While composing a response to William “Bill” Vallicella’s recent posts on presuppositionalism (starting with “The Holocaust Argument for the Existence of God”), his Substack post, “Notes on David Mamet,” arrived in my inbox. In that post, Bill takes issue with what this distinguished playwright and self-described conservative said about government and taxes.
I will evaluate, not the dramatist’s claims, but Bill’s dismissal of them. Bill shows no awareness of, let alone respect for, the well-developed case that has been made for a philosophical position (with which non-philosopher Mamet loosely identified himself in an interview).
That is, I’m interested in whether Bill fairly represented, not Mamet, but the view that Bill, the self-described conservative, excoriates as “absurd.”
I stipulate that I’m ripping out of context (a context available to interested readers who take the link above) these sentences of his:
Conservatives . . . . are not anarchists because they accept the moral legitimacy of the State. Conservatives are law and order types, but there can be no law and order without a coercive state of [sic] apparatus that forces people to do what they are often uninclined to do. Conservatives believe in a strong national defense. They want the nation’s borders to be secure. All of this requires local, state, and Federal government. Conservatives are not libertarians because they understand that culture matters and that not every question is an economic one.
The last implication is, apparently, that for libertarians, either culture doesn’t matter, or every question is an economic one (or both). As someone who read and befriended Murray Rothbard 40 years ago, I never met a libertarian who held either belief. Whom did Bill have in mind?
The conservatives whom I’m sure Bill and I admire have cared a great deal about justice. Thoughtful conservatives, when confronted with argument and evidence that suggests that the way they go about establishing law and order, a strong national defense, and secure borders has offended justice—that is, that the policies they sincerely intended to secure those goods are unjust—don’t retort, “So what!” Rather, they examine the libertarian’s premises to see whether they’re (a) true or false and/or (b) linked validly or not in support of his conclusion. Bill neither did this nor pointed his readers to those who have.
Bill’s working definition of “state” (or “government”) is close to Rothbard’s:
. . . I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a State.[1]
But what is Bill’s argument for justifying the state? I ask, because it’s not clear to me (and hasn’t been for four decades) how a conservative’s “acceptance” of the state’s legitimacy comports with other aspects of his morality, say, the prohibition of theft or of compulsory labor. Bill seems to appeal implicitly to the reader’s practical sensibilities. We all want x, but since y is a necessary condition of x, we are bound on pain of contradiction to support y.
(If it happens that if we get some of y, we also get a lot more than we bargained for, much of it as counterproductively irrational as it is distasteful, well, we can chalk that up to human nature, the contingencies of history, the way of the world—in any case there’s no other way to arrange our affairs and you’re a fool to try to find one. Now, pay your taxes!)
Bill’s conservatives seem to have anesthetized themselves to the logical pain to which their bullet-biting apologia for the state, an intrinsically rights-violating institution, commits them. “You want to protect property rights?,” they ask. “All right, but first we’ll need to violate them a teensy-weensy bit. Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing!”
That is, until there’s a federal income tax, a central bank that adulterates your money to finance the welfare-warfare state, thereby distorting market signals, which leads to a society-upending market crash, and before you know it, you’re trillions in debt. But, hey, what’s the non-statist alternative?
“My God, how on earth will we have roads?!”
Every good or service that Bill seems to think only a state can provide has arisen on markets. State-monopolization, with its attendant higher costs and lower quality (and moral decline), follows like the night the day. He also writes:
Only a lunatic extremist would think every cent paid in taxes was wasted [as Mamet had off-handedly averred]. And surely no conservative would maintain such an absurd position. We need government, and government needs to be funded. You might say that such funding does not require taxation of any sort. If you believe that, I invite you to work out such a funding scheme.
Well, this lunatic extremist for one thinks it was Bill’s duty to ascertain whether such a scheme has already been worked out only to return from his search emptyhanded.
Again, what we need is not “government,” but the services it has monopolized (at lower quality and higher costs) via the moral hazard of compulsory taxation, the proceeds of which are haphazardly, if at all, allocated solely to those targets. Bill’s conservatives seem to prefer to be stuck with the proposition that government must violate property rights in order to protect them.
The U. S. Department of Education, for example, is a creature of the American government, but unless one is an educrat, one cannot credibly claim a need for it. But that’s just one of the many rackets that government makes possible, even those ostensibly involved in defense, police, and courts. (The military-industrial complex, anyone?) There’s nothing “absurd” about maintaining the view that “every cent paid in taxes is wasted” even if tax receipts occasionally pay for things you like and even need (but with infinitely long strings attached).
The expenditure of tax dollars represents a waste of scarce resources in the economic sense: spending the loot mulcted from the hapless citizen is the opposite of investment: it diverts scarce resources away from investment in the enterprises that actors on markets prefer.
If however, one supports a “coercive state apparatus that forces people to do what they are often uninclined to do,” then their preferences be damned. Uncle Sam knows better.
Every socially necessary service or function that’s ever been monopolized by government (defense, police, courts, etc.) was originally provided by market actors. There have been many volumes about such “funding schemes,” and Bill would have clarified his position by evaluating their arguments instead of resorting to invective (e.g., “lunatic extremist” and “absurd”).
I recognize that the probability of peaceful cooperators arranging their political affairs “statelessly” (even dealing with violent noncooperators that way) is, of course, low. Practical considerations, however, which incline me to want to vote for Donald Trump for a third time next year, have no bearing on the defensibility of the anarcho-capitalist proposal.
Suggested Reading:
I’ve found the following authors and their works useful for my own thinking and believe others, including Bill, would also benefit from considering them.
Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)
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- Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (1962)
- For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973)
- Anatomy of the State (1974)
- The Ethics of Liberty (1982; with an introduction by Hoppe, 1998)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe (b. 1949)
Note
[1] Murray Rothbard, “Society without a State,” The Libertarian Forum, VII:1, January 1975, 3-7. Text available on my old site. Readers interested in exploring the subject further should at least read this essay, even if they ignore the reading list appended to this post.