You’ll recall that I asked Mike of Liberal Jesus to explain why, if the government should take care of people who are poor—by taking away things from other people, who have earned those things—why should the government not also force people into religion? That is, why should government “care” only for the material “needs” of people, but not for their spiritual ones?
Liberal Jesus has a thoughtful and intelligent answer here. It’s quite long, so this post will be too, because he makes many errors, and I am kind enough to help him out.
He begins by rightly saying that he won’t rest on the Constitution’s text. That is good, not only for the reasons he gives, but also because the Constitution also contains a provision forbidding government from taking stuff from people who have earned it and giving it to people who do not: the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth (and Fifth) Amendment(s). But we are talking about legitimacy, not Constitutional law, so we’ll stick to the basics.
LJ is opposed to forcing people to go to church against their wills, because
people should be able to freely practice their religion, but possibly more importantly…government should never force people to participate in any sort of religious activity. While I think that a few people might be more virtuous people, and have better lives, if they were forced to go to church, I think that most of the population’s virtue and quality of life would be unaffected. Besides, putting the power of government together with the power of religion results in a concentration of power that is just too dangerous to be allowed.
The first two sentences merely restate the problem. The third sentence is a good answer: the public choice problem; that is, if you give the government this power, it will fall into the hands of the politically adept, and be used in very dangerous ways. Later on, he adds a second reason: “there is a right to be free from religious coercion.” That is, some things are simply too private to be properly anyone else’s business. This principle was best phrased by Thomas Jefferson, who said
[O]ur rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg…. Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation.
This, of course, is a hallowed principle of classical liberalism; the Christian innovators of liberalism (such as Milton) argued that God created human beings, and
gave us onely over Beast, Fish, Fowl
Dominion absolute; that right we hold
By his donation; but Man over men
He made not Lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free.
This is the basis of political equality between people: nobody owns another person—that would be theft from God—therefore, individuals have the right to rule over themselves, within the boundaries set by natural moral law:
[R]eason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker…they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure. And…there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours…. [U]nless it be to do justice on an offender, [no person may therefore] take away or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.
Note that the natural rule against taking the “goods of another” is not an arbitrary postulate for which God’s authority is invoked. That is a common accusation of positivists, but it is not true: as this paragraph reveals, the basis of the right against deprivation is equality—that is, the fact that no person is naturally justified to rule over another.
In other words, the justification for religious freedom is that the only legitimate role for government is to protect people’s rights—to ensure that no person deprives another of his liberty. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” and religious differences do not reach that level. Therefore, government has no right to infringe on our religious freedom. And, secondly, when it does, it leads to dangerous public choice problems: factions use the government’s power to make people obey their religious dictates, and the result can be disastrous.
Now, the question is, why do the same considerations not apply to the right to earn a living? Property cannot be divided from other kinds of rights, because all rights are interconnected, and are, in fact, property rights. Religious freedom, for example, is protected by ensuring that religious dissenters aren’t deprived of their property in retaliation for their dissent—as well as by ensuring that they are able to own Bibles, or churches, or to arrange for large-scale religious events in ampitheaters that are privately owned. And interfering with property rights is just as likely to fall into the public-choice problem as religious interference: “putting the power of government together with the power” of redistributing wealth certainly “results in a [dangerous] concentration of power.” If a person has a right to direct his moral compass, he should have the right to direct his economic life as well. LJ seems to follow all of these points, because he says, “I can’t come up with a single principle that always provides justification for social programs and always prevents the government from forcing people to go to church.” So if there is not qualitative difference between property rights and other types of rights, what difference can there be between the freedom to pray, and the freedom to work?
LJ’s answer is that capitalism is “inherently oppressive.” I am delighted that he takes care in his definitions: he properly defines capitalism, not by reference to the mixed economy of today, which is not capitalism, but as a state of affairs “in which government makes no laws regarding commerce.” (I would put it, “a complete separation of government and economics, and in which all property is privately owned.”) Yet he omits to define “oppression,” which is singularly unfortunate, given the importance of the term to his argument.
The dictionary definition is “arbitrary and cruel exercise of power…[including] unlawful, wrongful, or corrupt exercise of authority by a public official acting under color of authority that causes a person harm…dishonest, unfair, wrongful, or burdensome conduct by corporate directors or majority shareholders that entitles minority shareholders to compel involuntary dissolution of the corporation…[or] inequality of bargaining power resulting in one party’s lack of ability to negotiate or exercise meaningful choice.” This is pretty broad, and seems to include the relevant meanings. But it’s important to keep things straight here, because how we evaluate LJ’s argument depends on our definition of this word. When I go to Carl’s Jr. and order a hamburger, I may wish to bargain with the person behind the counter, and say that $5 is too much for a burger; I’ll offer him $2.50. But of course, that person will not bargain with me; Carl’s Jr. will not bargain with me. I can either pay the $5 and have a hamburger, or order something else, or leave. Does this qualify as oppression? If we accept the third definition—inequality of bargaining power—then the answer would seem to be yes, and that’s what LJ seems to be arguing: “relative wealth,” he says, “determines power,” and as a result, in a free society, “wealth…is gradually funneled into the hands of fewer and fewer people.” (This is, of course, not true: LJ has stipulated that in a capitalist society there would be no laws regarding commerce, and therefore no tariffs or other laws which preserve wealth against fair competition, and therefore wealth would not determine power—unless, of course, we define “power” as the “power” that Carl’s Jr. has in pricing its hamburgers.) So Does Carl’s Jr. oppress me by refusing to sell me a hamburger for $2.50?
It seems like a ludicrous thing to argue. Indeed, if that is oppression, then the term oppression would seem to include every imaginable interaction between people who wish to exchange things or ideas. Moreover, any definition of oppression which includes no reference to the parties’ freedom from coercion would also seem to be useless. When I go to Carl’s Jr., and don’t want to pay $5 for a hamburger, I am not being forced to do anything that I do not want to do: I don’t have to make anything, or give up anything, or do anything, beyond respecting the rights of Carls Jr. On the other hand, if I were to force Carl’s to give me a hamburger for $2.50 when they want to sell it to me for $5, that does require them to do something they don’t want to do—it requires them to make a hamburger and give up $2.50 worth of their freedom of choice. Defining it as “oppression” for me not to get what I want merely because Carl’s can afford to refuse the bargain, while I want a hamburger, is to use the term in a way that renders it impossible to distinguish between being forced to do something against your will, and being free to choose. And since that is the most important distinction in conversations about justice, that usage is self-defeating. (Indeed, I have noted before that the attempt to define “oppression” as “unequal bargaining power” is a collectivist rhetorical tactic.)
The fact is, there are two kinds of power: the power to coerce, which is political power, and the power to bargain, which is economic power. The power to bargain always rests on the freedom of the parties to reach an agreement. The power of coercion does not. The “power” of Carl’s Jr. in a hamburger sale is nothing more than their decision to use their property as they wish, and not as I wish. The power of me and my voting buddies to force them to give their hamburgers to me for half price is not like that. Instead, it is the decision to use someone else’s property as I wish.
The problem with LJ’s reasoning is in conflating these two kinds of power. But since we have stipulated that in a free society, there are no laws regulating commerce—that is, economic power is separated entirely from political power, so that people must bargain and reach agreement, rather than forcing others to obey—then this argument must fail.
Let us imagine two people meeting in the middle of nowhere, with no legal oversight. The first man has a hamburger, but is cold; the second man is hungry, and has a blanket. The two men trade. Where is the oppression in this? Each has the ability to walk away. Yet they trade because they have wants. Neither has a moral right to force the other to give up his property, and the respect that. So the exchange contains no injustice. If it contains no injustice, then the outcome—even if unequal—is just, and that is true no matter how unequal the bargaining positions of the two parties. What I’ve described is a free exchange, before the imposition of law; it is, to use the old phrase, the state of nature. It is the unregulated state.
But LJ doesn’t seem to recognize the possibility of the unregulated state. He assumes that government has the legitimate authority to “choose” between various economic methods. Government may, he writes, can “choose[] capitalism as its economic system.” But that is to imagine an impossibility, because markets come first, and government comes later, both historically and philosophically. People are born free, and then have laws imposed upon them. They are free to pray or not to pray, until government “chooses” to bar their freedom. They are free to exchange and trade and labor, until government “chooses” to bar this freedom, as well. For LJ to say that government may “choose” a capitalist system is to commit the Red Queen fallacy that I wrote about long ago.
Finally, LJ suffers from a misunderstanding of the character of rights. Rights, by their nature, must be compossible—that is, it must be possible for people to exercise their rights simultaneously without coming into conflict. If there is such a conflict, then the concept of “right” has been violated in some way. I have a right to free speech. Joe has a right not to listen. Therefore, he may get up and leave when I speak, and we have both exercised our rights. But LJ’s version of rights is self-contradictory. He says that “[t]he government must ensure that it is not itself a significant impediment to the pursuit of happiness, and must work to create a society in which all of its citizens have the chance to pursue happiness.” But this is not possible. If the government is going to “create a society”—a task which no government has ever successfully done, by the way—which includes giving people things, it can do so only by appropriating my earnings, and telling me what to do. It therefore can only act insofar as it significantly impedes my pursuit of happiness. I’ve discussed this more in depth here.
Rights are based on the principle of self-ownership. I own myself. I therefore have the right to life—my present-tense right of self-ownership; liberty—my future tense right of self-ownership; and property—my past tense right of self-ownership, in that it protects the fruits of my labors. Anyone who presumes to violate these things so as to ease someone else’s plight, when I have not wronged that person, when I have not picked his pocket nor broken his leg, is committing an injustice against me when I am innocent. There can be no justification for that, whether I am rich or poor; successful or unsuccessful; faithful or an atheist; white or black; a human being, or a group of human beings called a corporation.
Now, I’ve briefly sketched on the downstroke some of LJ’s primary errors. Let’s go back up again to see what happens when we apply his reasoning to freedom of religion. Imagine a single person in the Catholic church, who devises what he believes to be a vitally important, new theological proposition—indeed, a principle handed down to him from God Himself. This man goes to the priest and says, “You must preach this new idea that I have discovered.” Do we not have here an imbalance of bargaining power? The Catholic church is a massive, extremely wealthy, extremely “powerful” institution; surely when it comes to numbers of followers, the “richer” churches just get “richer.” A single person has no real “negotiating” power with the Church. Is the situation inherently oppressive? Is the priest obligated to preach this new truth? Or can the priest say, “Friend, if you believe that, and you want to teach it to people, by all means do so, but you may not do so in our church; you have to go found your own or something.” It’s a take-it-or-leave-it proposition analogous to the Carl’s Jr. situation. So, if the Carl’s Jr. situation is oppressive—if the customer (or the mass of customers acting in concert) have the right to legally force Carl’s to sell its hamburgers for less than $5, why doesn’t the dissenter have the right to force the church to teach his truth?
Finally, on our way back up, let us suppose that what LJ charges against capitalism is true. Is there any reason to believe that any other state of affairs would eliminate the things he complains about? He says that people shouldn’t be forced to go to church because it wouldn’t really accomplish much: “most of the population’s virtue and quality of life would be unaffected.” Probably right. But is the regulatory welfare state any different? Certainly, by stealing my earnings, and giving them to other people, it does not make me a more virtuous person. And what reason do we have to believe that a mixed economy is any less oppressive than a free one? In a mixed economy, you replace a system of bargaining—and one which will often include bargains between unequally matched persons—with a system of part bargaining, and part coercion: that is, a system with bureaus and agencies and commissions. Is a homeowner in any stronger a bargaining position with regard to the City Redevelopment Agency than the customer at Carl’s Jr.? Is a taxpayer in an equal bargaining position with the IRS? Is the teenager, who would be willing to work for less than minimum wage, but cannot find a job because his skills are not good enough to get him a job at the artificially high minimum wage rate, in a stronger bargaining position, when he cannot get a job? We often say—with words we cannot seriously believe any longer—that those who suffer the injustices of the regulatory welfare state can “vote the bums out.” Does anyone really think this empowers the average man more than the free market?
In the end, I think LJ’s claim that people are at the mercy of greedy monsters in a free economy is not only wrong on the facts, and based on numerous fallacies, but represents a system of shifting a perceived unfairness in outcome—an unfairness which cannot be called unjust, since it was the result of consensual bargains, but which is simply unequal—into a genuine violation of the rights of others. He sees a poor lady—poor through no fault of anyone having done anything to her—and feels that he may remedy this inequality by imposing an actual injustice on millions of hardworking taxpayers. When those taxpayers complain, their only remedy is to “call their congressmen.” The end result would seem to compound an imbalance of bargaining power with a serious injustice.
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