Callahan Against Fake Libertarian Clarity

by Will Wilkinson on December 22, 2009

Gene Callahan at ThinkMarkets offers an excellent post explaining why axiom-of-non-coercion-style libertarian arguments just aren’t very illuminating.

[E]very wavelength of the political spectrum considers some coercion to be OK, and some to be “aggression.” Anarcho-capitalists believe that coercing a trespasser off of one’s property is OK coercion, and collecting taxes to be “aggressive” coercion; while Marxists consider dividing up the social product per “each according to his need” is OK coercion, while hiring guards to block workers from ownership of the means of production to be “aggressive” coercion. So the question is not who is for or against coercion (since everyone is for “just coercion” and against “unjust coercion”), but, rather, what makes a particular act of coercion just or unjust?

In the comments, somebody predictably pipes up to say:

The example you cite of “coercing” a trespasser off of one’s property does not, in my opinion, constitute coercion, because this is the owner’s property, and people can do what they want with their property.

Here we see the impulse to conflate coercion and unjustified coercion. But threatening to shoot a guy if he doesn’t get off your lawn is pretty clearly coercive even if it is your lawn. And this kind of gun-waving threat requires justification. But there’s no justificatory story all reasonable people are logic-bound to accept.

There’s just no escape from honest intellectual toil. Theories of freedom are not free.

  • Aeon J. Skoble
    "If Smith claims ownership of a piece of land (or a car, or computer, or whatever) doesn't he likewise have some 'splaining to do?"
    Right, but Locke _does_ give an explanation for that - the right to acquire physical property follows from the property-right-in-one's-self.
  • blackadderiv
    No doubt. But Callahan's point was that libertarians often act as if the Lockean explanation is one that everybody agrees with, when this is clearly not the case. I suspect that most people, if you showed them that the Lockean explanation implied that taxation was theft, would view this as a refutation of Lockean explanation rather than a proof that taxation was theft.
  • murali284
    Not only that, if you said that mixing your labour with something made it extensionally a part of you, people would think you were bat-shit crazy. In the end, that's all Lockean property gets to be. Because you own yourself, you somehow also own all the products of your labour? Or do you own only the value that your labour has contributed, or what? Of course the whole LTV (Labour Theory of Value) is hiding in there somewhere. Given that most libertarians reject LTV, justifying what these rights are is kind of iffy.
  • grumpy realist
    By that logic, we have a very good argument that mothers own their newborns and should be able to do whatever they want to them--including killing them.
  • Aeon J. Skoble
    Well, one way to think about Lockean rights is in terms of non-rights. If Smith claims ownership of Jones, it is Smith who has some 'splaining to do. One of Locke's points is that such stories tend to be BS, e.g. Divine Right of Kings. But if Smith (and for all x, x=smith) doesn't have a natural right to Jones, then Jones is naturally free. Since we also univerally quantify my "Jones" placeholder, we can say that Jones has a right to do whatever doesn't violate Smith's rights, i.e., negative liberty rights. Any positive rights must arise contractually (and consensually).
  • blackadderiv
    "If Smith claims ownership of Jones, it is Smith who has some 'splaining to do."

    If Smith claims ownership of a piece of land (or a car, or computer, or whatever) doesn't he likewise have some 'splaining to do? The whole point is that while everyone needs to explain something, not everyone agrees about which explanations are BS.
  • Amen. Coercion seems rarely to be doing much interesting moral work in these arguments. What's doing the real heavy lifting is the underlying theory of rights that tells us which acts of coercion are legitimate and which are not. Proudhon may have been wrong to say that property is theft, but property *is* coercive - whether it be libertarian private property or socialist common property.
  • Proudhon also said "property is freedom" & "property is impossible", making distinctions as to the root of different forms of property.
  • Ben A
    Oh boy, it's Gerry Cohen!

    Isn't the liberty to murder a kind of liberty? So how can you say you are "pro-liberty" if you favor jailing murderers, etc., etc.
  • Yes, the liberty to murder is a kind of liberty. The point is you have to justify limits on liberty. Murder isn't one of the hard cases. (It is "wrongful" by definition!) Your liberty to walk across my yard is a kind of liberty. And it's not obvious if or when I, or the law, should be able to stop you.
  • Ben A
    Is this the same man who wrote of the able and infirm story that infirm was telling some kind of bullshit story in claiming 50% of the yard-clearing dues? Yeah sure, it's not obvious, but man, stay out of my yard!
  • The piece of that comment you cherry-picked actually is part of this paragraph:

    "I would argue that Anarcho-Capitalism is simply the rejection of coercion in all shapes or forms, under whatever justification. The example you cite of “coercing” a trespasser off of one’s property does not, in my opinion, constitute coercion, because this is the owner’s property, and people can do what they want with their property. By trespassing on your property I open myself to being the subject of whatever you please to do to me. I do not see it as coercive for you to decide to shoot at me on your property, because you are shooting at your property and I have no permission to be there."
  • Abby Normal
    I don't see how including more of this circular argument makes it less circular!
  • blackadderiv
    You got it all wrong, officer. I didn't shoot the guy for being on my property. I was just shooting at my property (I randomly shoot my stuff all the time) and the guy just happened to walk into the path of the bullets.
  • lhhunt
    In the Lockean natural rights tradition (which, unless someone like Will convinces my I'm deluded, is where I am located), the fundamental concept is not coercion nor even freedom, but rights. Liberty is the exercise of one's rights, all else is license. The property owner who repulses an invader is not abridging anyone's liberty. Of course, in this tradition, freedom/liberty are not morally neutral terms (nor is coercion, if you decide to define that in terms of liberty).
  • Yeah, I suspect Locke's moralized notion of liberty is the source of more confusion than illumination. The Hobbesian view seems clearer to me. The difference, I guess, is whether you think rights are the starting point of justification (E.g., "Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them...") or need to be justified by reference to some other notion. Like Hobbes, I think rights are conventional and need justification. Outside of a civil condition, you are at liberty to do whatever you can. Rights are constraints or limits on natural liberty, and our reason to heed them, or to comply with a scheme of enforcement, is that we will do better with them than without them.
  • david
    But where does your initial right to that property come from? Presumably Coase suppresses any efficiency concerns from arbitrary assignments, but there has to be some given set of 'rights' to begin with.

    You think it's yours. Marxists think it belongs proportionally to each according to his need. You are right because why...?

    At least, this is what I read the allegation of circularity to be arguing.
  • In the trespasser example, the tresspasser has the freedom to tresspass or not to trespass. I think a principled libertarian could argue that "justified coercion" is simply coercion to which a person chooses to expose himself. Is income taxation then justified coercion, because we choose to work and be taxed? I suppose you could argue it, but most of us need to work to eat and eat to live. So perhaps justified coercion is only justified if it involves activities which you can choose to engage in (e.g., enjoying another's property VS. merely existing and attempting to subsist through mutually voluntary exchanges.)
  • vladtarko
    I think a better example is the libertarian classification of fraud as initiation of force, although fraud doesn't involve physical violence but only the performance of a speech act. Classifying fraud as initiation of force allows supporters of the non-coercion axiom to say that the punishment of fraud (which involves coercion) is justified in the light of their axiom. However, it seems to me that it's more straightforward to abandon the axiom and just say that punishing fraud is a legitimate case of initiation of force. Why is it legitimate? One could argue in principle that fraud is covered by freedom of speech. However, we don't accept such an argument due to its nasty consequences - the idea of contract would become meaningless. (Is there some other reason?)

    It seems to me that many of those who appeal to the axiom of non-coercion (or other similar devices) are doing so because they want to avoid relying exclusively on a consequentialist approach - which is not guaranteed to deliver all their favorite conclusions (such as that taxation is illegitimate).
  • vladtarko
    I think a better example is the libertarian classification of fraud as initiation of force, although fraud doesn't involve physical violence but only the performance of a speech act. Classifying fraud as initiation of force allows supporters of the non-coercion axiom to say that the punishment of fraud (which involves coercion) is justified in the light of their axiom. However, it seems to me that it's more straightforward to abandon the axiom and just say that punishing fraud is a legitimate case of initiation of force. Why is it legitimate? One could argue in principle that fraud is covered by freedom of speech. However, we don't accept such an argument due to its nasty consequences - the idea of contract would become meaningless. (Is there some other reason?)

    It seems to me that many of those who appeal to the axiom of non-coercion (or other similar devices) are doing so because they want to avoid relying exclusively on a consequentialist approach - which is not guaranteed to deliver all their favorite conclusions (such as that taxation is illegitimate).
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