Not as a matter of principle. But as a matter of practice I do, because private coercion is much easier to route around than government coercion. When my employer, my club, or my neighbors coerce me too much, finding replacements isn't too difficult. I just find a new job, join a different club, or move to another neighborhood. By contrast, when it's my government that coerces me too much, finding a substitute can be done, but it's much harder. This is especially true for a national government.
Technical question: When you say "private economic coercion", does "economic" mean "pecuniary" for you? Or does it include mobbing, deflating the tires of your car, and other non-pecuniar forms of economic coercion? I don't think it makes a big difference to the conclusion, but would feel more comfortable if the terms are clear.
I agree it ought to, but see no reason to believe that it would. If there's a correlation between some reasonable measure of equality in a nation and some reasonable measure of how much the government is stepping in, I have never seen evidence of it.
But let me rephrase my question. Let's say you are forced to emigrate for some reason. You can freely choose the country; in fact, you get to write that country's laws and define the values of its society. Where would you choose the boundary between private and government institutions to be, and why?
I disagree about rights. For one, some rights were much more liberal in the 19th century than they are today. Just think of drug laws -- cocaine, marijuana and morphium were all legal and in fairly widespread use.
Moreover, I don't see why we'd have to re-introduce slavery or repeal womens' right to vote to get a 19th century type government again.
But yes, I might be willing to accept 19th century type services and protections. Why not?
Do you think you would have as many employment opportunities if, for instance, all antitrust regulations were removed? Do you think that your choice of neighborhoods would be as vast if regulations banning discrimination in housing were repealed?
Well, it means "marketplace" coercion. For example, if only one company made cars, the company could charge monopolist prices for its products. The choice, then, would be to pay the inflated price or do without. That would be coercive.
Thomas wrote:I disagree about rights. For one, some rights were much more liberal in the 19th century than they are today. Just think of drug laws -- cocaine, marijuana and morphium were all legal and in fairly widespread use.
Quite true (except for marijuana, which was not widely used in the US except to make rope), but they were used primarily in medicines. Of course, in a libertarian society, there would be no governmental regulation of foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals at all, so we could all have the right to return to the good old days of tainted meats and patent nostrums.
Thomas wrote:Moreover, I don't see why we'd have to re-introduce slavery or repeal womens' right to vote to get a 19th century type government again.
No, but we'd certainly repeal all labor, health, social security, educational, and marketplace regulations. That wouldn't be a return to 19th century rights, that would be more like the 17th century.
Thomas wrote:But yes, I might be willing to accept 19th century type services and protections. Why not?
Why not simply return to a Hobbesian state of nature?
Hell yes! Monopoly-regulating agencies notoriously turn into agencies for conserving the monopoly -- the sad history of railroad regulation and the ICC is especially instructive here. Historically, democratic government is no more likely to legislate emancipation than to legislate that blacks can only sit in the back of the bus -- a bill the bus companies lobbied against when it was introduced, and that was repealed only by the private initiative of citizens like Martin Luther King. But my conclusion doesn't even depend on this strong form of the assumption. It continues to hold as long as more government coercion is sacked than private coercion is introduced, measured by the ease with which I can route around it. I am certain that this is the case in the scenario we are talking about.
Thanks for clarifying. You are certainly aware that you're using a non-standard definition of coercion here. Here is one version of the standad definition: According to encyclopedia.com, coercion is "the unlawful act of compelling a person to do, or to abstain from doing, something by depriving him of the exercise of his free will, particularly by use or threat of physical or moral force. In many states of the United States, statutes declare a person guilty of a misdemeanor if he, by violence or injury to another's person, family, or property, or by depriving him of his clothing or any tool or implement, or by intimidating him with threat of force, compels that other to perform some act that the other is not legally bound to perform. " I don't see how any of your examples match this definition.
I doubt that tainted meats were ever as much of a problem as modern people think they were, if you discount for average people being 20 times poorer in the 19th century than they are today. Poisoning your customers is rarely a profitable business strategy, so butchers have an incentive not to sell it regardless of what the government does. Patent nostrums are still en vogue. They are now called homeopathy, Christian Science, and acupuncture. The availability of genuinely helpful medicine is a consequence of technical progress. Patent nostrums against infections were pervasive in the 19th century because antibiotics hadn't yet been invented, not because Congress neglected to outlaw them.
This is a good example of why I think libertarians must believe that people, in general, are both good and rational.
Your definition is wrong.
Well, the problem with marketplace responses -- even if they worked perfectly -- is that they tend to work slowly.
My conclusion is independent of how good and rational people generally are.
joefromchicago wrote:Your definition is wrong.
Maybe so, but it happens to be consistent with the definition of standard references like Brockhaus and Encyclopedia Britannica. I only cited encyclopedia.com because it is accessible freely online. You can read the article here. If their definition is wrong, what would the law community consider the authoritive reference for defining "coercion" in a legal context? How does this reference define it?
joefromchicago wrote:Well, the problem with marketplace responses -- even if they worked perfectly -- is that they tend to work slowly.
Slower than government responses? You are obviously unfamiliar with the processing times typical for the FDA.
There is, as far as I know, no authoritative legal definition of "coercion," for the simple reason (as I pointed out earlier) that "coercion" is not, by itself, illegal.
A contract isn't a crime either. Nevertheless, the term "contract" has a well defined meaning in a legal context, and I'm certain that there is a standard reference lawyers, judges, and legal scholars use for the definition of legal terms. Every field has such a standard refernce, so what is the legal community's?
Here are two more scenarios.
3. In a libertarian society, several organizations of consumer advocates, competing for consumers who trust them enough to buy their magazine, inspect meat packing plants. Plant owners play along because they know that noncooperation immediately would immediately ruin their reputation. If meat turns out to be tainted, the plant goes bankrupt. If not, it doesn't. Cost in human lives: zero, because the expectation of bankruptcy keeps meat plant owners honest in the first place.
4. In today's America, someone invents a helpful, but inssuficiently tested medication. If an FDA official approves the medication too early and somebody dies of it five years later, his carreer is over. If he approves it too late, people die because medication that would save their lives stays off the market. But it won't cause any problems for the official because the causality cannot be proven. As a result, the FDA is notoriously slow to approve new drugs.
This scenario, of course, depends upon the plant owner being both rational and, in a sense, well-intentioned.
Once again, Thomas, I note that you are much more optimistic regarding human nature than I am.
Did you sleep well last night knowing that police and firemen were on duty in case something untoward happened? Did you get up and brush your teeth knowing that the water was pure? Did did you drive to work knowing the roads would be passable?
A few years ago, We spent a social evening with a senior fellow at a major think tank. His mantra for the evening was "all government is evil." Everything could and should be done without government.
LRR Hood.
You wonder about people who trust government to do a just and fair job in any situation.
Did you sleep well last night knowing that police and firemen were on duty in case something untoward happened? Did you get up and brush your teeth knowing that the water was pure? Did did you drive to work knowing the roads would be passable?
Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
And once again, Joe, you are missing the point. I am either less optimistic than you about human nature organized through political transactions, or more optimistic than you about human nature organized through private transactions, or a combination of both. Politicians are just as human as merchants are, so our opinions of human nature per se have nothing to do with the difference in our conclusions.
Thomas, you are optimistic because libertarianism rests on an assumption that marketplace decisions are made by rational economic actors. I believe that most governmental systems, in contrast, assume that people are not rational, at least not dependably so. I tend to agree with the latter.
either they acknowledge it as a regrettable but necessary concommitant to their theory, or else they deny that monopolies can ever exist. Where do you stand on that, Thomas?
I agree with your premise that you can't depend on humans being rational. But I still disagree with your conclusion because irrationality cuts both ways in two dimensions. First off, in any given situation, there is only one rational thing to do (or very few things). But there are infinitely many ways of acting irrationally. Therefore, to improve on the rationality assumption, it is not enough to argue that people are never strictly rational. You also have to argue that they are predictably irrational in a consistent enough way to change your conclusions about how a state should be organized. So far I haven't seen anyone making this case in a way that came close to convincing me.
To put it another way: a priori, for every meatpacker who is irrationally evil, there's a meatpacker who is irrationally altruistic and provides better meat than he would rationally do.
Therefore, if you predict that people will behave rationally, you will be wrong, but not as wrong as when you predict any particular irrational behavior. Also, the law of great numbers assures that rationallity tends to add up, but irrationality tends to cancel out in the aggregate that is human society. For an extended version of this argument, see the introduction of David Friedman's textbook on Price Theory. (Section "Why Economics might work")
The second way in which irrationality cuts both ways is because governors, judges and congressmen in the political system are just as irrational as meatpackers on the marketplace. Why does that compromise your trust in markets more than your trust in politics?
I don't deny that monopolies exist and that they are a problem. But I also don't think antitrust legislation improved on things, for several reasons. 1) Some degree of monopoly power is often the price we pay for division of labor, which is a good thing. 2) Government can bust monopolies, but it also grants a lot of monopolies. 3) Anti-trust legislation has turned out to have so many adverse side effects that their benefits may not be worth the damage they do.
For a broader exposition of points 1-3, I recommend "The concise Encyclopedia of Economics", in particular their articles on Monopoly and Anti-Trust. If you don't want to trust a Web page, one widely cited reference is Richard Posner: "Antitrust Law". Posner certainly isn't all-knowing, but he did co-invent the academic field we are talking about, which is commonly referred to as "Law and Economics".
Finally, there's a point 4): Government itself is a monopoloy, and suffers exactly the same problems as all the other ones. If monopolies in the market are the problem, I don't see how a monopoly in politics is the solution. Again, I'm not denying that markets are imperfect. I am rejecting your implicit claim that governments are any less imperfect.
