Month: July 2016 – כ״ה בתמוז תשע״ו

What’s Wrong With The State?

Why I Am an Anarcho-Capitalist

By

December 2, 2013

A great many people – more than ever, probably – describe themselves as supporters of the free market today, in spite of the unrelenting propaganda against it. And that’s great. Those statements of support, however, are followed by the inevitable but: but we need government to provide physical security and dispute resolution, the most critical services of all.

Almost without a thought, people who otherwise support the market want to assign to government the production of the most important goods and services. Many favor a government or government-delegated monopoly on the production of money, and all support a government monopoly on the production of law and protection services.

This isn’t to say these folks are stupid or doltish. Nearly all of us passed through a limited-government – or “minarchist” – period, and it simply never occurred to us to examine our premises closely.

To begin with, a few basic economic principles ought to give us pause before we assume government activity is advisable:

  • Monopolies (of which government itself is a prime example) lead to higher prices and poorer service over time.
  • The free market’s price system is constantly directing resources into such a pattern that the desires of the consumers are served in a least-cost way in terms of opportunities foregone.
  • Government, by contrast, cannot be “run like a business,” as Ludwig von Mises explained in Bureaucracy. Without the profit-and-loss test, by which society ratifies allocation decisions, a government agency has no idea what to produce, in what quantities, in what location, using what methods. Their every decision is arbitrary, in a way directly analogous to the problem facing the socialist planning board (as Mises also discussed, this time in his famous essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”).

In other words, when it comes to government provision of anything, we have good reason to expect poor quality, high prices, and arbitrary and wasteful resource allocation.

There are plenty of other reasons that the market, the arena of voluntary interactions between individuals, deserves the benefit of the doubt over the state, and why we ought not assume the state is indispensable without first seriously investigating to what degree human ingenuity and the economic harmonies of the market can get by without it. For instance:

  • The state acquires its revenue by aggressing against peaceful individuals.
  • The state encourages the public to believe there are two sets of moral rules: one set that we learn as children, involving the abstention from violence and theft, and another set that applies only to government, which alone may aggress against peaceful individuals in all kinds of ways.
  • The educational system, which governments invariably come to dominate, encourages the people to consider the state’s predation morally legitimate, and the world of voluntary exchange morally suspect.
  • The government sector is dominated by concentrated interests that ( I don’t think “interests” would be taken as meaning people) lobby for special benefits at the expense of the general public, while success in the private sector comes only by pleasing the general public.
  • The desire to please organized pressure groups nearly always outweighs the desire to please people who would like to see government spending reduced (and most of those people, it turns out, want it reduced only marginally anyway).
  • In the United States, the government judiciary has been churning out preposterous decisions, with little to no connection to “original intent,” for more than two centuries.
  • Governments teach their subjects to wave flags and sing songs in their honor, thereby contributing to the idea that resisting its expropriations and enormities is treason.

This list could go on indefinitely.

It’s understandable, to be sure, that people may not understand how law, which they assume must be provided in top-down fashion, could emerge absent the state, although there is plenty of good historical work demonstrating precisely this. But if government had historically monopolized the production of any good or service, we would hear panicked objections to the privatization of that good or service. Had government monopolized light bulb production, for example, we’d be told that the private sector couldn’t possibly produce light bulbs. The private sector won’t produce the size or wattage people want, critics would insist. The private sector won’t produce specialty bulbs with only a limited market, since there would be little profit in that. The private sector will produce dangerous, exploding bulbs. And so on.

Continue reading…

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

This Is Why Mashiach Is Needed!

Here’s an article from Dov Bear, here, with some comments:

Do you really long for the arrival of the Messiah? Think about this question carefully.

It’s not a question but a choice.

There are many views about what the Messiah will do. Among the Orthodox, the most common expectation is that when the Messiah arrives the whole world, or at least the whole of Jewry, will live under the law of the Torah.

This is less cool than it sounds.

Living according to Torah law means bringing back kings, and permitting slavery. It means permitting child marriage and polygamy and several brutal forms of execution. If the Messiah is a Haredi, his arrival also means the imposition of severe limitations on personal freedom and fewer rights and opportunities for women. A Haredi Messiah, with teachings that are in line with current Haredi ideology, would also mean the elimination of all the non-Torah industries and the widespread unemployment that would follow. All of the lawyers, entertainers, journalists, politicians and the people who depend on them will need new vocations.

Aside from manifold distortions of omission and commission in the above, the “Haredi” approach is just as rejectionist toward true Jewish supremacy as the others.

But will the Messiah actually be Haredi? Unclear. He might be some other flavor of Orthodox Jew. Or perhaps he won’t be Orthodox, at all. In any event, his arrival and anticipated preference for one expression of Judaism to the exclusion of all others will also mean the elimination of Jewish diversity. If you’re like most Jews you sort of unreflectively expect that the messianic era means your sect will dominate, but how can you be sure?

Perhaps the King Messiah will be a reform Jew. Perhaps he’ll insist that all the familiar and cherished rabbinic pieties we’ve accumulated over the last 2000 years are invalid, or no longer needed. Will the Orthodox stand for that? And even if he’s Orthodox, he might not be your kind of Orthodox. What if he’s a Litvak? Will the Hasidic rebbes resign their authority and recognize his? Unlikely. And what if he’s Satmar? Would Lubovitch stick around for a Satmar king? No chance.

The author doesn’t believe Truth is both One and provable, but in a human competition of biased actors.

In short, the whole beautiful idea of one unified Judaism under a universally accepted Jewish king sounds impossible unless quite a few heads are broken first. The King Messiah will need an army of secret police to root out and destroy all the competing flavors of Judaism, even within Orthodoxy. It will be like something out of an Orwellian nightmare, at least at until the opposition is defeated. Perform the wrong ritual, think the wrong thought, worship God in a way not authorized by the King, and you can expect severe punishment. That’s the Torah way, isn’t it? And no out-of-favor-sect will be safe. If the King is a Maimonidean all of you who believe in magic, demons, and specific divine providence will require re-education. Utter any of the well known, beloved prayers which reference the saving powers of angles, and the Maimonidean king will have not just the grounds, but the obligation, to execute you for heresy. And similar examples can easily be found no matter what style of king has the throne. Every Jewish sect does something terribly wrong by the lights of the other sects. Unless these real, entrenched, differences of opinion are made to magically disappear the king will be required to root out the opposition and to bring the rest of Judaism into line by force.

Force is nothing new. By angles, he meant “angels”. And do I need to repeat how silly and shallow his portrayal is?

Are you really desirous of a Messianic era ushered in with vicious infighting and a murderous civil war? Given what you know about human nature, and the history of Judaism do you think it could happen any other way?

The end.

__________

I won’t dignify mockery with a detailed response, though I could for an honest questioner. Why do I reproduce this article here? As evidence of the beliefs of a huge percentage of Jewry regarding their own Torah. Do Jews even accept Judaism?

Many Jews think that the above is an accurate portrait of their own, self-professed religion. This is what Judaism would look like if observed in the real world. They are unsure what exactly the Messiah would do since they disbelieve objective truth incontrovertibly emanating from authoritative texts.

So why are we surprised at Jews’ rejection of their own supposed Judaism? Unless it relates to the order of tying shoelaces… Enough  said. Maybe Hyehudi.org can help.