anarchism

In Nozicem

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 2 JDN 2460982

(I wasn’t sure how to convert Robert Nozick’s name into Latin. I decided it’s a third-declension noun, Nozix, Nozicis. But my name already is Latin, so if one of his followers ever wants to write a response to this post that also references In Catalinam, they’ll know how to decline it; the accusative is Julium, if you please.)

This post is not at all topical. I have been too busy working on video game jams (XBOX Game Camp Detroit, and then the Epic Mega Jam, for which you can view my submission, The Middle of Nowhere, here!) to keep up with the news, and honestly I think I am psychologically better off for it.

Rather, this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, but never quite got around to.

It is about Robert Nozick, and why he was a bad philosopher, a bad person, and a significant source of harm to our society as a whole.

Nozick had a successful career at Harvard, and even became president of the American Philosophical Association. So it may seem that I am going out on quite a limb by saying he’s a bad philosopher.

But the philosophy for which he is best known, the thing that made his career, is not simply obviously false—it is evil. It is the sort of thing that one can only write if one is either a complete psychopath, utterly ignorant of history, or arguing in bad faith (or some combination of these).

It is summarized in this pithy quote that makes less moral sense than the philosophy of the Joker in The Dark Knight:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (p.169)

I apologize in advance for my language, but I must say it:

NO IT FUCKING ISN’T.

At worst—at the absolute worst, when a government is utterly corrupt and tyrannical, provides no legitimate services whatsoever, contributes in no way to public goods, offers no security, and exists entirely to enrich its ruling class—which by the way is worse than almost any actual government that has ever existed, even including totalitarian dictators and feudal absolute monarchies—at worst, taxation is like theft.

Taxation, like theft, takes your wealth, not your labor.


Wealth is not labor.

Even wealth earned by wage income is not labor—and most wealth isn’t earned by wage income. Elon Musk is now halfway to a trillion dollars, and it’s not because he works a million times harder than you. (Nor is he a million times smarter than you, or even ten—perhaps not even one.) The majority of wealth—and the vast majority of top 1%, top 0.1%, and top 0.01% wealth—is capital that begets more capital, continuously further enriching those who could live just fine without ever working another day in their lives. Billionaire wealth is honestly so pathological at this point that it would be pathetic if it weren’t so appalling.

Even setting aside the historical brutality of slavery as it was actually implemented—especially in the United States, where slaves were racialized and commodified in a way that historically slaves usually weren’t—there is a very obvious, very bright, very hard line between taking someone’s wealth and forcing them to work.

Even a Greek prisoner of war who was bought by a Roman patrician to tutor his children—the sort of slave that actually had significant autonomy and lived better than an average person in Roman society—was fundamentally unfree in a way that no one has ever been made unfree by having to pay income tax. (And the Roman patrician who owned him and (ahem) paid taxes was damn well aware of how much more free he was than his slave.)

Whether you are taxed at 2% or 20% or 90%, you are still absolutely free to use your time however you please. Yes, if you assume a fixed amount of work at a fixed wage, and there are no benefits to you from the taxation (which is really not something we can assume, because having a good or bad government radically affects what your economy as a whole will be like), you will have less stuff, and if you insist for some reason that you must have the same amount of stuff, then you would have to work more.

But even then, you would merely have to work more somewhere—anywhere—in order to make up the shortfall. You could keep your current job, or get another one, or start your own business. And you could at any time decide that you don’t need all that extra stuff and don’t want to work more, and simply choose to not work more. You are, in other words, still free.

At worst, the government has taken your stuff. It has made you poorer. But absolutely not, in no way, shape or form, has it made you a slave.

Yes, there is the concept of “wage slavery”, but “wage slavery” isn’t actually slavery, and the notion that people aren’t really, truly free unless they can provide for basic needs entails the need for a strong, redistributive government, which is the exact opposite of what Robert Nozick and his shockingly large body of followers have been arguing for since the 1970s.

I could have been sympathetic to Nozick if his claim had been this:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with [theft]. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing [goods he has purchased with his own earnings].

Or even this:

[Military conscription] is on a par with forced labor. [After all, you are] seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Even then, there are some very clear reasons why we might be willing to accept taxation or even conscription from a legitimate liberal democratic government even though a private citizen doing the same fundamental activity would obviously be illegal and immoral.

Indeed, it’s not clear that theft is always immoral; there is always the Les Miserables exception where someone desperately poor steals food to feed themselves, and a liberal democratic government taxing its citizens in order to provide food stamps seems even more ethically defensible than that.

And that, my friends, is precisely why Nozick wasn’t satisfied with it.

Precisely because there is obvious nuance here that can readily justify at least some degree of not only taxation for national security and law enforcement, but also taxation for public goods and even redistribution of wealth, Nozick could not abide the analogies that actually make sense. He had to push beyond them to an analogy that is transparently absurd, in order to argue for his central message that government is justifiable for national security and law enforcement only, and all other government functions are inherently immoral. Forget clean water and air. Forget safety regulations in workplaces—or even on toys. Forget public utilities—all utilities must be privatized and unregulated. And above all—above all—forget ever taking any money from the rich to help the poor, because that would be monstrous.

If you support food stamps, in Nozick’s view, there should be a statue of you in Mississippi, because you are a defender of slavery.

Indeed, many of his followers have gone beyond that, and argued using the same core premises that all government is immoral, and the only morally justifiable system is anarcho-capitalism—which, I must confess, I have always had trouble distinguishing from feudalism with extra steps.

Nozick’s response to this kind of argument basically seemed to be that he thought anarcho-capitalism will (somehow, magically) automatically transition into his favored kind of minarchist state, and so it’s actually a totally fine intermediate goal. (A fully privatized military and law enforcement system! What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like private prisons are already unconscionably horrible even in an otherwise mostly-democratic system or anything!)

Nozick wanted to absolve himself—and the rich, especially the rich, whom he seemed to love more than life itself—from having to contribute to society, from owing anything to any other human being.

Rather than be moved by our moral appeals that millions of innocent people are suffering and we could so easily alleviate that suffering by tiny, minuscule, barely-perceptible harms to those who are already richer than anyone could possibly deserve to be, he tried to turn the tables: “No, you are immoral. What you want is slavery.”

And in so doing, he created a thin, but shockingly resilient, intellectual veneer to the most craven selfishness and the most ideologically blinkered hyper-capitalism. He made it respectable to oppose even the most basic ways that governments can make human life better; by verbal alchemy he transmuted plain evil into its own new moral crusade.

Indeed, perhaps the only reason his philosophy was ever taken seriously is that the rich and powerful found it very, very, useful.

Productivity can cope with laziness, but not greed

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, futurism, inequality , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 8 JDN 2460226

At least since Star Trek, it has been a popular vision of utopia: post-scarcity, an economy where goods are so abundant that there is no need for money or any kind of incentive to work, and people can just do what they want and have whatever they want.

It certainly does sound nice. But is it actually feasible? I’ve written about this before.

I’ve been reading some more books set in post-scarcity utopias, including Ursula K. Le Guin (who is a legend) and Cory Doctorow (who is merely pretty good). And it struck me that while there is one major problem of post-scarcity that they seem to have good solutions for, there is another one that they really don’t. (To their credit, neither author totally ignores it; they just don’t seem to see it as an insurmountable obstacle.)

The first major problem is laziness.

A lot of people assume that the reason we couldn’t achieve a post-scarcity utopia is that once your standard of living is no longer tied to your work, people would just stop working. I think this assumption rests on both an overly cynical view of human nature and an overly pessimistic view of technological progress.

Let’s do a thought experiment. If you didn’t get paid, and just had the choice to work or not, for whatever hours you wished, motivated only by the esteem of your peers, your contribution to society, and the joy of a job well done, how much would you work?

I contend it’s not zero. At least for most people, work does provide some intrinsic satisfaction. It’s also probably not as much as you are currently working; otherwise you wouldn’t insist on getting paid. Those are our lower and upper bounds.

Is it 80% of your current work? Perhaps not. What about 50%? Still too high? 20% seems plausible, but maybe you think that’s still too high. Surely it’s at least 10%. Surely you would be willing to work at least a few hours per week at a job you’re good at that you find personally fulfilling. My guess is that it would actually be more than that, because once people were free of the stress and pressure of working for a living, they would be more likely to find careers that truly brought them deep satisfaction and joy.

But okay, to be conservative, let’s estimate that people are only willing to work 10% as much under a system where labor is fully optional and there is no such thing as a wage. What kind of standard of living could we achieve?

Well, at the current level of technology and capital in the United States, per-capita GDP at purchasing power parity is about $80,000. 10% of that is $8,000. This may not sound like a lot, but it’s about how people currently live in Venezuela. India is slightly better, Ghana is slightly worse. This would feel poor to most Americans today, but it’s objectively a better standard of living than most humans have had throughout history, and not much worse than the world average today.

If per-capita GDP growth continues at its current rate of about 1.5% per year for another century, that $80,000 would become $320,000, 10% of which is $32,000—that would put us at the standard of living of present-day Bulgaria, or what the United States was like in the distant past of [checks notes] 1980. That wouldn’t even feel poor. In fact if literally everyone had this standard of living, nearly as many Americans today would be richer as would be poorer, since the current median personal income is only a bit higher than that.

Thus, the utopian authors are right about this one: Laziness is a solvable problem. We may not quite have it solved yet, but it’s on the ropes; a few more major breakthroughs in productivity-enhancing technology and we’ll basically be there.

In fact, on a small scale, this sort of utopian communist anarchy already works, and has for centuries. There are little places, all around the world, where people gather together and live and work in a sustainable, basically self-sufficient way without being motivated by wages or salaries, indeed often without owning any private property at all.

We call these places monasteries.

Granted, life in a monastery clearly isn’t for everyone: I certainly wouldn’t want to live a life of celibacy and constant religious observance. But the long-standing traditions of monastic life in several very different world religions does prove that it’s possible for human beings to live and even flourish in the absence of a profit motive.

Yet the fact that monastic life is so strict turns out to be no coincidence: In a sense, it had to be for the whole scheme to work. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

The second major problem with a post-scarcity utopia is greed.

This is the one that I think is the real barrier. It may not be totally insurmountable, but thus far I have yet to hear any good proposals that would seriously tackle it.

The issue with laziness is that we don’t really want to work as much as we do. But since we do actually want to work a little bit, the question is simply how to make as much as we currently do while working only as much as we want to. Hence, to deal with laziness, all we need to do is be more efficient. That’s something we are shockingly good at; the overall productivity of our labor is now something like 100 times what it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and still growing all the time.

Greed is different. The issue with greed is that, no matter how much we have, we always want more.

Some people are clearly greedier than others. In fact, I’m even willing to bet that most people’s greed could be kept in check by a society that provided for everyone’s basic needs for free. Yeah, maybe sometimes you’d fantasize about living in a gigantic mansion or going into outer space; but most of the time, most of us could actually be pretty happy as long as we had a roof over our heads and food on our tables. I know that in my own case, my grandest ambitions largely involve fighting global poverty—so if that became a solved problem, my life’s ambition would be basically fulfilled, and I wouldn’t mind so much retiring to a life of simple comfort.

But is everyone like that? This is what anarchists don’t seem to understand. In order for anarchy to work, you need everyone to fit into that society. Most of us or even nearly all of us just won’t cut it.

Ammon Hennecy famously declared: “An anarchist is someone who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave.” But this is wrong. An anarchist is someone who thinks that no one needs a cop to make him behave. And while I am the former, I am not the latter.

Perhaps the problem is that anarchists don’t realize that not everyone is as good as they are. They implicitly apply their own mentality to everyone else, and assume that the only reason anyone ever cheats, steals, or kills is because their circumstances are desperate.

Don’t get me wrong: A lot of crime—perhaps even most crime—is committed by people who are desperate. Improving overall economic circumstances does in fact greatly reduce crime. But there is also a substantial proportion of crime—especially the most serious crimes—which is committed by people who aren’t particularly desperate, they are simply psychopaths. They aren’t victims of circumstance. They’re just evil. And society needs a way to deal with them.

If you set up a society so that anyone can just take whatever they want, there will be some people who take much more than their share. If you have no system of enforcement whatsoever, there’s nothing to stop a psychopath from just taking everything he can get his hands on. And then it really doesn’t matter how productive or efficient you are; whatever you make will simply get taken by whoever is greediest—or whoever is strongest.

In order to avoid that, you need to either set up a system that stops people from taking more than their share, or you need to find a way to exclude people like that from your society entirely.

This brings us back to monasteries. Why are they so strict? Why are the only places where utopian anarchism seems to flourish also places where people have to wear a uniform, swear vows, carry out complex rituals, and continually pledge their fealty to an authority? (Note, by the way, that I’ve also just described life in the military, which also has a lot in common with life in a monastery—and for much the same reasons.)

It’s a selection mechanism. Probably no one consciously thinks of it this way—indeed, it seems to be important to how monasteries work that people are not consciously weighing the costs and benefits of all these rituals. This is probably something that memetically evolved over centuries, rather than anything that was consciously designed. But functionally, that’s what it does: You only get to be part of a monastic community if you are willing to pay the enormous cost of following all these strict rules.

That makes it a form of costly signaling. Psychopaths are, in general, more prone to impulsiveness and short-term thinking. They are therefore less willing than others to bear the immediate cost of donning a uniform and following a ritual in order to get the long-term gains of living in a utopian community. This excludes psychopaths from ever entering the community, and thus protects against their predation.

Even celibacy may be a feature rather than a bug: Psychopaths are also prone to promiscuity. (And indeed, utopian communes that practice free love seem to have a much worse track record of being hijacked by psychopaths than monasteries that require celibacy!)

Of course, lots of people who aren’t psychopaths aren’t willing to pay those costs either—like I said, I’m not. So the selection mechanism is in a sense overly strict: It excludes people who would support the community just fine, but aren’t willing to pay the cost. But in the long run, this turns out to be less harmful than being too permissive and letting your community get hijacked and destroyed by psychopaths.

Yet if our goal is to make a whole society that achieves post-scarcity utopia, we can’t afford to be so strict. We already know that most people aren’t willing to become monks or nuns.

That means that we need a selection mechanism which is more reliable—more precisely, one with higher specificity.

I mentioned this in a previous post in the context of testing for viruses, but it bears repeating. Sensitivity and specificity are two complementary measures of a test’s accuracy. The sensitivity of a test is how likely it is to show positive if the truth is positive. The specificity of a test is how likely it is to show negative if the truth is negative.

As a test of psychopathy, monastic strictness has very high sensitivity: If you are a psychopath, there’s a very high chance it will weed you out. But it has quite low specificity: Even if you’re not a psychopath, there’s still a very high chance you won’t want to become a monk.

For a utopian society to work, we need something that’s more specific, something that won’t exclude a lot of people who don’t deserve to be excluded. But it still needs to have much the same sensitivity, because letting psychopaths into your utopia is a very easy way to let that utopia destroy itself. We do not yet have such a test, nor any clear idea how we might create one.

And that, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things. At least, not yet.