Conversaton with a Minarchist

I had a go-round with Dave Budge this weekend – check it out there if you’ve a mind for repetition, and grandiosity on a grand scale.

This is far too long for the ordinary reader. It’s a response to Budge, nothing more. The rest of you, get on with your day.

Budge is a dogmatist – that much is clear. By that I mean he that he gets his ideas from books, is sure they are right, and seldom analyzes why they go wrong in the real world. In fact, his ideas do not go wrong in the real world. The real world goes wrong, and the reason is government.

He’s full of it. There are two people I have read who have taken philosophical input and real world output and come to the conclusion that since output is bad, the underlying philosophy is crap. They are Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. Can you guess where each falls on Budge’s scale of worthiness? He holds them in contempt.

Budge claims to have read all of the classical philosophers – and says that he arrived at his outlook, which he calls “minarchist” when it is not “libertarian” (which is apparently not at all like “objectivist”). He’s drawing a fine distinction here – he’s only saying that that governs best which governs least. It’s not a complicated thing, but Budge does not like to be counted among the ordinary, and so goes to great lengths to set him apart.

“Minarchist” reminds me of a guy I used to work nights with in a grocery store when I was a teenager – I was a Catholic – this guy was a pompous ass, and his religion? Bahá’í. Oh – he wasn’t all that different from the rest of us, no great believer anyway, but could not stand the thought of being ordinary. So he was Bahá’í. In the same vein, Budge is minarchist –

Somewhere in the comments I take a shot at intellectuals, and from that Budge concluded that I am anti-intellectual. I’ll cop to that with a huge caveat – there is a difference between intellectuals, per se, and very smart people who are also original thinkers. I separate the two – Budge is a very smart person, but he is not an original thinker by any means. He cannot stand being ordinary, and so goes to great lengths to set himself apart from us.

Most intellectuals have only their thoughts to sell, and are drawn to people who have the money to pay people to think. So most intellectuals end up in service of power, thinking thoughts that please and justify power. That’s why we have Heritage and CATO and all of them – intellectuals serving power.

I said that Budge, know it or not, serves power. But he doesn’t work for power, so it’s not true. He makes his living doing something else that wealthy people like – thinking up ways to preserve and grow other people’s wealth. He’s a financial planner. There’s not much difference.

Anyway, it got too long over there, so I decided to answer the latest salvo here instead of there. I really have better things to do on a Monday, but the gauntlet is there.

First, I say that in characterizing his view that

Property (wealth accumulation) is the ultimate freedom from which all other freedoms follow. Disagree? And people who accumulate wealth also accumulate wealth and power. And it is wrong to tax wealth to any degree beyond services returned for those taxes. What part of that you got a problem with?

He has only one small problem with it – he thinks other freedoms are important too. However,

But we should have the unabridged right to pursue wealth accumulation if we wish.

I’m on the other side of that divide – I side with Justice Louis Brandeis, who said We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.” Budge and I take different roads at this one juncture, as I explain in my comments:

Wealth accumulates and wants to preserve itself (enter the financial planners whose job it is to preserve wealth), it sees taxation as a form of confiscation, and seeks to prevent it. To do so it must take control of government.

Once wealth is in control of government, government itself becomes a tool for wealth. Having this power, government refuses to control the wealthy sectors of society, and we end up with monopolies and giant corporations without any legal restrains applied to them. They naturally think globally, as resources are global, and so it follows that government as a servant of wealth sends marines to foreign lands to serve the needs of wealth. Hence, Iraq.

Here’s Smedley Butler, who spent his life serving wealth as a marine:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Now, Budge doesn’t favor these interventionist wars or government protecting wealth. He just doesn’t realize that the ideas he espouses, foremost the uninhibited right to accumulate wealth, are the initial actions that set this chain of events in motion.

It reminds me of a movie called “Forget Paris”, with Billy Crystal and Debra Winger – he’s a basketball referee and at one point she tells him about soccer riots in Latin America where a referee was killed. Says Crystal, “See now, I’m against that.”

Budge is against everything I listed above. He just doesn’t know he is part of it.

You haven’t been listening these years. I have said repeatedly that the biggest dangers to capitalism are capitalists. Capitalists don’t want free markets, they want to control them. This is antithetical to everything libertarian. Von-Mises, Hayek, Rand, Freidman, Rothbard and every member of every branch of libertarianism have said the same thing.

He is dogmatic to a fault, and blind as a stone. He’s also against referees being killed at soccer matches.

Secondly, I have said repeatedly that some level of progressive taxation is justifiable. What I’ve also said is that confiscatory marginal tax rates are immoral.

This is disingenuous – he does not mean “progressive” when he says that some level is justifiable. What he means is that wealthy people tend to consume more government services than regular people, and so should have to pay for it. But he is forthright in saying that any taxation beyond that level is “confiscatory”. He doesn’t realize it, but he is saying that we should really have no taxation at all, as we are all just bartering for services, dollar for dollar.

I won’t go far down this road, as I have already lost every reader save one, but taxation is more than just paying for services received. It is a social mechanism, and reflects many social goods – for one, wealth that is accumulated is usually done without regard to externalities, for another, extremes of wealth and poverty produce tyranny. Also, there is the matter of the commons – things that we all share. We need an educated and healthy work force, we need to sift through the population and educate the next generation of high achievers, and we need to guarantee a good standard of living for all people who are able to work and who do work. We’ve had that debate. As you can see by what he just wrote above, our differences are intractable.

You think that European socialism has struck a better balance. A better balance for whom.

I know what he means – he’s talking about his client base now, the wealth accumulators and preservers. They don’t do so well in Europe as here. They’ve got a problem. Tough shit.

Now, on to the grandiosity, as we meet the man who walks with kings yet has not lost the common touch. Bear with me on this:

You have no idea what makes me happy in life or what makes me tick. You don’t know that I have minors in both music composition and English lit. You don’t know that if I could have a do over of my life I’d hope to be a Chef. You don’t know my favorite authors are J.D. Salinger and P.G. Wodehouse (as he is one of Chris Hitchens as well) and my favorite poets include T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman. You don’t know that the book that had the most profound influence on my life was On The Road. In other words, you don’t know me. You’re too busy stuffing me and everyone else into a box. I’ll say it again, your [sic] a bigot.

I’ll spare the reader all the things I like, the authors who give me pleasure. But ‘On the Road’ and Dave Budge are miles apart – think of the the beat generation, the sense of futility and hopelessness that novel leaves behind. The emptiness it addresses is not filled by wealth accumulation. Not hardly. I think the book was lost on Dave Budge.

You tell us were wrong and our theories end in disaster. Well, unless you can tell us why that’s so beyond “absolute power corrupts absolutely” your opinions are vapid. We, as a society, learn and develop social sciences so we can learn from history. We build economic theories with history as data. We look to learn from mistakes with all of those “ethereal pretenses” to find better ways to live. And you do to but you’re too obtuse to even see it. You tell us that the evidence for single payer health care is profound. Where did you get that data? From economists? You assert that high marginal tax rates don’t hurt growth. Did you pull that our of [sic] the air? You see, Mark, you grab for the same kind of straws that the rest of us do as we try to make sense of life but you stop short when you’re satisfied. Then you tell all of us you’re right and we stupid for looking further.

I don’t think I have ever called Budge stupid, but you might surmise from his brush with Kerouac that he does lack self-awareness. The evidence for single-payer is profound and but mere statisticians who measure public health and the cost thereof, and who have shown us that USer’s health system does not stack up well against other countries. He’s implying that I don’t see the value of economists because they too gather and interpret this information. Again, it’s a Kerouac-like experience for him, as he doesn’t see that I disdain not economists, but rather economists in service of wealth.

You’ve never made the moral argument for socialism – even European Socialism – besides some superficial pap about “we’re all in it together.” At the same time you’ve told me that we shouldn’t just be handing people money. Which is it?

I don’t recall ever saying to him that “we are all in it together”, as he is not part of us, so the statement is an oxymoron. And I am not a “socialist” in the dictionary sense, in that I don’t believe that government ought to own the industrial base. It ought to do the stuff it does best, and leave everything else to the private sector. I said “European Socialism” in the sense that they had “struck the right balance” – between what and what? He didn’t ask. Socialism and capitalism. Enough socialism to rein in the excesses of capitalism.

Western Europe has a shoddy history – millions upon millions died in its colonies of starvation and murder. Those countries that were colonized still suffer – those that avoided it (or broke free), are strong today. The wars they fought among themselves were on a scale that Muslims and Pushtans cannot imagine. The last war they fought – World War II, finally got us to a point where they realized that our power to destroy had gotten too big. It left them in ruins, and too weak to hang on to their colonies. They backed off. They settled down. Social movements thrived, religion ebbed. They built sustainable societies based on social welfare systems that promote the general health and well being.

It’s far from perfect. Europe still benefits from the use of forced labor and cheap resources of de facto colonies now called independent countries. And they still have that warlike impulse – witness the Falklands and Serbia. It’s a balancing act. Nothing in this world is perfect, but generally, people in Europe have more opportunities to live happy lives than we do here because they don’t have to worry about the cost of health care and education. As a result, taken as a whole, Western Europe is a far better place to live than here. As is Canada.

Where do we draw boundaries between your property and mine?

Spoken like a man who truly cannot distinguish between forest and trees. He won’t like the answer – there is more ours than mine. Your success has as much to do with what all of us gave you than what you did for yourself. Right wing white guys, excuse me, minarchists, have a hard time seeing this.

How do we define “the greater good?”

We talk about it, we debate it, we argue incessantly. But we don’t deny its existence, as is the wont of the minarchist/libertarian/objectivist.

What economic systems combine both sustainability and a right balance between equity and efficiency?

I wait for moments like this. Efficiency. Slavery was efficient. Use of sweatshops, the kissing cousin, is efficient. Trade barriers are inefficient. Protectionism is inefficient, and inhibits wealth accumulation. I don’t care.

How do we limit power without limiting freedom?

Are you getting the mindset here? The dogmatist cannot think in terms of bounds and limits. Complete freedom is impossible, not even desirable. We must place limits on it. I must pay my taxes, respect my neighbor’s boundaries, and look out for my brother. We, all of us, acting through our government, need to limit the formation of huge pockets of wealth, which are anti-democratic. Sucks, Dave.

You pose policy solution on many matters but unless you address the fundamentals (like the morality of wealth redistribution) you can’t make a case. And you don’t. In that way you’re an empty suit.

I think I deal quite forthrightly with the morality of wealth redistribution, but coming from a guy who started out his lecture by saying that the right to uninhibited wealth accumulation is a precious freedom, I don’t think I’m going to make much progress. Dave Budge is anti-social, basically. It’s not an uncommon trait on the far right – this disdain he has for ordinary people who don’t accumulate wealth, or even want to. There’s a contempt in him for ordinary humans, which takes us back to his desire to set himself apart from the rest of us. It’s true of most right wingers, although most of the only imagine themselves to be something special. Dave, in looking at himself, thinks he is really on to something important.

Now, tell where my economic policies have led to bad outcomes. I don’t care what examples you use. Just be specific. Enlighten me about both my policies and their outcomes. I bet you can’t and you’ll tell me you won’t.

At long last, the end, and his point. Libertarianism leads to good outcomes. I say it leads to bad outcomes.

There’s a small problem here – libertarianism (or f****** minarchism – whatever) is never put in to practice full throttle. We only get it in drips and drabs. We got it in California with electric power deregulation, and disaster followed. We got it with repeal of Glass Steagall, and Greenspan’s refusal to regulate the financial markets, and disaster followed. People – even those in public service who appear to follow the creed, know better. Libertarians are tools, means to other ends. Reagan/Bush used libertarian pretenses to lower taxes to enable wealth accumulation because they wanted wealth accumulation – not because it’s a societal good, but rather because it is good for wealthy people. Untaxed wealth has led us to economic bubbles and countrysides marred with hillside mansions even as ordinary people are making less each year while producing more. Worldwide, it leads to imperialism, as the resources of weaker countries are controlled by stronger ones. Wealth begets an insatiable drive to preserve wealth and to capture that belonging to others.

We live in a world where resources are fairly well evenly distributed, but not controlled. It’s like the Parker Brothers Monopoly board, where luck plays a great role, but wild-eyed accumulation in the beginning usually leads to control of the whole board in the end. Most people aren’t like that – only a few are, and their freedom to accumulate means very little to me. We don’t need them, they are harmful. They don’t make our world turn, they are not carrying us on their shoulders. Rand was wrong. Dead wrong. So is Budge.