Some readers consider my essay “Freedom From Force: The Most Basic of Human Needs” to be rather daunting in terms of length. For that reason, I have decided to adapt some excerpts of it to form the shorter essay below.
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| Illustration of a mugging by Landon for the Tacoma Times, June 7, 1904. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. |
A major misconception about those of us who object morally to compulsory taxation is that our objection mostly just comes from a dearth of generosity in our hearts. When we cross paths with a woman who resents having to turn over 10,000 U.S. dollars in taxes, much of the population is wont to assume that she feels as she does solely because she wouldn’t spare a penny to anyone else if not for the law compelling her to do so. Such an assumption reveals a grave misunderstanding. We take umbrage with compulsory taxation for a reason that goes beyond the monetary units being confiscated.
Imagine you are out running some errands. You are approached by a man brandishing a baseball bat. He informs you he is packing a gun as well. Then he demands you hand him ten cents, or else he will strike you on the head with the bat, drive your unconscious body to his residence in his car, and then dump your still-unconscious body in his basement. He expects that you will wake up in that same basement, where he will confine you for at least a few months. Yet, to prevent the mugger from doing this, you must do nothing more than discharge a ransom of ten cents? Just ten cents. You toss a dime to the mugger and he is off.
In that scenario, was the ten cents the only value you lost? No. Had you parted with nothing but the ten cents, this incident would be but a tiny inconvenience. It is disturbing exactly on account of your being robbed of something other than the dime. Prior to this mugging, you were relatively at liberty to go about your normal daily affairs peaceably without your person or belongings being violated. When a man approaches you and warns that he will subject you to bodily restraint if you do not relinquish control over your belongings to him, that ultimatum deprives you of such liberty. Even if the event did not traumatize you — even if it does not discourage you from future productivity or motivate you to change your behavior — that was an imposition that never should have commenced.
As Meghann Ribbens has encapsulated the situation to me,
The initiation of force is worse than the sum of the physical trauma, financial hardship, time lost and fear/outrage endured in the moment. The extent to which you are forced to act against your own judgment is the extent to which you are treated, not as a rational human being, but as an object.
That is what bothers the woman who is flustered by having to give up $10,000 to the IRS. The false assumption is that her mourning is exclusively over the $10,000 — every penny of that sum and no more. No. She may be unable to articulate the words for it, but, on some visceral level, she comprehends that along with the $10,000, she was divested of a still scarcer value. This principle frequently goes over the head of those who ridicule us as we lament the nature of compulsory taxation, as if it is nothing but the monetary units that we wish to keep. But more than the monetary units themselves, what has been violated is the freedom to create such economic value and secure it for our own peaceable purposes.
When the tax collector threatens to punish you if you do not cough up your cash, that is ultimately the same ultimatum that the mugger delivered. The one fundamental distinction between the government and the civilian sector is that the government is authorized, at least tacitly, by most of society’s members to exercise and threaten the use of physical force against persons who defy its will or its rules. When one private citizen enacts or threatens force on another, that citizen’s exercise of force is properly identified as a crime, and it is correct for the government to retaliate against that citizen in kind. By contrast, not only is the government authorized to exercise or threaten force to have its will sated, but for the government to threaten force against those who break its rules — and to carry out such force on the rule-breakers — is for the government to fulfill its very mission, to do the very job for which it exists. But when extortion is performed by the State instead of a random mugger, that does not render the extortion to be morally permissible.
The Value of Laissez-Faire Political Freedom Being Shamefully Absent From Economists’ Models
According to economists, the most direct measure of wealth is what they call utility. It refers to the value that a good or service adds to your life and ultimate happiness. Because utility cannot be quantified directly, monetary units are often a convenient proxy whereby economists measure utility. Economists can discern the extent to which you derive more utility from Product/Service 1 than you do Product/Service 2 by observing how many more monetary units you are willing to exchange for Product/Service 1 than you are for 2 . . . or by looking at how many more hours you are willing to put in at your employment to obtain Product/Service 1 than you are for 2.
I bring this up because economists who are partial toward the regulatory-entitlement state — they call themselves economists in the “neoclassical” or “Keynesian” tradition — properly observe the importance of utility while improperly ignoring the point I made in this essay’s opening, the point about extortion stealing more from a victim than the object that is retrieved. In order to rationalize their policy proposals, these ideologically Progressive economists will construct a model that purports to demonstrate that if the State initiates the use of force upon Party 2, so that it may advantage Party 1 at Party 2’s expense, it will result in a net gain in utility for society as a whole.
I told several Ph.D. economists my concern that if a dime is forcibly removed from Party 1 and given to Party 2, Party 1 was robbed of a value beyond the ten cents: the freedom to go about peaceably without being subjected to the initiation of the use of force. I asked those Ph.D. economists whether they knew of any economic models that incorporated the fact that such freedom is itself a form of utility, and that when a dime is forcibly taken from Party 1 by the State, that is itself a reduction in utility for Party 1 that had existed independently of the dime itself. Those economists replied to me that they do not know of any economic models taking that issue into account. Well, inasmuch as economic models overlook this factor, that needs to change.
Conclusion: What Would Be Stolen Besides the $39 Billion
Now I will present one final thought experiment. Suppose there is a man named Bizzy who holds a net worth of 40 billion U.S. dollars, and a self-appointed busybody in the government, Ellie, somehow gained the authority to make the following threat to Bizzy: armed federal agents will drag Bizzy to prison, and sentence him to it for at least ten years, if he does not liquidate his entire estate and provide 39 billion dollars’ worth of the proceeds to the government for redistribution to the lower classes. After the sale, Bizzy can still hold onto the remaining one billion dollars. This measure, Ellie promulgates, will do much to tend to the human needs of the poor and the sick.
If you feel any ethical qualms about such a threat being leveled upon Bizzy, it is worth ruminating on the basis for such reservations. After all, once this procedure plays out, Bizzy will still get to keep one billion U.S. dollars.
A libertarian who only cares about utilitarian economics — about which public policies can produce the greatest net happiness for the greatest number of people — might protest that if this Ellie issues this threat to Bizzy, it will crush the incentives of would-be entrepreneurs everywhere to put their innovative goods and services on the market. I think such a complaint would be really silly. A multimillionaire arrives at a point where each additional dollar he accrues will supply him less utility than did the dollar that preceded it. In terms of how a wealthy individual may indulge himself, there isn’t much that Bizzy can do with $40 billion that he cannot do with one billion.
I think that the proper grievance is that if Ellie issues this threat and Bizzy acquiesces to her demand, Bizzy will be robbed of something alongside the $39 billion: the freedom to go about exercising one’s own judgment peaceably without having been violently threatened. And that freedom, of which Ellie is denying Bizzy in this instance, is a human need more basic than the human needs that Ellie purports to be satisfying as she indisposes Bizzy.
That is what I want the partisans of the regulatory-entitlement state to understand: when someone resents $10,000 being taken from her in taxes, it is not a matter of her being stingy and mourning every last cent of the $10,000; what she mourns is that, aside from the $10,000, she was also robbed of her freedom against violent threats, an incalculably greater value.
“The initiation of force is worse than the sum of the physical trauma, financial hardship, time lost and fear/outrage endured in the moment. To the extent you are forced to act against your own judgment, you are treated not as a rational human but as an object.” —@MRibbensPhD— ((($tuart K. Hayashi🌎💱))) (@legendre007) October 13, 2018
Shortened quotation of Meghann Ribben for Twitter.
