[ExI] Who are the people? Who suffers?/was Re: Privatization and so called public "ownership"

[Dan]

--- On Tue, 7/14/09, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/14 Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com>:
>> But you seem to think this is the default case. 
>> Also, in fact, this could never be a matter of continuing
>> things as they are -- unless all consented, including the
>> original owners of the properties that were stolen.  (Or,
>> in the case of property improperly taken from an unowned (or
>> abandoned), homesteading would have to be allowed.)
> 
> I don't think it's the default case that people will want
> to manage
> everything communally, but they do as a matter of fact
> decide to
> manage some things at least semi-communally, in that they
> decide to have public services.

Uh, no. The state or a group of people who petition the state to do this does exist, but this is not all people. If you agree, then how is this different than saying, "people" "do as a matter of fact decide to manage some things at least semi-" criminally, "in that they decide to have" criminal syndicates run some things?  :)

> Rarely is the property so managed directly
> "stolen"; that usually happens in revolutions, and the
> revolutionaries
> generally argue in their turn that they are taking the
> property back
> from thieves and returning it to its rightful owners.

It is directly stolen in the form of taxes, eminent domain, and other means of coercive transfer. That such transfers require coercion -- e.g., the people whose wealth is being taken can't decide they don't want to transfer it -- is enough to describe them as not the product of their choice and deliberation, but of someone else forcing them to do something or to give up something. Anyone can, of course, claim people want to do something some way because some of them do it that way or because there's a coercive apparatus in place and they are forced to do it that way. But one can't really tell how they would do something until they are free to choose.

That said, if you merely meant that people prefer to voluntarily do things communally, I see no problem with that from a libertarian perspective. However, in that case, such things wouldn't need to be provided or managed by the state. The state is a coercive institution or process.

>>> They might decide that roads should be treated
>>> differently
>>> to a telecommunication company or airline that is
>>> being
>>> privatised, for example, with a different share
>>> structure.
>>
>> Whole possible, it appears to me rather that you're
>> baking in a possible case as the only likely one.  This is
>> not to say it's unlikely.  One could easily imagine people
>> having little imagination -- believing roads have always
>> been [mis]managed in one way and not being able to see any
>> other way -- and continuing with present forms.  But then
>> why de-nationalization or de-socialization at all?  It's
>> almost as if you're imagining that the Soviets fell and
>> people in, say, Hungary decided they actually prefered to be
>> ruled by the Soviets, so they're going to keep the Red Army
>> there, keep the secret police, and all that, but just do it
>> through a different form.  It's not impossible, but hard to
>> see why they'd bother changing things at all.
> 
> As I have explained, allowed the freedom to choose people
> often decide
> that restaurants, shoe factories and farms are better
> managed
> privately and hospitals, schools and prisons are best
> managed publicly.

At best, some people have decided this. The rest did not. So there was no free choice -- such as taking a vote that is only binding if all parties consent -- but merely some people enforcing their policies (tax funding for hospitals, prisons, and compulsory schools) on others. The very fact that schooling is compulsory as well as tax funded, too, shows that some people must disagree with these things. If not, why are they forced to pay for or attend?

> The Soviets decreed that *everything* is best
> managed
> publicly, and the extreme capitalists decree that
> *everything* is best managed privately.

This is not my point. My point is that initiating coercion should be banned in society. That means that the notion of coercing people in the name of the majority, the people, the race, the nation, the proletariat, social efficiency, future generations, God, etc. is ruled out. If people then want to voluntarily manage some or all things communally, fine. But this would not give any more rights or powers to the people who decide on this than they formerly had -- in other words, Rafal and I can take a vote on how to communally manage your labor.

> Is it in general a better idea to base your
> decision on how things are best run on experience and
> observation of
> how the different systems work, rather than blind ideology?

I've nothing against observation. My point, though, has been that if you already start with false notions baked in, your observations are likely to go awry. Think of the case where people here have voiced the opinion that a free market in healthcare has failed and use as evidence of this failure the US healthcare system -- the very system where the government actually spends more perecentage-wise and in terms of absolute amount on healthcare and where regulation is extremely high. I.e., the very case where we're very far from a free market or any sort of voluntary system (free markets aren't the form of voluntary interaction). In that case, what does observation tell one? (This is leaving alone the difficulties of generalizing with data on societies and which data anyone will accept.)

>>> If these really were
>>> "stolen" from an individual or corporation then
>>> there may
>>> be a case
>>> for returning them to the previous owner, but if
>>> they were
>>> built up on
>>> public land with public funds, then they should be
>>> returned
>>> to the
>>> public, or if privatised the money thus obtained
>>> returned to the public.
>>
>> As I pointed out earlier, it's not the public per se,
>> but taxpayers or others robbed.  These would be, in this
>> case, the original owners.  If, e.g., the government taxes
>> you and me to buy, say, a computer, then it's really our
>> (your and my) property -- not the property of the whole
>> public.  (Especially, not the property of other net
>> tax-receiving members of the public.  In this case, net
>> tax-receivers actually owe money or property back to the net
>> tax-payers, all else being equal.)
> 
> If your computer breaks and the insurance company buys you
> another one
> then who really owns the new computer: You? The insurance
> company? All
> the people who have paid premiums for longer than you have
> and never
> claimed, and whose premiums will now be increased by the
> insurer to pay for your carelessness?

We've been over this sort of example before. In this case, assuming no one is coerced, there's no problem. I'm not forced to buy computer insurance. No insurance company is forced to insure me. No one else is forced to buy insurance. All these are voluntary interactions. You can't generalize from the voluntary case -- one where someone agrees to buy me a new computer and however she or he got the money to pay for it was also voluntarily gotten -- to a coerce one -- one where someone is forced to buy me a new computer either directly (where the insurer is forced) or indirectly (where the insurers other customers are forced).
 
>> I grant that in might be tough to figure out who owns
>> what if many are taxed, it's all put into one fund and the
>> government doles it out for this or that item.  (And most
>> government spending is pure consumption anyhow -- and almost
>> all of this will never be recovered.  This is little
>> different than the guy who robs your dinner and then eats
>> it.  Yes, he owes you dinner, but the original property has
>> been consumed.  One can imagine an extreme case of the guy
>> robbing your dinner every night for years and not being able
>> to compensate you -- maybe because he just can't afford to
>> pay you back.  This is, sadly, the case with a lot of theft
>> by government.)  But this doesn't change the principle.
> 
> We could start a whole debate about the morality of
> taxation again.
> You think that taxation is immoral; I think that a refusal
> to tax or pay tax is immoral. We're not going to agree.

Taxation is unjust because it coerces people. It does so in a clearly observable way: they pay taxes because they fear the penalties of not paying taxes. This is no different than it's clearly observable that if an old lady is being mugged, she's not giving up her purse of her own volition.

Now, you might believe, say, someone is getting services, so he or she should pay. That argument would be flawed because people cannot opt out of these services -- which would be like a restaurant charging me for a dinner I never wanted or agreed to have.

Or you might believe that people should just be coerced because this serves some higher purpose. If that's the case, then any arguments about human suffering fall by the wayside and in a practical sense might makes right. After all, real human suffering will happen under coercion -- to be coerced is to suffer -- and it's anyone's guess if anyone is better off in the long-run from this.

(To my knowledge, no one here has addressed the problem of how to measure suffering -- much less addressed my earlier use of pareto optimality and subjectivism here. Let me repeat this point: there seems no objective way of making such interpersonal comparisons. So, the best "meta-policy," from the perspective of not wanting to increase suffering, is to not to adopt policies that entail any more suffering. To wit, there's no way to tell if a policy that makes some people suffer while benefiting others really balances out, so pareto optimality forces out to seek policies where, at least, suffering is not increased. Put another way, pareto optimality counsels one not rob Peter to pay Paul because one can never tell if Peter's suffering is balanced out by Paul's gain. This is so even if Paul is suffering: one can't tell if Paul's suffer is worse than Peter's will be. To wit, policies that reckon these things in terms of social cost or other supposedly
 objective measures are merely some person or group pretending, wittingly or not, that his/her/its subjective evaluation is objective -- that it knows who suffers, by how much, and can actually make valid decisions based on this.*)

Or you might claim that the state is merely taking back what belongs to it or to society. But, in that case, one would have to show how the state or society as a whole (and apart from the person ostensibly being coerced) came to own this property it's supposedly taking back.

>> Now you might add that, in many cases, the best rule
>> is to divide up the properties among the public.  Again, it
>> would only be the net tax-payers and not the whole public. 
>> And this would have to be judged according to how much on
>> net they were stolen from.  For example, someone who, on
>> net, was robbed of $1 million (say, over the course of
>> decades) is owed a larger share than another person who, on
>> net, was robbed of $100,000.  (I also grant that
>> determining these net amounts might not be easy in practice,
>> but assuming equal shares shouldn't be the default state. 
>> Just as in the case of, e.g., two farmers whose grain was
>> robbed, we shouldn't assume on finding the robbers with all
>> the grain that both farmers get exactly one half of the
>> grain.  It could be the case that each owns one half of it,
>> but that would remain to be proved NOT merely assumed.)
> 
> Unless what happened wasn't actually robbery.

Which is merely a way of avoiding the problem. I started out in this example by saying they were robbed and we were discussing returning property taken from various individuals or groups -- particularly how it might be returned to its just owners. If you disagree that it was taken in the first place, then what's being discussed?

I'll respond to the rest of your post later.

Regards,

Dan

* Well, of course, in some cases one might be forced to make such choices, but in terms of "meta-policy" one should not make this the rule, but the exception and try to make it as rarely used as possible, no?