Christopher St. Clair has a long post responding to my harangues about the regulatory welfare state. He writes that he believes that giving money to the poor is the same thing as “a right to life itself for the most downtrodden.” Consider what this means. The right to live, properly understood, means the right to be free from criminals or wrongdoers who would deprive you of your life. It is a right to defense—a right not to be interfered with. It is based on the recognition that the individual owns himself, and does not belong to anyone else. But Mr. St. Clair defines the “right to life itself” as meaning a right to what he calls “compassion”—that is to say, access to the money earned by other people. The right to life is not a right to be free from interference, in his mind, but a positive claim on the earnings of others. It is the right to own what other people have earned—because you need it. That is, St. Clair reverses the “right to life” so that it is not based on the recognition that the individual owns himself, but instead it means the right of some (allegedly “downtdrodden”) people to own others, and the product of their labor. Although he claims to speak from the right to life, he is actually defending the right to live off of the product of other people’s labor. Lincoln made this clear when he spoke of the two different definitions of the word liberty:
We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatable things, called by the same name—liberty.... Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.
St. Clair has embraced the wolf’s definition of the “right to life”: the right to live off of the labor of others.
This is not particularly shocking—just about everyone commits these fallacies today. What started all of this was how amusing it seemed to me that St. Clair could take the wolf’s view while claiming that he does so out of his contempt for the greed of human beings. He does it again now when he writes, “I am of the mindset that people are greedy, and lacking strong protective measures, it is much easier to take wealth than it is to create wealth.” Well, yes! Exactly! So the question is, why can we not have strong protective measures against the type of person who believes he may pay for his compassion with my money?
Rather than trying to convince people to contribute to charity out of pure motives, Christopher St. Clair finds it “easier to take [my] wealth,” and provides us with a half-baked moral rationalization of such a policy—all while claiming the high ground. That is my principal objection. If you find it “easier to take [my] wealth” than to give away your own, or convince others to contribute to charity, then at least admit that you are among the greedy bastards of whom you complain; don’t pretend that your theft is an exercise in superior morality.
Political society most certainly does not “boil[] down to whether you would have government taking wealth or peers taking wealth,” as St. Clair claims. Indeed, this false dichotomy is the standard routine of defenders of unjust, thieving government. Indeed, it is so old, that Algernon Sidney responded to it four hundred years ago:
our author confines the subject’s choice to acting or suffering, that is, doing what is commanded, or lying down to have his throat cut, or to see his family and country made desolate. This he calls giving to Caesar that which is Caesar’s; whereas he ought to have considered that the question is not whether that which is Caesar’s should be rendered to him, for that is to be done to all men; but who is Caesar, and what doth of right belong to him, which he no way indicates to us: so that the question remains entire, as if he had never mentioned it....
St. Clair concludes with two points. First, he resorts to the tired argument that because the government provides us with the police department through taxation, therefore my property isn’t really mine: “in order to provide for a system of laws that protects private property (yes that too is a part of my ‘compassion’) and free markets costs money.” Of course, this commits an obvious contradiction—compassion consists equally of protecting my earnings from theft, and of committing theft on those earnings—but St. Clair is not much bothered by contradiction, evidently: “Yes the notions are conflicting,” he writes, but doesn’t seem to care. Tom Palmer has, of course, thoroughly obliterated the argument that taxation somehow demonstrates that property isn’t real, and I refer the interested reader there.
Second, Mr. St. Clair claims that “sometimes need does equal deserve, and in some cases it does not. I tend to view it as a grey area, not in terms of black and white.” Well, that’s helpful. After all, if it were black and white, the contradictions would be too obvious for the conscientious to sustain. Who, of course, is going to determine when need equals deserve and when it does not? And on what criteria? St. Clair suggests only that the deciding factor is life and death: a person may justly force me to give up property that I have justly earned if “without [it he or she] would die.” Not anything short of death? A person has a moral claim on my earnings when he is going to die without them—but not when he will suffer excruciating bodily injury without them? How about total psychological devastation? What about crushing poverty? Under St. Clair’s limitation, he would, I think, have to say that all government-funded education should be abolished, as well as the vast majority of the regulatory welfare state, which does not provide for life-and-death needs. Clothes for the poor; daycare; pension guarantees; small business grants—all of these things would be abolished? Now, really, is that compassionate? But of course, St. Clair does not really believe that the threat of death is the actual point at which justice magically reverses itself to legitimize theft. We know this because he says that people “deserve some fundamental social security net to protect them from both the foibles of the market and the broad spectrum of human failings.” By this, of course, he means that government should steal from people who work to provide for themselves and their families and give to those who do not. So much for the “without which they would die” criterion; now we’re back to the “broad spectrum of human failings” and other such non-black-and-white things.
As a philosophical matter, St. Clair suffers from a profound confusion about justice. Consider, for example: if people “deserve some fundamental security net,” whatever that means, then a person in the middle of the desert who has run out of water is having his rights violated by the earth itself: after all, it is not providing him with a “fundamental security net.” See here the difference between genuine rights—which make sense in a state of nature, as I can pray or speak as I wish in a state of nature as well as in a state of society—and false rights, such as the right to a “fundamental security net,” which make no sense in a state of nature. Yet in St. Clair’s world, in which a person has a right to whatever will preserve his life (or protect him from the “broad spectrum of [his own] failings”) the person lost in the desert has a moral right that is being violated by Nature Herself. I submit, as Anthony de Jasay does, that any conception of moral and political rights which ends up blaming the universe for violating our rights is an incoherent one.
(I will refrain from directly discussing Hayek; my disagreements with Hayek are obvious. Suffice to say that I agree with Jasay and Rand that Hayek’s arguments in defense of a “safety net” are unconvincing and as self-contradictory as St. Clair’s.)
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