Enrights were part of.
But the demographics of people attracted to Objectivism in the 80s/90s were more captured by things like futurism and extropianism near 2000, and then post 2005/10, it was the Yudkowskian "Rationalists" that were ascendent.
An example you gave some years ago of a voluntarily funded government was a government that operated casinos. Assuming that the casinos would make a profit large enough to fund (limited) government activities, no taxation would be required. And even in a market with perfect competition, price may not be the only factor for the customers, hence the ability to make a profit without undercutting competitors.
While I have no dog in the Obectivist vs anarchist fight, while reading DF brilliantly take apart much of Ayn Rand’s reasoning, it occurred to me that Rand is liked Substack’s Richard Hanania (or more fairly, Hanania is like Rand):
Brilliant and interesting, correct ~85% of the time, but maddeningly, infuriatingly wrong - and dogmatically inflexible about it - ~15% of the time.
“While I believe that a stateless society would be superior to even a limited government I also believe that such a society would not be stable in all environments, have written at some length about circumstances in which it would break down. Under circumstances in which anarchy is not an option I would probably regard a limited government along classical liberal lines, providing police, courts and national defense and funding them by taxation, as the least bad alternative available. It involves some violation of rights, but the alternatives are worse.”
As someone who has read only a small sliver of your writings, thanks so much for this closing paragraph.
You are literally (old school use of that term) the first anarcho-capitalist I’ve ever seen acknowledge “‘the alternatives are worse” point. Bryan Caplan perhaps comes next closest.
I don't recall seeing anything in your blog post with which I disagree. I agree that Rand didn't solve the is/ought problem. I'm unaware of any solution. I regard it as a deontological problem. However, I think some of her premises can be used to solve the related axiological problem resulting from the fact/value distinction. If you're interested, I can send a complex argument that seems to solve the problem. It contains a biconditional proposition whose two sides are simple propositions. One side is an indubitably true statement of fact and the other is a materially equivalent statement of value. I'm not sending the biconditional because it isn't intuitively obvious. It must be argued for.
I would guess that Rand was thinking about these things more in the "rule ethics" way rather than the "case ethics" way. The prudent predator theory necessitates taking each case and deciding whether to predate. But as a general rule, I think it is in the rational self-interest of most people most of the time to be honest. However, of course for some people some of the time, it isn't. And to your point, this is where rational self-interest kind of fails.
However, I would guess that Rand's position *started* from the NAP and concluded that if NAP is held in some way (via social/governmental/etc forces) *then* rational self interest holds morally. That seems likely rather true. The idea that you can derive NAP from rational self interest works, again, only as a general rule, not a universal rule.
But the idea that there is a single "correct" morality you can derive from facts is I think highly flawed. Fundamentally, each individual has a set of preferences and those preferences guide their goals. Different preferences lead to different morality. Its perfectly valid to have preferences for equality of outcome, but they will conflict with anyone who has preferences for survival and quality of life. Preferences are the premises of morality, and there's no accounting for taste.
The prudent predator point is an interesting one. If taken seriously, it suggests that people should be over committed to vengeance/retribution, relative to what pure individual cost/benefit might suggest. That is, being hyper aggressive against violations would make the rational level of violations much lower, as the potential cost (never certain) gets much higher. Which is actually kind of what we see, e.g. through loss aversion.
It is particularly interesting to me because my job market paper looked at the development of behaviors observationally equivalent to respect for property rights via prior ownership in animals and (near) zero intelligence agents. A big outcome was that predatory behavior dropped down a great deal as costs of conflict rise, faster than defensive violence. Short version being that when the level of retaliation is uncertain, violence to take resources becomes a very bad long term strategy. (This is not a great explanation, but it is slightly complicated and I am tired :) )
Thanks, I will have to check that out! I was making a Schelling point claim in the work, that the easily observable asymmetry of current possession makes it easier to for norms to develop that lower violence, and that even without strategic behavior over time that norm becomes self reinforcing as those who fall on the wrong side of it get knocked out of the gene pool. The bigger implication is then that behavior that looks awfully like respect for prior possession property rights becomes just what is done, such that one would try to explain why if one didn't know the agents themselves had no capability of having intentionally gotten to that point.
(Also interestingly why some animal species have anti-property rights on some, but not all cases, whereby new comers are given resources by current possessors as a matter of course.)
George Smith made the strongest argument that Rand's theory of "voluntary government" was in practice no different from anarcho-capitalism.
http://www.anthonyflood.com/smithrationalanarchism.htm
George, by his account, was convinced by Roy Childs' letter to Rand.
I see her point about the coercer living in defiance of reality, trying to "bend" another's will as one might try to "bend" the world to one's advantage. But isn't all life lived in defiance of reality? Reality keeps trying to turn us into dust, and we keep stubbornly refusing.
That is not the same kind of defiance of reality. Rand is talking about ignoring what is real. But you can "defy" reality in the sense of accepting what is while determining to change what will be. (If that sounded vaguely like Kamala Harris, I apologize.)
Just based on the quotes in the essay, she seems to have the idea of a natural order that dictates (or at least constrains) what one ought to do. It sounds very Aristotelean. But then she also has the Nietzschean idea that the true hero defies the natural order and bends it to his will. So, like the rest of us, she's a bundle of contradictions.
That all sounds right to me!
I had a bout of Randianism in my youth. I think it lasted about a year in my teens in which I devoured her books and argued fiercely with libertarian friends. Even at my most enthusiastic I was clear that Rand got things wrong. Her view of free will was one problem area. Another was her epistemology which went down the tired and failed track of looking for certainty. I also could see that her principle clearly led to anarchism. I'm pretty sure I already thought that before reading Roy Child's pellucid essay (probably from talking with Chris Tame who ran the UK's Libertarian Alliance and Alternative Bookshop.
In "Morality and Capitalism: A Dialogue on Freedom," The Moral Imperative is this: "do not compel unjustly." Compulsion is force, threat of force, or fraud. Half the book argues the logical case for The Moral Imperative; obviously the argument cannot be made here.
But if it is granted that The Moral Imperative is right human behavior, then all mandatory taxation is theft, because theft is obviously compelling another rational being. I offer a reasonable and workable means to finance a limited state that does not require the state to compel unjustly. All taxation could and should be strictly voluntary, accomplished by voluntary contribution or voluntary subscription.
Any number of people will assert that voluntary taxation is impractical and unworkable due to the "free rider" problem. I have never once seen anyone asserting the free rider problem produce a scintilla of evidence that the assertion is anything but an assertion. Some economists asserted that no one would ever build a lighthouse privately due to the free rider problem; and yet, lighthouses were in fact built privately. Some people assert that police protection and national defense and courts are public goods in just the same way as lighthouses, and hence, must be financed by mandatory taxation enforced by compulsion of people unjustly. Again, I've never seen evidence of any kind that supports the assertion that without mandatory taxation, we cannot have and would not have police protection, national defense, and courts. Interested reader should read Robert Heinlein's classic novel, "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" for details.
On the other side of the argument, we do have ample evidence that people have contribute to finance such public goods frequently, and we have good reason to believe that most people would not be free riders. I'll offer two examples although a bit of research will turn up legions more. Roads were paved in early Philadelphia financed by voluntary subscription. Volunteer fire departments are the financing a public good in kind.
Mandatory taxation is neither advisable, necessary, or moral for a well functioning society. In fact, society would function better for a host of reasons with strictly voluntary financing of limited government. The case is made a greater length in my little book, for readers interested in the whole argument.
With regard to funding government, Georgist taxation is a form of "charging a fee to enforce a contract" - the contract being one of exclusive right to land, enforced against everybody else.
And as for not taking other people's stuff, there's a whole lot of argument around that point that is being neglected here. The arguments there are that your possessions, as an extension of yourself, should embody your virtues (they should embody you); they significantly apply as much to winning the lottery as stealing somebody else's stuff. The point relies on your relationship with your property as an extension of self, and the ideal, in a sense, is that all of your possessions carry the same personal meaning to you that a sweatshirt you knit yourself might.
Like, you can see that somebody might value a sweatshirt they knit themselves more than they value a sweatshirt they bought; you can see how somebody stealing one versus the other might be the bigger loss. The ideal is, in a sense, that -all- of your possessions so embody yourself. "I spent four hours shoveling coal that I might have this sweatshirt."
A lot of us, meanwhile, are considerably disassociated from the product of our labors; we live surrounded by things we have no personal investment in, which hours or weeks or months or years of our lives were spent in order to acquire. Rand's point relies, in part, on stepping back and appreciating how much we do for ourselves, how much of ourselves we have put into the world, and taking a moment to savor the product of our labor - that the things we enjoy, we enjoy not because of impersonal forces beyond our control, but because we are beings of creation, and we have created. Glory in that this sweatshirt was the product of creation, and that you are a part of that vast creative process.
Without this appreciation, sure, an apple stolen tastes the same as an apple paid for.
"With regard to funding government, Georgist taxation is a form of "charging a fee to enforce a contract" - the contract being one of exclusive right to land, enforced against everybody else."
Wouldn't that logic imply that the government can tax everything you own, as part of the contract for your exclusive right to use it?
It doesn't, but that gets into the weeds of the logic of natural rights.
Very roughly speaking, we can assert a right to a tomato that you have planted, watered, fertilized, and otherwise grown yourself; you have in substantive part created the tomato (mixed your labor with it).
Likewise, we can extend this to an entire field of crops.
But property ownership is a bit broader than this - now you own the rocks a hundred feet below the soil, and can prevent somebody else mining down to get them? That seems a bit odd.
You decide you're going to build a house where your field of crops was. Joe says he wants a house there, too. There's a bit of oddness there, as well - why do you have a prior right over Joe, based on a field of crops that in any case won't exist there anymore?
Georgist taxation is acknowledging the oddness in all of this, and taxes the opportunity cost imposed by land ownership directly; it doesn't tax the tomato, or the field of crops, or the house. It taxes only the opportunity costs - that is, the costs to everyone else that your ownership of the land imposes.
It does not universalize to "all property can be taxed", or even "all opportunity costs can be taxed" - if I grow a tomato, the continual process resulting in my ownership of the tomato does not impose an opportunity cost on you, excepting only that you might have grown a tomato there instead - it is a specific tax on a specific unjustifiable opportunity cost imposed on other people from a very particular philosophical perspective on the natural origin of property rights.
The question of mineral rights is a red herring. How much land you own, how deep, and how far up into the sky, all that is a different question irrelevant to this conversation.
So the issue with the house gets to the issue of Georgist taxation: the house is not entirely separable from the land it is built into. Likewise the land is not separate from the crop currently growing on it. In neither case can you just pick up the house and the crop and move it somewhere else and still leave that value intact. So your claim that the system is taxing the opportunity costs of the land (which are not the costs to everyone else, by the way) that is incorrect on the face, and implies that the taxation is limited to just those costs.
"Oh! We are not taxing your crop, we are just taxing the opportunity costs of the land under it!" says the taxman as he charges you 100x the normal tax rate one month before your crop is to be harvested.
Georgists consistently claim that their taxation scheme is limited, both in scope and scale, but in fact there is no limiting factor on what is being taxed.
Taxation is the moral equivalent of extortion. I would prefer that government--if it is to exist--be financed by voluntary means, such as user fees and freely chosen contributions, just as are businesses and charitable organizations in the private sector. That way we'd get the government people are willing to pay for. An objection is that there are certain public goods, such as national defense, that can't be voluntarily financed because of the free rider problem. So some taxation is a necessary evil. As a general rule, if you subsidize something, you get more of it; if you tax something you get less of it. In my opinion, the worst tax is a tax on labor because (1) it results in there being less unconcealed productive labor and (2) it presupposes that, like a slave, your labor doesn't belong entirely to yourself. Nearly as bad is a tax on capital, which reduces the amount of capital, making labor less productive and low-paying. The least harmful tax seems to be a single tax on land because (1) the tax wouldn't significantly reduce the quantity of land, (2) exclusive ownership of land is harder to justify than almost any other type of property, (3) material wealth originates from land, (4) government already claims ultimate ownership of land through both its powers of taxation and eminent domain, and (5) that would encourage government officials to increase revenues and reduce spending by selling public lands to private individuals, businesses, and charitable organizations (e.g., the Sierra Club), who would be those who value it the most, thus benefiting the general public. Severance and pollution taxes could be imposed to avoid a reduction of the land's value.
On some level, a land tax basically is a user fee. Land is, after all, in an important sense the central thing the government is defending.
Natural fisheries should probably also fall in this bucket. Intellectual property, as well, albeit to a lesser extent.
"It implies that you should be a prudent predator, only violate other people’s rights on those occasions, perhaps rare, when it is in your interest to do so."
Although I think "your interest to do so" has an unmeant hint of deliberate intent, it certainly matches my philosophy. It is why I find the arguments about hanging from the 9th floor balcony and stealing the 25 cent rocket part so annoying. Life is seldom about absolutes. Even walking down a crowded sidewalk makes "hurried" hard to distinguish from "aggressive". I based my anarchy-lite on resolving self-ownership disputes, not violations of some purist absolute NAP.
I know I haven't worded this particularly well. Apoligies.
One possible way to pay for defense is to take up a collection from the original group members, invest it, and pay out of the proceeds. It works for retirees, why not the government?
Thank you, David, for mentioning and linking to Roy Childs letter to Ayn Rand pointing out her logical errors regarding government. I just finished reading it and found his refutation of her arguments very impressive.
The reading of Rand's ethical argument as primarily one of practical consequences is erroneous, though some inconsistencies in her presentation may suggest it. Her position is that personal integrity is one of the highest values, and that any breach in it is harmful to one's self-interest, even if it brings material gains. Her characters illustrate this point. If you cheat and steal, you violate people's rights, and this means you can't support the principle of rights without tying yourself in mental knots. You must increasingly evade the implications of your thinking, or else decide that there's no principle of action beyond what you can get away with. This takes you down the road to viewing the world as dog-eat-dog.
You can offer arguments against this, but it's a far more subtle point than the notion that crime never pays.
1. I was in those discussions in the late 90s, mostly on the IOS (not ARI) side.
2. David Schmidtz does a better job with the Randian argument than Rand does, and aligns with Public choice thinking as well. D.S. -- If I want goal X, then in order to pursue goal X, I also have to preserve my life. Preserving my life is this a necessary precursor goal ... and you can get roughly all Rand's self-choosing goals from that. Kinda like "in order to accomplish my political goals, I have to be elected/re-elected". Cleaner, better solution.
3. The central logical failure is an equivocation regarding LIFE. Rand (or Schmidtz) goes a long way towards "Life as a standard of Value" -- but in those cases, she's using "MY life as a standard of value" -- and then she jumps to Life itself, mine or others. Not properly justified anywhere. English makes it easy to switch meanings mid-argument.
4. I hung out with George Smith, and read the Childs letter, but your Machinery of Freedom was the key shift for me. The smartest objectivists I hung out with in the 90s had reached: "We all agree on what direction we should be heading in today ... let's finish the argument when the government is small enough to drown in a bathtub"
Of the people I argued this with online in Humanities.Philosophy.Objectivism on Usenet, the smartest, indeed the only one who followed the argument for AC and offered a relevant criticism, was Jimbo Wales, later of Wikipedia. I don't know if he still considers himself an Objectivist.
I love Jimbo/ now Jimmy, and was on MDOP. Paul Hsieh, and close friend of Jimmy, now occasionally wiring guest pieces for Glenn Reynolds and volokh. Always insightful, less combative than the rest of us.
It would be interesting to know where the participants in the H.P.O threads I spent time in all are now. I'm pretty sure Jimbo's then girlfriend is still an orthodox Objectivist. I think I recognize Paul Hsieh as a name from those arguments. I don't know how much Jimmy's political views have changed — Wikipedia as an organization is pretty left-wing at present, whether because of or in spite of his influence.
Someone with free time should go back over those threads and research what became of the participants for an article, even, if sufficiently ambitious, a book. An odd angle on the intellectual history of the past forty or fifty years.
MDOP was dominated by folks who eventually worked with IOS / David Kelley's Objectivist splinter group that then spawned the Atlas Society, which Robert Bidinotto was running for a long time.
HPO was a much broader mix of ARI doctrinaire Peikoff / Brooks Objectivists with the MDOP'ers.
Jimbo's then Girlfriend Diana (Mertz-Brickell) Hsieh dated a few folks, including Joshua Zader, then married the Paul Hsieh I was referencing. In the last 5-10 years, Diana and Paul split up, and Diana maybe moved back to California? Paul is near me in Colorado, where he's been for the better part of 20 years.
With IOS fading, more serious Objectivist types went back to the ARI/Peikoff/Brooks side of the world, while a lot of others went in different directions.
A large number of the younger generation of Oists of that generation spent time in LA with first Nathaniel Branden, and then with Brandyn Webb and his sifter folks. Many of them went in the direction of Meditation/Buddhist/Circling/more aggressive "philosophy for living". Spiral Dynamics popped up a bit as well.
The biggest groups I was familiar with were FROG -- Front Range Objectivist Group and the Chicagoland groups that the Enrights were part of.
But the demographics of people attracted to Objectivism in the 80s/90s were more captured by things like futurism and extropianism near 2000, and then post 2005/10, it was the Yudkowskian "Rationalists" that were ascendent.
Yeah...maybe a book.
An example you gave some years ago of a voluntarily funded government was a government that operated casinos. Assuming that the casinos would make a profit large enough to fund (limited) government activities, no taxation would be required. And even in a market with perfect competition, price may not be the only factor for the customers, hence the ability to make a profit without undercutting competitors.
Perhaps interesting to others, perhaps not, but…
While I have no dog in the Obectivist vs anarchist fight, while reading DF brilliantly take apart much of Ayn Rand’s reasoning, it occurred to me that Rand is liked Substack’s Richard Hanania (or more fairly, Hanania is like Rand):
Brilliant and interesting, correct ~85% of the time, but maddeningly, infuriatingly wrong - and dogmatically inflexible about it - ~15% of the time.
“While I believe that a stateless society would be superior to even a limited government I also believe that such a society would not be stable in all environments, have written at some length about circumstances in which it would break down. Under circumstances in which anarchy is not an option I would probably regard a limited government along classical liberal lines, providing police, courts and national defense and funding them by taxation, as the least bad alternative available. It involves some violation of rights, but the alternatives are worse.”
As someone who has read only a small sliver of your writings, thanks so much for this closing paragraph.
You are literally (old school use of that term) the first anarcho-capitalist I’ve ever seen acknowledge “‘the alternatives are worse” point. Bryan Caplan perhaps comes next closest.
I don't recall seeing anything in your blog post with which I disagree. I agree that Rand didn't solve the is/ought problem. I'm unaware of any solution. I regard it as a deontological problem. However, I think some of her premises can be used to solve the related axiological problem resulting from the fact/value distinction. If you're interested, I can send a complex argument that seems to solve the problem. It contains a biconditional proposition whose two sides are simple propositions. One side is an indubitably true statement of fact and the other is a materially equivalent statement of value. I'm not sending the biconditional because it isn't intuitively obvious. It must be argued for.
I would guess that Rand was thinking about these things more in the "rule ethics" way rather than the "case ethics" way. The prudent predator theory necessitates taking each case and deciding whether to predate. But as a general rule, I think it is in the rational self-interest of most people most of the time to be honest. However, of course for some people some of the time, it isn't. And to your point, this is where rational self-interest kind of fails.
However, I would guess that Rand's position *started* from the NAP and concluded that if NAP is held in some way (via social/governmental/etc forces) *then* rational self interest holds morally. That seems likely rather true. The idea that you can derive NAP from rational self interest works, again, only as a general rule, not a universal rule.
But the idea that there is a single "correct" morality you can derive from facts is I think highly flawed. Fundamentally, each individual has a set of preferences and those preferences guide their goals. Different preferences lead to different morality. Its perfectly valid to have preferences for equality of outcome, but they will conflict with anyone who has preferences for survival and quality of life. Preferences are the premises of morality, and there's no accounting for taste.
The prudent predator point is an interesting one. If taken seriously, it suggests that people should be over committed to vengeance/retribution, relative to what pure individual cost/benefit might suggest. That is, being hyper aggressive against violations would make the rational level of violations much lower, as the potential cost (never certain) gets much higher. Which is actually kind of what we see, e.g. through loss aversion.
It is particularly interesting to me because my job market paper looked at the development of behaviors observationally equivalent to respect for property rights via prior ownership in animals and (near) zero intelligence agents. A big outcome was that predatory behavior dropped down a great deal as costs of conflict rise, faster than defensive violence. Short version being that when the level of retaliation is uncertain, violence to take resources becomes a very bad long term strategy. (This is not a great explanation, but it is slightly complicated and I am tired :) )
I've made your loss aversion point in the context of treating rights as the consequence of a structure of mutually recognized commitment strategies:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html
Thanks much for this link. I found it a very rewarding read.
Thanks, I will have to check that out! I was making a Schelling point claim in the work, that the easily observable asymmetry of current possession makes it easier to for norms to develop that lower violence, and that even without strategic behavior over time that norm becomes self reinforcing as those who fall on the wrong side of it get knocked out of the gene pool. The bigger implication is then that behavior that looks awfully like respect for prior possession property rights becomes just what is done, such that one would try to explain why if one didn't know the agents themselves had no capability of having intentionally gotten to that point.
(Also interestingly why some animal species have anti-property rights on some, but not all cases, whereby new comers are given resources by current possessors as a matter of course.)
It occurs to me that I also made the point in my piece on economics and evolutionary psychology as an explanation of the endowment effect:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/econ_and_evol_psych/economics_and_evol_psych.html
One more for the reading list :) Though it seems a bit familiar, I might have actually cited that. (It's been a few years now.)