Responsibility and the State Making Life More Difficult

[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Mike Morris]

There’s a line by the great 20th century economist Ludwig von Mises, which, forgive me for I must paraphrase, that stuck with me upon reading some now-forgotten excerpt of some of his voluminous work. Mises was a great champion of capitalism and freedom, and his theoretical defenses of free-markets are more or less unmatched these days. In the brief quote he is explaining how, under a system of socialization (in this case, medicine), that people “lose the will to wellness.” What he means is that, when responsibility is no longer on that individual, but it’s thought the good or service in question is capable of being provided by someone else, virtually divorced of costs and supply considerations, and probably imagined in some unlimited quantity, that there is less concern or planning on part of the individual. He can externalize his costs onto “society.”

A complimentary quote by F.A. Hayek, who worked with Mises in economics, sums it up well too that, “the more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” If one is not to bear the cost themselves of their own ailing health, and that is, they’re essentially invited to consume as much healthcare as possible as prices have presumably been removed in socialized health care, as well as to ride on the support from the healthy, then they are less likely to maintain their own health. To some extent, the individual’s responsibility has been removed. Why eat a healthy diet and exercise if there’s no reason to worry about your health failing, as there is no direct cost to you now to consume more?

These economics can be applied to anything which has become socialized: it incentivizes imprudent behavior. On the demand side, the demand is subsidized, and therefore consumption encouraged; demand increases. On the supply side, the supply is discouraged by various restrictions; and thus there’s less availability (supply) to meet that rising demand. Less doctors coming into existence, because, say, their wages are not rising, or licensure keeps them from entering into practice, coupled with increased demand upon those lesser and lesser health care providers, is a sure recipe for rising costs and lowering quality.

If the state has assumed sole responsibility, i.e., “single payer,” rather than just to be an interventionist, then these rising costs can no less be escaped. There will be shortages, waiting lines, and a decreasing quality of care for those who do receive it. A socialist healthcare system will come to ration its scarce supply of goods as it decides how to allocate them to those in need. It might even be true that a socialist health care system will come to discriminate against the obese, smokers, etc., denying them the service whereas they’d still be free to pay for some obesity/smoking-related surgery in a free-market.

Somehow though, despite acknowledging the great amount government spends and has intervened upon the service of health care, social democrats are persistent in proposing they spend even more, while maintaining that it must be some outdated capitalist system too which should catch up with the always-cited Europeans. But American health care is far from free-market; it is highly interventionist. The solution isn’t to continue the intervention to total socialism (as is their plan), but to leave the market for everything alone.

As for Mises’s words, though, I believe this is something of a principle that could be applied to all areas of life once the state has stepped in, replacing personal responsibility for the illusion that it can meet all of our various, subjectively-valued ends. For the State, assuming a role of protection of the people, and fooling them into following it, has substituted its own rules and ways for a variety of choices and services that otherwise would be available for us to explore. This keeps us from discriminating against services we don’t like, or discovering ones that we do like.

Application

As for relevance to the quote, we see in the tragic Las Vegas shooting that concert-goers simply expect (and it’s a shame they shouldn’t have) the venue to be safe to attend. Security probably crossed the minds of few that night, out to enjoy their time out in the Sin City and escape their normal worries that led them out there in the first place. I don’t wish to comment on the event, which private eyewitness accounts seem to contradict the mainstream narrative, but this brings into question the role and need for private security; and it illustrates the deficiencies of the public provision of security. We see that, despite an intrusive and expensive surveillance state and local police force, the act was not prevented.

Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute, and resident of Colorado, has suggested in a recent piece that private venues ought to bear the cost of security and not rely on the public police to provide it. This would seem to be the theme here for me: that we cannot rely on others to keep us safe, and that doing so leaves us with wholly inefficient alternatives, if not completely helpless at some point.

Following this sad display of human evil, whoever perpetrated it, which many other sick folks have found the opportunity to politicize into a gun-control debate, many event and concert promoters are seeing to it that they must be the ones responsible in assuring that nothing like that could happen at their event. This is a good development. They always should be concerned, and shouldn’t rely on police to show up in a timely manner should defensive force suddenly be needed.

This whole idea also fits well with the notion that “no one needs an automatic rifle,” or that people shouldn’t be able to concealed carry without a government permission slip. This is the thinking that only the people who call themselves the government should be able to own guns. Precisely, that is the theory of the state: that we must all submit to a monopolist of law and defense. This is also why Republican-types are collectivists too, if not for endorsing most of the welfare state just like their alleged political adversaries on the Left, then for believing in socialist security, i.e., the idea of a “common defense.” That is, the State be the ones with guns, with the sole authority to provide us with protection—that is, a coercive monopoly. If anything, it should have been the realization that more privately armed individuals are needed

While any sidearm would have been ineffective in this case, perhaps any event of this nature should get people thinking about defending themselves. While many Americans do own guns, many still do not; they defer to the police should trouble come their way. As a saying goes, however, [a] “1911 is faster than 911.” People everywhere should be prepared to defend themselves, not waiting on others to do it for them. We then lose not only the will to protect ourselves—or care for ourselves and others—but the ability to, too.

While many Southerners might have grown up shooting, and indeed might be more equipped to resist tyranny, many in the city have never shot a gun, nor even seen a need to learn how to take care of themselves in a defensive situation. And sadly, many of the gun-owners in America are avid statists as well. If not a duty to others, then to yourself, one ought to train martial arts (such as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai, Boxing), shoot guns, learn practical skills. Why should we train in handguns or rifles when the police care about us, right?

Economics involving responsibility

Interventionism of the state makes everyone worse off, breaking up families, causing unemployment, stress, etc. Whereas free exchange means a maximization of utility among the actors, the alternative—statism, and its taxation, etc.—means that there are losers. Inevitably these losers are the ones who could tolerate it the least: the already-poor. The state means relative impoverishment as it grows parasitically on private production. It is not in the profit-making business of providing goods and services, but in the business of coercing payment from producers. Those who work for the state have a market income of zero, which means they’re simply takers, not adders, from the pool of wealth.

Since the U.S. government has grown to an unimaginable size in the last century, or, hell, the last quarter century, this is another means in which people are finding it hard to take care of themselves, their families, and feel secure in their lives. Paying for an Empire is not cheap. Often, blame is misplaced on capitalism, but exactly what is wrong is a lack of capitalism, i.e., a lack of state interference in our private lives. In its place are numerous invasions of property rights, from taxes and regulations to minimum wage laws and central banking system, which serve only to make everyone worse off.

If things were cheaper, we would be more free and secure in our lives, but they’ve been made unnecessarily expensive. It doesn’t have to be this way, but they don’t want self-sufficiency for us; that would make us turn our backs on their alleged necessity. Rather, that want full dependence on them for all our needs, including solving any and every dispute that might arise in the world. This takes away from our personal responsibility.

In a short ten years, from my first apartment to the present, my rent has tripled from $300 to $900; a friend in Denver reports that his has tripled in the past couple years. This hasn’t occurred in a free-market, but in the lack thereof. Like anything else, the way to bring down the price of anything is to increase the supply. Rising prices must’ve meant that demand exceeded the supply. For housing, aside from the fact that the central bank has deliberated inflated the housing market, there are permits, land-use restrictions, taxes and regulations, etc., all which hamper the production of housing.

Health care too, to unleash a supply and bring down price, needs the barriers before it—licensing, patents, subsidies, other government-imposed costs—removed so that more people can enter the profession to become service providers. It doesn’t help either that the demand-side is subsidized, driving prices even further up.

I have virtually written off home ownership and health care as an option for myself, and not because of a lack of socialism, as social democrats would claim, but because the market for health care in the U.S. is highly interventionist, i.e., socialist. I have always struggled to maintain a car in my life, which has become a necessity for most these days. Cars, which are a major, excessively jacked-up expense in most of our lives—from registering it, renewing tags, paying for a license, mandatory insurance, endless tickets, etc.—could drastically fall in price were there not numerous regulations—from tariffs on importing cheaper cars, safety regulations, etc.

The same can be applied to virtually anything, as the state has its hands in all industries today. The state’s scheme over time is to incrementally remove liberties. This is how they eventually posit that full socialism is the only solution to what half-ass “democratic” socialism ruined. What they have in place today would have even been more unacceptable in a pre-9/11 world, under two short decades ago. When they intervene, and screw things up, they’re once again looked at as the solution. Usually, the claim is that it’s because something isn’t socialist enough. So while the U.S. market for health care is far from free, rather than suggest we go back to freedom, many end up suggesting that we go all the way socialist. One intervention begets the next, and they like it this way.

It might even be true that getting rid of the numerous legislative regulations on the books, more so than taxation, could unleash great prosperity into the economy, an immeasurable loss we’re suffering under right now. Politician’s promises, however, are notoriously spurious. They debate “tax reform” or deregulation rather than to declare taxation an intolerable theft. But “reform” alone should already tell anyone it didn’t work the first time.

All these regulations create barriers and hurdles for people to make voluntary and beneficial exchanges with each other, preventing our needs from being satisfied. They prevent us from taking care of ourselves, under the idea that “the collective” need (whether for defense or health or nourishment) comes before ours. This keeps us from being responsible adults. While I don’t have statistics to show, it would seem more people than ever are finding it price-prohibitive to move out of their parent’s home and begin a life of their own. How must that feel to young adults? Young couples? People who want to be independent?

Social effects

There is the just-mentioned effect above, of a lack of opportunity leaving young adults trapped in their home without prospects for work or a place of their own. This is hard for any man who wants to fulfill his need to be a provider for someone, or for anyone simply wishing to take charge of their life.

Another lasting line for me was in Hans Hoppe’s treatise on economics and ethics, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, of the social problems created by the state. He speaks of the former need to be keen in life in general, i.e., responsible, which gets removed under socialism:

“..in short: the ability to initiate, to
work and to respond to other people’s
needs, will be diminished­, if not
completely extinguished. People
will have become different persons,
with different skills, who, should the
policy suddenly be changed and
capitalism reintroduced, could not
go back to their former selves
immediately and rekindle their old
productive spirit, even if they
wanted to. They will simply have
forgotten how to do it and will have
to relearn, slowly, with high psychic
costs involved, just as it involved
high costs for them to suppress
their productive skills in the
first place.”

Besides other necessities for wealth to come about, an entrepreneurial spirit is high on the list of the driving force in the economy. For this spirit to be sapped, and for production to be discouraged by taxation and regulations means inevitably that the economy will become poorer, as less and less people have the will or means to make their entrepreneurial goals possible, and consequently to inadvertently serve others in the process.

Socialism is thus a rolling-back of civilization, not the advancement it pretends to be. As diverse and unique individuals, the market economy and the division of labor harmonize our skills and interests, allowing for a maximized benefit to anyone who wishes to engage in this economic network. Upsetting this process is not a way of achieving optimality in the economy, with the most efficient uses of labor and scarce resources being found. It [intervention] will inevitably lead to waste.

For example, all the worthless people who sit in cubicles doing administrative work for the state will have to enter into productive lines of work, ones that serve the consumer’s demands. They’re not quite ready to; they’ve kept their cozy jobs working for government for so long. Surely they work hard to preserve their wasteful positions, from military to local government, sitting on their ass producing nothing. But we have to work that much harder to show just how much a waste of resources, human and physical, it is to maintain a bureaucracy and other busybody state employees.

In another more frightening thought, it might quite literally mean war once the welfare checks are pulled for the non-government people, who, getting comfortable on welfare, have forgotten how to take care of themselves. They’re trapped in the cycle. They will likely rise up in anger once the state finally admits it’s insolvent, demanding “their” property from redistribution to continue.

The whole idea of socialism indeed is to expand the amount of non-producing consumers. Anything you subsidize you get more of: unemployed people, non-producers, inefficient companies, etc. This also means, as per the Mises quote, that you get more sick people when you subsidize them. People are even encouraged to call themselves “disabled” because it pays, and think of themselves as incapable of productivity anymore. The state encourages waste by lowering the cost of non-production, and discourages and punishes productive activity. This is the essence of socialism’s impoverishment: lowering the cost of non-production (by redistributing property), and raising the cost of production (taxation).

Under the state, we ebb toward forgetting how to take care of ourselves as well as how to treat others. There seems to exist a tendency to become intrusive ourselves, as is the surveillance state, on par with North Koreans who might tattle on their neighbor for some behavior rather than to be imbued with a live and let live philosophy that I believe would be prevalent in a libertarian society.

It might be noteworthy to add a social effect: we’ve come to rely on the third-party state (the police) to arbitrate between all our petty disputes rather than to approach one another ourselves. I recently parked in front of a neighbor’s house, who, instead of telling me he didn’t like that, opted to leave me a windshield note that, “I see you parking here, and the next time you do it I’m calling the police!” So, we don’t even know, or care to know, our neighbors anymore. Trust appears to be diminishing in our society. Gone are the days of pumping gas before paying, or checking into a hotel with cash.

And what about the men and women living in the streets? Many callously shout to the homeless, “get a job, bum,” perhaps without realizing that unemployment is an issue caused in large part by government policies, and not the market that has been severely hampered through interventionism. It is not so easy as to go out a “get a job,” which is a likely conservative response.

Sure, there will be vagrants and nomads in a free society too, and many people simply don’t want to be productive, but for the most part I believe they would be homeless voluntarily so if the opportunities, options, and choices that free-markets afford the people would be wide open and growing. More to the point, however, is that most likely assume the government’s services are taking care of them just fine, and they don’t need to do anything for them. Again, we might lose the will to lend a hand, if we ourselves are even able, in belief the incompetent government is doing something for someone.

Getting our thoughts back on track

The state has totally corrupted the minds of most with the idea of positive rights, i.e., entitlement to other people’s property. So much so, that someone not doing something for you anymore (e.g. provide you with birth control) is equivalent in their minds to theft! Losing a made-up right to another’s stuff, or not paying taxes, is considered theft when precisely the opposite is true: the taxation is. Ending compulsory funding of birth control, for a contemporary example, and anything else for that matter, is considered the same thing as preventing someone from freely obtaining it. My right to marijuana, in one way to put it, is not to have people give me marijuana, but to not have anyone prevent me from buying and using it.

I think there is a much more fundamental way to put this. If anyone really believed “health care is a right,” then this should be stated in the context of property rights, i.e., our right to freely contract with others. And therefore, we must ask, why can I not freely contract with others who want to provide me health services? Why cannot people freely offer services without a license? Why cannot someone go to a pharmacist for care? What about employee and employer? Company and consumer? Instead of freedom of contract, we get health care cartels, licensure, compulsory insurance, etc. To me, that’s not healthcare as a right; that’s cronyism.

For the democratic socialists who claim there is virtue in coercion against others by using government violence to get what they want, they should realize that the only true compassion and altruism must come from them, from within. There is nothing noble in robbing your neighbor, and indeed this causes antagonism rather than harmony. If you wish to be a humanitarian, the choice of helping others is on you, not compelling others to act. Being a statist does not make you a “nice guy,” but a condoner of corruption and evil.

Why can’t we take care of ourselves?

Of course, the government does not want independence and private opportunity to exist; and so, it stifles it anywhere possible. Independent people, who don’t need anyone else, are natural enemies of the State. And since their rule ultimately exists and rests upon popular support of the public, they do all they can to keep us reliant and docile. It is for this reason of winning the people’s sanction that the State engages in redistribution of property, to bribe and win support among the people who come to find it as a necessity rather than to be appalled at the idea of a special group of people who have some divine right to engage in expropriation, whereas no private individuals can rightfully do so. They have been much successful today. Beneficiaries of the state will always apologize for its ruinous continuation.

We don’t have a culture that condemns theft, but rather, one that clamors for more of it through the political means. This can only mean social decline if the people at large continue to see the only means of organizing society to be centered around aggression, i.e., statism. For the few criminals that would indeed exist in a stateless society, though I believe they would tend toward integration into the economy out of their own self-interest, a massive thieving state of legalized criminals has been erected to supposedly stop this.

That there exists criminals does not justify legalizing crime in a state. When private criminals commit crimes, they don’t, as American anarchist Lysander Spooner noted, claim they had any right to do so. The State believes their theft is legitimate. He says of the private robber, who he considers more moral than the state thieves who euphemistically refer to their theft as “taxation”, that,

“The highwayman takes solely
upon himself the responsibility,
danger, and crime of his own act.
He does not pretend that he has
any rightful claim to your money,
or that he intends to use it for your
own benefit. He does not pretend
to be anything but a robber.”

Not that sporadic crime has vanished upon their existence anyway, but to institutionalize it as a counter to a few bad people is completely absurd. As Rothbard said in a great essay Society Without a State,

“no combination of private
marauders can possibly begin
to match the state's unremitting
record of theft, confiscation,
oppression, and mass murder.
No collection of Mafia or private
bank robbers can begin to compare
with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens,
and Lidices and their analogues
through the history of mankind.”

Could anyone imagine private criminals compelling trillions of dollars worth of property from us for a war-budget, as they have, without legitimacy? It’s impossible to imagine.

Parents’ role?

Parents, and the family, have a role in raising kids that can take care of themselves one day. Delegating this task to the government should be found appalling, and not a substitute for parent-on-kid teaching. But since it’s normal now to send your kids off to compulsory government-schooling each day of the week, surely many (or most) parents no longer see as great of a need to bring their kids up on this world and teach them about life, since they assume that’s what the awful public schooling system is doing for them.

And the kids themselves believe everything is going to be taken care of for them, so long as they graduate high school. Less than instilling business-minded ambition in children, in schools we’re more or less steered toward thinking of who we should sell our labor to, and how if you don’t complete high school, or even a general education, there’s no spot for you in the division of labor economy. We’ve bred a culture that believes liberal arts colleges are for everyone, and that specialization and skilled-trades are sub-par options.

I’d encourage anyone, despite prospects of income, to pursue what it is they truly love and are good at. The things frowned upon in the public school may well become the very thing those children pursue as a career upon getting out, but just because it doesn’t fit in line with the mold, kids are often punished for doing those things. The kid who skips to play his guitar might be in a money-making band one day; the desk-tapper might become a drum instructor; the one who sits at home and plays video games might build or test those games one day; the doodler in class who is supposed to listen up might become a famous painter; etc. The idea that everyone should be some STEM genius misses that we don’t only need people working in the hard sciences, but people in the economy to provide an assortment of goods and services.That we’re all different, and not equal is a great thing, not something which needs to be stifled through statist-egalitarianism. This is precisely how the division of labor flourishes.

Instead of dreaming, we’re taught to conform and fit in with the pack, rather than to express and delight in our differences. In general, we’re told not to be ourselves, think outside the box, and discover our own talents, but to fit into a mold and be like the rest of the crowd. Any outcasts get shunned, and inevitably fall through the cracks. The idea of public schooling, like all state programs, is a one-size fits-all solution that is applied to subjective and unique individuals. Instead of someone caring for myself, for instance, a high school “drop out” (or, I prefer, “broke free”), schooling did nothing for me. Though I am not competent in mathematics or the other sciences, whereas I may have been suitable to learn another skill or have found interest in another subject, I left without learning anything at all. I would have been indefinitely better off now if I knew one thing, such as emerging as a young master-gardener adult, truck driver, or anything. I left with nothing but resentment that I was forced to attend a public school, which felt like, and was, prison to me. Maybe it is for some people, but certainly it is not for everyone. I had to learn on my own that you have to take control of life by yourself.

As a general rule, monopolization is always about doing away with choice and putting in its place a top-down, state-approved program [curriculum] in place of competition. Were we free to choose, different possibilities would be available to us, tailored to fit the various needs of different humans, than to find our little options acceptable. We would take the responsibility in our own hands to decide our future. It’s unfortunate most tolerate the status quo without question. It is the way it must be, they have apparently resigned to believing.

What is needed?

We’ve come so far from the idea of government in its most limited, minarchist role of protecting life, liberty, and property, which is a logical and empirical failure, to a concept of government that isn’t relegated simply to protecting our rights, indeed which precede them and which they come to infringe, but one where its scope is to fulfill our any and every need. The concept of rights, to most now, are not negative rights as the libertarian conceives of them, i.e., that it is your freedom to do as you please so long as you do not violate another’s equal right to do so, but they’re a plethora or buffet of positive rights that everyone is supposedly entitled to. Nearly everything is said to be a right, from newer inventions in the scope of things: internet, cell phones, air conditioning, to houses, healthcare, and anything else you can think of. This will create a culture of infantilization, not responsibility and adulthood.

In a time of crisis, which today necessarily means a government-created one (such as: recession, war, social division), anyone expecting the government to come to their aid is going to be at a loss of options. In fact, it has been legally decided that the police have no obligation to protect you. Can you protect yourself?

But it all leaves us in an interesting situation in that, though government cannot work to satisfy us, it nonetheless will never willingly relinquish power and turn its monopolization of goods and services over to the private market economy. This leaves us feeling that, if the roads are to be fixed, we must give in and provide them ever-more money. Or, although the socialized police cannot be fixed, that we should give them more tax-money.

Nothing will suffice to sustain our lives but a privatization of all public property, and removing the state from our lives. Humans need to get to self-government, or else the future of the world will be one of war and misery, and other horrid conditions which states create. It already means this for many victims of state aggression.

Those who will look to the state for solutions to the very end will eventually find it coming up absolutely short. The state is unsustainable. Their operations are already financed by way of creating paper-money from nothing. The “debt ceiling” or budget deals are always in debate. One day the U.S. government will have to default on its obligations. This day could be bad, because it will catch so many unprepared. When central planning is substituted for a spontaneous order, trouble emerges everywhere, and in addition the people never knew what life was like without the all-intrusive state deciding things for them.

Without sound economics, as taught by that of Mises in his magnum opus, Human Action, civilization threatens to go with it. Civilization depends on the people at large adhering to the ethic of private property and the resulting free-exchange, natural money, and other things which follow from it. If it is everyone’s responsibility to educate themselves, a philosophy of things would be a good place to start. Of course, government-schools don’t teach any real economics, history, or philosophy, and this is why the bulk of the public have never even thought twice about the government they take for granted, but will soon be exposed as unable to make good on its promises. It’s been a long time in the making.

We need to think about doing things ourselves and thinking for ourselves when it comes to solving problems. Indeed life is economics: solving one problem after another, and making choices at each step. We can only learn from our mistakes, which liberty provides us to do, and correct them in the future. We don’t need a government to hold our hand, which is only a disguise for their power-lust. I can’t say I practice what I preach. I cannot cook good, survive in the forest, shoot very well, or do all these other things, but I think it’s a part of the lifestyle of libertarians that they’re aware they must take their life into their own hands, as even if the government pretends to hold your hand for you, it is merely a show.

The government does not know our needs anyway. There is no “needs” databank it works to satisfy. Without a free market, and the tests market forces impose upon things, such as profit and loss, there is no way to rationally allocate resources; and we don’t get to know who might best provide us with some given good or service. We’re forced to accept the government way, and that’s that. The monopoly is hardly ever questioned, but is believed only to be in need of some “reform.” If crime rises, rather than the police being viewed as inept at their job, their budget is said to be in need of expansion. If the schools can’t teach kids, rather than privatizing the service of education, it’s only because their budgets were insufficient. If the roads have potholes in them, it’s because those greedy taxpayers wanted to keep more of their own money. The excuse provided, from Venezuela to the United States, that there just wasn’t enough socialism for it to work.

Isn’t it about time, instead of bickering over half-solutions, that some more people stand up and insist it isn’t the role of the state to teach their children, provide them with healthcare, etc., until finally reasoning to the point that there is no necessity for any goods or services be monopolized whatever?

Can’t they see they’re preventing us from being free and acting freely? They can’t allow a social order to emerge out of a division of labor, or for the economy to be too free, because then we would have no need for them. Our needs would, more so than now, all be met. They need to get in the way, screw things up, and then declare themselves the indispensable third-party in our lives. This is the problem of government: it is the cause masquerading as the cure. Since another option, the free society, isn’t even on the table, discussion exists within the tiny statist box for how people ought to be organized. Almost always this includes evermore public goods, and talks of “privatization,” like of air-traffic control, school vouchers, etc., are all half-assed and don’t really involve getting the government out entirely. The government subcontracting out tax-funded services is not privatization in the way the libertarian means it.

But I think, if what we have now is safety, then give me danger. I don’t want the state’s “security.” If without the state, there would be an underproduction in force, then give me that. I’m done with a military spread around the world that I’m forced to support, and expected to bow down to. I’m tired of police brutality that I’m supposed to apologize for, assuming they’ll hire some better people or reform the department. Yeah, right! When? Never! They will only get worse.

But liberty perhaps is dangerous: it requires responsibility! Criminals aren’t going anywhere. As I’d always uphold, that they exist does not logically lend to a need to institutionalize crime (theft, aggression) in a state. In fact, this increases crime, as no private crime could ever amount to the trillions of dollars siphoned off by the state to run its burdensome programs that help no one but the non-contractors and non-producers who receive a government check.

We might, in a free society, with increased property rights, be able to exclude people from our property, and thus have one element of natural justice that is social ostracization should a few bad apples not wish to cooperate in an order that respects each man’s right to liberty and security in his property. But more likely is that people whom the state presently turns into criminals, and the people who work for that non-productive criminal organization, would begin to join the productive ranks of economic activity, leaving behind aggression for the more profitable venture of serving others in the voluntary market economy.

As of now, being that any recipients of state redistribution have a market income of zero, their activities are parasitic on production and serve only to make us poorer. This prevents us who strive for bettering our lives from reaching that point. The poorer we are, the less we’re able to uphold civilization that capitalism and freedom can give us. Wreckless irresponsiblity and the existence of a state go hand-in-hand in my mind.

Closing thoughts

If I may lastly state that when I was first turned on by libertarian ideas quite some years back, it made me realize that it must be stressful being a socialist and feeling like everything is owed to you, and not receiving free things means you’re oppressed, because I experienced quite a sense of relief to realize that no one owes me anything in this world; I need to create my own life if I am to be satisfied. Our rights are necessarily negative, and yet this does come with great responsibility. Should we concede our rights to a monopolistic agency that is the sole provider of protection (i.e., the state), it’s likely that we will lose with it the ability and will to take care of ourselves elsewhere in life. That our freedom comes from the state looting us is the joke of our age. It means we will lose freedom.