"Libertarians Are Huge Fans of Economic Coercion"

[applegrove]

Libertarians Are Huge Fans of Economic Coercion

Posted by Matt Bruenig at Demos

http://www.demos.org/blog/10/28/13/libertarians-are-huge-fans-economic-coercion

"SNIP...........................

This is an identical situation to the one above. Given this range of possible options, I choose option one. So are income taxes voluntary and non-coercive? It would seem so, right? At minimum, paying income tax is just as voluntary as me paying rent to a landlord. That is, I have chosen that option among all of the available options because it is the best one. But of course, the rub is that this is not a complete set of possible options. There is a third option here that the state forecloses: Get a job and do not pay income taxes.

.......


What’s amusing about libertarians and laissez-faire people (and the loose way certain economists talk) is that they will describe my choice to pay rent as non-coerced and voluntary while describing my choice to pay income taxes as coerced and involuntary. But there is no neutral construction of “coercion” that would ever support such a distinction. As Hale aptly demonstrates, coercion occurs when there are “background constraints on the universe of socially available choices from which an individual might ‘freely’ choose.”

In a world of scarcity, all economic rules–including rules that create private property ownership, contract laws, and so on–impose background constraints on the universe of choices individuals can make (e.g. the choice to move into a building and sleep in it without paying anyone anything). When we talk about the economy, we are not arguing about whether we want coercion. We are arguing about what coercion we’d like.

None of this is to say you can’t make arguments for the laissez-faire system of violent economic coercion. You certainly can. Utilitarian arguments are very much available as are desert theory arguments (though I think those all fail as well). But what you most certainly can’t do is say your reason for supporting laissez-faire is because you oppose economic coercion. Such an argument is either patent nonsense (as explained above) or turns upon an idiosyncratic definition of "coercion" that has packed into it the very normative propositions that libertarians try to justify by appealing to non-coercion in the first place.




............................SNIP"

[PETRUS]

1. Nice. (nt)

[DireStrike]

2. Not left-libertarians. -nt-

[applegrove]

3. No such thing.

[Major Nikon]

4. Noam Chomsky

Just sayin'

[DireStrike]

5. With the country's rightward trajectory, you wouldn't expect to hear about them.

If radical ideas must be expressed, the establishment would much rather they be right-wing radical ideas, and so those are promoted. Nonetheless:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism

[bemildred]

6. Political Libertarianism is about exactly that: the liberty of money to buy what it likes.

Last edited Sun Nov 3, 2013, 11:21 AM - Edit history (1)

All the rest of it is bullshit and window dressing.