I.1.14
Man produces in order to consume. He is at once both producer and consumer. The argument that I have just set forth considers him only from the first of these points of view. From the second, the argument would lead to an opposite conclusion. Could we not say, in fact:I.1.15
The consumer becomes richer in proportion as he buys everything more cheaply; he buys things more cheaply in proportion as they are abundant; hence, abundance enriches him; and this argument, extended to all consumers, would lead to the theory of abundance!I.1.16
It is an imperfect understanding of the concept of exchange that produces these illusions. If we analyze the nature of our self-interest, we realize clearly that it is double. As sellers, we are interested in high prices, and, consequently, in scarcity; as buyers, we are interested in low prices, or, what amounts to the same thing, in an abundance of goods. We cannot, then, base our argument on one or the other of these two aspects of self-interest without determining beforehand which of the two coincides with and is identifiable with the general and permanent interest of the human race.I.1.17
If man were a solitary animal, if he worked solely for himself, if he consumed directly the fruits of his labor—in short, if he did not engage in exchange—the theory of scarcity could never have been introduced into the world. It would be all too evident, in that case, that abundance would be advantageous for him, whatever its source, whether he owed it to his industriousness, to the ingenious tools and powerful machines that he had invented, to the fertility of the soil, to the liberality of Nature, ox even to a mysterious invasion of goods that the tide had carried from abroad and left on the shore. No solitary man would ever conclude that, in order to make sure that his own labor had something to occupy it, he should break the tools that save him labor, neutralize the fertility of the soil, or return to the sea the goods it may have brought him. He would easily understand that labor is not an end in itself, but a means, and that it would be absurd to reject the end for fear of doing injury to the means. He would understand, too, that if he devotes two hours of the day to providing for his needs, any circumstance (machinery, the fertility of the soil, a gratuitous gift, no matter what) that saves him an hour of this labor, so long as the product is as great, puts that hour at his disposal, and that he can devote it to improving his well-being, He would understand, in short, that a saving in labor is nothing else than progress.
(thanks to bh)
The part just before sheds light on the nature of progressiveism and precisely what it stands for and have overwhelmingly been successful at where ever it has been put into practice. They consistently put into operation the “theory of scarcity”. It is their heart.
Climate change pansies like Chris Christie’s boy Mike Castle have done yeoman’s work making America terrified and ashamed of courting abundance.
Here‘s another oft-read section.
Somewhat OT, although it’s basically the same thing seen from a different angle, I’d like to recommend this guy. He shares with Jeff a critical approach to current thinking, here as regards the behavioral sciences. A lot of it’s “inside baseball”-type stuff that takes a little followup to get context, but he does a pretty good job of introducing the players.
And I’ve been too busy lately to do much followup, so I don’t know if it’s Bastiat or not, but there’s what Jack Vance called “the sad, plangent tolling of the bell of Inevitability”: people who are possessed of abundance also have inordinate influence on the rest of society, and thus are well placed to promulgate measures that enforce scarcity economics on others.
Regards,
Ric
Scarcity is merely the inescapable fact that there will always be less of a commodity available than the combined desires of the economy desires add up to. Prices are merely the reflection of that relative scarcity in any given time and place, and are the negative feedback that an economy needs in order to overcome that scarcity.
When prices on a commodity that is scarce rise rapidly, that encourages those people looking to make the maximum profit on those units of that commodity that they currently own to move those units to where they will draw a higher price, and as rapidly as possible so as to maximize those profits.
When government interferes by setting maximum prices on certain “necessary” commodities, they limit/eliminate those incentives, which limits/eliminates the desire of those who own that commodity to move them to where they are most in demand.
I mean, if you own a thousand flashlights worth $1, and then price rockets to $5 or $10 in the nearest big city because of a massive power outage in the area, you will bust your ass to get those flashlights to that spot and sell them to people who desperately need lights, because you have a chance to make a solid profit. But if the government steps in to prevent prices from rising from that original price of $1, there is no reason why you should take the extra time and effort and incur the extra shipping and security costs if there is no incentive, especially when they are selling for that price just fine sitting where they are…
This was exactly the reason that the gas shortages of the 70s hit our economy as hard as they did.
There is nothing that a government can do to an economy that doesn’t act as a either a brake or as positive feedback
in California this year we get to vote specifically on whether we prefer the scarcity or the abundance
If you could actually bottle the real thing and sell it, one of us could retire the national debt, or at least buy everyone their fill of cupcakes.
Speaking of abundance, here’s one result of vast sums of money flowing INTO science: “Physicist Hal Lewis to American Physical Society: Here Are My Six Theses, Nailed to Your Church Door; I Can Belong to Your Corrupt Religion No Longer” (Ace’s headline).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/08/hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society/
Sky Ferreira did a song about the obsessings and Sky Ferreira has verve plus she knows Michael Madsen
[…] A follow-up to yesterday's free trade post/discussion Share and Enjoy: […]
CK Obsession
‘zono arigato, bottle vibrato.
Yesterday I was left wondering whether “ox even” was a typo or what? Today all the more so? Anybody get it?
it means “hugs and kisses even” I think
heh
Also, congratulations to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I’m ashamed to say that this former Spanish Lit major only
readremembers reading one of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Pantaleón y las visitadoras (which was pretty entertaining, BTW).Further, the guy isn’t a total douchebag:
Which, come to think of it, leads me to wonder how he got the prize at all.
One of the features of Obamacare is that the government becomes the middleman in the whole chain from producer to consumer. They are in the role of producer to the consumers of healthcare the patients and are in the role of consumer to the actual producers the doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Because they have the use of force to impose what is best from their own perspective we will end up with the worst possible for each end and the best flowing to the middle.
It’s just x and r, nevermind hugs and kisses, aren’t even near one another on a Dvorak keyboard, let alone a Qwerty is what’s confuzzling. lesion?
I worry about responses like Drumwaster’s because they perpetuate a damaging myth: that there is something unique about Government that doesn’t apply elsewhere.
Bullshit. Government is just one of several ways of devising an organization. A corporation is an example of a form of Government (and vice versa), and if GM or BP is capable of activities that aren’t “either a brake or positive feedback” then Government is, too. And since arguments like that are false on their face, they tend to discredit the rest of the proposals made in that vein.
Regards,
Ric
In context “or” fits perfectly for “ox” and it’s a one letter substitution. I’d guess typo.
One reason I think this is that “or” works well enough that I didn’t even notice that it was “ox”.
The typo could have been from the original translation because it’s also “ox” in the other versions I find online and there are zero hits for the same text string with “or” instead.
It’s neat that it isn’t really a problem, since we do make the correcting substitution so readily, sort of like those made up lines without vowels I used to run into now and again with the appended tag “Can you read this?” Brains are nifty that way, doing what they do.
bh, did Bastiat own a typewriter?
There’s an old-fashioned version of cursive “r” that goes curve right and up, vertical stroke down, curve up and right. In some people’s script it can sure look like an “x”. Maybe the error was in the original transcription from cursive manuscript to typeset?
Regards,
Ric
I’d a thought the dude wrote in Froggish.
this guy says it’s greek
Ox ( pronounced oh) is just a Greek exclamation.
maybe nk would know but I hardly ever see him anymore
I’ll repost this question from yesterday’s thread, since no one has answered it: We know you can’t have free immigration with the welfare state. Can you have free trade with it when “comparative advantage” is going to leave you with a body of citizens who can’t trade up to new careers because they don’t have the ability, but who do have a vote they can sell to the highest bidder?
When Bastiat made his arguments, one of the givens underlying them is that there was not a warm body democracy. If that given is no longer true, does it undermine the argument?
And Ric, there is something unique about Government that doesn’t apply to BP or GM: I don’t have to have anything but a pulse to be a voting shareholder — and in Chicago I don’t even need that!
Wouldn’t have thought it was Bastiat’s mistake regardless. He wrote it in French.
here is another suggestion that it might could be greek
ox even means “I got your ox after you got mine, so we’re even.”
– A parable of supply and demand:
– Early in the days of state owned farms during the rein of Stalin, farmers discovered they could work less, and make the same income by growing fewer pigs for market. Why raise 10 pigs when they could get the same income with just 5 pigs.
– As more and more farmers delivered fewer livestock, the market demand rose. Eventually the State Farm collective of domestic commodities tried raising the quota’s on pig farmers with very little effect, since the reported numbers were always fudged to protect government jobs.
– Next the collective imposed artificially high prices on livestock, by the manipulation of inflationary controls, in an effort to reduce demand. As demand dropped and and farmers found they could no longer make a profit raising pigs they turned to other ways of making a living, and the net result was even fewer pigs to market resulting in the Collective having to buy livestock from neighboring countries at inflated prices caused mainly by their own economic policies..
– Thus they now had fewer pigs to market at higher prices. Government intervention. Always a win-win.
– Think healthcare. There yah go, I knew you could.
Here’s another: if the government kills me, GM can’t prosecute it for doing so.
You’d have to establish that this was the case.
????????? — Greek: the management of a household or family, husbandry, thrift.
Well, SDN, that’s true for a particular type of Government, what you call a “warm body democracy” (good phrase, BTW). The delusion that Government is distinct from a Corporation predates establishment of WBD.
As for your first question — I need to work my mind through some of the variations. At first blush, I would say that a WBD with welfare is actually dependent on free trade, especially if somebody else in the system is trying to subsidize an industrial buildup. To a close first approximation, a WBD with welfare doesn’t have anything to sell — looking from outside, the costs of maintaining the welfare state get added to the costs of production, making its products too expensive for anyone else to buy. If they don’t have free trade, especially as regards imports, they get nothing to eat.
Regards,
Ric
SDN, further thought: Because the products of the WBD are more expensive, they should have a strong incentive to establish free trade in exports as well. If other polities impose import duties, they are added to the already-high price of the WBD’s products, making them even harder to sell.
That looks to me like a brief summary of European trade practice since WWII, by the way.
Regards,
Ric
– In relatively stable economic periods it’s the “charitable organizations” that offset some of the difference Ric.
That is a problem for the Socialists in two ways. For one, they can’t control that pool of money very effectively, plus its very existence makes the public less dependent on governmental largess.
#30 ak4mc that’s an implementation detail. GM can’t protect its “citizens”. The East India Company could, and frequently did.
#35 BBH — channels don’t matter much. When talking about trade, it’s useful to think of an economy as a sort of gray box, not totally black so the internals aren’t visible at all but not making much distinction.
If you have an unproductive population being supported by the productive fraction, the costs of supporting the moochers are added to the cost of production when seen from outside that economy, i.d., from the point of view of trade. When an item is exported, its costs reflect actual production cost plus a proportionate share of moocher-support. Whether the moocher-support is collected via private charity or Government reallocation doesn’t matter. The costs have to be covered either way.
Regards,
Ric
Ric
worry about responses like Drumwaster’s because they perpetuate a damaging myth: that there is something unique about Government that doesn’t apply elsewhere.
Bullshit. Government is just one of several ways of devising an organization
Sorry, but I have to disgree with you. A corporation cannot throw me in prison.
Why did banks make loans they knew weren’t credit worthy? Because the government had treatene them, backed (as all laws are) with guns.
Businesses can do a lot of powerful things, but the government has exclusive rights to run judicial courts and police powers.
a Dvorak keyboard
His Slavonic Dances are Teh Bomb.
?????????
And there’s the root of “oikophobia,” ne?
homey-haters I like to think them.
Well it occurs to me that true free trade represents a happy compromise between societies over-arching need for abuncance and the merchant’s need for sarcity. By aquiring an abundance of low-cost products, the merchant can realize monetary success by concentrating on volume of sales, counting on the large number of small margins to profit him in the long run as opposed to wanting scarcity to dictate high prices. Instead of scarcity, all they desire now is demand.
It seems like free trade would strike this balance nicely, that is, as long as demand was steady; which is part of the problem we’re having now.
In a larger sense also it occurs to me that a pure welfare state would desire free trade as well, since it would allow them to optimize the individual “dole”; more bang for the buck would allow even the most meager stipend to go a long way, and would make the person feel more “wealthy”.
Of course, in practice we know this not to be the case what was once the largest welfare state of all-the Soviet communists-who chief desire was to keep thier economic system open only with respect to exports.
But they were hardly a warm-body-democracy, as SDN so nicely termed it, like ours, where if enough envious folks get together they can simply vote for politicians that will legislate taking the fruits of thier more productive bretheren’s labor.
That same type of demagoguery, in part, is what swept the commumists to power in Russia though; and responsible for a great number of the previously uninvolved, low-information, warm-body voters that came out to cast their “historic” vote for Obama in 2008. And in a delicious turn of irony, the sword cuts both ways, as now in 2010 another large group of previously uninvolved, low information, warm-body voters are apparently turning out to voice their displeasure with Mr. Obama’s agenda by voting his Congressional accomplices out!
Which is why I wonder if many of the “tea-party” types will continue to pay attention to goings-on after they “loose thier arrows” in this election or when the economy finally recovers more fully.
Sorry for the meandering tl:dr bloviating
“the sad, plangent tolling of the bell of Inevitability”: people who are possessed of abundance also have inordinate influence on the rest of society, and thus are well placed to promulgate measures that enforce scarcity economics on others.
There are two (ontological) theories of wealth, which seem to correlate to the two epistemological theories.
There is absolute, empirical wealth (how much crap do I have), and relative wealth (how much more crap do I have than my neighbor?).
Even people who are empirically impoverished may percieve themselves rich if they are relatively more wealthy than their peers. Being constantly reminded of what others do not have makes it difficult for them to be ungrateful.
Vice versa, people tend to take for granted what is omnipresent for any length of time, and if everyone had solid gold toilets people would start claiming gold toilets were a fundemental human right, and the withholding of which, an injustice.
And people who try to persue scarcity are quite right in that it may generate for them wealth (depending on the situation) so long as you are talking about relative wealth.
In other words, rich leftists behave exactly how leftists think rich people behave. It’s predatory and exploitative.
Beyond a certain threshold, you have all the money you can really use, and a rich person could afford to lose an awful lot without actually suffering in terms of his standard of living. So the greater effect comes not from having more stuff, but from making sure he has stuff you can’t have. And high priced scarcity is a great way to accomplish that.
The delusion that Government is distinct from a Corporation predates establishment of WBD.
This is because government predates corporations, or if you prefer – goverment was the first corporation adopted into wide use.
As sellers, we are interested in high prices, and, consequently, in scarcity; as buyers, we are interested in low prices, or, what amounts to the same thing, in an abundance of goods. We cannot, then, base our argument on one or the other of these two aspects of self-interest without determining beforehand which of the two coincides with and is identifiable with the general and permanent interest of the human race.
I was going to link to an article at Ace of Spades about John Boehner’s proposal to split up appropriation bills but I keep getting malware infections from that site the last day or two.
But… divide and conquer. I think so long as you attack each (merchant) interest directly, since there are far far more people who will benefit from abundance than be harmed by it, you can garner solid majorities in favor of cheaper stuff, so long as you do it one ‘stuff’ at a time.
The danger is when you have them collude. You make my oil scarce and I’ll make your corn scarce. Then everyone jumps in on it and it becomes a Tragedy of the Commons scenario.
#37 Darleen: again, no, GM can’t throw you in jail. Again, that’s an implementation detail — the East India Company could and did maintain jails with fair-sized populations, plus police and courts to keep them full. If GM needs that facility, they call on Government to provide it, because unlike the EIC, that’s what their charter says.
A Corporation is a deputy Government established by the higher-order Government to manage some fraction of the polity in certain ways, as established by its charter. It works usefully because it’s a form of decentralization, placing management closer to the scene than the Prince is or can be. Private property serves the same function.
#43 Entropy, yes, that’s a very useful way of looking at it.
Regards,
Ric
Ric,
In modern terms would you say the East India Company would be considered an archetypal fascist construct or a purely commumist one?
How either Bob, since neither fascism nor communism had been theorized when the Company was built?
#46 Bob — “archetypical”? Neither. If you have to slap a modern label on it, “fascist” is about as close as you can get, but it papers over a lot of important features.
The East India Company was an extension of the British Government of the time, operating on pretty much the same basic principles, i.e., suppress the riffraff (from their POV) and let the rest get on with it. The micromanagement inherent in the concept of “fascism” was definitely not present to any notable degree, just as it wasn’t in HM Government.
Regards,
Ric
Sorry, but I have to disgree with you. A corporation cannot throw me in prison.
A corporation in AMERICA cannot throw you in prison because Government does not allow it. Government is unique in that it is the dominant corporation.
In other places, in other times, government cannot throw you in prison either.
And in other places, or in other times, business corporations do.
Also, churches.
Where does La Cosa Nostra fall on this spectrum? Were they a government or a ‘family business’ or something else?
The meaningful difference between the Mafia and the idea of a government is that the government turned out to have more guns. Else the mafia could have wound up being the government. They functioned at one. The ‘protection racket’ is, viewed from another angle, pretty identical to taxation.
Back home in Sicily the mob and the local government were indistinguishable.
And under other, hypothetical circumstances, the same could have been true of Carnegie or Microsoft. But they haven’t as many guns as the government, and don’t appear to feel lucky or want to try.
So… I don’t see any ‘divine right’ or special magical sanction for government bodies. They are organizations of individuals who get together to make forceful assertions, or else.
sdferr,
I was talking about characterizing it in modern term; tempted by the sin of revisionism I guess :)
Ric, thanks for entertaining my poorly worded question regarding your EIC example.
#49 Entropy: exactly right. Unless you adopt the libertarian definition of Government, there’s no way to make a meaningful distinction.
Regards,
Ric
Bastiat is extremely accessible. There’s much more available at econlib.
If you have a younger kid who doesn’t have econ classes available at their high school, you could do worse than directing them here.
(End of public service announcement. I’m enjoying the “government is a corporation” discussion, btw.)
You keep saying this crap, but it simply isn’t true. There is one very important unique characteristic of Goverment: It claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force to coerce compliance with its dictates.
Walmart does not point a gun at the head of its customers and demand they purchase its products. It must appeal to their voluntary consent.
When all transactions are entered into voluntarily and honestly (no fraud), each party values what he’s getting over what he’s giving. That leaves everyone richer than before the transaction. A corporation that fails to offer its customers and suppliers a better deal than they can get elsewhere must change its behavior or go out of business. A government is not subject to such checks on its power. It can coerce transactions that leave one or even all parties worse off.
It is an enterprise engaged in the illegitimate coercive use of force. It is much like a government, save for the “legitimate” bit. No Mafia boss claims that his organization is the rightful government.
In fact, the difference between criminals and organized criminals is criminals simply try to ignore the state, where as organized criminals are direct competition to it and organize precisely toward the end of supplanting it.
An ‘organized crime’ organization is an attempt to create a proto-state within a state. An autonomous region.
If you look at autonomous ethnic seperatist movements in depth, and places where ethnic mafias have had great sway, where can you draw a distinction between the two?
How do Kurdish seperatist organizations and terrorists in Turkey distinguish themselves meaningfully from what a Kurdish Mafia might look like? Or Waziristan? Or anywhere else. In South America, with groups like FARC?
I suppose they may seem fundementally different, if you buy into the idea that Che and Fidel were purely ideological freedom fighters, fighting for the Proletariat with the most pristine intentions. Then they are quite different from a bunch of oligarchical optimates pushing their own brand of self-interested tyranny.
But wherever such a group gains influence and power, we can see that the end results are indistinguishable.
“Where does La Cosa Nostra fall on this spectrum?”
Anywhere they decide to; Fuhgeddabowdit!
Thank you, Monster, for introducing the libertarian definition of Government.
A Government is an organization that establishes and maintains a monopoly on the use of coercive violence. It defends its territory because the bastards next door aren’t allowed to rob the peasants; it engages in thief-taking because only its agents are permitted to rob the peasants; it invades and subjugates neighboring territories to extend its ability to rob to more peasants.
This turns out to be useful in a lot of ways, the main one being predictability — if only the IRS is permitted to rob, the individual can go about his business with confidence otherwise.
Wal*Mart can’t rob its customers — but it can defraud them, then call on Government to collect the proceeds (or intimidate others into tolerating the fraud). That’s because that’s the way its charter from the Government, which allows it to operate as a Corporation, is written. On the other hand, under ObamaCare your insurance company is a contract tax-collector.
My point, from which we’ve strayed a bit (gotta love thread drift) is that howling and screeching about “eevul Corporations”, and expecting Government to protect you from them, is a stupid waste of time from either Left or Right perspective. They aren’t even “in bed with one another”. They’re the same thing.
Regards,
Ric
“You keep saying this crap, but it simply isn’t true. There is one very important unique characteristic of Goverment: It claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force to coerce compliance with its dictates.”
The Monster makes a good point; the state claims the legitimate monopoly on violence. We exchange that right to be violent given the assurance that laws will be administered equally to all.
Of course, the founders of our nation directly experienced the phenomena of selective enforcement based on birthright claimed or patronage from one who did so; which is why they wisely included the second amendment to our Constitution.
Just in case the compact with the state became null and void, and they no longer enjoyed our consent to monopolize violence.
I’m guilty of contributing to thread drift. So arrest me already!
Thread drift is good :-)
Bob, a fine but important point: The State claims a monopoly on coercive violence, then declares itself legitimate, and what’re you gonna do about it, a*hole? Zimbabwe, q.v.
Regards,
Ric
It is an enterprise engaged in the illegitimate coercive use of force. It is much like a government, save for the “legitimate” bit.
Define legitimate. Who defines that, by the way?
That is like those arguments people used to have about who was the ‘legitimate’ king and who was the ‘pretender’. Very serious business. But… suprisingly fluid.
No Mafia boss claims that his organization is the rightful government.
Yes they do. “This is our area/territory. We operate here, you do not”. Voila. They claim jurisdiction.
What they do not do, is use the same rhetoric. They do not use the word ‘government’ or probably ‘rightful’, they do not make appeals to Montesquieu, Rousseau or Voltaire for their legitimacy.
They function identically, however. They very much behave as a government. The stake out territory, have an army, claim a monopoly on the use and/or sanction of force within that area, and a right to levy taxes and demand proceeds from everything that occurs within said territory.
They are a government.
They may not be like OUR government, they may not well represent the ideas of Thomas Jefferson about what a government should be, but they very much resemble things that are called governments.
Ahem
One small example of how it gets used:
mexico today anyone
A singular person on a desserted island has no need for government. However, he can’t sit for 7 hours a day moving his fingers up and down and provide for his shelter, clothing, food and entertainment.
In a society made up of many individuals, he can.
But once one gets into groups above three or so, some formalization of how things are going to be run — obligations, duties, settlement of disputes, code of ethics — government of one form or another will necessarily arise.
“You keep saying this crap, but it simply isn’t true. There is one very important unique characteristic of Goverment: It claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force to coerce compliance with its dictates.”
EXACTLY.
Exactamundo.
A “government” claims a monopoly on the use of force.
They do this by… the application of said force.
Any group that uses it’s force to remove any other group that challenges it’s monopoly on force is vying for ‘government’ status.
You need not even HAVE a monopoly on force to claim you should have it. So people can fight about these things… If you want to distinguish between “governments” and “perspective governments”, to me it’s a nit. He who claims to have it is trying to run a government. He who actually (most) has it is THE government.
In fact, even beyond that, any group that uses force at all is obviously asserting a right to use force (as they just did it). And so, it is a governmental action. They’re claiming some sphere of sovereignity.
Some measure of “imperium”, as the Romans would have called it.
It becomes a party to a legal controversy, and a court determines whether it has committed fraud or not. That in turn determines what the Men With Badges And Guns do about it.
That it is a corporation has nothing to do with this.
#62 Darleen: That’s exactly why Jefferson’s innovation[1] was and remains so startling. He puts a logically consistent moral underpinning to “Government”.
And yet: What do Kim Jong-Il, Robert Mugabe, the mullahs of Iran, the sons of Abd-ul-Az’iz, Vladimir Putin, Nicolas Sarkozy, Julia Gillard, and Mary McAleese have in common?
They’re all running governments. The Governments they head up are chalk and cheese, but we all recognize them as “Government”. Many (perhaps most) of them come nowhere close to matching Jefferson’s description. What makes all, or any, of them “legitimate”?
Regards,
Ric
[1]Yes, I know, Jefferson wasn’t the only one, but he articulated it so beautifully…
In which then the TEA party movement could be seen as a shareholder revolt against a management that has taken control of the board of directors and is running the company into the ground for their own and their cronies benefit.
bill whittle shareholder
He puts a logically consistent moral underpinning to “Government”.
As for me, Ric, that’s what separates out the legit Governments from the illegit … regardless of what the UN says …
NK, Iran, Gaza … not one legit government there …
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Yes, I do believe that.
Also, I do not dispute the existance of Zimbabwe.
Which neccessarily means that, the Zimbabwean government has derived it’s power from the consent (or at least, the acquiescance) of those it now governs.
Which means, that for the governed to empower a government with their consent, it need not in any fashion aim to serve them or even tolerate them. What it most fundementally MUST do is overpower them, one way, or another.
For them to govern, people MUST voluntarily submit.
But whether they voluntarily submit because they are enthusiastic about the process, or because they were beaten into accepting it, is practically speaking… irrelevant.
It is just like with kings, really. This “legitimate/illegitimate” question. Silly stuff.
One may, in a principled ideological way, declare someone a pretender. But none of that really matters. The man with the power, the support, and the throne is the king, and that matters far more than any old customs about proper order of seccession.
Anyone may indeed claim a monopoly on the use of force and then use force to assert it.
This ‘legitimate/illegitimate’ stuff… If you overthrown them with force (thus proving they didn’t have a monopoly after all) and put someone else in, then history shall judge them illegitimate after all. If you don’t, then they were legitimate.
Any appeal to principle on the matter is kind of naively idealistic. Kings do not govern on the principle of the matter. They govern on the power.
That which is, is legitimate. That which might have seemed so but wasn’t, was illegitimate. That’s the way it actually works.
By calling someone’s power illegitimate you may as well be denying they exist, calling them figments of your imagination. They have the power or they don’t.
If they don’t have the power, then go take it from them. Do not let them excercise it.
If you try and you can’t take it from them, then it turns out they do have it.
An important thing to keep in mind as we debate whether or not the government has the power to force you to buy insurance. You can scream ‘illegitimate!’ all day long.
They’ll either make you do it, in which case they DO have the power and authority to do so, or they won’t make you do it, in which case it turns out they really don’t.
Which boils out to: There is no right, there is only power. Justice? Ha!
power and cupcakes you better believe it
that’s what separates out the legit Governments from the illegit … regardless of what the UN says
Again, go read how make-believey if-wishes-were-horses it sounds when people unsuccessfully deny the ability of monarch to do what he just did.
Then they go around just acting like whatever just happened didn’t happen. They just ignore it because it’s illegitimate so somehow, it doesn’t count and it didn’t really happen.
They’ll talk for a few generations about the “rightful” king, by which they mean, they hypothetical alternate-history king, who governs them in their make-believe world of delusion.
Eventually reality must catch up.
Dissident: But you can’t do that!
King: And yet I just did.
Dissident: But you can’t!
King: Nope, and yet… there you go.
Dissident: It isn’t possible!
King: Whatevs. Look it’s right there. It isn’t possible, fine, it’s impossible. Just do it anyway or I’ll kill you.
So Kim Jong Il is illegitimate. How does that wonderfully relevant fact actually impact him differently than if his tyranny was legitimate?
He IS legitimate. He rules because the people he rules allow him to rule them, and they obey.
If Kimmy was an ‘illegitimate’ ruler, he wouldn’t rule anything. He’d be some crank standing on a street corner barking orders that everyone ignored. Then, when he claimed supreme dictatorial authority, you could call him illegitimate and be right. A phoney fake ruler who doesn’t actually rule anything, just some crazy imposter.
Alas, the fact that his orders are followed proves his authority is actually legit. Because.. well, there it is.
I assure you, it is NOT a scam. It’s legit – the dude actually DOES rule North Korea.
If you’re going to call him illegitimate you may as well say to him “But you are impossible, therefor you cannot exist, do not exist, and you are just a mirage. I deny thee, phantom!” Yuh-huh. That’ll show him.
Which boils out to: There is no right, there is only power.
I don’t know that I’d say that. There is equal sovereignity of man. People only lose that when they surrender it. People only rule others when the ruled allow it.
But that does not mean the rulers serve the ruled. It merely means the ruled allow it. It may mean they SHOULD serve the ruled – that’s an opinion. I agree with it. It’s not a law of nature. Doesn’t mean they must.
The ruled often empower those who oppress them.
Rulers cannot do certain things – until the ruled allow them to, and then they quite can.
The people can in fact empower governments to do things constitutions prohibit. The people can in fact empower governments that turn around and wipe out the people. The people can in fact imbue governments with the authority to ignore them and rule against their wishes, if they wish for such powers in government and allow that to happen, that is what they will get.
And if they revolt and throw it away, then “it cannot happen” and so it didn’t.
BUT if they do NOT revolt and tolerate it, it just happened, so obviously it can and did. By not revolting, and by tolerating and accepting, they empower the authority to do whatever he just did, legitimately. The reasons kings ‘cannot’ do this or that, is because we will decapitate them. Because we will not listen. If we do not decapitate them, if we listen, well then obviously they do have the legitimate authority after all.
This is a clash between rationality and empiricality.
Some of you guys seem to have a rational ideas about what a government is, and you’ll be damned if reality gets in the way.
All that is true is rational, but not all that is rational is true.
You cannot just insist what is isn’t. Einstein, stop telling God what to do.
You seem confused Entropy.
howling and screeching about “eevul Corporations”, and expecting Government to protect you from them, is a stupid waste of time from either Left or Right perspective. They aren’t even “in bed with one another”. They’re the same thing.
Which is why similarly expecting influential business interests to save you from Gubmint socialism is equally fool-hardy.
The left paints Big Gov and Big Business in opposition when in reality there is none; some on the right buy it and, in rejecting government, attempt to side with Big Business.
But it’s the same thing.
I don’t feel confused at all, sdferr. It seems to me quite clear.
Being confused would not be a bad thing. Being confused and not realizing it would.
It’s not the bigness of the business (or government); it’s whether they engage in honest, free competition or turn to coercive force to prevent competition.
There are small businesses that are tied into the good ol’ boys’ network, so that they get special favors from government. There are large businesses that just do a better job than everyone else.
What seems to you confusing about what I’m arguing?
Your argument seems to me to confuse an agent’s ability to commit an injustice with the existence of legitimacy (justice) or illegitimacy (injustice) in the act. Or, in other terms, to confuse power with justice.
No, sdferr, you’re the one who’s confused.
Your confusion arises between what ought to be (by your standards) and what is.
Entropy and I, and you, have opinions about what ought to be, and I strongly suspect that those opinions would be remarkably similar among the three of us. But Entropy and I are arguing a general case; your belief about what actually exists is based on a single, and rather extraordinary, one — and I, at least, see it as a Pollyannaish and naiive view of that.
Matthew, the 8th Chapter:
5When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. 6″Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering.”
7Jesus said to him, “I will go and heal him.”
8The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
–and if he says to you, “Do this”, and you do it, you have accepted his authority. Now, we all have some attitudes about legitimacy of authority; they make wonderful ideals, and when they’re implemented they yield a good result, in general. Nevertheless, the very act of doing when told establishes authority.
“Justice”, like “fairness” and similar concepts, is a judgement that ranks actions according to some ideal. We observe that societies work better, make their members better fed and more prosperous, when certain ideals are conformed to, and we mostly build our societies around attempts to conform to the ideal. That doesn’t prevent the underlying relationship from remaining true. Might doesn’t make “right”, because “right” is an ideal. It does, however, direct behavior.
Regards,
Ric
No Ric. One act is just, another unjust. One justly done, another, unjustly. So we think, so we judge. This isn’t airy fairy idealization at all. It is quite real, to the extent that these judgments are as much a thing of the world as judgments of power or authority or decisions to act on them or not. Look, for an instance, to Mr. Liu.
Yup. But Mr. Liu is still in jail and will probably stay there, and his wife’s been disappeared. Those are truths, facts on the ground. The people who did those things maintain stoutly that it is “justice” that it should be so — just as stoutly as you do. In other words, they and we have different standards for “justice”, and they’re just as dogmatic about theirs as you are about yours.
But even if they weren’t, Mr. Liu would still be in jail. It follows that the people who put him there had the power to do so.
Regards,
Ric
It is not that I confuse the two. Legitimacy is not entirely synonymous with justice. All that is legitimate is not neccessarily just. ‘Justice’ is more honestly subjective, at that.
And that is the key,… when you say “this or that is illegitimate”, in the way you’re saying it, it’s entirely subjective. You may as well say, and should rather say “I don’t like it and oppose it”. Well good. You can do that.
The way some might play games with the word ‘legitimate’, it is like how a state might play games with recognizing other states. Denying legitimacy (of a government, or a state) does not make it go away. You’re just playing a little game of voicing your opinion by insisting your opponent doesn’t even exist.
If we do not recognize the Statehood of Israel it does not make Israel go away, and it does not change whether or not it is a state in any sane definition. If we were to do that, to deny Israel’s statehood and legitimacy, it would be a game of saying “I oppose you so severely I refuse to even accept or acknowledge that you can exist”. But they still exist (unless you do something about that). The fact that you can’t acknowledge it does not change anything. It’s just melodramatic.
And it’s fine and dandy if you want to do that… keeping in mind you understand what your doing. We don’t want to go off thinking that once we disavow the legitimacy of Iran it becomes automatically annhilated from existance because that would be… lacking in sanity.
Legitimate:
1a : lawfully begotten; specifically : born in wedlock b : having full filial rights and obligations by birth
2: being exactly as purposed : neither spurious nor false
3a : accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements b : ruling by or based on the strict principle of hereditary right
4: conforming to recognized principles or accepted rules and standards
On the second score, it’s self-evident. Kim Jong Il’s rule of North Korea is neither spurious nor false. It IS. He does indeed rule.
On the 4th score, it is like Patterico’s attempt at defining language by consent. Which rules and standards? Rules and standards ‘accepted’ among whom? Which recognized principles and who’s to judge their conformity? Again – Jefferson’s principles about the nature of government were descriptive. That “Power comes from the people” is not a “should” but a “does”. As to Jefferson’s principles about how government should serve the interest of the people… On that score alone you can say it’s illegitimate.. but on that score most of all you’ve reverted to using the concept of legal legitimacy as way to say “nyah-nyah I think you suck”. Not least of which because us choosing Jefferson’s principles is like cherry picking foreign law. North Korea is of no party to anything to do with Jefferson. Bald assertions about which regimes you think should not exist by your own chosen personal standard, we should all know, will not actually delegitimize them. More rhetorical melodrama.
On the first and the third… we’d argue whether or not the law itself is lawfully begotten. That’s … yeah. Why don’t we argue rather about whether or not the color red is really red or actually green. What I am saying is that Jefferson’s account of government is descriptive. It’s a natural law. It’s not perscriptive meta-law that shall govern the laws. Power to govern DOES come from the governed. But that is not a standard by which to judge whether or not people have power based on how well they serve the governed. Applied that way, the only thing keeping it from being utterly farcical and ridiculous and demonstrably wrong is the fact that determining what “serves” the ‘interests’ of others without consulting them is entirely academic and has no mooring in reality.
What’s interesting is, if you accept it as true, and as descriptive, the implication is that since Kim Jong Il undeniably has power over those he governs, and the power to govern comes from the governed, that means Kim Jong Il has the consent of those he governs. Since power to rule comes only from consent, that he rules is proof he has consent. He is legit.
In fact, if you took an honest poll, Kim Jong Il’s regime is probably MORE legitimate, on the basis of consent, than George Washington’s was.
You’ve declared him illegit only by superimposing what YOU want from YOUR government onto North Koreans without asking them.
A good thing that legitimacy does not operate that way, but instead, precisely backward from that way.
It is not “Because a legitimate government serves it’s people, government should get the power to govern from the governed”.
It is “Because a legitimate government does get the power to govern from the governed, a government should serve it’s people”.
That Kim Jong has ruling power in North Korea is undisputable. Praytell where do you think it came from?
If North Koreans resisted his tyranny, he would be deposed, and his power would then be spurious and false (illegitimate).
It is not. Is factual and concrete.
Therefor…
Mr. Liu understands what his jailers do not. They too confuse power with justice. So? Ontologically, there is little to choose between the fact that Mr. Liu knows what he knows about justice and the fact that his wife is missing.
“Why don’t we argue rather about whether or not the color red is really red or actually green.”
See W. Sellars, who more or less does just that.
I have to disagree as well, Ric.
A government must wield the threat of force. It has no choice. A corporation does not have to employ anything except labor and capital.
Using the BEI Co as an example of a typical corporation, one created in the time of mercantilism, is a bit dishonest. As you wrote, BEI could only operate in the manner that they did with the implicit backing of the UK. The BEI is not a general case of a corporate entity; it is an exception at best.
Human nature and our physical existence denies the possibility of a perfect system where free enterprise and government are in some ideal balance. I’d rather err on the side of free enterprise than on the side of big government.
To anyone who would disagree, I’d first ask one question.
Where does the power to control others come from? What is the root and the source of the power behind tyranny?
*looks around*
Fucking echo chamber.
*exits stage right*