Freedom, I Write Your Name - Assignment Example

Freedom, I Write When we consider the ramifications for the of restricting all considerations of justice to individual intention and self-ownership, we find ourselves considering Libertarianism. Libertarianism seeks to limit the central power of the State as severely as possible, leaving all or almost all matters of justice in the hands of individuals or extremely localized small groups of individuals. In essence, there are two modalities of this philosophy of Statehood. Some libertarians adhere to the “entitlement theory of justice”. Its major exponent being the philosopher Robert Nozick, it holds that every individual has the rights to life, liberty, and property, where these are rights of non-interference, or entitlement to resources. This would mean that one’s right to life simply imposes the obligation on others not to kill one, and the right to property imposes the obligation on others not to use any property that one justly acquire without one’s permission. As a ramification of this stance, these libertarians hold that the only legitimate functions of the state are the enforcement of such rights and defense of the country from invasion. Taxation is to be outlawed on the grounds that it violates the right to property, and any laws and regulations must have as their sole raison d’etre only to enforce the rights of non-interference. Thus, libertarianism advocates a minimalist state which does nothing to interfere with the workings of a free market economy, save to protect peoples rights. Illustratively, State regulations put in place with the intent of protecting the health and safety of workers would be repealed on the grounds that they are a violation of the freedom of contract (Hammerton, 2001). Other libertarians uphold the perspectives of economist Friedrich August von Hayek. Hayek concluded that the rules of conduct in a society are evolving, that they survive because they are useful and help that society survive. To his mind, the free market had survived the test of time, in that most successful societies were market based in some way. Hayek considered free market capitalism to be superior to other economic systems because it handles human ignorance by passing information in coded form through the price mechanism, which indicates areas where profits could be made and resources efficiently used. Additionally, it allocates resources without being predicated on any specific objectives or assuming what the objectives of individual people are. It also facilitates freedom, in that for it to work there need to be rules demarcating “protected domains” for each person, where no other has the right to interfere. This facilitation manifests in private property rights. Hayek viewed strong property rights and the free market as the best way of protecting liberty. But, Hayek did not argue for the total abolishment of tax, or even that it should be restricted to law enforcement and defense. Hayek thought taxes, levied rightly, could be used for welfare—a kind of “bleeding heart libertarianism”—or to provide certain goods which the market might fail to adequately supply. However, in practice Hayek believed it would hardly ever be necessary to use taxes in this way, as the free market could always do it better (Hammerton, 2001). Nozick’s philosophy of entitlements and non-interference grew out of his reflections on the ideas of John Rawls. John Rawls spent most of his career seeking to better understand the foundations of the modern political state and the obligations of citizens to one another. He developed a few critical intellectual concepts, which he and his acolytes utilized to think in a fresh way about our civic obligations. One of those concepts was the now famous “veil of ignorance” behind which any person must situate himself in order to determine the proper responsibilities of citizens and the state. Behind a veil of ignorance, a person is stripped of the particulars of time, place, social status, inherited wealth, and happenstance of birth. Rawls considered all of these circumstances to be “arbitrary from the moral point of view”. Only from behind the veil of ignorance will any man be able to assess what he owes the body politic and what he is justifiably owed in return. Rawls also developed the “difference principle”. This principle holds that any inequalities in society are only justified when they result in gains for the least well-off members of society. Rawls’ passionate concern for the least well-off members of society was the deep heart’s core of all of his philosophy (Schulz, 2002). Nozick’s point of departure from Rawls came when he formulated his “principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable,” wrote Nozick in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia. This statement of moral individualism was the basis for his view that individuals possess rights to life, liberty, and property, and that such rights must never be sacrificed in the name of welfare, equality, or anything else that is allegedly good for society. Nozick sought to explain how a government could arise in the first place. He used the old thought experiment of a “state of nature”—a society in which people live and interact but have no established political system—to ask the question: How could a government legitimately be formed in such a society? Could anything justify it in claiming sole jurisdiction over the society? “Anarcho-capitalists” within the libertarian movement argued that even a minimal state, limited to the sole function of protecting individual rights, would nevertheless violate those rights by prohibiting competition among would-be providers of protection services. In reply, Nozick explored how a marketplace of competitive protection providers would work, and what each of them would be morally entitled to do. Considering economics and law as well as philosophical abstractions, he outlined the complex procedural issues involved in using force to protect rights, respond to criminal activity, and settle contractual or obligatory disputes between individuals. He demonstrated that when it comes to the protection of individual rights, the “service provider” has to have the power to make itself the court of final appeal. In effect, it would have to be a government. However, nothing more than a minimal state, he asserted, could be justified. Political philosophers like Rawls accepted individual liberty as a value but assumed that it is compatible with welfare rights, the redistribution of wealth, and regulation of business and the economy. Socialists claimed to believe in liberty but insisted that it requires enforced equality and collective control. Nozick relentlessly exposed the fallacies in these views. Though he made ample use of economic theory in this critique, he wrote primarily from a moral point of view. “The socialist society,” wrote Nozick, “would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.” In a discussion of the income tax as a device for redistribution, he argued that “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.” He demonstrated that any government “welfare” or “distribution” programs on any level actually use coercion to violate individual liberty (Kelley, 2002). Nozick’s entitlement theory holds that a distribution is just if it results through just acquisition from the state of nature or through voluntary transfer via trade, gift, or bequest from a prior just distribution. Nozick held that 1) a person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding; 2) a person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding; and 3) no one is entitled to a holding except by repeated application of 1 and 2. Along these lines, Nozick writes of “mixing one’s labor with the material world.” He explains that what is vital about this is that in so doing a person tends to increase the value of a portion of the external world. He reasons that in such instances, self-ownership can bring about ownership of a part of the physical world. In the footsteps of John Locke, Nozick asserted 1) that previously unowned property becomes owned by anyone who improves it; 2) that an acquisition is just if and only if the position of others after the acquisition is no worse than their position was when the acquisition was unowned or owned in common (Younkins, 2002).   However, Nozick also found that free market capitalism leads to injustice. Given the fact that people have unequal endowments and capabilities, the free market will inevitably lead to unjust distribution of property, from Nozick’s perspective. This was a quandary, however, for he also believed that individuals blessed with talent, wealth, aggressive competitive drive, or other social advantages were morally entitled to enjoy them and to benefit from them with absolutely zero impingement from any government. Hayek, however, saw that the free market of capitalism is the most just of all sociopolitical systems and the best protector of individual rights and liberty. Hayek appealed to his principle of “spontaneous order”, which he likened to evolution in biology. Spontaneous order is a complex social order that emerges in an unplanned way from people interacting freely based on their own conceptions of the good life. Such an order can include commerce, cooperation, and highly developed systems of social norms. Spontaneously ordered society is so complex that it is beyond any one person’s understanding. Consider trying to understand all of the elements, components, and other factors required to build a personal computer. Unless you are a computer programmer or engineer, we would say you are rationally ignorant about most of these processes, although you know very well how to use your computer. Unintended consequences are perhaps more familiar and are another Hayekian principle. These are the events that crop up unexpectedly as, say, a government tries to regulate or plan some highly complex operation. Frequently such consequences run counter to the intended objective. Hayek favored only that kind of societal rule structure that allows spontaneous order to arise. He called these “non-teleological rules”—rules without any objectives in and of themselves. Trying to artificially delimit spontaneous order, as communist and socialist principles do, causes us to come face to face with Hayekian knowledge problems—that is, the difficulty national bureaucracies have due to the fact that 99 percent of knowledge required for solving a problem is local (Borders, 2004). Hayek’s work focused on how it is that complicated and reliable systems of cooperation come about without any centralized direction. When they do, they outperform systems of “command”, systems that rely on central direction. Since Hayek was an economist, his primary object of study was the market and how, counterintuitively to so many people, it can work without commands; and why it outperforms large scale centralized economies like the former Soviet Union. It doesn’t take a directive from Washington to get Apple Computers to make more iPods. Why? Because the market tells Apple how many will sell (Van Winkle, 2004). Hayek theorized that markets worked better primarily because of their ability to facilitate the use of extremely precise knowledge, knowledge that is very unique to a particular person or place. Steve Jobs knows more about making iPods than any dictator or president or congress ever could. Everyone has something he knows more about than just about anyone else, even if that something is as basic as his own home’s interior layout. A command system requires the person with the knowledge to wait on the guy without it. A market system gives the person with knowledge the freedom and power to act on it (Van Winkle, 2004). Hayek recognized that the modern welfare state actually evolved from Bismarck’s Germany, with the regulation of private enterprise, government intervention in people’s lives, and the development of state health coverage and pension plans. He argued, to the dismay of the intelligentsia, that Nazism, far from being an extremist movement, really was the “culmination of a long evolution of thought… simply collectivism freed from all traces of individualist tradition.” Furthermore, he said, “The democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who now wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences… the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security… are the ultimate aims of socialism… [But] socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of ‘planned economy’…” Hayek later said, “After the publication of The Road to Serfdom, I was invited to give many lectures. During my travels in Europe as well as in the United States, nearly everywhere I went I met someone who told me that he fully agreed with me, but that at the same time he felt totally isolated in his views and had nobody with whom he could even talk about them” (Ball, 2004). When the Berlin Wall was torn down, it was a dramatic physical act of symbolism. Hayek had foretold, prophet-like, the fall of Socialism. Its advocates and enthusiasts regarded it as the highest stage of progress, the final state of human development revealed by scientific study and achieved by revolutionary activism. They regarded human history before that time as a collection of myths and superstitions, of barbarous beliefs and selfish exploitation. When “the great day dawned”, humans would live in mutual respect and treat each other with kindness. Scientific analysis, applied to history and society, had revealed mankind’s true destiny. Socialism was not something that could fall. They were utterly certain of its eventual global triumph (Pirie, 2004).   Hayek himself had little time for inevitability. He looked at human development with a more empirical mind, and observed that the human societies which prospered and survived were those which enabled certain institutions and practices to take firm root and be passed on to succeeding generations. Prominent among the cultural traditions which enabled this were things like respect for property rights, and a strong value placed upon family ties and loyalty. He included traditions such as those which encourage people to forgo present gratification in favour of greater future benefit (Pirie, 2004).   Nobody thought this out, according to Hayek. It was only a matter of observing that the societies which respected and practiced such things survived, while the others did not. He observed that new religions came and went through the age. Those which incorporated values such as these lasting societies did might last, but the others never would for very long. He expressed the view that the “false religions” which did not respect these values would be counted out, on average, after a few score years. The first generation adopted the new ways in the flush of enthusiasm; loyalty to these ways was passed on to the children but it was already weaker in them; and they would finally be abandoned during the third generation (Pirie, 2004).   To the utter frustration of Socialists, Hayek treated Communism as if it were just another “false religion”, albeit a seductive and deadly one. He conjectured that it would suffer the same fate as those other value systems which had run counter to the values upheld by the lasting, prosperous societies of history. His prescience was remarkable, for it was merely 72 years between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the final collapse of its edifice (Pirie, 2004). In May 1978, Hayek delivered a paper in London entitled The Three Sources of Human Values. He explained that from the first source came ideas which were genetically determined and innate. The second source was the product of rational thought, the ideas we think up. These two were relatively minor. The third, and by far the most important, came by cultural transmission, the ideas passed on by society. Hayek shocked many people when he referred to Socialism as “atavistic”—that is, the regressive reversion to an older, more primitive form. Many of those readers whom he shocked were among those who thought that Socialism was modern and scientific, and could perhaps bring rational order to a chaotic and unjust world. Now here was Hayek equating it with a primitive instinct, inferior to the learned rules which had enabled human society to develop (Pirie, 2004). Observation makes clear that except in the most clear-cut cases of systemic harm or damage, such as environmental pollution, that the idea of government officials being capable of figuring out how to improve upon the results of decentralized, voluntary decision-making becomes more and more dubious. Hayek called that supposition the “pretense of knowledge.” Yet our tendencies to keep on pretending to have knowledge might very well be driving us on our way down a “new road to serfdom”. Dr. Hans H.J. Labohm spells out many of these tendencies. “If there is anything at all which socialism still separates from other political currents, it is its emphasis on egalitarianism. ‘Hot’ socialism is old-fashioned; that is, turning the economy into a government monopoly, either through direct state ownership of the means of production or through complete state direction of economic life. It is not this type of socialism that is a risk; instead, it is the type of socialism that aims at a massive redistribution of income through taxation and subsidies to rearrange economic out­comes in order to bring about a more egalitarian income distribution…there is a trade-off between the creation of wealth and the distribution of wealth. Overgenerous income redistribution will under­­mine incentives, thus diminish­ing the creation of wealth, from which we all suffer. “[T]he American economist Arthur Laffer [posed] that, beyond a certain level, high tax rates would stifle economic activity, thus lowering total tax revenues for govern­ment, while lower tax rates would pro­mote economic activity, with increased government revenues as a result. “The (classical) liberal project for an integrated Europe includes the repeal of the privileges to minority groups at the expense of the immense majority, because they invariably result in impairing the wealth and income of the majority. It was the American economist Mancur Olson who first analysed the growing ossification of national economic systems caused by the advent of special interest groups. The latter are acting as distributional coalitions, i.e., to receive special favours from the government in the form of protection, subsidies, monopolistic status, or other forms of barriers to exit and entry in a particular industry. “Trade unions… have for a long time held our societies hostage, in the sense that they have effectively blocked all kinds of socio-economic reforms which are long overdue, including the efforts to make labour markets more flexible and to reform pension schemes, so that they will become sustainable. It should not be forgotten that society as a whole pays a high price for this kind of behaviour of a minority imposing its will on the majority. Just by way of illustration, in Germany only 18 percent of the workers are member of a trade union. “[U]gly regulation has a protec­tionist effect. In agriculture, for instance, the de facto prohibi­tion of the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Europe, offers a case in point… the precautionary principle requires scientific demonstration of absolute safety when new products or processes are being introduced. On balance, however, over­cautiousness suppresses scientific knowledge in favour of political considerations, false beliefs and irrational fears. Excessive application of the precautionary principle prevents action until there is complete certainty that it will not produce any harm. But 100 percent safety can never be guaranteed. The result is paralysis and stagnation” (LaBohm, 2003). Works Cited Ball, Carlos A. “To ‘The Socialists in All Parties”. Tech Central Station. Retrieved Nov. 20, 2005. . Borders, Max. “Hayek and Iraq”. Tech Central Station. Retrieved Nov. 20, 2005. . Foldvary, Fred E. and Klein, Daniel B. “The Fatal Conceit Revisited”. Tech Central Station. Retrieved Nov. 20, 2005. . Hammerton, James A. “A Critique of Libertarianism”. Retrieved Nov. 21, 2005. . Kelley, David. “Robert Nozick and the Good Fight”. The Objectivist Center. Retrieved Nov. 19, 2005. . Labohm, Dr. Hans H.J. “A New Road to Serfdom?” Tech Central Station. Retrieved Nov. 20, 2005. . Pirie, Madsen. “Atavistic Socialism”. Tech Central Station. Retrieved Nov. 19, 2005. . Schulz, Nick. “Justice as Warfare”. Tech Central Station. Retrieved Nov. 20, 2005. . Van Winkle, Michael. “Hayek Smiled”. Tech Central Station. Retrieved Nov. 21, 2005. . Younkins, Edward W. “Robert Nozick’s Libertarian Framework for Utopia”. Le Quebecois Libre. Retrieved Nov. 19, 2005. . Read More