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.)

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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.