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... concern with liberty... [T]his way of seeing the relationship between equality and liberty is altogether faulty. Libertarians must think it important that people should have liberty. Given this, questions would immediately arise regarding: who, how much, how distributed, how equal? Thus the issue of equality immediately arises as a supplement to the assertion of the importance of liberty. The libertarian proposal has to be completed by going on to characterize the distribution of rights among the people involved.
In fact, the libertarian demands for liberty typically include important features of equal liberty, e. g. the insistence on equal immunity from interference by others... Liberty is among the possible fields of application of equality, and equality is among the possible patterns of distribution of liberty. [ 9 ] Sens analysis is confused here, for two reasons. First, as weve already seen, equality of liberty is not a supplement to the value of liberty, but simply follows from the ideal of total liberty. (Sens failure to recognize this may be due to his thinking of liberty in positive terms, as freedom to do this or that, in which case the need to respect others liberty would be a limitation on ones own liberty, thus rendering total liberty for all impossible. But if liberty is understood in negative terms, as freedom from coercive interference, then total liberty for all is entirely possible. ) Second, Sen treats liberty as something that libertarians just happen to value, and to which egalitarian considerations are subsequently applied not recognizing that liberty itself is grounded in a concern for equality in the Lockean sense.
The case against socioeconomically egalitarian legislation is, as I said, an egalitarian one; for such legislation invariably involves the coercive subordination or subjection of dissenting individuals to the taxes and regulations imposed by government decision makers, and thus presupposes an inequality in authority between the former and the latter. As Ludwig von Mises writes: It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend.
Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom. [ 10 ] Nor would an anarchistic version of socialism fare any better; as long as some people are imposing redistributive policies by force or threat of force on unconsenting others, we have inequality in authority between the coercers and the coerced, regardless of whether those doing the coercing are public citizens or private individuals, and regardless of whether they represent a majority or a minority. Nor would a Hobbesian jungle, where anyone is free to impose her will on anyone else, embody equality in authority; for as soon as one person does succeed in subordinating another, an inequality in authority emerges. The Hobbesian jungle might represent equal opportunity for authority, but in this context the libertarian favors equality of outcome. (That, incidentally, is why the right to liberty is inalienable. ) Only defensive uses of force are justified, since these restore equality in authority rather than violating it.
By the same token, an idealized democracy in which every citizen had an equal chance to get into a position of political power would also represent only equal opportunity for authority, not equality of outcome, and so would likewise offend against Lockean equality. To a libertarian, the saying "anyone can grow up to become president, " if it were true, would have the same cheery ring as "anyone might be the next person to assault you. " Inequality in authority is far more offensive, from a moral point of view, than mere socioeconomic inequality; hence, whenever the demands of socioeconomic equality conflict with the demands of libertarian equality, which they generally do, preference must be given to the latter. So I assert. I think this claim can be argued for, not just asserted.
But I shall not argue for it at present both because my time today is limited, and because in a certain sense I do not need to argue for it. For socioeconomic egalitarians themselves show, by their actions if not their words, that they regard inequality in authority as a greater evil than socioeconomic inequality. Most socioeconomic egalitarians of my acquaintance would certainly be more outraged at being robbed or assaulted by a colleague than at learning that the colleague was receiving a higher salary. Hence in practice they clearly recognize which of these inequalities is the greater evil. Indeed, most socioeconomic egalitarians govern their everyday personal interactions by a scrupulous adherence to libertarian principles, and they expect the same treatment in return.
Nor will it do to reply that socioeconomic inequality is itself a form of inequality in authority, and so should be forbidden for the same reason. For, as Rothbard points out, this combination of ideas is inconsistent: A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say... if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange? ... B is committing violence; there is no question about that... [T]his violence is either invasive and therefore unjust, or defensive and therefore just. If we adopt the "economic-power" argument, we must choose the latter position; if we reject it, we must adopt the former...
The "middle-of-the-road" statist cannot logically say that there are "many forms" of unjustified coercion. He must choose one or the other and take his stand accordingly. Either he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion overt physical violence or he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion refusal to exchange. [ 11 ] To expand on Rothbards point: a prohibition on all, or even on most, cases of Lockean inequality is not consistent with recognizing both socioeconomic inequality and initiatory force as forms of Lockean inequality, because an effective ban on socioeconomic inequality requires the endorsement of systematic initiatory force on a massive scale. Hence socioeconomic egalitarians, if they wish to be consistent, can offer their ideal only as a replacement of Lockean equality, not as an extension of it. (The same point applies to those statist's who say that negative rights are all very well, but we need positive rights tools though every positive right added didnt mean one more negative right removed. ) Given the vast inequality in authority between the state apparatus and its subjects given, for that matter, the vast socioeconomic inequality between them how is it that so many who think of themselves as dedicated above all to human equality so readily become apologists for the state? Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence. The fifth-century B.
C. Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu once remarked that if someone can recognize an act of unjust aggression when it is perpetrated by one individual against another, but not when the same act is perpetrated by an organized group of individuals, such a person must be confused about right and wrong. [ 12 ]Socioeconomic egalitarians, then, must likewise be under some sort of confusion. But what, and why? A cynic might respond that socioeconomic egalitarians are not confused at all; their supposed devotion to equality is simply a disguise for power lust, and they exempt the state from their criticisms because they plan to wield its reins, or at least to get in good with those who do. This strikes me as a fair analysis of some, but only some, socioeconomic egalitarians. Most of the socioeconomic egalitarians I know personally are sincere in their egalitarianism and well-meaning in their statism.
I dont mean by this that they are entirely innocent; after all, an innocent statist would have to be one who says: "I recognizes who could not? that the coercive subordination of individuals to the state by the means of systematic legalized violence and the threat thereof is a great evil. But this evil is, unfortunately, necessary in order to prevent evils still greater. "A statist who took this point of view could not be cheerful about her statism, but on the contrary would have to conduct herself with the tragic solemnity of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter to save the fleet. The innocent statist, too, could hardly permit herself to reach this grim conclusion without first investigating possible alternatives which, for a statist in the academy, would have to involve carefully researching and trying to refute (and desperately hoping to be unable to refute) the wealth of libertarian literature arguing that most of the other evils she cites can be prevented through non statist means.
By these criteria, few statist's qualify as innocent. To seek for alternatives to inequality in authority would be to acknowledge that statism involves such inequality before ascertaining that alternatives are available, and this would force upon the statist an unpleasant choice she prefers to avoid. Hence I regard statism as being, at least in most cases, a moral vice, rather than a mere cognitive mistake, in much the same way that racism and sexism are moral vices, not mere cognitive mistakes. But, again like racism and sexism, statism is the kind of moral vice that tends to enter the soul through self-deception, semi-conscious osmosis, and a kind of Arendtian banality, rather than through a forthright embrace; it is a form of spiritual blindness that can, and does, infect even those who are largely sincere and well-meaning. (Nor do I mean to suggest that libertarians are generally more virtuous than statist's.
Justice is only one virtue among many, and libertarianism is only one application of justice; so the only self-congratulatory moral we can draw is that we score higher on one aspect of one virtue than our statist colleagues do. ) What form does this spiritual blindness take? On the one hand, statist ideology must render the violence of the state invisible, in order to disguise the affront to equality it represents. Hence statist's tend to treat governmental edicts as though they were incantations, passing directly from decree to result, without the inconvenience of means; since in the real world the chief means employed by government is violence, threatened and actual, cloaking state decrees and their violent implementation in the garb of incantation disguises both the immorality and the inefficiency of statism by ignoring the messy path from decree to result. Yet on the other hand, the effectiveness of governmental edicts depends precisely on people being all too aware of the force backing up those edicts. Hence statism can maintain its plausibility only by implicitly projecting a kind of grotesque parody of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: just as bread and wine must be transformed in their essence into the body and blood of Christ in order to play their necessary spiritual role, whilst at the same time they must retain the external accidents of bread and wine in order to play their necessary practical role, so the violence of the state, to be justified, must be transubstantiate d in its essence into peaceful incantation, yet at the same time, to be effective, it must retain the external accidents of violence. (This socialization of state violence explains how proponents of gun control, for example, can regard themselves as opponents of violence whilst at the same time threatening massive and systematic violence against peaceful citizens. ) But to ignore or mask the violence upon which socioeconomic legislation necessarily rests is to acquiesce in the unconscionable subordination and subjection that such violence embodies. It is to treat those subordinated and subjected as mere means to the ends of those doing the subordinating, and thus to assume a legitimate inequality in power and jurisdiction between the two groups.
The libertarian revulsion against such arrogant presumption is ipso facto an egalitarian impulse. Those who feel no such revulsion should not expect their egalitarian credentials to pass unquestioned; they may revere equality in theory, but they fail to recognize it in practice. For as we passed by, and beheld their devotions, we found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN IDEAL. What therefore they ignorantly worship, that declare we unto them. For too long, we have allowed our misguided opponents to monopolize the banner of equality. We have more right to that banner than they do.
The time has come to seize it back.
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