Tuesday

"Rothbard famously observed that one could uncover the libertarian position on X by imagining a gang of thugs carrying out the state action in question." Thomas Woods, Real Dissent.

It's a good example. The libertarian basically asks, "If you wouldn't tolerate your neighbor doing X, Y, or Z to you, why would you tolerate the government doing X, Y, or Z to you?"

There are various responses to the parallel that I respect. For starters, render unto Caesar what is Ceasar's. Also: Government is part of human society; every human society has some sort of governing structure, and some level of autonomy must be sacrificed to the structure in order for it to be effective. Also: Government is ordained by God.

Those responses are apt, but in today's environment of the mass State, they all fall short. Way short. Render unto Caesar? Sure, but Caesar didn't reach into every day lives with reams and reams of laws and regulations. You paid a tax or two, and you were left alone. Today, you pay taxes upon taxes (income, inheritance, property, sales, excise) then pay additional disguised taxes through wealth-shifting schemes like Obamacare. And then you incur expenses in the form of money (e.g., complying with vehicle air emission requirements), time (e.g., renewing your drivers license), and stress (e.g., completing and filing tax returns) in an effort to comply with all the laws.

Some level of government is inevitable in every human society? Absolutely, but the reach and expansiveness of the government structure in the age of our mass State is a far, far cry from the governing structure of, say, the local Kiwanis Club or even of the Bourbons.

Government is ordained by God? Yes (Romans 13), but so is everything. That doesn't make everything right and it certainly doesn't make every government right, as we know from Nazi Germany and from one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 8):

And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king.

And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.

Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;

That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the LORD.

And the LORD said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king.

There's also a response to Woods/Rothbard's example that I don't respect: "We live in a democracy, so when government does X, Y, and Z, we are basically doing X, Y, or Z to ourselves." I don't respect that position because (i) it's so patently false that you'd have to be full-on imbecile to believe it, and (ii) it's the fiction that dupes us into accepting the ongoing raping of middle America that is turning Washington DC into the Capitol of Panem. By consoling ourselves that we are raping ourselves, we somehow think that makes it better, though a brief mental excursion into the metaphor quickly allows a person to discern that it's not better.

In any event, the Woods/Rothbard example is highly useful for non-libertarians to understand the libertarian mindset. It's also a useful mental exercise that, I think, allows a person to think more clearly about what exactly is happening in the modern world.