General

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

John James — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 05:54:15 GMT

Can't believe I didn't see this when it happened, but here's another that's worthy of bumping this thread:

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Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

John James — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:13:29 GMT

Just came across this and felt it was worthy of a bump. Obviously it belongs in this thread, but it also provides concise (and quite good) exposé, if you will, on the illogical nature of the minarchist position, and it's complete lack of difference from any other statist persuasion...

Why should the government be limited?

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

Autolykos — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:46:28 GMT

Now on to refuting her arguments.

Elizabeth Warren, High Priestess of TARP:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you.

But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory...

Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay [it] forward for the next kid who comes along.

There seem to be a few arguments bundled up into this. The one I'd like to touch on first is the so-called "public goods" argument. This is really an argument about externalities. The idea is that externalities are bad - typically the word used is "unfair". Things can then be made (more) fair by eliminating externalities. How can externalities be eliminated? By internalizing them. Who should internalize them? Those who benefitted from them - otherwise, more externalities are simply created.

This notion has its roots in the reciprocity principle. I do something nice for you, so you should do something nice for me in return. It doesn't have to be right now, but in the meantime, I'd like you to keep in mind what I did for you. Friends and relatives do favors for one another following this principle. There are often non-violent sanctions when someone fails or refuses to "return the favor".

However, when the favor isn't returned, has anything been actually taken from the person who expected the favor? No. There has been no cost or loss imposed on him. He was never guaranteed to receive a favor in return, regardless of how he felt about it. As far as I'm concerned, it's aggression if he then forces, tries to force, or even threatens to force, the other person to perform the favor.

Furthermore, I don't see how the recipient of a favor is a priori or prima facie obligated to return an "equivalent" favor at all. He may not have even wanted the favor to begin with. Now he nevertheless owes the other person something? To me, an obligation involves, at the very least, a prior agreement. Even then, however, if no ownership of property has been exchanged one way or the other, no one has actually lost anything if one party to the agreement fails or refuses to carry out his side of it.

I know that people are typically disappointed or worse when reality fails to meet their expectations. People certainly don't think it's fair when others refuse to "keep their word". But as my dad always said, life isn't fair. In trying to impose fairness for oneself by force, a person can make things less fair for others and ultimately less fair for himself as well.

What does this have to do with the government? The government ostensibly provides services for people. These services come at a cost. They also convey benefits. The distributions of costs and benefits are never guaranteed to be equal, and typically they aren't. Regardless, many (if not most) government services are supposed to be equally available to everyone to take advantage of, if they so choose. If some people end up reaping much more than they've sown, so be it.

This is all well and good for those people. But it all too often ends up being a bitter pill to swallow for those who feel like they've paid in more than they've gotten out. It makes a certain amount of sense, after all - people don't like to feel like they've been taken advantage of. So this is why we see calls for those who appear to have disproportionately benefitted to "pay their fair share".

The thing is, we can't have our cake and eat it too. Either these services are publicly available - i.e. available to all, equally - or they aren't. If they're publicly available, it makes sense for everyone to pay the same amount for them. Otherwise, those who actually make use of them should pay for them.

Ironically, the logical conclusion of advocating "paying one's fair share" is the privatization of government services. Under privatization, those who would stand to benefit the most from services would pay the most for them. Hence everyone would "pay his fair share". This is all well and good, until someone demands more of a service than he's able or willing to pay for. As noted above, there are no real solutions here - only different trade-offs. No matter which way the cake is cut, scarcity will ultimately rear its ugly, unfair head.

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

Autolykos — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:46:52 GMT

James:
[Elizabeth Warren is] a Wall Street/DC lawyer. She personally oversaw the bailout of the banks. Chaired the Congressional Oversight Committee that handled TARP.

She's much, much worse than just a tax-feeder. :p

Oh sweet Raptor Jesus.

Seriously, I think this is the best (rhetorical) counter for her: relentlessly point out that this woman personally and significantly contributed to the filthy rich getting richer and the rest of us getting poorer. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the people pushing her quote around Facebook and elsewhere have no idea who she is.

Edit: In a nutshell - Elizabeth Warren is one of the 1%.

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

John James — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:57:32 GMT

Please do. I'm sorry to say I end up not reading much of many of your posts because of this.

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

Clayton — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:51:50 GMT

@JJ: I start out thinking the post will be a two-liner... then it just grows... I'll remember to hit Enter a little more often.

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

John James — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:45:01 GMT

Clayton can I ask why you so rarely use paragraphs? It makes your posts so difficult to read.

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

Clayton — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:16:44 GMT

Awesome response from Murphy, as always. It would have been nice if he had commented on the calculational aspect of this, as well. Part of the problem with the whole argument about whether taxes should be raised or lowered is that both sides (Democrats for higher taxes on "the rich" and Republicans for lower taxes for the rich) are engaging in price-setting. The argument is not over whether we should be price-setting but, rather, what the set price should be. The price of roads, utilities, fire departments, etc. is bundled into one gigantic, irrational cash-wad called "government expenditure" and then the political apparatus attempts to pay for this wad by borrowing, printing money and taxing.

But the coordinating component of prices has been removed from all of these government-monopolized lines of production and further scrambled through being bundled together. Both Republicans and Democrats are attempting to solve the problem of how many roads should be produced and how much money should be spent on maintaining them and how this should be paid for through hot air. The problem is that such verbal jousting is demonstrably irrational. The participants in the debate form lobbies and wage verbal battle with each other. The wealthy business class lobbies the "right-wing" to fight for ever greater government services to the industrial sector (roads, electric lines, etc.) and ever-lower taxes (hoping to burden the lower classes through government debt and inflation) while the parastic class lobbies the "left wing" for greater entitlements and higher taxes on the wealthy.

We are living in Bastiat's reductio ad absurdum situation of a democracy where "everbody plunders everbody" while those who eschew the political means for hard, honest work are punished the most severely. Then everybody wonders why we're in an economic depression. America has descended into economic, political and legal insanity. This is my country where I was born and I'm not in a situation where I can easily leave. I hope my fellow countrymen soon recover from the mass delusional spell that has been cast upon them.

Clayton -

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

John James — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:48:54 GMT

Today on the Daily:

Elizabeth Warren's Blank Check

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

John James — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:22:55 GMT

tckb909:
Peter Schiff did a good job on his radio show when he addressed this. I was pretty surprised and happy, because he made a very anarcho-capitalist argument.

Thanks for bringing that up! I'm behind on the shows so I wouldn't have caught it for a while...

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Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

James — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:29:08 GMT

She's a Wall Street/DC lawyer. She personally oversaw the bailout of the banks. Chaired the Congressional Oversight Committee that handled TARP.

She's much, much worse than just a tax-feeder. :p

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

Marko — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:17:26 GMT

What is the background of this person? Did she ever actually pay towards building roads, or is she a tax-feeder?

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

James — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 08:31:59 GMT

In fairness, a principled minarchist argument holds that the state's appropriate role is that of a nightwatchman which complies with the non-aggression principle. Not whatever it likes as long as it's relatively smaller than a government which isn't arbitrarily deemed not to be minarchistic.

In terms of providing this-that-and-the-other, minarchists should know well enough that the state can't do it. Their problem is that they regard security, defense and arbitration as something special and fundamentally non-economic, somehow, that emanates naturally from government rather than scarce economic goods exploited, monopolised and taxed by government like any others.

I think the problem is that security, defense and arbitration have been provided by governments for such a long time - being fundamentally necessary to enforce its monopoly on anything - that they that can't get their head around it being done any other way. It's funny how people draw a false dicotomy between necessarily public goods and others based first on their personal experience, then the personal experience of others that they've heard about, and only then do they consider applying a priori reasoning to the problem. :p The only verifiable way of discerning truth is a last resort.

Nothing must ever be done for the first time, you see...

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

tckb909 — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:35:56 GMT

Peter Schiff did a good job on his radio show when he addressed this. I was pretty surprised and happy, because he made a very anarcho-capitalist argument.

I don't remember everything he said, but he basically talked about how she has it all ass backwards. The only reason the government has roads, schools, police, etc is because they took money away from the private sector. If it wern't for all of the wealth created in the private sector, the government would not be able to pay for roads or anything else. He also went on to say he would rather pay for his own private security, his own roads, and everything else.. He would be more than happy to opt out completely in return for paying zero taxes. I was surprised because Schiff usually makes minarchists arguments, but not this time.

Re: Elizabeth Warren needs to be debunked

Libertyandlife — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 05:35:07 GMT

This is why I made this thread, can we throw it all in there?:

http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/26349.aspx