Pardon my insolence

David Giacalone says I have “the ideologue’s certainty that he alone has the truth and that everything in the unviverse [sic] (including every historic vignette and non sequitur) somehow proves he’s absolutely correct.” I am reminded of a passage from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground:

mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

I asked a simple question: if the laws of the market are political, originating with the state, what accounts for the fact of inflation? Why can the state not simply change the laws of the market? Mr. Giacalone raises a bunch of dust and screams at me, but does not answer the question. So which of us is the dogmatist?

The issue is not whether “[h]uman beings have not always had free entry into the marketplace to buy and sell goods,” or whether “governments helped delineate and enforce necessary rights and rules of fairplay.” The question is whether the marketplace works on the basis of rules which are not political in their origin—that is, whether the rules of the market are deeper, and ontologically prior to, the existence of the state. And the answer is yes, they are. The existence of inflation is evidence of this. No matter how much the political state tries to avoid it, inflation occurs. Likewise, justice—or as Giacalone puts it, the “necessary rights and rules of fairplay” exist prior to the state; in Locke’s words, “The promises and bargains for truck, etc., between the two men in Soldania, in or between a Swiss and an Indian, in the woods of America, are binding to them, though they are perfectly in a state of Nature in reference to one another, for truth, and keeping of faith belongs to men as men, and not as members of society.”

Yes, of course the state ought to delineate and enforce rights and rules of fairplay. I have never said otherwise. That is the very reason for the existence of the state: to secure the rights that belong to people by nature, including the right to buy and to sell things. But the state does not create those rights and rules, which is what Foer claimed. Giacalone’s ad hominem rant that I am dogmatic (for daring to say that a thing is what it is, and is not something else) cannot change that fact.

Nor can the state enforce rules of fair play by violating those rules: it cannot make a free market by making it illegal for companies to get successful, or making up arbitrary trade rules to enforce “fairness” by punishing innovation and rewarding economic failure, and creating a Robin Hood state. But then, for some people, I guess, it is a sign of high intellect that they are able to ignore contradictions. Following the Underground Man, Giacalone says that “limits on unrestrained capitalism...are needed to have a working free market.” In other words, having the opposite of a thing is consistent with having that thing. Well, sorry, but no. A free market works by ensuring that people are left alone to run their lives and make their own economic decisions. To take property from people who earn it and give it to people who do not, does not “enable the market to work”; it is the opposite of the market. If a man said “well, some censorship is necessary to enable freedom of speech to work,” you would laugh at him (I hope). But then, no doubt, Mr. Giacalone would say that you’re being insufferable.

Update: Welcome f/k/a readers. I respond to Mr. Giacalone here.