Politics in More than One Dimension

The terms ‘right’ and ‘left,’ as political terms in use today appear to me to be applied in an ad hoc and makeshift manner.  Certainly, there seems to me to be no clear theory underpinning their application to politics.  So let’s develop one.

We will start with two positions: 1)  Society should act to benefit the individual.  We will suppose that to be the premise of the right.  The nest step is the notion that society is best served when it serves the individual.  The extreme logical conclusion is that society can be sacrificed for the individual.

                                                      2)  The individual should act to benefit society.  We will suppose that to be the premise of the left. The next step is that the individual is best served when he serves society. The extreme logical conclusion is that the individual can be sacrificed for society.

This is just where we are starting.  We will come back to this. 

This will not give us our usual alignment of interests.  For instance, from this basis, universal health care is something which should be desired by someone on the right. On the other hand, the justification for national defense is found on the left.  So, apparently we have another axis, independent of the left or the right, which is the size of government.  The argument against universal healthcare, then, is against a larger government, and in favor of a smaller one. But it cannot be one of efficiency.  There are dozens of examples where universal healthcare is more efficient at delivery of services to citizens than what happens in its absence.  Neither can it be a liberty argument, and it cannot be a danger argument.  

We also observe that while totalitarianism is indeed on the left, anarchy, reputed to be a phenomenon of the left, is under these premises, in fact a possibility of the right.  Note we have said nothing about inequality.  We have not mentioned any relationships between individuals, but only between an individual and the rest of his society.

Now our two premises are incomplete, and in fact pejorative of the left.  We have placed the benefits to the individual on the right, and the costs to the individual on the left.

Lets go back to what we see. Or rather what we are told is what we see:   We see Right and Left.  We see Republicans and Democrats.  We see the rights of the individual versus the demands of the state. But I do not think that is the real situation.

Consider instead that all politics comes down to who gets the benefits, and who bears the costs.   And remember, all benefits have to be paid for.  The extreme positions on each of these then is either the individual as a particular, or society as a whole.

But this gives us the following table:  I have also included some rubrics one might consider these positions, and their arguments, to go under.

  Society pays: Society Benefits                     Society pays:  Individual benefits

           (Communism)                                                      (  Capitalism )

Individual pays: Society benefits                 Individual pays: Individual benefits  

           (          ?           )                                                   (Libertarianism)

          

So these statements are like the corners of a physical table.  They are the extremes, and all of politics, all the actions of and in society, goes on on the surface of this table, inside these corners. 

                     

Now, no society really exists, or has ever existed, at the corners, or even at the edges, of the table.  Robinson  Crusoe, for instance, being both the individual and his complete society, is squarely in the middle.   They are ideals that (misguided) individuals strive for.  They are misguided because these corners properly apply to different aspects of every society.  These values are themselves a higher dimensional structure than we have come to understand, and -  and the table,  it’s actually a tetrahedron.  I am preserving the line of my thinking because, even described, it is far more difficult to jump directly to the tetrahedron.

But to return to consideration as a table, the left-right axis is from the lower left corner to the upper right hand corner.  The lower left corner, we can substitute for the question mark "altruism."  Or, taxes.  Similarly the upper right, which we have shown is congruent with universal health care, we have put capitalism. As we have stated above, there is another, independent, dimension, which is size of government.  On the right we can have all government, (which de facto I suppose would be fascism,) and on the left no government, which we have named "altruism," extending the definition of the word to include the corresponding political structure, however it may be constructed.   

A Third and a Fourth Reason Libertarian Societies Must Fail

A Third and Fourth Reason Libertarian Societies Must Fail

We previously presented two social problems libertarian societies are incapable of solving.  The first is the producer-consumer problem:  Without a compulsive mechanism to continually, or at least periodically, redistribute demand, that is, a government capable of effective taxation, the net consumers, (which is to say, those who actually allocate consumption,)  end up with all the money, and the producers end up decapitalized.  The second is the bully problem:  In the absence of a government, there is no mechanism to prevent the strong from victimizing the weak. 

A third reason is the necessity to regulate competition among the powerful.  The problem here is that, among the powerful, there are two incompatible expressions of self interest. 

Consider the rest of society as the common resource of the wealthy. Clearly it is in the collective interests of the wealthy to manage, maintain, and nurture society, since they are dependent on it.  However, it is in the individual interests of the wealthy to exploit society as much as they can, since any one who does not will be left with less, and weaker than the others.  The wealthy are thus in competition with each other to exploit society, and to the greatest of their ability.  It is the tragedy of the commons, where the commons is the entirety of society.

Now there are (many) cases of successful community regulation of shared resources.  But they are invariably local in scale, and associated with strong and close community relationships.

In the absence of close community, there are only two solutions.  One is to divide up the resources.  In terms of a country, this would be the fragmentation of that country into smaller ones, and the assumption of the government functions of each new country by a single individual. In this case, the libertarian society fails by fragmentation into a collection of independent autocracies. However, the force of competition between nations need not allow this as a solution at all, as resources may be consumed in a greater than sustainable rate in an arms race.  That is, the competition between the new, smaller, nations to build force will impose a higher rate of discounting the future. 

The other solution is to restrain and direct the self interested behavior of the wealthy by an overarching agency. That is, the institution of a government of sufficient strength to restrain the wealthy.  One of the necessary requirements of strength needed to accomplish this is an effective monopoly of force by the government.  So the third reason, then, that a libertarian society will fail, is that either it will tear itself apart, or it will acquire a government.

And this is already incompatible with the premises of Right Libertarianism.  However, even this government is not sufficient. The monopoly of force will merely prevent the competition between entities from itself degenerating into a balance of realized and potential violence.    The other required ability of the government is to force the internalization of costs.  The internalization of costs must be done in both space and time.  In particular, pollution must be eliminated, or at least paid for in real, compensatory, investment.  Also, all resources must be consumed at a sustainable rate. Since the consumption of non-renewable resources by definition cannot be sustained, they must be either recycled or, if they are of a nature where they cannot be recycled, dependence on them must be eliminated. Only with this requirement can society be assured that the benefits of production are greater than the costs. 

One note here. The greater the concentration of wealth, the greater the powers of government required to counterbalance it.

To put the point nicely: Right Libertarianism, except perhaps on the smallest scale, lacks the necessary organization to respond to the demands of its physical environment. This includes the demands made by other, more organized, societies.  This is the fourth reason libertarian societies will fail.  

Regarding organization, the body politic of Right Libertarianism might be regarded to most closely resemble that of a jellyfish, rather than any higher life form with some sort of functioning brain.  In consideration of that, the increasing rise of moneyed power, the concomitant reduction in government functionality as it increasingly becomes subject to control by the wealthy, the "Libertarianization" of our nation, are given additional perspective. 

A Second Reason Libertarian Societies must Fail

In the previous post, we argued that a mechanism for the redistribution of demand was required to maintain a society. In a libertarian society, there can be no such mechanism. In consequence, in a libertarian society the market for production is progressively destroyed, and with the market the entire economy.

There is also a more direct reason libertarian societies fail: Libertarian societies provide no adequate mechanism for protecting your neighbor from  the aggression of others.  There must be a mechanism, because without such a mechanism, there is inadequate motive for you, or anyone else, to help your neighbor resist the bully.

It is in the concentrated interest of the bully to oppress your neighbor.  The bully may profit greatly if he succeeds.  The benefits to the bully will be greater than the cost.  But you, and everyone else, only have a diffuse interest in helping your neighbor resist the bully.  The cost to you to help your neighbor is concentrated, and may be far greater than the benefit to you.  Further, if mutual aid is agreed to, but such protection is voluntary, it is in your interest, and the interest of others who might be expected to contribute, to contribute as little as possible to the protection of your neighbor. Which would likely be nothing.  This is an instance of the free rider problem: If anyone can ride for free, everyone will ride for free, because only a fool, (or a saint, perhaps,) would pay for what is offered for free.

So the consequence is that in the absence of government, and police, and regulation, the bully, the large organization, the wealthy, will dominate and oppress your neighbor, and after your neighbor, you. A government diffuses the cost for the protection of your neighbor across the whole society. In the libertarian state, some are more equal than others, and the more equal shall devour the liberties of the less equal, because the only thing to stop them is: principle.  That is, in libertarianism, the only mechanism to stop the powerful from effectively enslaving the weak is the moral disposition of those same powerful interests.

From the point of view of Widerquist's thesis, there is only the pronouncement of platitudes and the benevolence of the powerful to prevent the establishment of absolute monarchy by force of violence. There is no real reason for the prospective despot to wait on 'legitimate' means.  

Why there are no Right Libertarian Societies

Why there are no Right Libertarian Societies 

Despite the attractiveness, to some, of libertarian prescriptions for creating a ‘better’ and ‘freer’ society, there is a notable absence of any examples of states run according to libertarian principles in the record of history.  The reason is that libertarian societies, as a matter of definition, lack an institution, ( a government, basically) capable of redistributing demand.  They thus are incapable of dealing with the producer-consumer problem, (which I describe below,) and so fail.

One of the problems in dealing with libertarian economics is the protean nature of the libertarian state, which, in the hands of libertarians, changes according to the criticism leveled against it.  That is, what ever the libertarian state one criticizes, it is not the state advocated by any libertarians.  

Anyway, from Karl Widerquist (who, granted, seems to be no apologist for libertarians,) “A Dilemma for Libertarians,” we have:

            “Libertarianism can be thought of in at least three ways: It is the ideology

supporting (1) maximal equal liberty understood as self-ownership or noninterference, (2)

strong, inviolable property rights without regard to the pattern of distribution of those

rights, or (3) a so-called libertarian state, which is either a government limited to

protecting property rights and self-ownership or no government at all.

 Natural rights libertarians think of their philosophy as embodying all three of these claims, believing that a commitment to maximal equal freedom entails a commitment to strong property rights, which in turn entails a commitment to a libertarian state.”

http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=widerquist

Widerquist, whose paper is well worth the read, argues that any libertarian state operating under these assumptions necessarily evolves into what is effectively an absolute monarchy.  (An aside:  A close analysis of the 11 incidents of property,  as described by Tony Honore an conveyed by Widerquist in his paper, at least strongly suggests that it is impossible to eliminate any of the functions of government.  These functions can only be redistributed.  Libertarians, then, seem to believe in appropriating all, or for the minimalist state libertarians almost all, of the functions of government to the individual.)

So we will address libertarianism as described above.  But we will show something different.  (Since here the notion of property is paramount, we will consider this an instance of right libertarianism. Here we will not address the concerns which might be raised by any of the many varieties of left libertarianism.) We show that in the libertarian ‘minimal state’ of government protecting only property rights and ‘self-ownership,’ the economy cannot maintain demand for its production, and so will collapse. (Actually, we will show something quite different from this!)

But consider then a closed model economy, consisting of two sectors: a producing sector, and a consuming sector.  We allocate to the consuming sector a quantity of money. Here we are just talking tokens of demand, as I discussed in “The Standard Definition of Money is in Error.“  With these tokens, this money, the consuming sector buys the products of the producing sector. The consuming sector must spend its money to support itself, since it produces nothing on its own, and therefore can earn no money selling what it produces. So eventually it runs out of money.  (With this model there is no provision for borrowing, or assets.  Adding these features do not change the direction of the dynamics.)  As a result, the consuming sector demand then collapses.  With the collapse of the demand of consuming sector, there is no one to buy surplus production.    Prices crash, and with that crash production, and so the economy.  Adding the possibility of borrowing, or the selling of assets by the consuming sector, does not change the direction of the process, but merely adds to its duration.

Reality is of course, more complicated. First, any economy is more properly divided into net consumers and net producers. Consumers do produce, and producers do consume, but the distinction may still be made.  Now, whenever the consuming sector of the remaining economy is driven from the economy, the remaining economy may still be so divided. That is, the remaining economy cannot produce a net surplus to its own consumption, because there is no one to buy it. No one else has any money.  Therefore, the remaining economy must reduce production to match the reduced demand. Because production is reduced, so is that part of the economy which produces.  Thus, the producing sector is less than the whole of the remaining economy, and so the other part of the remaining economy is necessarily a net consuming sector. But this new net consuming sector has only a finite amount of money, with which to buy the surplus production of what is now the producing sector.  And so the process iterates.  The actual process of collapse, then, can better be described as a continual increase in the concentration of money and wealth, as ever an ever larger portion of the economy is stripped of its demand on the ever shrinking net producing portion of the economy. 

Although we have argued from a closed economy, we can actually start from an open one.  The entire economy then is the net producer, which exports its entire surplus into the exterior. The exterior, however, necessarily starts with a finite amount of money.  And this money necessarily is eventually depleted.  And so we return to the start of the previous process, which we have already shown eventually leads to collapse.

In a more realistic monetary economy, relative profits determines who is a net consumer, and who is a net producer.  The net consumer is the one who profits from his production, and the net producer is the one who loses money from his production.

This is not intuitive.  But suppose a fixed money supply.  The producer who profits, can buy more than he produces.  That is, he can consume more than he produces.  He is a net consumer.  The producer who loses money, can only buy less than he produces.  That is, he can only consume less than he produces.  He is a net producer.  ( I would like to point out here that, under capitalism, labor, certainly at least in private industry, is a net producer. This is because, for the capitalist to make a profit, labor, in the net, must produce more than it consumes.  (Consider first a one product economy.)  Even if we include government labor, if in the net businesses make a profit after taxes, labor as a whole is still a net producer.)

 This fact inverts the conclusion:  It is the net consumer who ends up with all the money and wealth, whereas the net producer is stripped of all his money and eventually all his assets. So as promised, what we have instead shown is that it is production which is decapitalized, and which the economy fails to maintain, and that is the cause of the economy failing. 

Labor, of course, is not the only net producer.

In the libertarian economy, there is no mechanism to redistribute demand, as is required to maintain production. Voluntary redistribution of demand from the net consumers to the net producers cannot work.  The set of all producers represents a commons, and any consumer who restrained his consumption would be exploited by other consumers.  And any compulsive mechanism of redistribution is contrary to minimal government libertarian principles.

The best solution seems consist of the continual issuance of money by the producers, (as defined in the more realistic monetary economy,) and, in order to prevent inflation, be attendant by the extinction of money among the consumers.  This is another way of saying money is taken from the consumers and returned to the producers.  This requires an instrument of compulsion, a government.  Such government must remain an instrument of the (real) producers, or it will fail to adequately return demand to the producing sector, and the economy will increasingly, de facto, approximate the character and trajectory of a libertarian society, and collapse.    

Two final notes:

1) Principle never stood in the way of profit. For instance, there is profit to be made from slavery, that is, the violent appropriation of the ‘ownership of self’ by others.  It took a war to establish the principle, and overcome the profit.  And there is profit to be made from the violent appropriation of property. In the absence of a mechanism to enforce principle, principle is empty. While libertarians enunciates the doctrines of “(1) maximal equal liberty understood as self-ownership or noninterference,” and “(2) strong, inviolable property rights without regard to the pattern of distribution of those rights,” the ‘libertarian state’ libertarians promote provides no effective mechanism to guarantee these rights.  Indeed, the very existence of such a mechanism is anathema to Libertarianism. 

So the preservation of individual rights, civil, political, and economic, requires a mechanism to guarantee those rights:  A government. This government requires a sufficient input of real resources to both to maintain itself, and to be able to act to effect such guarantee. It must also answer to those whose rights it guarantees.  Where the input of resources to this government erodes, or where that government less and less answers to the people, so must the rights of the people that government guarantees, erode. 

2)We will divide the functions of government into two:  internal and external.  We will suppose the external functions of government to be a net consuming sector of the economy. That is, any society with external functions of government has less wealth to distribute among its members.  That every society, or more certainly, almost every reasonably complicated society that we have ever known of, has had these external functions of government, despite the net cost, suggests that at least the leading members of those societies considered those functions necessary.  

Suppose now that all the internal functions of government were necessarily a net consuming sector.  That is, any society with a government would necessarily have less wealth to distribute among its members than a society without the internal functions of that government.  There are two possibilities.  The internal functions of government are used and maintained as an instrument for the oppression of the majority of the people by some ruling elite, to that elite’s profit.  That is, the benefits of those internal functions to that elite would be greater than the cost, to that elite, of maintaining and operating those functions.   Or, it would be preferable to the members of that society to have no internal functions of government, since then they wouldn’t have to pay for any functions.  That is, the people would be better off, and presumably choose, the internal functions of the libertarian state.  (Except, perhaps, for internal functions to enforce taxation to support the external functions.)  However, we have not seen this, or at least have not seen it perpetuated often enough for it to make the record, so we must assume that such an internal libertarian state must be unstable, and evolve as described above. (One possible example, though, might be the Old West.  Which raises other issues.)