Premise Checking Chris Trotter: Mining, Protest, Indigenous Rights, Externalities, Free Markets.

In his latest column, Chris Trotter has written on what he sees as a paradox within free markets. The below post is my rebuttal. (Minor qualification: it was written on a sunny Tuesday afternoon over a bottle of Mud House pinot gris, so is possibly wordier than otherwise.)

* * *

Chris, you've gone beyond question begging to premise begging, signified even in the language used: your premise is phrased entirely in the coercive paradigm of the Left, therefore using a lexicon anathema to a peace loving, force hating, free marketer, indeed, you’ve written your post in terms that are irrelevant to the thinking of free marketers. Your post demonstrates the paradox is in your thinking, not in free markets.

From the beginning you set up a hollow straw man when you set your premise as follows:

For prosperity to be guaranteed, argued the free marketeers, the power of the state must be curtailed, and its interfering hands forcefully removed from the economic levers.

The paradox of the free market lies in the political implications of those two words: “curtailed” and “forcefully”.

You then argue how, in your opinion, free markets 'paradoxically' require the use of state force, using as your proof the legal clampdown on protest against deep sea drilling off the east coast of New Zealand, to protect the activities of the big corporations involved. To surmise same, you plainly do not understand a free market, and the misunderstanding is on a more fundamental level than the usual Left confusion between our current crony capitalist systems, and true laissez faire capitalism (which is as sensible as comparing sea horses to horses).

I am a free marketer, thus  a classical liberal, thus a libertarian, thus a minarchist, which is to say I advocate a constitutional republic wherein the role of state is only to protect the individual from the initiation of force or fraud imposed by other individuals, groups, or most especially, government. That is, to uphold a transparent, non-arbitrary, rule of law (including a civil and criminal legal system), based at bottom always on a property right.

In the context of the above there is first no question of having to ‘curtail’ government, or 'forcefully' remove government from the economic levers - though that latter point, incidentally, and only slightly off topic, shows where your thinking is further wrong in your premise setting: you, as with Keynesian socialism, are adrift from reality at the get-go in your illusion held regarding supposed economic aggregates, for there is no macro in economics, there are no 'levers'; the free market is merely an expression of the needs and desires of the individuals in a society, and the meeting place where such needs and desires are voluntarily, peacefully resolved  – a free market exists in its workings only on the micro level, and with such a complexity, the oaf central planner will always destroy it. That's precisely why governments thinking they can 'pull levers' cause so much damage in the lives of individuals.

Um, returning to my point :)

A properly constituted - both meanings - government doesn't have to be 'forced' or 'curtailed', because nor does it ‘force’ or ‘curtail’ a society; if it has come to that point, then it's already outside the free marketers premise of what a limited government is about: property rights. Your paradox – which I’ll soon define in concrete terms via the example you use - comes from your misconception of the ethos of a free market: philosophically and politically there are no contradictions such as you suggest in the workings of free markets, per se, as they exist on voluntarism, not the use of force that the entirety of the Left politick is founded on. Indeed it's their lack of contradiction that brought me over to the politics (libertarianism/classical liberalism), philosophy (are you sitting Chris, Objectivism), and economics (laissez faire) of a freedom ethic, intellectually; and driven to that by the glaring, lethal contradictions in the Left.

In other words, free markets are about peaceful, non-coerced living; a peace that is not possible under the Left - look at history. I’d go so far as to say the true expression of the 60's hippy/peace movement is laissez faire classical liberalism, not Left thuggish Big-Bossyism? In your Left paradigm the state is always the prime mover, master of all, in mine, my servant, protecting my property and my person only.

Regarding the specific case of deep sea mining you mention, in order to get to the instance of your paradox, we might in many ways have more agreement than you think: as I said above, the rule of law issues turn on what is considered a property right, and I think the property rights of indigenous peoples, or rather how our social democracies have dealt with them, are, frankly, a mess (a mess which has arisen historically from colonialism). I pretend to give no answers to those issues here. There is also the thorny issue of externalities such as Green Peace are concerned with, on which I am starting to think more and more, and with some trepidation, given the slippery slope they represent into subjectivity and away from an objective law. (The only solution for bringing externalities into the property rights field where they belong is good science, and then from there to the valuation problem). But my point here is you are confusing the debate over the role of government in a peaceful society, the nature of a property right, and the importance of property rights for a free society, with the nature of what a free market is, and the structuring of a properly constituted limited government that concerns itself only with the issues of rights. Your paradox is in the Reagan quotation you gave, ‘“Government isn’t the solution … Government is the problem.” Despite your paradigm trying to bend this backwards, you cite this mining/protest example whereby you believe government has egregiously overridden a group of rights in favour of big corporates - and I agree with you that governments are now sadly the chief abusers of property rights - yet your paradox is that you believe always in ever bigger, more omnipotent government as a solution (to governments being already so powerful, they destroy property rights, and in this case, possibly, freedom of speech and protest).

That’s nonsensical: the same type of nonsense homeopathy that has Keynesians religiously believing the problems of too much debt can be solved by more debt. These are amongst the myriad of paradoxes that plague the Left, and more aptly, statists, to the point that I’m sure in some more sensible age, rational people will view an historical belief in the Left politick and its theocracy of state, akin to a belief in Father Christmas. Although needless to say, this New Enlightenment of reason and healthy suspicion and limitation of all authority won’t be in my lifetime.

I put it to you that governments are now so huge, our welfare states exhausting so much wealth, up to 50% of the activity of our entire economies needed to feed an out of control state sector and force-fed dependency, that governments have had to become abusers of all our property rights, including our right of free speech and protest, to feed their voracious appetite for tax revenue which now makes all foreseeable generations tax slaves. The state, or more precisely, the authoritarian surveillance states now in place, have destroyed the Free West, and with that, civilisation.

As you started with Reagan, I’ll finish with him:  ‘It’s about up versus down, freedom versus statism’, … and every party in Parliament today is a party committed to statism, committed, thus, to coercion and the use of state force, with the price paid the destruction of liberty. National are as big a culprit in this as Labour and Greens are. The answer to it is free markets and a free people, and there is no paradox, which is why some few left of us, continue to strive for our freedom against that chief butcher of the twentieth century, the state, which you keep giving a free pass to, via the theft of redistribution.

Update 1: Chris’s Reply:

I've underlined and made bold the important part.

Chris Trotter said... 

I must say, Mark, I'm tempted to rebut your rebuttal, but experience has taught me there is nothing to be gained by doing so.

Those who believe as you do are simply not available to the sort of debate that takes as its starting point the reality of events in historical time and their continuing influence on the present and future.

This sort of debate assumes an opponent who exists in the same historical time-frame, and who is subject to the same physical laws as myself.

Which you do and are, of course, but, mysteriously, you don't think you do.

Yours is a strange Platonic sort of universe: a world of ideal concepts and forms - which simply doesn't respond to the logic of the gritty old world the rest of us inhabit - down here on Planet Earth.

So, I'll just say that I enjoyed your posting. It is, I reckon, a little masterpiece of its kind.

But, in terms of having a discussion about what really happens - or is likely to happen (out there on the high seas, for example) - there really isn't anything to get to grips with.

Like Plato's ideal chair, it looks very sturdy in my mind's eye, but, unfortunately, when I try it sit down on it there's simply nothing there.

Charter Schools: Individualism Versus the New Zealand School Curriculum.

… it became evident that the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one.

Christopher Hitchens: Hitch-22

Even if charter schools prove to produce no better educational outcomes in reading, writing and arithmetic, they are essential philosophically because they represent what is quickly becoming a revolutionary concept in the West: individual, individually tailored, free choice.

The concept of individualism, on which classical liberalism is built, can broadly be separated into two parts; constitutional-political, and creative-entrepreneurial, and traced back to two antecedents, in the form of those only two revolutions, first of the mind, and then as Hitchen’s reminds us, of the people, that left long-lasting good. From the seventeenth century that questioning by free men of every edict and every authority that is known to us as the Enlightenment, which raised man up by his reason and threw off the shackles of tyrants - albeit the French took it a tad too far; and from the eighteenth century, that remarkable good flowing from the American revolution, which President Obama is currently printing, borrowing and spending the final breath from. Both these revolutions had led to that economic system of individualism, laissez faire capitalism, that raised the living standards for those of us living in the West to such a height it appears to have produced its own demise in the form of pampered humans who are destroying every principle gained by the blood of free men to replicate the rotten principles and evil ethic of those alternate revolutions of forced altruism in Russia and China which in enforcing equality, fairness, and social justice, missed them entirely, and caused only enslavement, death, and human misery.

Over and over, the importance of individualism as the foundation of a free and peaceful society, must be reiterated against the dictates of those choice-destroyers in our mobocracy who would force us to be sacrificed to the(ir) common good: a conceptual individualism is why we once had the freedoms being daily legislated away from us in Wellingrad.

(1) Constitutional individualism in the political sphere.

I simply quote a previous post:

… the common good has been the battle cry of almost every tyrant throughout history. The common good has been so important, apparently, that hundreds of millions of individuals over the twentieth century had to be exterminated or killed by the state for it. We should have learned from the resulting bloodbath that rights cannot attach to a collective, and when you try to, you open the gates to tyranny and atrocity. That same common good is currently being used in Christchurch to usurp private property rights on a breath-taking scale. Just as the common good is used as the excuse to steal the property and effort of productive individuals while making those individuals victims to a department of state with literally the powers of the Orwellian police state. To be meaningful, and cause no harm through the fist of state, rights can and must only attach to individuals. A society must only base itself on protecting the smallest minority: the rights and property of an individual (especially from the abuse of state).

In this way we have a constitutional individualism won in the American Revolution, in contradistinction to those gulags such as the Soviets had to endure, where law-making was the legal enactment of the common good – noting that planned totalitarian menace is what our social democracies are slowly devolving down to: regulation, tax, plain packaging; the sacrifice of our liberty to the needs of complete strangers, to whom our free will is first bent, then taken from us.

(2) Individualism as Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

A laissez faire capitalist economy, and therefore our standard of living, turns on entrepreneurial innovation; the same human impulse of artistic creativity which provides a depth of meaning to our existence. By individualistic creativity I don’t mean, in this instance, wanton, emoting self-expression; many of the brats I see could do with a deal less of that, and a bit more discipline; save me from, as Harold Rosenberg aptly termed it, ‘the herd of independent minds’, but rather as George Orwell, well versed in the ways of the police state, said:

... Modern literature is essentially an individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels, or it is nothing. As I say, we take this notion for granted, and yet as soon as one puts it into words one realizes how literature is menaced. For this is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot allow the individual any freedom whatever. When one mentions totalitarianism one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be world-wide. It is obvious that the period of free capitalism is coming to an end and that one country after another is adopting a centralized economy that one can call Socialism or state capitalism according as one prefers. With that the economic liberty of the individual, and to a great extent his liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to move to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end. Now, till recently the implications of this were not foreseen. It was never fully realized that the disappearance of economic liberty would have any effect on intellectual liberty. Socialism was usually thought of as a sort of moralized liberalism. The state would take charge of your economic life and set you free from the fear of poverty, unemployment and so forth, but it would have no need to interfere with your private intellectual life. Art could flourish just as it had done in the liberal-capitalist age, only a little more so, because the artist would not any longer be under economic compulsions. Now, on the existing evidence, one must admit that these ideas have been falsified.

Literature and Totalitarianism.

Unfortunately all is gone. A constitutional individualism has been suffocated by bleeding heart collectivism, and creativity and innovation are being lost to a writer’s block of bureaucracy, taxation and ‘you must do this, you must wear this, you mustn’t smoke that, better tax that it’s not good for you, no don’t take that risk dear, the taxpayer shouldn’t bear the cost if it, this women with the IQ of a rabbit has ten kids you have to look after them …’

And at the root of it, explanation for why this essential, civilising ethic of individualism, and classical liberalism, have been defeated in New Zealand, as it has in the West, is that the minds of our young are captured, each generation, by those foot soldiers of bounded-liberty, teachers, 95% of whom are signed up Borg of the PPTA, impaling us all on that confounded founding document of statism, the New Zealand School Curriculum. I quote:

Values

To be encouraged, modelled, and explored

Values are deeply held beliefs about what is important or desirable. They are expressed through the ways in which people think and act.

Every decision relating to curriculum and every interaction that takes place in a school reflects the values of the individuals involved and the collective values of the institution.

[Snip]

Students will be encouraged to value:

• equity, through fairness and social justice
• community and participation for the common good.

 

There it goes: direct from the Soviet Union and into our curriculum, written in the blood of those shot trying to scale that bloodied wall between East and West Berlin, or otherwise trying to escape their grey, plain packaged lives behind the Iron Curtain. Whereas individual based law promotes a peaceful freedom and prosperity, laws around the common good always devolve to a slavery forced violently – just look at the Tax Administration Act if you want proof of this.

Too many of the Arrogance of Altruists in the Fortress of Legislation whom think they have a mob’s sanction to rule over me, of those who fill our bureaucracies, and finally the PPTA, a union conducting an all-out campaign with my tax money – because that’s where teachers wages come from -  to deny parents the choice of charter schools in order they keep their monopoly of a child’s mind, grew up with this group-think taught to them, as they now teach it: and there are not enough left questioning the evil at the heart of it, as the flame of the Enlightenment is extinguished in more complete a sense than Hitler, Stalin et al ever managed, because it’s been hard wired onto each child’s mind, and people now take sacrifice of everything good in the pursuit of happiness, to the bloodied altar of the common good, as axiomatic. Per by blog by-line, Gramsci won, and turning it back one mind at a time is not enough, the western state lurches ever more quickly toward planned lives, not free ones.

So liberty is lost in this unenlightened age, though regardless, to the PPTA I say, no one has said charter schools are to be compulsory, they will exist alongside the state school system, so if your ethic is worthy, the teachers you represent so needed and consented to by parents, then you don't need the force of government to defend yourselves against the competition of ideas represented by the choice that parents will have with charter schools. Why are you so against choice and the voluntary society?

Charter schools must exist, and only as the first rear guard action in the dismantling of the state. If I have a complaint, in every piece of literature I read on them, I keep seeing a charter school is still a partnership with the State … we need to grow up way beyond that, for as W. Hayden Boyers writes of the common good, look what we have done to ourselves (hat tip Café Hayek):

Unquestionably, simple out-and-out plunder is so clearly unjust as to be repugnant to us; but, thanks to the motto, all for one, we can allay our qualms of conscience.  We impose on others the duty of working for us.  Then, we arrogate to ourselves the right to enjoy the fruits of other men’s labor.  We call upon the state, the law, to enforce our so-called duty, to protect our so-called right, and we end in the fantastic situation of robbing one another in the name of brotherhood.  We live at other men’s expense, and then call ourselves heroically self-sacrificing for so doing.

The Dairy Cliff in America: An Alice in Wonderland of the Planned.

A journalist from the land of fiat money and central banking sat down this week and, no doubt with a straight face, wrote the following about the American ‘dairy cliff’:

As if the “fiscal cliff” and the long-suffering farm bill weren’t enough, Iowans may soon face a new dilemma — a “dairy cliff.”

If Congress fails to act in the handful of weeks it has left in its lame-duck session before adjourning for Christmas recess, the nation’s dairy programs for farmers will expire Jan. 1.

The effects won’t be limited to the dairy industry — retail prices for all sorts of dairy-related products could soar. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has predicted the price of milk could rise to $6 a gallon, just as almost all Americans’ income taxes are scheduled to increase …

“That’s why the dairy cliff is similar to the fiscal cliff, because if nothing is done, in January the USDA’s price support level could be so high that the price the government will offer for things like cheese and butter will be about double what the current market price is,” Galen told The Gazette. “So if you wanted to buy cheese for your pizza company or a large supermarket chain, you’d be competing with the government.”

Roll the Laughing Policeman song. 

A theme of this blog is how our Western planned economies derive from Soviet styled planned economies, dependent as they are on planned lives: not capitalism. One person in two in America receives some form of State benefit: it’s the biggest welfare state in the world. The West is now so far from laissez-faire capitalism no one in the Fortress of Legislation knows what it is anymore; it’s a myth they were told to be scared of by the progressives who stand at the front of our school rooms. The only opinion I might be changing, slightly, from reading the above, is rather than referring to the West as semi-police states of forced altruism, I’m starting to think the mob has voted in a world approximating more a childish version of Alice in Wonderland, and we are all living in a Politician’s tantrum. The consumers of Iowa are being financially gutted by their politicians: what in the wonderland are those politicians thinking.

Oh silly. Thinking, of course not: policies like this don’t come from thinking; they come from emoting. That’s the problem.  And while on rural matters, don't forget this post.