The
Rational Argumentator
Responding to "The Liberal Manifesto" by Kyrel
Zantonavitch gives me an opportunity to explore some interesting and
complex questions with regard to how a free society would work and
how it might be achieved. There is both much I agree with and much
that I would like to challenge and clarify in Mr. Zantonavitch's
article. I hope in doing this to break new intellectual ground in the
study of individual liberty, one of the most vital and
life-enhancing concepts of all.
Liberty and Competing Ideals
Mr. Zantonavitch writes:
"Individual liberty is absolutely everything. Nothing
else in government and the law is important –
or even relevant –
to society, culture, and civilization. No other value, concept, idea,
or ideal even exists!"
I
would agree that individual liberty is the central goal of a just
political order. For a government, no other goal should take
precedence over respecting and protecting the rights of the
individual. At the same time, other political theories do exist. They
are mistaken, in my view, but their proponents do consider themselves
to have an alternative framework of values and goals. Examples of
such "competing" values include equality, community,
societal homogeneity (either in composition or in adherence to a
certain set of behavioral norms), the advancement of a particular
concrete religion or ideology, and the enrichment and glorification
of a particular ruler or oligarchy. It is the job of the advocate of
freedom to continually show why these goals for a political society
are inferior to the goal of individual liberty –
and why suboptimal and sometimes devastating consequences, from poverty to persecution to mass
murder, ensue when a government sacrifices individual liberty to
achieve any of these goals.
Still, even though it is not the only ideal out there, much can be said in favor
of individual liberty. It is the most consistently universalizable
political ideal, since it is possible for all individuals to have
liberty. Any of the other political goals must of necessity be more
parochial, advancing the interests of one group of people at the
expense of others. Individual liberty is the only political ideal
that has the potential to continually improve the lives of all
people,
as long as they do not initiate aggression or fraud against others.
Mr.
Zantonavitch writes: "Individual
liberty is probably best defined as the right to think, say, and do
anything, but absolutely anything, which the individual personally
wishes, or freely chooses to do, provided he respects the equal and
concomitant right of his fellow man to think, say, and do anything,
but absolutely anything, which his neighbor identically wishes or
chooses. It's understood that none of these rights clash, conflict,
compete, or contradict; rather, all of them supplement, complement,
coincide, and reinforce."
I
generally agree with this characterization. I would clarify, though,
that liberty of this sort is consistent with economic competition
among individuals, as well as sincere disagreements about facts and
values in some cases –
since
no individual has complete knowledge of the world and all people are
capable of error. Individual liberty therefore allows for commercial
rivalry and ideological disagreement (including intense
disagreement), as long as violent force and fraud are not used by any
party. This enables all contests among individuals to be resolved in
a civilized fashion, or, if they are not resolved – as, for
instance, with a lingering interpersonal feud – to have their
consequences be contained so as to enable the individuals involved to
continue leading peaceful lives.
In
the long run, even though the participating individuals may not feel
like the activity of their economic competitors or ideological
opponents complements their own interests, Mr. Zantonavitch is right
to suggest that this complementarity exists in a larger sense.
Peaceful competition and disagreement constitute the free market of
goods and ideas, which enables both products and ideas to continually
improve to the benefit of all in a free society.
Mr.
Zantonavitch writes: "And
please note: humans don't have to be 'angels' as America's
constitutional framers pitifully longed for. Neither the citizens nor
the government leaders. The whole society can consist of, and be run
by, Hitlers, Stalins, and Khomeinis. And you can still create
Paradise on Earth.
"All
you ever need is infinite freedom for the individual. Once you have
100% personal liberty, and 100% self-responsibility, this will free
and force the fascists, communists, and Muslims to completely behave
personally, and entirely get along socially."
I
can respond to this idea in various ways.
(1)
It is indeed true that a free society does not
and
should not require its members to adhere to any particular set of
ideas, including ideas favorable to liberty. It is possible for a
free society to consist of a large population of individuals who are
hostile to freedom. As long as they express their ideas peacefully,
without resorting to actually limiting the individual rights of
others, their presence can even be beneficial in a free society
(since they will also build and trade things and can enable advocates
of liberty to refine their views through peaceful argumentation).
(2)
At the same time, a free society requires somebody
who
respects liberty and is willing to enforce it. Institutions are
ultimately comprised of people and do not run themselves. This is the
"eternal vigilance" that Jefferson noted as being required
for the maintenance of liberty. Even all of the right principles and
laws can quickly be reduced to a dead letter unless an active
contingent of friends of liberty continues to give them life by
explaining them, refining them, and creating works of culture to
promote them. This can all be 100% peaceful and outside the
activities of the government itself. Such an effort also does not
require anyone to agree with these ideas, or even to engage them –
though enough people will find them appealing if they are actively
promoted. Government officials also need to understand that they are
bound by the protections for individual liberty, even if they
personally disagree with those protections. This is where the rule
of law is
essential to the preservation of a free society (assuming, of course,
that the laws are just).
(3)
Of course, the "fascists, communists, Muslims," and
everybody
else in
a free society will be able to lead their lives as they see fit, and
to promote any ideas they see fit, as long as they do not initiate
force on others and limit the corresponding rights of others. One can
hope that some illiberal individuals would be influenced by the
dynamic of a free society to reconsider their views and evolve
intellectually toward a better set of values. Indeed, over time, I
expect a free society to have exactly this effect.
Scope of Legitimate Government
Activity
Mr.
Zantonavitch writes: "For
the individual this means no (physical) force or (financial) fraud.
For the government this means no personal, social, or economic
taxation -- which would be theft -- or personal, social, or economic
regulation -- which would be coercion. All social activity must be
based entirely upon persuasion, and none at upon coercion."
I
would agree with the general prohibition against (initiation of)
force or fraud by any individual –
and this includes individuals in government. A fully free society
would indeed be able to fund its government without any coercion
involved –
hence, without taxation as it presently exists. In the transition to
a free society, though, it may be necessary to phase out taxation
gradually, or to change its form (for instance, replacing an income
tax with an equivalent sales tax that eliminates many hours of
burdensome paperwork for individuals), in order to enable a logical
sequence of free-market reforms, including the repayment and further
non-issuance of government debt, to be carried out. From today's
vantage point, it is important for advocates of liberty to avoid
further tax increases
while
continually seeking ways for governments to fund themselves in ways
that do not involve compulsion. Once a government's reliance on
taxation enters a downward trajectory, we can hope to, in time, wean
that government off of dependence on compulsory revenue sources
altogether.
With
regard to regulation, it is important to clarify which
kinds
of regulations constitute coercion, and which kinds constitute
protection of the individual from coercion. For instance, if a
regulation were to say, "A government agency shall follow such
and such procedures to protect individuals against financial fraud,"
this would be a harmless and possibly a beneficial regulation, even
if it directly addresses economic matters. More generally, if all a
regulation does is enforce the "rules of the game" in a
free society – private property rights, contractual honesty,
freedom of association, free mobility of capital and labor, and
protection against violence by private parties – then it is
compatible with liberty. Indeed, even a minimal government would need
to have some sort of administrative/regulatory apparatus to ensure
that its efforts to protect against force and fraud have a real-world
presence. Otherwise, even in a nominally free society, private
parties (possibly including gangs, community associations, and
certain religious groups) that do not respect liberty will begin
enforcing their illiberal notions of how other people should behave.
The
kinds of regulations that are incompatible with liberty are those
that restrict individual choice through prohibitions and mandates
pertaining to peaceful, non-coercive activity. Other regulations
hostile to liberty include those that facilitate redistribution of
wealth away from those who legitimately earned it, and those that
artificially prop up economic entities that should have failed if the
free market had its way (the recent bailouts of large financial
institutions in the United States are a case in point). Much of what
passes for U.S. federal regulation today is unfortunately of this
sort: a morass of prescriptions, restrictions, and prohibitions on
everything from what kind of appliances may be designed to how
individuals are scrutinized at airports. It is clear that advocates
of freedom have their work cut out for them in limiting all
governments to only practicing the kind of regulation that protects
individuals without infringing on any peaceful activity.
Transition
to a Free Society
Mr.
Zantonavitch writes: "To
get around the problem of taxation, and how to legitimately fund the
freedomist government –
which no one has yet solved (except me) –
all individuals over 18 or so, in a proper, legitimate, liberated,
and free society, must personally sign the liberal constitution, and
agree to abide by it, and pay some tiny income 'tax' or net-worth
fee. Anyone who refuses to sign, or doesn't pay his fee for
liberty-defense services rendered, gets deported and loses his
citizenship. But there are no other penalties, including fines,
property confiscation, or jail time."
While
this system would have the advantage of lacking many of the punitive
measures imposed by national governments today, it still could
conflict with individual rights if a person has property in land or
buildings within the borders of the country but refuses to sign the
constitution. Deporting this person would, by definition, deprive him
of the use of the property which he cannot simply relocate –
and forcing him to sell that property would also be a restriction of
his rights. A possible improvement to this system would be to allow
individuals who refuse to sign the constitution to secede, with their
land and property, from the country. By doing so, they would, of
course, forfeit any right to protection or judicial services from the
government whose constitution they refuse to recognize. They would,
in effect, become micronations, likely surrounded by the territory of
the original country, but still having the right to move within its
borders as long as they remain peaceful and respect the rights of all
property owners.
I
will, furthermore, point out that other ways to solving the problem
of taxation have been proposed, particularly with reference to how to
transition from the status quo to a more desirable system.
One
way is the Fiscal Restriction Amendment I described in "A
Plan for Cutting Big Government" –
a
way to limit the growth of U.S. federal power and spending right away
while setting in motion incentives for the scope of the U.S. federal
government to shrink over time through the activities of the
politicians themselves! The Fiscal Restriction Amendment would set in
motion a chain of events whose end result would be the elimination of
all taxation –
as the federal government would be able to run a surplus for many
years and to earn interest off of that net revenue, without engaging
in any more coercive extraction of funds from the population.
Another
way is the system of investmentocracy that I proposed in 2009, as
outlined in my paper, "Investmentocracy:
A Challenge to Conventional Democratic Principles and a Framework for
a New Free Society". Under investmentocracy, nobody is
forced to fund the government, but individuals who wish to have
influence in the electoral process will only get such influence in
proportion to their contributions, with the exception of one default
vote that everyone has. In order to work, this system would need to
be accompanied by a constitution that is considerably refined from
the present U.S. Constitution or any other constitution in the world.
My Freecharter
is an attempt to furnish such a constitution, though it probably
could not be adopted right away in the United States as it is today,
since a sizable portion of the wealth in the United States in the
status quo has been gained through political pull (e.g., bailouts,
subsidies, tariffs, and other economic barriers to entry favoring
certain politically connected businesses). A transitional period of
free-market conditions would be needed to enable the wealth to once
again flow to people of merit by means of uninhibited, consensual
economic production and exchange.
Within
any transition to a free society, governments would have an important
role in undoing the damage done by previous illiberal (e.g.,
mercantilist, socialist, fascist, communitarian, or egalitarian)
policies. On the most basic level, this would include compensating
victims of theft and impoverishment by previous administrations.
Furthermore, if prior policies had the effect of propping up
organizations that should have failed on the free market, proper
transitional policy would be to break up those organizations or allow
them to fail of their own accord, whichever is more effective. In
"Wrongful
Foreclosures and the Free Market" I argue that the
bailed-out large banks, which have ceased to be genuine market
entities and have also rampantly foreclosed on homeowners who did not
in any way default on their contractual obligations, should be broken
up in order to protect individual rights – since these banks would
have failed on their own if they had not been bailed out in 2008 and
afterward.
A
vital principle to keep in mind during a transition to a free society
is that the sequence
of
steps is just as crucial as the end goal, if one is to have liberty
in the real world. Indeed,
if the effect of certain government policies (e.g., corporate
welfare, granting of legal monopolies, interference in retirement
funding and healthcare) has been highly damaging, then it is also
likely that they will inflict some of their damage when one attempts
to remove them. Think of a bomb which will blow up unless it is
disarmed in a very specific way –
by cutting the wires in a specific order. Even if you cut the right
wires, but in the wrong order, it will blow up on you. Or think of a
doctor trying to perform surgery on a patient. It is not enough to
want the health of the patient and to have a detailed picture of what
is wrong with illness and how a healthy organism functions. The
doctor needs to know the sequence of medical procedures that will get
the patient to a condition of health –
often involving some unpleasant steps in between and sometimes a long
time of painful recovery for the patient. But the question for the
doctor is how to achieve the health of a sick patient, while
minimizing that patient's suffering in the process.
Sheldon
Richman, a great libertarian thinker at the Foundation for Economic
Education, distinguishes between primary government interventions and
secondary government interventions. The primary interventions are the
ones that directly do the most damage. For instance, most national
governments in the West engage in so-called corporate welfare, where
they directly favor certain large, politically connected firms by
means of subsidies, tariffs, and regulations that are harder for
smaller competitors to comply with. This artificially raises barriers
to entry into those companies' field of business and thus makes it
much easier for those companies to dominate the market, charge higher
prices, decrease the quality of service, and abuse their customers.
Corporate welfare also makes it harder for otherwise qualified people
to find paying work, since fewer businesses exist to hire them and
fewer open job positions are available. The secondary interventions
are the attempts of well-meaning but often economically ignorant
people to mitigate the damage. Examples are unemployment aid as a way
of alleviating the damage of corporate welfare and minimum-wage laws,
or price controls on utilities (water, gas, electric, and
telephone/Internet companies) to alleviate the damage caused by their
legal monopolies over particular areas. In a fully free society,
these secondary interventions would be completely unnecessary and
undesirable, since markets would readily provide ways for individuals
to achieve gainful employment or purchase any good or service at a
reasonable price. However, in transitioning
toward
a free society, it would be disastrous for a reformer to eliminate
the secondary interventions without also touching the primary
interventions whose effects the secondary interventions try to
mitigate. Corporate welfare and coercive utilities monopolies need to
end first –
and then unemployment aid and price controls on utilities can be
removed.
Mr.
Zantonavitch writes: "It
should be noted that individual freedom absolutely supersedes the
values and ideals of democracy, republicanism, constitutionalism, and
the separation of powers with their concomitant checks and balances.
All of these are merely methods for gaining and maintaining liberty.
But they aren't individual liberty themselves, nor are they valuable
in and of themselves. These political techniques for governance are
virtually useless and trivial next to the pure socio-economic
disideratum of freedom.
"Even a society governed by exceptionally foreign space
aliens, who call themselves kings or emperors, and who are elitist
aristocrats which pass on their rule via primogeniture, and who never
hold elections, or consult the peoples' delegates in their rule, and
who have no constitution, and which combine all executive,
legislative, and judicial powers into one branch of government, etc.
can still create political perfection and socio-economic utopia if
they have utterly untrammeled, unlimited, unchecked, fully guaranteed
individual rights."
With
regard to this passage, I both strongly agree and strongly disagree
in certain respects. I strongly agree that the fact
of
liberty is far more important than the specific political structure
that
maintains it. Indeed, the enlightened space aliens who guarantee
individual rights would be far preferable to me than a constitutional
system that was designed to protect individual rights but has, as the
U.S. system, failed miserably at maintaining such protections in the
long run. It is also quite possible, in my view, for many political
structures to be capable of preserving individual liberty. Which
political structure will work best may not be a universal law, but
may well be contingent upon the specific society in which one desires
to have liberty –
and
economic, cultural, and technological factors would certainly make
some political structures more viable and more effective in
protecting liberty than others.
At
the same time, I disagree that questions of the manner of governance
are "useless and trivial". Indeed, even though these
questions are subordinate and instrumental to the political goal of
liberty, they are, in practical terms, some of the most important
questions one can ask.
A
great parallel with health can again be made. Mr. Zantonavitch has
described the ideal of liberty commendably, and I can imagine a
similar description of the ideal of physical health, focusing on the
smooth functioning of all bodily processes, abundant energy, capacity
for prolonged physical effort, strength, flexibility, freedom from
chronic or mysterious acute pain, and the ability to maintain these
attributes into the foreseeable future. But describing this ideal of
health alone does not even begin to describe the work and thinking
needed to achieve and maintain it. The question of healthy
lifestyles is
just as critical if actual human beings are to have health in this
world. Just as multiple valid structures of governance are possible,
so are multiple healthy lifestyles conceivable (though, of course,
there are many more possible flawed structures of governance and
unhealthy lifestyles). Likewise, the subject of disease,
injury, and death is
vital to study in order to understand as fully as possible what can
undermine human health and how to avoid coming into contact with
these perils. The parallel in politics is the study of all the failed
systems and ideologies, and how they might be avoided. Finally, the
subject of curing
sick patients is
literally vital. Without knowledge of how to take a diseased patient
and make him healthy again, health remains an abstract ideal only,
without actually being embodied in the lives of those who should
be but
are not healthy. In politics, the parallel to this question is the
issue of how to transition to a free society from what we have now.
This
is why, in my view, the subordinate, practical questions of politics
are also the most interesting. In is certainly not the case, as Mr.
Zantonavitch suggests, that "now
politics is a problem solved. There's nothing more to discuss –
ever."
The nature of liberty has largely been explicated already by some of
the finest thinkers of all time, from John Locke, Voltaire, and
Thomas Jefferson to Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. But the study of
how to actually achieve liberty, given what we have today, has been
sparse to say the least. I think that many advocates of liberty shirk
away from examining these more concrete, practical questions because
doing so introduces much more complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity
than just exploring the ideal of liberty itself. But the discomfort
involved in considering these challenging issues may be part of the
medicine we need to personally take in order to eventually live in a
healthy, free society.
I
do not claim to have all the answers, or even most of them, with
regard to how to achieve a transition to freedom. In fact, one virtue
of discussions such as this one is to arrive at more of the answers,
or at least to get a better idea of where to look for them.
As
a general observation, we are currently limited in our understanding
of how to achieve and maintain a politically free society in a
similar way to our limitations in understanding how to achieve and
maintain health and continued life for any individual. We have some
imperfect, temporary workarounds in both fields, which enable us to
(sometimes) temporarily prolong the life of a patient or the relative
freedom in a society. But, thus far in human history, all such
workarounds have shown to be insufficient in reliably, sustainably
preserving the values we hold foremost. This needs to change; these
limitations must be overcome. To achieve this, however, will take
continued determined thinking, at hitherto uncommon levels of
sophistication, by the friends of life and liberty.
Achieving
a healthy, free society may be even more difficult than arriving at
reliable health for individuals, since a doctor treating an
individual is in a position of considerable (though by no means
complete) control over his treatments and their outcomes. Each of us,
on the other hand, cannot step into the role of a reformer with a
reliable ability to even get his reforms enacted. For most
individuals, the best they can hope for is an extremely indirect
influence on the political process, removed from the actual locus of
decision-making by several steps. Even when such indirect influence
is possible (and it is not always), an idea can become dramatically
transformed in ways unintended by its originator by the time it
actually gets to a person who is in a position to implement it. In
this way, even completely valid theories can have terrible
consequences if they are misunderstood and misapplied by others.
I
hope that I have been able to demonstrate that much intense, thorough
thinking is required if we are to personally enjoy a free society
within our lifetimes. I welcome and questions, suggestions, and
extrapolations from readers with regard to what I have written here.
Nuances of a Free Society and How to Achieve One
G. Stolyarov II is an actuary, science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov also publishes his articles on Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. He holds the highest Clout Level (10) possible on Associated Content and is one of Associated Content's Page View Millionaires. Mr. Stolyarov also holds the designations of Associate in Reinsurance (ARe) and Associate in Insurance Services (AIS). Mr. Stolyarov has written a science fiction novel, Eden against the Colossus, a non-fiction treatise, A Rational Cosmology, and a play, Implied Consent. You can watch his YouTube Videos. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.
This essay is Mr. Stolyarov's response to "The Liberal Manifesto" by Kyrel Zantonavitch.
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Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus, here.Read Mr. Stolyarov's comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.