Give me liberty and give me cheese!

| Thursday, August 4, 2011
A little bit back Tesh suggested that there's some sort of division in America best summarized as Statist vs. Libertarian.

I offer to you the story of cheese and liberty. It is 1940 and Britain needs an army, because of Nazis. Armies need food and cheese is an excellent one, so the British offer this excellent idea: ration and tax cheese, in order to have enough to fight the Nazis. Alas, there are a few too many libertarians. "Cheese and Liberty!" they cry. They explain that liberty, not more statism, is the source of freedom, and it sounds good, so we all agree to resist the oppression of the British government and reject the cheese rations.

There is no army and the Nazis win the war. They in turn take all the cheese. And a few people as well. We write to the Nazis and explain freedom, but they reject the idea, no matter how convincing our arguments. Perhaps we would have been better off with a bit less cheese and a lot less Nazi, but alas, we wanted our liberty, and all of it, now.

Libertarianism is founded on the absurd notion* that we can all just say "freedom and liberty" and it will be so. But it will not. If the government does not tell us what to do, the market will, or the corporation, or the mob boss. People desire power and inevitably some are better able to gather it than others, and from that comes oppression. We cannot eliminate it, but we can minimize it. A representative government can exert power, but in turn the people have power over it.

It's not a nice idea, that we cannot have total freedom, but it is true. Someone or something will always attempt to control us, so what we must do is ensure that we choose carefully, to pick leaders who are powerful enough to protect us from those who are too powerful.

I don't think we're in this situation right now. In fact, we're caught in a worst of both worlds, with corporations taking control of government, and through it, acting as the powerful leader.

This isn't a new idea. Once upon a time Americans opposed both big government and big business. They understood that both can take excessive power, to our detriment. Somehow the narrative was re-written and anything non-government became untouchable. Anything that wasn't government was classified as market, and you cannot question the market.

I like representative systems. Equal representation. This is why I don't buy into the notion of "voting with your wallet", because we clearly do not have equal wallets and never will, since communism doesn't work well beyond very small groups. In other words, wallet voting is unequal and therefore undemocratic. And it's self-perpetuating inequality. If I have ten votes and you have one, do you think I'd vote for anything other than myself? Perhaps I'd vote to give myself more votes.

So how about this for a different polar division: representative vs. non-representative. Now we don't have to make arbitrary distinctions between market and government, but can instead focus on what matters: not being horribly oppressed by non-representative leaders.

* I lied. Libertarianism is actually founded on the popular notion of "why should I care what happens to the sewage that I dump in your drinking water?"

P.S. I would have written about Civ V, but I was playing a game I just got called Homefront. I might write about it instead, because there is a lot to complain about.

4 comments:

Michael said...

The problem is that it's tricky to define what what would make for a truly representative government. You say equal, but do you mean that as in egalitarian or as in fair? These are very different.

In America, we have something approaching an egalitarian representation, where everyone over a certain age who is registered as a citizen gets a vote. If you think of government's role as to tax citizens so as to provide for public goods (an army against the nazi's as in your example) or to redistribute wealth, then that's far from fair.

40% of Americans are net receivers of money from the government, they get back more from social programs than they pay into through taxes. And they have 40% of the voting power. The top 10% of wage earners have 33% of the income, and pay 45% of the taxes. And yet they only have 10% of the voting power. If a group brings 45% of the pie and only has a 10% say in what happens to it, that just leads to moral hazard and is simply unfair, unjust.

I wouldn't claim to be a libertarian, but I'd replace your definition with: A libertarian believes that in the eyes of government, no one should be treated differently from any other, regardless of race, religion, socioeconomic status, sex or sexual preference, health, age, etc. The government's role isn't to redistribute wealth among people to reduce suffering, but to see that when government has to intervene in private life to enforce laws and contracts, it doesn't give unfair advantage to any.

Derek said...

Michael, your arguement doesn't hold up in real life though. It's completely dependent on the idea that votes are completely independent acts, unaffected by outside influence, and lets be honest, only a nutter would agree with that statement. To pretend that the rich and corporations don't have undue influence over our political system is to put the blinders on. If money didn't equate to political power we wouldn't have a perpetual election cycle, lobbyists would be part of the 10% unemployment rate, and financial institutions, large scale food producers, utilities, drug companies and other essential industries wouldn't be running around completely deregulated with no concern for the public wellfare.

By your definition of libertariansim, just about every wall street executive would be serving a long sentence for fraud and larceny, but that doesn't seem to be happening now either. Every time their is an outbreak of a preventable food born illness that happens due to lax regulation, the corporate overseers should be treated the same as an individual who kills through recklessness. All of this made possible by the rich who got our govenment to recognize corporations as having the rights of an individual.

The governments role was to provide education to all so that they may become productive, happy members of society as well to provide a safety net for those who fell through the cracks in an effort to avoid the social stratification seen in so many previous societies. This system only works when 1. the government actually provides adequate education to its citizens, and 2. when corporations act with societies greater good in mind. Both of these are false at the moment requiring a higher level of government interventiion to minimize the stratification that has unstabilized societies since the beginning of time. Obviously education suffers as tax revenue falls, we see that everyday. As for corporations, well they've never inherently valued their employees, but government regulation and unions provided a strong check, and oddly enough our society flourished, see post-war period.

Edawan said...

What's the difference between freedom and liberty ?

Klepsacovic said...

@Michael:
"If you think of government's role as to tax citizens so as to provide for public goods (an army against the nazi's as in your example) or to redistribute wealth, then that's far from fair."
You're right. A functioning police and military provides far more protection to the wealthy, due to having more to lose without them.

But beside that, you seem to be assuming that the distribution of wealth is itself fair, so that any change to it must be unfair. Given the vast disparity in availability of education and childhood nutrition, the current market system is clearly not fair, giving some people huge initial advantages.

"If a group brings 45% of the pie and only has a 10% say in what happens to it, that just leads to moral hazard and is simply unfair, unjust."
First off, this assumes that they actually bring 45% of the pie, rather than simply holding 45% of the pie. Second, you're acting as if government is going to steal everyone's wealth based on voting power, which is simply absurd.

"The government's role isn't to redistribute wealth among people to reduce suffering, but to see that when government has to intervene in private life to enforce laws and contracts, it doesn't give unfair advantage to any."
Government's role is national defense. In the most narrow sense this means military and police. In a broader sense it means maximizing the economic power of the nation, which at times means socialist programs which cause net economic gains. These include things like public education and childhood nutrition, because no one wins if the next generation is stupid and ignorant. But that's for a future post titled; "why the capitalist will be a socialist."

I don't believe government is meant to reduce suffering. But I do believe that perpetuating a system of suffering is not in the interests of anyone except sociopaths. Massive inequality is not efficient or productive. Concentrating wealth is needed for economic progress, but too much concentration has the opposite effect, stifling progress.

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