Tag Archives: Confiscation

How Empowered Bleeding Hearts Do Harden

01 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in Collectivism, Socialism, The Road To Serfdom, Tyranny

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Here’s an empirical regularity: altruists attaining power to collectivize society’s productive machinery do not stay nice for long. In fact, aggressive pursuit of their goals might compel them to participate in brutal tyranny. But why? What happens to these sweet egalitarians who are, after all, imbued with the most earnest desire to elevate the common man by equalizing the fruits of society’s bounty?

Bryan Caplan offers Venezuela as Exhibit A in “A Short Hop from Bleeding Heart to Mailed Fist“:

“When Hugo Chavez began ruling Venezuela, he sounded like a classic bleeding-heart – full of pity for the poor and downtrodden. Plenty of people took him at his words – not just Venezuelans, but much of the international bleeding-heart community. … Almost every Communist dictatorship launches with mountains of humanitarian propaganda. Yet ultimately, almost everyone who doesn’t fear for his life wakes up and smells the tyranny.”

Venezuela’s collapse is merely the most recent in a long history of socialist debacles. Authoritarians certainly come in other stripes, but collectivists seem especially prone to the development of vicious alter-egos. But again, why?

Caplan knows the answer, and in something of a dialectical exercise, he proposes several explanations for the nice-to-nasty phenomenon. It’s not the infiltration of “bad guys”. Plenty of evidence suggests that the same people are at both ends of the transition, and for now let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the nicest elements of the avant guarde, or even those who go simply along on the basis of their idealism. It’s implausible that such humanitarian souls could believe it will be necessary, at the outset, to crush their opposition by force. Moreover, that approach risks immediate outcomes that are far too dire. Might an authoritarian or militaristic turn be necessary to deter hostile foreign actors who might attempt to foil collectivization? If so, it still doesn’t explain why subjugation of domestic citizens is ultimately accepted as a legitimate use of force by sincere altruists.

Caplan moves on to more compelling explanations of the disorder. Perhaps the expression of bleeding heart intentions is propaganda from the very start. Perhaps the rhetoric is really just hate speech disguised as noble intent. Surely those two explanations comport with the behavior of those having uglier motives for collectivism: envy and vengeance. And while those elements are certain to be active in any socialist front, they don’t explain why the bleeders also abecome beaters.

The best explanation for the horrid metamorphosis of empowered altruists is that egalitarian policies simply do not work very well. Caplan says:

“Bleeding-heart policies work so poorly that only the mailed fist can sustain them. In this story, the bleeding hearts are at least initially sincere. If their policies worked well enough to inspire broad support, the bleeding hearts would play nice. Unfortunately, bleeding-heart policies are exorbitantly expensive and often directly counter-productive. Pursued aggressively, they predictably lead to disaster. At this point, a saintly bleeding heart will admit error and back off. A pragmatic bleeding heart will compromise. The rest, however, respond to their own failures with rage and scapegoating. Once you institutionalize that rage and scapegoating, the mailed fist has arrived.” [Caplan’s emphasis]

The compulsory nature of policies advocated by leftists makes their system of social organization inherently unstable. With the imposition of every rule limiting the operation of private markets, with every compromise of the price mechanism, and with every new confiscatory policy, the economy becomes more feeble and inflexible. As several commenters on Caplan’s post note, socialists are people who simply do not understand economics.

The path to collectivism always involves promises that are impossible to keep. Personal concerns must be renounced in favor of the collective. Individuals are denied their freedom to act on creative impulses and their ability to cooperate freely with others in pursuit of personal well-being. Those are human rights that are quite unnatural to part with. That means it is impossible to achieve the collective without an implicit or explicit threat of enforcement through violent police power. Bleeding hearts will actually participate in the inevitable tyranny because they are so convinced of the righteousness of their cause.

Whether you call it socialism or social democracy makes no difference. The latter merely cloaks tyranny in a majoritarian dominance that would have enraged our nation’s founders. They understood the despotism inherent in allowing a majority to dictate the existence of basic rights. However, the bleeding hearts are always sure they know “what’s right” without weighing implications beyond the injustice du jour. That demands the application of force. And when confronted with the catastrophic results of their peremptory whimsy, they have no choice but to use still more force.

The banality of evil is truly a progressive disease. Fortunately, we have a preventive vaccine: the U.S. Constitution. But it will work only if we’re wise enough to rely on the framer’s original intent.

 

March of the Benighted Pawns

30 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in Gun Control, Gun Rights

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I’ll say one thing for the high schoolers participating in the “March For Our Lives“ political front: they are no more ignorant about guns and the Constitution than their anti-gun, adult counterparts. These naive kids are learning the charms of virtue signaling, newly imbued with so much superstition, misconception, misplaced blame, and inflated self-regard that you’d be hard-pressed to engage most of them in reasoned discussion. But I reserve my highest disdain for adults who shake their fingers and say, “How dare you speak critically of these poor kids, who survived the tragedy that took place at their very own school.” Indeed, some of the Parkland students saw the mayhem with their own eyes. but that admonition is a sham show of indignance designed to squelch legitimate debate. The debate would be unnecessary if not for the anti-gun lobby’s opportunistic exploitation of children befallen by tragedy.

First, as I noted recently on SacredCowChips, the supposed escalation in mass shootings at schools is a myth. Northeastern University provides this summary of the research quoted in my post, including the chart on the long-term decline in school shootings shown above. In light of these statistics, the lead researcher, James Alan Fox, believes that most school security measures are counter-productive, including proposals to arm teachers. I do not fully agree, but be that as it may, it is astonishing that the media and large swaths of the public have accepted as fact the myth of a school shooting epidemic.

The ignorance of would-be gun controllers about guns themselves is legendary. Few of them can actually define an “assault weapon” yet are convinced that they must be banned. The cosmetic addition of certain features to a standard semi-automatic rifle apparently makes these guns too “scary”. And there is little understanding that standard rifles sold today, which fire one shot at a time, are semi-automatic weapons! Rifles, by the way, are involved in only a small fraction of gun homicides, so the focus on “assault weapons” is misplaced. Given this level of ignorance, it’s all too easy to dismiss the gun control crowd as unworthy of a real debate over gun regulation.

Of course, the crux of the debate revolves around constitutional rights. While many of those in favor of stricter gun regulation disavow any desire to repeal the Second Amendment or to actually confiscate guns, there is a significant contingent among them harboring that as an end-goal. Their ideal is politically laughable because it would never get a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress, let alone ratification by 3/4 of the states.

The Second Amendment is described by its foes as outdated and dangerous. I submit, however, that the right to defend oneself against predators, human or otherwise, is a natural right and not subject to obsolescence. The Second Amendment was also intended as protection against tyranny by government, and it serves as protection against a tyranny of any majority or rogue minority. Gun-rights critics argue that the founders of our country did not anticipate the powerful weapons available today, and that they would never have intended citizens to be armed with them. The claim is dubious because the founders certainly would have believed that citizens should have the freedom to arm themselves at least in proportion to the arms used by potential predators (please forgive the use of the term “assault weapons” at the link).

Frankly, I do not expect government tanks to roll down my street on a mission to confiscate guns. Instead, the first step would be a strongly-suggested voluntary sacrifice of weapons. Later, perhaps actual confiscations would be attempted via small detachments of authorities or perhaps by marauding, black-shirted proxies. But confiscations won’t happen as long as a serious threat of reprisal exists, with reasonably powerful weapons, and that is a credit to the Second Amendment.

There are serious misconceptions (not to mention plentiful media propaganda) about the likelihood that stricter gun laws can reduce gun homicides, or that they could have prevented the mass shooting tragedies that have occurred. Some of those shootings are better viewed as failures of law enforcement — examples are the lack of official follow-up on prior tips about the shooter in Parkland, FL, the failure of the school’s resource officer to engage the shooter, the failure of the FBI to detain a shooter prior to an attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and in still other cases, the failure of background checks to identify individuals as ineligible to purchase guns. There is little doubt that proper enforcement of existing law and protocol would have prevented a number of mass shootings. The focus should be on improving the existing system before expecting responsible citizens to happily consent to further erosion of their natural and constitutional rights.

Strict gun regulation would certainly infringe on liberty, leaving private citizens defenseless in exchange for tenuous assertions of social benefits. Defensive gun uses (DGUs) are thought to far outstrip gun homicides (seven posts touching on that subject are at this link). If guns could be effectively outlawed in the U.S., other instruments of homicide would replace guns because so much killing is driven by the drug war, gang activity, and other social dysfunctions. The same is true of suicides. If you recognize the futility of the war on drugs, you shouldn’t expect much success from a war on guns. Criminals will acquire guns whether they are illegal or not, so the ability to defend oneself with equal force is critical. There is a lively debate over the empirical research on the efficacy of stricter gun laws, but it’s always good to be skeptical when it comes to government prohibitions. Control advocates often cite Australia as an example of successful firearms control, but the country’s gun ban and buy-back program was ineffective in reducing gun homicides (also see here).

Finally, it’s appalling to see the depths to which certain radical enemies of gun ownership will sink in attempting to cast blame on their opponents for mass shootings. In fact, they have blamed not just the NRA, but all gun owners for the Parkland shooting and gun homicides generally. But the NRA represents responsible, law-abiding gun owners and promotes safe and responsible gun use. Roughly 47% of adults in the U.S. have guns in their homes, and they own guns for self-defense or sporting purposes. Attempts to shame them into supporting curtailments on their liberties is obnoxious and rather foolish because it is so unlikely to be fruitful approach. Successful codification always hinges on consensus, which just doesn’t exist with respect to gun law in the U.S.

The media have fawned over the students who have participated in the March For Our Lives campaign. The childrens’ ignorance of constitutional principles, and guns of course, is noteworthy, but their exploitation by powerful political and economic forces is pathetic. The significance of their numbers has been exaggerated as well: reports show the crowd size at the march in Washington, DC was about a quarter of what the organizers claimed. And the anti-gun students have failed to convince many of their peers, according to a poll conducted by USA Today/Ipsos. Perhaps as the spotlight fades, more of these student protestors will have occasion to study the U.S. Constitution and the natural rights it protects against government overreach. No matter how the kids feel now, I’m certain that many of them will be responsible gun owners someday.

Suspending the Economic Problem With Free Stuff

27 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by in Central Planning, Socialism, Subsidies

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denial

When things are scarce, they can’t be free. That’s an iron law of economics. It’s true of everything we ever wish for and almost everything we take for granted. Things are naturally scarce, but when we are told that things can be free, it always comes from likes of whom Jeffrey Tucker calls “scarcity deniers”. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have told America that a college education should be free, and a large number of people take that seriously. They are scarcity deniers. On one level, the Sanders/Clinton claim is like any other promise that simply cannot be met at the stated cost — a rather garden-variety phenomenon among politicians. These promises are not harmless, as such initiatives usually involve budget overruns, compromised markets, underproduction and wasted resources.

The Sanders/Clinton claim, however, is a form of scarcity-denial that comes almost exclusively from the political left. That is really the point of Tucker’s article:

“This claim seems to confirm everything I’ve ever suspected about socialism. It’s rooted in a very simple error, one so fundamental that it denies a fundamental feature of the world. It denies the existence and the persistence of scarcity itself. That is to say, it denies that producing and allocating is even a problem. If you deny that, it’s hardly surprising that you have no regard for economics as a discipline of the social sciences.“

Our socialist friends (who otherwise claim to be defenders of science) contend that free things can be offered to a broad swath of the population with little consequence. The least cynical among them (perhaps including Sanders) believe that the costs can be shouldered by the wealthy and/or big corporations and banks. Others (including Clinton) know that the cost of “free things” must be met by higher taxes on a broader share of the population. Doesn’t that mean they recognize scarcity? Only superficially, because they fail to grasp the dynamics of resource allocation, the subtle forms in which costs are imposed, and the true magnitude of those costs.

If a thing is scarce, available supplies must be balanced against demand. The reward to suppliers at the margin must match the willingness of buyers to pay. That means there is no surplus and waste, nor any loss attendant to shortage and non-price rationing. The price creates an incentive for consumers to conserve and an incentive for producers to bring additional supplies to market when they are demanded.

A crucial prerequisite for this to work is the establishment of secure property rights. Then, absent coercion, one can’t overuse what isn’t theirs. One can’t simply take a thing from those who create it without a mutually agreeable payment. Creators cannot be forced to respond on demand without compensation. No one can be required to husband resources for others to simply take. No one can be asked to pay for a thing that will be commandeered by others. The establishment of property rights serves these purposes. Incentives become meaningful because they can be internalized by all actors — those consuming and those producing. And the incentives solve the problem of scarcity by balancing the availability of things with needs and desires, and balance them against all other competing uses of resources. Then, the market-clearing price of a thing reflects its degree of scarcity relative to other goods.

The socialist bluster holds that all this is nonsense. Would-be central planners propose that more of a thing be produced because they deem it to be of high value. Furthermore, it must be made available to buyers at a price the planners deem acceptable, or quite possibly for free to their intended constituency! Property rights are violated here in several ways: first, the owner/producer’s authority over their own resources is declared void; second, the owner has no incentive to care for their resources in a responsible and sustainable way; third, a confiscation of resources from others is required to pay at least some of the costs; fourth, the beneficiaries overuse and degrade the resource.

We know a scarce thing cannot be provided for free. Here are some consequences of trying:

  • Overuse of resources. When the buffet is free, the food disappears.
  • The “free thing” will be over-allocated to those who benefit and value it the least. (Example: the education of students for whom there are better alternatives.)
  • Supplies will evaporate unless producers are fully compensated. Otherwise, quality and quantity will deteriorate. This is a form of “contrived scarcity” (HT: Don Boudreaux).
  • If supplies dwindle, new forms of rationing will be necessary. This might involve time-consuming queues, arbitrary allocations, bribes, side payments and favoritism.
  • If suppliers are compensated, someone must pay. That means taxes, public borrowing or money printing.
  • Taxes weaken productive incentives and chase resources away. The consequent deterioration in productive capacity undermines the original goal of providing  something “for free” and inflicts costs on the outcomes of all other markets. This creates more contrived scarcity.
  • So-called progressive taxes tend to hit the most productive classes with the greatest negative force.
  • Government borrowing to fund “free stuff” today inflicts costs on future taxpayers. More fundamentally, it misallocates resources toward the present and away from the future.
  • Printing money to pay for a “free thing” might well cause a general rise in prices. This is a classic, hidden inflation tax, and it may involve the distortion of interest rates, leading to an inter-temporal misallocation of resources.

Scarcity denial is a carrot, but it inevitably becomes a stick. To voters, and to naive shoppers in the marketplace of ideas, the indignant assertion that things can and should be free is powerful rhetoric. Producers, too, might happily accept “free-stuff” policies if they expect to be fully compensated by the government, and they might be pleased to have the opportunity to serve more customers if they think they can do so profitably. However, serving all takers of “free stuff” will escalate costs and is likely to compromise quality. It is also likely to create unpleasant circumstances for customers, such as long waiting times and unfulfilled orders. The stick, on the other hand, will be brandished by the state, blaming and penalizing suppliers for their failure to meet expectations that were unrealistic from the start. The fault for contrived conditions of scarcity lies with the policy itself, not with producers, except to the extent that they allowed themselves to be duped by scarcity deniers. Tucker notes the following:

“Things can be allocated by arbitrary decision backed by force, or they can be allocated through agreement, trading, and gifting. The forceful way is what socialism has always become.“

Politicians and would-be planners with the arrogance to claim that naturally scarce things should be free are dangerous to your welfare. These scarcity deniers cannot provide for human needs more effectively than the free market, and ultimately their efforts will make you subservient and poor.