The Trouble With Libertarian Activism
by N. Stephan Kinsella <mailto:Stephan@…>
I recently ran across The Need to be Anarchists
<http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/001823.html> , by big-L Libertarian
Carl Milsted. The piece provides a good illustration of some of the
dangers of relying on utilitarian arguments and being overly focused
with "strategy" and tactics. And it demonstrates the importance of
relying on principle and carefully distinguishing the pursuit and
advocacy of truth and rights from activist concerns.
Milsted, who runs the website "Holistic Politics
<http://www.holisticpolitics.org/> " (res ipsa loquitur), argues that we
libertarians are uncomfortable with government because "Taxation is
theft". On the other hand if we "call[] for no government" we are
"subject[ed] to ridicule." So we libertarians face a dilemma: damned if
we do, damned if we don't.
Apparently, being subjected to ridicule is undesirable - perhaps it is
not a good way to "get things done." (See the activist mindset creeping
into a question of what our rights are; whether aggression is
justified?) So Milsted wants to cut the Gordian knot by abandoning the
ridiculous opposition to theft and state, assuming he can find a way to
justify it. Here we have the activist or tactical mindset making Milsted
look for a way to justify theft: here is where utilitarianism enters the
picture. Both activism and utilitarianism push principle to the side as
a nagging inconvenience. There is no room for principle in the
ultra-pragmatic ever-shifting weighing and balancing of utilitarianism;
and activists want results, and now!, damnit, not principles.
Milsted concludes that we have to "allow some theft to enable the
minimal state that maximizes liberty." He bases this conclusion on the
idea that if a given act of theft creates enough surplus value to be
able to "adequately compensate" the victim, then it's worth doing and
justified - the victim is made whole, and the rest of society is made
better off. For example, in the case of national defense, or "country
roads," because of "economies of scale," government can do these things
more cheaply, so that, if the majority assesses a tax on everyone to
spread the burden of supporting the new defense system. This is theft of
the minority. However, suppose that the economies of scale are such that
this tax is less than half of what people would have had to pay for
defense on their own. Now we have theft with adequate compensation.
Aside: I have long noticed that many brash young libertarians of the
activist flavor who are not all that interested in theory and What Has
Gone Before are - perhaps influenced by Rand? - often unfamiliar with
the great body of libertarian literature and want to reinvent the wheel
from a clean slate (many engineers
<http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/004634.html> , in my
experience, take a similar pragmatic, isolated, almost anti-intellectual
approach in their views on politics). Now I don't know if this
observation applies to our current author, but he does seem blithely
unaware that his stab at theory is nothing more than a rudimentary
version of what utilitarian legal theorist Richard Epstein proposed in
his book Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674867297/qid=1138141642/sr=2-1/ref=p
d_bbs_b_2_1/103-5778968-7205468?/lewrockwell/> .
Anyway, Milsted tries to justify his reasoning by appealing to Rothbard:
In the Bible, a thief was supposed to pay double. Should he do that, he
can go free. Murray Rothbard called for the same principle
<http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/thirteen.asp> in The Ethics of
Liberty
<http://www.mises.org/store/Ethics-of-Liberty-The-P238C18.aspx?AFID=1> .
In other words, theft is morally acceptable if all victims are paid back
double.
Milsted's "in other words" does not follow from Rothbard's reasoning,
nor is it correct. Rothbard was merely arguing for a certain standard
for restitution after a crime has happened. As should be quite obvious,
specifying the standard for damages payable for a crime most certainly
does not mean the crime is "morally acceptable." If it did, this would
imply that if someone is trying to take my property I have to let them
if they offer me enough money. But this is untrue. The standards for
what can be done to stop a crime and what should or may be done after it
is too late to stop it are different. If someone tries to take my car, I
may use force against them to stop them; I would argue it is justified
to kill them, if necessary, to prevent the crime. After the crime is
committed, however, killing the criminal won't prevent it, so, arguably,
the only remedy left is some form of restitution. This does not mean
that the restitution justifies the crime, however.
In fact, if theft is morally acceptable if enough restitution is paid,
the same reasoning would apply to all crimes, including murder, rape,
and torture. By this reasoning, if a billionaire can pay your heirs
millions of dollars in compensation for torturing you to death against
your will, his act of murder is morally acceptable.
Here Milsted perhaps unwittingly takes utilitarianism to a reductio ad
absurdum, saving his critics the trouble. As has been pointed out many
times, the utilitarian standard would permit, for example, a very
desperate rapist to rape a woman of loose morals, since the damage to
her is arguably small (by utilitarian standards) and the benefit to him
great, providing a net benefit to society; or a rich man to be taxed to
support the poor, since the money means so much more to the destitute
than to the one rich man. And so on. Utilitarians usually deny the
aptness of such reductios, but Milsted here seems to embrace it.
In my view, our author's argument here demonstrates the perils of
thinking in utilitarian terms - you start thinking that an act of crime
is okay so long as some people benefit from the crime more than the
victim suffers. The focus on individual rights is lost, as is the
distinction between victim and aggressor.
In any event, the appeal to utilitarianism is problematic on several
fronts. It is, first and foremost, ethically bankrupt because it is an
unproven, and indeed, false, assertion that it is justifiable to rob one
man if the robbery benefits others. It is also economically incoherent
because the subjective and ordinal nature of value makes it impossible
even in principle to ever determine whether a given invasive action
results in a "net" benefit or "surplus" (see on this Rothbard's Toward a
Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics
<http://www.mises.org/rothbard/toward.pdf> ).
Moreover, even if we assume away the ethical and methodological problems
with using a utilitarian standard, it would be completely unworkable in
practice, given the corrupt nature of government; and indeed, as with
the utilitarian case for intellectual property
<http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1763> , those who assert this or
that measure is a "net benefit" don't ever make a serious attempt to
show that it really is. Instead, they say, "defense" is "obviously" a
public good, and satisfies the test; "roads" are "easy cases"; and so
on. They can never tell you in dollar or util terms what the alleged
surplus is; they just know there is one. And they never make a serious
attempt to take into account all the costs. For example, even if
utilitarianism made sense, and even if we assume that national defense
and public roads led to surpluses that could be used to compensate the
victims (Epstein analogizes this to measures that increase the "size of
the pie"), why assume that the state, once given the power to engage in
wealth transfers, will restrict itself only to "efficient" takings?
Surely there is a real risk - even inevitability
<http://www.mises.org/hoppeintro.asp> - that the state will not
restrict itself to the few things it "ought" to be doing.
Additionally, even if the state engages only in "efficient" activities,
what about mushrooming costs of these activities? Let's say national
defense benefits citizens more than the taxes to pay for it cost them
(and that it would be more expensive to buy defense on the free market).
Does this still hold true a decade down the road, when the state decides
to use its restless army for imperialist ambitions? Or when the use of
the army provokes a war, which leads to the state imposing conscription?
And so on.
In other words, utilitarianism is both ethically bankrupt as well as
economically incoherent (see pp. 12-15 of this article
<http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf> for further
references). It cannot serve to justify theft.
The focus on tactics and strategy also leads to confusion about
libertarian principles. Writes our author,
Libertarians have a serious dilemma. Either we make a Machiavelli [sic]
trade-off and allow some theft to enable the minimal state that
maximizes liberty, or we plunge ahead calling for no government and hope
for the best, based on some daring theoretical extrapolations. The
former makes us uneasy. The latter subjects us to ridicule. 99+% of the
people consider anarchy to be too risky to be attempted.
Not surprisingly for a big-L Libertarian, Milsted's focus is on
strategy, tactics, activism, and rhetoric. Such a focus often leads
libertarians to confuse "what persuades people" with "what is true." We
principled libertarians have no problem recognizing the difference
between what is right and true, with what is likely and what we can get
away with. They are different questions. But strategists have trouble
seeing past strategy and "what works". If a principles-based libertarian
says, "public education is unjustified and ought to be abolished," a
typical reply of a tactician-activist is "but that is not practical" or
"but that is not going to sell with the average person". In other words,
the activist makes the mistake of confusing what will sell with what is
true. But the committed activist too often relegates something that will
not sell now, today, as useless, and in effect as untrue - or, more to
the point, he adopts the view that what is true does not really matter;
only results matter. Sure, both inquiries - what is the best strategy to
achieve liberty? what is liberty? - have their own value and roles. But
they are not the same.
In Milsted's case, his activist-tactical approach leads him to mistake
the nature of anarchism and libertarianism. To be an anarchist is not to
"plunge ahead calling for no government and hope for the best, based on
some daring theoretical extrapolations." Only the activist would think
this way, since he thinks in terms of things we advocate and try to
achieve. But anarchists per se are not "in favor of" some "alternative
system." That's not what it means to be an anarcho-capitalist.
Rather, as I have pointed out elsewhere
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/kinsella/kinsella15.html> , to be an
anarcho-capitalist is simply to recognize (a) aggression is unjustified;
and (b) even the minarchist state necessarily commits aggression (and is
therefore unjustified). It does not mean one predicts such a situation
will occur, or "is workable," etc. It only means that the anarchist
libertarian opposes all forms of aggression: both private aggression
committed by criminals, and institutionalized aggression the state is
able to perpetrate only because a large percentage of the population
erroneously regards it as legitimate.
In other words, if one is not an anarchist, this means one either holds
that states do not commit aggression, or maintains that aggression is
(in some cases) justified. Admirably, Milsted does not try to evade
this. He acknowledges that the state commits aggression. It is theft he
is trying to justify, after all. He simply thinks aggression in some
cases is justified; such a view is also common among socialists and
criminals. As I noted above, his reasons in support of justified
aggression are confused. On the one hand, his reasoning seems to be
based on a desire to avoid being "subjected to ridicule." This is
obviously not a justification for violent invasion of others' bodies or
property. Certainly not one that will satisfy libertarians who oppose
aggression as a matter of principle. His argument also relies on
utilitarian reasoning, and rests on the false assumption that a crime
can be justified ahead of time by the criminal paying the proper toll.
(See also this post by Manuel Lora
<http://www.vanguardist.org/archives/242-Atomic-libertarianism-is-nonsen
se.html> , critiquing Milsted's political gradualism and
anti-radicalism.)
I don't say Milsted's attempt to justify a small bit of aggression is
evil or insincere. In fact it's common and probably sincere. I think he
would like to reduce aggression, but he is willing to break some eggs to
make an omelet. However, if libertarianism is at root about the
opposition to aggression and the desire for peace, harmony, and
cooperation - as I believe it ought to be - the proposed normalization
of theft simply isn't libertarian.
January 26, 2006
Stephan Kinsella [send him mail <mailto:Stephan@…> ]
is an attorney in Houston. His website is www.StephanKinsella.com.
Copyright (c) 2006 LewRockwell.com
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