leftlibertarian.org

Although I’m still in the middle of a site overhaul, renewed efforts to bootstrap the Center for a Stateless Society as a market anarchist educational org are gradually moving forward. We’re promoting Kevin Carson’s new book. Also, Carson’s first quarterly study for the Center has been published in PDF format - Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles. To complete the Carsonian trifecta, check out his latest commentary piece — Ecuador Repudiates Foreign Debt: It’s About Time.

Finally, don’t forget that we have an upcoming market anarchist bloggers conference call this coming Saturday morning. Drop in to chat about current events, blogging or C4SS.

If you are dissatisfied with current alternatives in organized libertarian advocacy, please consider providing some of the crucial early support we need to build c4ss.org into a going concern.

Amazon seems to have reduced the price of Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective from $39.99 to $31.57. I don't have anything to do with the pricing, so I don't know why they're doing this or how long it will last. But if you've been delaying purchase, you might want to take advantage of this while you can.

We are certainly used to the fallacious Keynesian “economics” that pours forth from most of Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns. That’s bad enough. But dishonesty too? What’s the excuse for that? In a recent column called “Fifty Hebert Hoovers,” Krugman expressed fear that the nation’s governors would follow in the footsteps of Hoover, with devastating consequences for the economy. And what did Hoover do that has Krugman so concerned? He writes:

No modern American president would repeat the fiscal mistake of 1932, in which the federal government tried to balance its budget in the face of a severe recession….

But even as Washington tries to rescue the economy, the nation will be reeling from the actions of 50 Herbert Hoovers — state governors who are slashing spending in a time of recession…. [Emphasis added.]

Krugman here leads his readers to believe that Hoover tried to balance the budget by slashing spending. In fact, Hoover did not reduce spending. On the contrary, he increased it. If he aimed at balancing the budget, it was through tax increases not spending cuts. For example, the top marginal income-tax rate jumped from 24 to 63 percent. Anyway, he actually ran large budget deficits. In this, as in many other areas, Hoover anticipated Franklin Roosevelt. (See my article, “Bad Deal,” in The American Conservative, Jan. 12, not yet online.)

Does anyone believe that Krugman is unaware of that fact?

Cross-posted at Anything Peaceful.

This afternoon I had the wonderful experience of working with the awesome folks at

Thanks also to the new Whole Foods in Short Pump for their extremely generous donations of food; there was so much great food nobody knew what to do with it all!

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5 January 2009

War Tax Resisters in New Hampshire are planning a get-together in Hopkinton on January 10. The pot luck is being organized by Ginny Schneider, and will be held at the First Congregational Church of Hopkinton at 1548 Hopkinton Road (Route 103).

Dave Ridley promotes the conference, and talks about the possible synergy between New Hampshire war tax resisters and the libertarian activists in the Free State Project, on The Ridley Report.

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Here’s some commentary on an unusual tax resistance case in the battle for women’s suffrage in England — a man was imprisoned when his wife refused to pay her income tax.

THE CASE OF MARK WILKS

(Communicated by Alvin Waggoner, Esq.)

The fact, not generally known, that in England, a man may be imprisoned for his wife’s failure to pay her income tax, should be of interest just now in this country where we are in the act of adopting an income tax amendment to our own Constitution. With a proposed exemption of five thousand dollars we need not remind ourselves that few lawyers are likely to go to jail for failure to pay the tax on their annual incomes, but if the English procedure should be adopted here, who can foresee what may come upon any one of us for a wife’s delinquency in this regard. It behooves us then to consider the case of one Mark Wilks.

Dr. Elizabeth Wilks is an English physician. From her practice and property she has an income sufficient to bring her within the tax on incomes. Dr. Wilks is a suffragette. With others of her sex, she believes that taxation without votes is tyranny, and is an enthusiastic member of the Woman’s Tax Resistance League. As concrete evidence of opposition to a man-made government, when her income tax became due, she refused to pay it. The government decided to make an example of — Mr. Wilks! He was called upon, under the statute, for the tax his wife owed. Whether it was a matter of principle or cash with him does not appear, but he also failed to pay the tax. Whereupon he was taken to jail. A wife, less conscientious and fixed in her opinions, might have wavered, but not Dr. Elizabeth Wilks. She stood on the doorstep and watched the detestable government cart her husband off to jail, feeling, no doubt, that her martyrdom was as sweet as it was peculiar. Other women had gone to jail for the cause; she had sent her husband!

The situation was sufficiently novel to attract a great deal of public attention. It was seized upon by the conservative press as a new subject for ridicule of the present government and its policies. The Wilks case soon assumed an importance equaled only by the Home Rule Campaign.

A great meeting of protest was held under the auspices of the Woman’s Tax Resistance League in London early in October. Sir John Cockburn presided. George Bernard Shaw was the principal speaker, and a newspaper report quotes him as saying:

I knew of cases in my boyhood where women managed to make homes for their children and themselves, and then the husbands sold the furniture, turned the wife and children out, and got drunk. The Married Woman’s Property Act was then carried, under which the husband retained the responsibility of the property, and the wife had the property to herself. As Mrs. Wilks would not pay the tax on her own income Mr. Wilks went to jail. If my wife did that to me, the very moment I came out of prison I would get another wife. It is indefensible.

Mr. Israel Zangwill, the novelist, added to the gaiety of the occasion by suggesting that “marrying an heiress might be the ruin of a man.” Possible American complications, involving some of our best families, do not seem to have been pointed out, however, by any of the speakers.

In the end, after Mr. Wilks had been in jail several weeks, such an uproar was created that the Government receded from its position, and the prisoner was released.

The London Times, commenting editorially on the affair, declared that the Government had blundered in sending Wilks to prison, pointed out that this was “admitted by his release,” and added:

Mr. Wilks’s case is also worth noting because it illustrates the anomalies of the law of husband and wife, most of them very much to the disadvantage of the former. From one extreme the law has gone to another. The husband is liable for the wrongs committed by his wife, though he has no power to prevent her from committing them. She for many kinds of contracts is his agent, and can bind him practically to almost any amount. He may be compelled to find her in funds wherewith to carry on proceedings in the Divorce Court. Liabilities founded upon the identity of husband and wife are continued when, by reason of the Married Woman’s Property Acts, it no longer exists. Of these anomalies we rarely hear, though, as any one conversant with proceedings in Courts of Law is aware, they lead to cases quite as hard as that of Mr. Wilks. Somehow, then, is kept well in the background the fact that, in a Parliament elected by men, laws placing them in a position of inferiority and disadvantage are passed.

As usual the Times extracted the large fact of sober significance from an affair that was in most of its phases a comedy. Barely half a century ago, so far as property rights were concerned, the English law regarded the husband and wife as one person, and the husband as that one. Today she not only has her own property, but he may be imprisoned for her delinquency in paying her taxes. And yet there are those who say that the legal world does not move.

This is from the March, 1913 edition of The Green Bag: An Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers.

Some recent conversation on Kevin Carson’s “Free Market Anti-Capitalism” blog has focused on the notion of bargaining power, and the visceral reaction that talk about bargaining power seems to evoke among some libertarians. One commentator suggests that “[t]he inability to recognise bargaining power comes from a profound methodological individualism or atomism among many American style libertarians.”

Some libertarians of various stripes may be atomists. And, if they are, rescuing them from that dubious metaphysical position may be a worthwhile endeavor.

But I wonder whether “inability to recognize bargaining power” may also reflect another difficulty or family of difficulties.

I suspect that the primary underlying objection on the part of the libertarians who are uncomfortable with talk about bargaining power may not be that bargainers’ different positions don’t give them unequal influence over the outcome of their bargain. I’m not sure they’re—necessarily—denying this point. Rather, I suspect, their claim is often, instead, that, even when this is the case, the use of unequal bargaining power does not involve the use of physical force, and therefore doesn’t justify the legal system’s becoming involved in altering the outcome of the bargain. Because appeals to unequal bargaining power have lain at the roots of much modern labor legislation, such appeals raise the hackles of some libertarians, since they seem designed to pave the way for interference with contracts these libertarians regard as free because not grounded in the aggressive use of physical force.

There are multiple objections, I think, to this line of reasoning. I will attend only to two:

1. Someone could express concern about unequal bargaining power without being committed to any particular view regarding what would count as an appropriate response to a contract concluded on the basis of an unequal bargain. Someone could, that is, regard making a bargain the terms of which one is able to shape unfairly to one’s own advantage as wrong without taking any position one way or the other on what sort of response the wrongness of the bargain ought to trigger on the part of the legal system (whether in our world or in a stateless society).

The point is that claims about unequal bargaining power are claims about (potential) moral wrongs, not about remedies.

The difficulty in acknowledging the potential unfairness of a contract concluded on the basis of unequal bargaining power reflects the Remedial Fallacy to which too many libertarians seem to me to be prone. The proponent of the fallacy says something like: If the legal system can’t use force to remedy the supposed harm caused by this conduct, then there’s really nothing wrong with the conduct. The unavailability of a particular kind of remedy is taken, fallaciously, to imply the absence of a wrong in the first place.

In fact, of course, other legal options aside, there are multiple force-free options (which, BTW, could, though need not, be facilitated non-coercively by the legal system in a stateless society—the range of remedies needn’t be exhausted by forceful legal remedies and non-forceful non-legal remedies) that might be pursued in response to the abuse of bargaining power in a stateless society. These might include boycotts of various kinds, public shaming, non-appearance on endorsement lists published by anarchical Better Business Bureaus, etc. (It is also not clear to me why a non-state court system in an anarchic society—not, after all, backed up by the threat of state violence—couldn’t simply announce that it was not going to enforce contracts emerging from what it judged—in light of publicly specified criteria—to be unfair bargaining situations. No libertarian would presumably want to use force to compel such a court system to decide in certain ways.)

But the wrongfulness of an action is not determined by the kind of remedy available for it. To take an obvious example: does anyone imagine that people have stopped objecting to infidelity by their partners in those jurisdictions in which criminal and civil penalties for adultery aren’t available? If exploiting unequal bargaining power to one’s unfair advantage is wrong, it’s wrong quite apart from the question whether it can justly be remedied using forceful legal remedies. The concern about force here is a red herring.

2. It is also a mistake to suppose that unequal bargaining power, where it exists, is unrelated to the prior use of force in multiple ways. As Kevin Carson has emphasized—for instance, here and here—the background conditions for many, perhaps the vast majority of, economic transactions are shaped by centuries-old histories of dispossession and oppression. Even if an individual trader does not act unjustly in making choices within the constraints set by those histories, the existence of bargaining disparities can be seen as a pointer to background injustice. And, of course, the relationships may sometimes be much more intimate, as when wealthy landowners who are themselves responsible for (or in partnership with those responsible for) dispossessing peasants of whose circumstances they then take contractual advantage, or when employers opposing strikes choose, or threaten, to do so violently. Even people for whom force is seemingly the only visible factor ought to be able to acknowledge its significance here.

With humility and honor I acknowledge this post from Pete Boettke at the always-worth-reading Austrian Economists blog. Thank you, Pete.

I spent much of my recent vacation reading Henry Hazlitt's chapter-by-chapter demolition of Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), The Failure of the "New Economics" (1959). I didn't expect to read the book cover to cover, but after only a few pages I had to keep going. It is that well-written and interesting. I'm now a few pages from the end.

The more I read the more I thought: Keynes was surely joking. No one in his position could really be that confused, contradictory, and ignorant of economic logic. It had to be a gag on the economics profession, an emperor-with-no-clothes experiment.

Thus I smiled when I got to Hazlitt's statement in chapter XXV, "Did Keynes Recant?" (p. 398):

Keynes was a brilliant man. Much of what he wrote he wrote in tongue-in-cheek, for the pleasure of paradox, to épater le bourgois [shock the middle class], in the spirit of Wilde, Shaw, and the Bloomsbury circle. Perhaps the whole of the General Theory was intended as a huge (400-page) joke, and Keynes was appalled to find disciples who took it all literally.

If it was a joke, Keynes helped inflict much misery and oppression on innocent people just for a laugh. I guess for the elitist Keynes, the well-being of the masses can't be allowed to impede his bold and daring lifestyle. It is for people like him that secularists like me wish there was a place of fire and brimstone.

At any rate, I highly recommend Hazlitt's book. Don Boudreaux says that Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker proves that any subject, no matter how complex, can be written about clearly and accessibly. I say the same about The Failure of the "New Economics."

Cross-posted at Anything Peaceful and Liberty and Power.