DemocracyThe God That Failed (47 page)

Whether this conclusion is correct or not hinges on the definition of government. It is correct if government simply means any individual or firm that provides protection and security services to a voluntary paying clientele of private property owners. However, this was not the definition of government adopted by liberals. For a liberal, government is not simply a specialized firm. Rather, government possesses two unique characteristics. Unlike a normal firm, it possesses a compulsory territorial monopoly of jurisdiction (ultimate decisionmaking) and the right to tax. However, if one assumes
this
definition of government, then the liberal conclusion is false. It does
not
follow from the right and need for the protection of person and property that protection rightfully should or effectively can be provided by a monopolist of jurisdiction and taxation. To the contrary, it can be demonstrated that any such institution is incompatible with the rightful and effective protection of property.

According to liberal doctrine, private property rights logically and temporally precede any government. They are the result of acts of original appropriation, production, and/or exchange from prior to later owner and concern the owner's right to exclusive jurisdiction over definite physical resources. In fact,
it is the very purpose of private property to establish physically separate domains of exclusive jurisdiction in order to avoid possible conflicts concerning the use of scarce resources.
¹²
No private property owner can possibly surrender his right to ultimate jurisdiction over and physical protection of his property to someone else
unless he sells or otherwise transfers his property (in which case someone else gains exclusive jurisdiction over it). Every property owner may partake of the advantages of the division of labor, however, and seek more or better protection of his property through cooperation with other owners and their property. Every property owner may buy from, sell to, or otherwise contract with anyone else concerning more or better property protection, and every property owner may at any time unilaterally discontinue any such cooperation with others or change his respective affiliations. Thus, in order to meet the demand for protection, it would be rightfully possible and is economically likely that specialized individuals or agencies would arise which would provide protection, insurance, and arbitration services to voluntary clients for a fee.
¹³

¹¹
See Mises,
Liberalism,
p. 37.

¹²
The liberal position was summed up nicely by the eighteenth century French physiocrat Mercier de la Riviere, at one time
intendant
of Martinique and for a brief period advisor to Catherine the Great of Russia, in his
L'Ordre
Naturel.
By virtue of his reason, he explained, man was capable of recognizing the laws leading to his greatest happiness, and all social ills follow from the disregard of these laws of human nature. In human nature, the right of self-preservation implies the right to property, and any individual property in man's products from the soil requires property in the land itself. But the right to property would be meaningless without the freedom of using it, so liberty is derived from the right to property. People flourish as social animals, and through trade and exchange of property they maximize the happiness of all. See Rothbard,
Economic
Thought
Before
Adam
Smith,
p. 370.

While it is easy to conceive of the contractual origin of a system of competitive security suppliers, it is inconceivable how private property owners could possibly enter a contract which entitled another agent to compel anyone within a given territory to come to it exclusively for protection and judicial decisionmaking, barring any other agent from offering protection services. Such a monopoly-contract would imply that every private property owner had surrendered his right to ultimate decisionmaking and the protection of his person and property permanently to someone else. In effect, in transferring this right onto someone else, a person would submit himself into permanent slavery. According to liberal doctrine, any such submission-contract is from the outset impermissible (hence null and void), because it contradicts the praxeological foundation of all contracts, i.e., private property and individual self-ownership.
¹⁴
No one rightfully can or likely will agree to render his
person and property permanently defenseless against the actions of someone else. Similarly inconceivable is the notion that anyone would endow his monopolistic protector with the permanent right to tax. No one can or will enter a contract that allowed a protector to determine unilaterally, without consent of the protected, the sum that the protected must pay for his protection.

¹³
See on this Murray N. Rothbard,
Power
and
Market:
Government
and
the
Economy
(Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977), chap. 1.

¹⁴
The contract theory of the state here criticized originated with Thomas Hobbes and his works
De
Cive
(chaps. 5-7) and
Leviathan
(chaps. 17-19). Hobbes there claimed that the legal bond between the ruler and the subjects, once it has been tied, is indissoluble. However, notes Cassirer,

most influential writers on politics in the seventeenth century rejected the conclusions drawn by Hobbes. They charged the great logician with a contradiction in terms. If a man could give up his personality [i.e., his right to self-ownership] he would cease being a moral being. He would become a lifeless thing—and how could such a thing obligate itself—how could it make a promise or enter into a social contract? This fundamental right, the right to personality, includes in a sense all the others. To maintain and to develop his personality is a universal right. It is not subject to the freaks and fancies of single individuals and cannot, therefore, be transferred from one individual to another. The contract of
rulership which is the legal basis of all civil powers has, therefore, its inherent limits. There is no
pactum
subjectionis,
no act of submission by which man can give up the state of a free agent and enslave himself. For by such an act of renunciation he would give up that very character which constitutes his nature and essence: he would lose his humanity.
(The
Myth
of
the
State, p. 195)

Since Locke, liberals have tried to solve this internal contradiction through the makeshift of "tacit," "implicit" or "conceptual" agreements, contracts, or constitutions. Yet all of these characteristically tortuous and confused attempts have only contributed to one and the same unavoidable conclusion: That it is impossible to derive a justification for government from explicit contracts between private property owners.
¹⁵

¹
On John Locke's views on "consent" see his
Two
Treatises
on
Government,
Book II, sec. 119-22. Recognizing that government is not based on "express" consent, he writes there,

the difficulty is, what ought to be looked upon as a tacit consent, and how far it binds—i.e., how far any one shall be looked on to have consented, and thereby submitted to any government, where he has made no expression of it at all. And to this I say, that every man that hath any possession or enjoyment of any part of the dominions of any government doth hereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of that government, during such enjoyment, as any one under it, whether this his possession be of land to him and his heirs for ever, or a lodging only for a week; or whether it be barely traveling freely on the highway; and, in effect, it reaches as far as the very being of any one within the territories of that government. (sec. 119)

In effect, according to Locke, once a government has come into existence, regardless of whether one has expressly agreed to its rule in the first place or not and no matter what this government does in the following, one has "tacitly" consented to it and whatever it does as long as one continues to live in "its" territory. That is, every government always has the unanimous consent of everyone residing under its jurisdiction, and only emigration—"exit"—counts as a "no" vote and the withdrawal of consent according to Locke (sec. 121).

For a modern, even less convincing (or rather more absurd) attempt along the same lines see James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock,
The
Calculus
of
Consent
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), and James M. Buchanan,
The
Limits
of
Liberty:
Between
Anarchy
and
Leviathan
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). As Locke before them, Buchanan and Tullock recognize that no government, anywhere, is based on express consent or explicit contracts. But not to worry, they assure
us, for this does not mean that governments do not nonetheless rest on unanimous consent. Even if actual disagreements and real nay-sayers exist, this fact might merely obscure some underlying and more profound agreement and unanimously shared consensus on the level of "constitutional choice" and decisionmaking. However, this underlying deeper agreement on the "rules of the game," we are then told by Buchanan and Tullock, is also not an actual agreement—in fact, no constitution has ever been expressly agreed upon by everyone concerned. Rather, it is what they refer to as a "conceptual" agreement and "conceptual" unanimity. In so twisting a real "no" into a conceptual "yes," Buchanan and Tullock then first come to diagnose the state as a voluntary institution on a par with private business firms:

IV

Liberalism's erroneous acceptance of the institution of government as consistent with the basic liberal principles of self-ownership, original appropriation, property, and contract, consequently led to its own destruction.

First and foremost, it follows from the initial error concerning the moral status of government that the liberal solution to the eternal human problem of security—a constitutionally limited government—is a contradictory, praxeologically impossible ideal. Contrary to the original liberal intent of safeguarding liberty and property, every minimal government has the inherent tendency to become a maximal government.

The market and the State are both devices through which cooperation is organized and made possible. Men cooperate through exchange of goods and services in organized markets, and such cooperation implies mutual gain. The individual enters into an exchange relation in which he furthers his own interest by providing some product or service that is of direct benefit of the individual on the other side of the transaction. At base, political and collective action under the individualistic view of the State is much the same. Two or more individuals find it mutually advantageous to join forces to accomplish certain common purposes. In a real sense, they "exchange" inputs in the securing of the commonly shared output.
(The
Calculus
of
Consent,
p. 19)

Moreover, by the same token, Buchanan claims to have discovered a justification for the
status
quo,
whatever it happens to be. "The institutions of the status quo" always embody and describe an "existing and ongoing implicit social contract." Even

when an original contract may never have been made, when current members of the community sense no moral or ethical obligation to adhere to the terms that are defined in the status quo, and ... when such a contract... may have been violated many times over The
status
quo
defines that which exists. Hence, regardless of its history, it must be evaluated as if it were legitimate contractually. (Buchanan,
The
Limits
of
Liberty,
pp. 96,84-85)

Once the principle of government—judicial monopoly and the power to tax—is incorrectly accepted as just, any notion of restraining government power and safeguarding individual liberty and property is illusory. Predictably, under monopolistic auspices the price of justice and protection will continually rise and the quality of justice and protection fall. A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms, for it is an expropriating property protector that will inevitably lead to more taxes and less protection. Even if, as liberals have proposed, a government limited its activities exclusively to the protection of preexisting private property rights, the further question of
how
much
security to produce would arise. Motivated (as everyone is) by self-interest and the disutility of labor but equipped with the unique power to tax, a government agent's goal will invariably be to
maximize
expenditures
on protection (and almost all of a nation's wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection) and at the same time to
minimize
the
production
of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work to produce, the better off one will be.
¹⁶

Moreover, a judicial monopoly will inevitably lead to a steady deterioration in the quality of protection. If no one can appeal for justice except to government, justice will be perverted in favor of the government, constitutions, and supreme courts notwithstanding. Constitutions and supreme courts are government constitutions and agencies, and whatever limitations on government action they might contain or
find is invariably decided by agents of the very institution under consideration. Predictably, the definition of property and protection will continually be altered and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the government's advantage.
¹⁷

¹⁶
Explains Murray N. Rothbard,
For
A
New
Liberty
(New York: Collier, 1978), pp. 215-16:

[T]here is a common fallacy, held even by most advocates of laissez-faire, that the government must supply "police protection," as if police protection were a single, absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all In actual fact, there are almost infinite degrees of all sorts of protection. For any given person or business, the police can provide everything from a policeman on the beat who patrols once a night, to two policemen patrolling constantly on each block, to cruising patrol cars, to one or even several round-the-clock personal bodyguards. Furthermore, there are many other decisions the police must make, the complexity of which becomes evident as soon as we look beneath the veil of the myth of absolute "protection." How shall the police allocate their funds which are, of course, always limited as are the funds of all other individuals, organizations, and agencies? How much shall the police invest in electronic equipment? fingerprinting equipment? detectives as against uniformed police? patrol cars as against foot police, etc? ... The point is that the government has no rational way to make these allocations. The government only knows that it has a limited budget.