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Tom Woods just recently posted videos of he and Dr. Casey on Libertarian Anarchy, the second one (“Ireland”) focuses this very subject (and isn’t limited to Ireland as an example of privatized justice).

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The other thing that emerges out of this system is that people who do want to influence elections ideologically primarily do it by organizing or funding interest groups outside the party structure (though often tied to interests within it), and only secondarily within the party structures.

They then attempt to mobilize people to share/who share their views in “get out the vote” efforts, which, if successful, have the effect of shifting the ideology of the actual electorate (if more people who believe x vote, the “50” moves in that direction).

The other thing activism does is shape the perception politicians have of where that “50” is (letter-writing campaigns, protests, and other schemes to make a group seem numerous or at least intensely interested – and voter intensity often matters, out of the numbers involved. Intensely interested minorities can often get their way on issues of interest to them, because it matters more to them than to the average voter).

Then there’s the ultimate way of shifting the electorate, which is not directly done by parties at all: managing “public opinion” (Chomsky often highlights the concept of “manufacturing consent,” and Lippmann, but without noting that at the time Lipmann wrote that, Walter was a left-progressive social democrat. This is their method, though now it’s also attempted, with less success, by the right), capturing institutions that promulgate ideas and other methods of, to put it starkly, mind control/manipulation methods.

This is one reason why education, both “higher” and “primary,” has become corrupted. It’s the ultimate way to sway electorates by inputting beliefs directly into impressionable young people.

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Of course, both of those explainations just get into the electoral dynamics and do not even begin to touch the ways in which the parties collude together when in power.

Which then comes to your point about why the deck is stacked in their favor: each party is full of people who belong to the Party of Incumbency, over time they form, in essence, a cartel, and are able to use the fact that they write the laws and they enforce them (as executives) and their appointees (judges) rule on them to stack the deck even further in their favor and against potential competitors; they set up campaign finance laws that finance each other, ballot access laws that restrict potential “outsiders” from gaining a toehold, and so on.

plus of course since each Party is basically pushed towards being near identical under this system, they end up drawing from similar donor groups; big donors give to the parties not so much on the basis of ideas (though some do that as well), but to have and maintain “access” no matter who wins (or loses), so the same influential people end up having disproportionate influence no matter which side wins (think Goldman Sachs executives who end up in the Treasury or wherever; no matter which Party wins, there is always some Goldman guy. And so on).

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Handling this point separately:

“Today we seem to have an illusory two-party system where both parties tend to put forward weak, watered down candidates that are mostly pro-statism. They seem to be calculated to as nearly identical as possible on most issues, vocalize strong opposition over a few minor points with which to differentiate themselves, and almost never stick to those few points of difference once elected.”

Political scientists in general have a theory, a flawed but still useful one, for why this happens.

Imagine the political spectrum as a line, running from 0 – 100. People (the electorate) have some distribution across this line, but for definitional purposes “50” is the exact middle of the electorate (if the views of the electorate shift, so too does the location of the magic “50” number. That is, the spectrum always remains, as an abstraction, 0-100 with 50 as its middle regardless of beliefs).

Each party’s “bases” are distributed somewhere along this spectrum, we’ll say the average “Donkeycrat” voter is at 25, and the typical “Eliphublican” voter is at 75. We’ll also say that voters – people who have already decided they are going to waste their time going to vote* are, by and large and for the most part,** going to vote for the party whose views are closest to their own.

The logic of this is that a party can gain more votes – and, theoretically, lose none (remember, we’re considering here only voters who have already decided to vote, and to vote for one of the parties with a chance of winning) – by shifting towards the center. If Party D remains at 25 (the center of it’s “base,”) then party E can gain votes by shifting from 75 to, say, 60: they now capture all their old votes, plus some of the people near the middle who would otherwise have voted for D. They are teh winrar! But, hey, not so fast, dood – Party D can play this game, too! They also shift, but they decide to shift moar; they move from 25 all the way to 48! Now they are teh winrar! Only, not so fast…E moves again…

And soon you end up with two parties each trying to crowd the middle as closely as possible, while still throwing red meat to their bases (to keep them interested in voting at all), and each trying to portray the other as “out of the mainstream”/”fringe kooks.”

*Political scientists still have not – and they openly admit this – come up with a satisfactory explanation for why people bother to vote in the first place, since it is such a low-value use of time.

**Spending your vote on a party which is guaranteed to have no chance of winning – any “fringe” party in a two-party system – is, in the sense of winning, irrational. At least according to political scientists. Now people may have rational reasons for voting that way anyhow, some are willing to concede, but these reasons have nothing to do with winning elections and thus determining what policies get implemented, so these votes are “safely ignored” in this model.

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It happened over time.

1) The way the U.S. electoral system is structured, two parties is the “equilibrium point” (to use a flawed concept). Factions that in other countries, with other systems, would be in their own party end up as part of a big coalition party (not that I endorse a multiparty system; most of these are even worse, though for other reasons) because everything is set up around having a majority and winning the presidency: it’s a binary system so it produces a binary dynamic.

The most that can happen is what happened a couple times early on: the rise of a new party causes the collapse of one of the older ones (or, conversely, the collapse of one of the older ones opens up space for a new one to rise). Creating new parties is hard, and is made harder all the time (see below), so usually now people/groups who want a party simply take over one of the existing ones; this method first happened in 1896, with the takeover of the old Democratic Party by Bryanite radical populist-progressives, who shifted from the Republican Party (and, conversely, this takeover caused groups that were formerly Democrats to shift into the Republican party) (a switch described by Rothbard in one of these lectures here, though now I forget if it is most fully detailed in “The Decline of Laissez Faire” or “The Rise and Fall of Monopolies,” or “Tarrifs, Inflation, Anti-Trust” – all I do remember is that though “Pietism and the Power Brokers” is really good, as I remember, the 1896 party realignment is detailed most fully in one of the other lectures).

Anyhow, two-parties is basically the product of how the U.S. electoral system is set up, and it is possible to avoid that particular trap, but not without falling into another (such as establishing a system that is more conducive to multiparties, the product of which usually is endless coalitions, usually made up of the same parties that form a coalition, with small single-focus parties then demanding, as a price of their participation in the coalition, significant control over their pet issue, and the position they hold on that pet issue may be one where 80% of the rest of the electorate opposes them, but they get their way anyhow. Another usual dynamic of seriously multiparty systems is that because either the coalitions are eternally “stable,” you basically get the same policies no matter who you vote for OR they’re eternally “unstable” – that is, swings are so wild and coalitions so fragile that the “governments” (that is, the elective aspects of them) collapse frequently; in either case, bureaucracies end up having even more control – and I bet you didn’t think this was possible, but it is – over policy than under our system. Such multiparty states are controlled almost entirely by the Permanent Party of Government, despite any riotous political activity in the streets).

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Felt the need to add this:

“I feel that voting in morally objective officials, who are not incentivized by money [and power] may the best option we have…” (Emphasis added; “and power” added).

Please let me know when you find some.

I don’t really mean to be snide there or go all Diogenes on you; but the myth of impartial, scientific public-policy carried out by disinterested, objective officials is what early Progressives believed in (and some modern ones still claim to believe in, or, at least, peddle).

But it’s like the old saw about making best way to make the most delicious rabbit soup, without having caught the rabbit.

1) Find these persons.

2) Find an electorate that will vote them into office (rather than voting for the ones that promise them the most boodle/make the most outlandish promises/offers of free lunch).

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“I feel that voting in morally objective officials, who are not incentivized by money [and power] may the best option we have…” (Emphasis added; “and power” added).

Please let me know when you find some.

I don’t really mean to be snide there or go all Diogenes on you; but the myth of impartial, scientific public-policy carried out by disinterested, objective officials is what early Progressives believed in (and some modern ones still claim to believe in, or, at least, peddle).

But it’s like the old saw about making best way to make the most delicious rabbit soup, without having caught the rabbit.

1) Find these persons.

2) Find an electorate that will vote them into office (rather than voting for the ones that promise them the most boodle/make the most outlandish promises/offers of free lunch).

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As osgood mentioned, Thomas Sowell has a number of good books on the subject.

Murray Rothbard also had a theory, which has been taken up by Hans Hoppe (and probably some others) that the academic intellectual establishment represents a restoration of the “Throne and Altar” – progressives subsidized certain intellectuals, which then propagated (through their students & others influenced by them) various opinion-creating institutions (not limited to universities and schools, but also including what are now known as the “mainline” protestant denominations), whose purpose were to generate rationales for an expansion of government.

Since all (literally, all) of the first PhDs in America got them in German universities during the Bismarck era, such apologias came naturally to them.

Of course, if you ask the average Progressive academic, they are *highly* critical of government policies. Which is true, because they criticize them for not living up to the sacrelized version of government, they criticize it for not doing more, for not having more power, money, and control over people’s lives. They criticize politicians in the same way an Established Throne-and-Altar Church might criticize political leaders in that era: for sinning against their duties.

Part of Rothbard and especially Hoppe’s analysis is that intellectuals intuitively realize that on the free market there would be less demand for the services of intellectuals and many of them would have to take up another trade,* but Progressive government has a near endless demand for creative apologias, and so subsidizes more of them than anyone would otherwise.

However, as far as I know neither Rothbard nor Hoppe wrote a specific book on this; rather it is described in their works on other subjects pertaining to the growth of government.

Also, Robert Nozick, who I know gets a hard time from Misesians/Rothbardians (and I don’t disagree with the reasons they give him a hard time) wrote a incisive, scathing article on why intellectuals reject capitalism (titled “Why do Intellectuals Oppose Captalism?”) which, along with his article “Who Would Choose Socialism?” is included in his book “Socratic Puzzles” (Nozick is a very clever and even humorous writer, rare for a philosopher, and I really do recommend this book, regardless of the problems with his version of minarchy).

Of course, the intellectuals you speak of have also written voluminously about why they support Progressivism (because it’s good and true, a holy thing, and only stupid, ignorant, or selfish people reject it, which is why so many people in “higher learning” are Progressives and so few are non-Progressives). I could direct you to some of those books, too, if you’re short on kindling or are an intellectual masochist or simply have a perverse interest in modern sophism and plenty of time on your hands.

*Hoppe is very old-school and paleo, and seems to long for the days of the full-service gas station; therefore his favored suggestion of what trade ex-intellectuals could take up on the free market is “the mechanics of gas-pump operation.” Manual labor is an honorable trade. Certainly more morally worthy than being an apologist for the modern state.

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“I mean who decides on what court to go to in the first place?”

I’m probably not the best person to respond to this because I remain a “minarchist” myself, but there are various anarcho-cap responses to all of what you said.

First, when you said “won’t the rich [and powerful] just have an advantage?” – they certainly do now, and nobody expects absolute utopia.

Secondly, police and the courts might be two separate businesses (then they won’t be in collusion, necessarily at least).

As for “who decides which to use?” the way I’ve always heard it described there would have to be mutual agreement between the parties (or their advocates), and that if this sounds “not plausible, or anyhow the guilty party just won’t agree to any and will string it out,” the people who have worked this out have proposed mechanisms to insure that won’t happen, and they point to historical examples of similar institutions that they say have worked in practice.

But it’s probably best left to a full Anarcho-cap to explain their position. I know Robert “Bob” Murphy has given Mises lectures on this, one is here and another is here (note: they cover pretty much the same ground, having been given at two separate times to two different audiences; I mention this because you might only want to watch one, depending on how much time you have).

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Ok though here’s the sort of answer Statists do give to “why YOU are subject to their laws.” (Noting that they would not accept the description that the laws are “unilateral,” “arbitrary,” or “destructive.” Of course, they are wrong, but we’re looking at what their argument would be, and among their arguments would be that this characterization is false).

Note that on one level, the more philosophically-aware statists, or at least the currently dominant branch of them, actually do accept the fundamental principle that unanimous agreement is required, and the “social contract” cannot be imposed upon hold-outs.

They also note that social institutions ought to be set up in a generally disinterested way; that is, for example, they shouldn’t (as an ought) benefit those in power just because that is in the interest of those who are in power (and use that power to exact resources from others for their own benefit). Social institutions should (again, in the ought sense) be set up in such a way that everyone would agree to them.

They then note that in society-as-we-find it, everyone has their particular interests and would want to arrange things so as to benefit themselves, or at least not be made worse off than they currently find themselves. But they note that these particular self-interests are of no philosophical social importance; that is they may or may not be worthy, and the people who hold them may have good reasons to hold them, but they are not of primary significance when attempting to determine what social arrangements/institutions we ought to have.

From there they construct elaborate thought experiments to find out what institutions “we would all agree to” that satisfied conditions of (social) justice. Thought experiments carefully designed (by them) to lead everyone down a chain of argumentation to arrive at an idealized-utopian version of the modern social welfare beamtenstaat. They then claim everyone would agree to form a social contract on this basis if they were not blinded by their current social interests (so, if, for example, you-in-the-hear-and-now disagree, it’s just because you haven’t sufficiently divorced yourself from your own particular social circumstances): “we” would all want certain social guarantees so that no matter what happened, “we” would not fall below a certain materiel minimum, &tc.

Note also that among the “givens” (though somewhat argued for) within this is the determinism that neoclassical social welfare/general equilibrium economics has as one of it’s outputs-of-premises, and a philosophical commitment to the belief that all our personal characteristics (intelligence, physical ability or disability, drive to succeed, and so on) are, from an ethical point of view, accidental; that is, we did nothing to “deserve” them (and those who lack the characteristics that society ends up finding valuable did nothing to “deserve” whatever bad fate befalls them), which is one reason why, behind the veil-of-ignorance, we not only do not know our particular social interests (where we find ourselves in society-as-it-is), but when we’re deliberating on what social institutions “we would all agree to,” we are not supposed to know our individual abilities & disibilities, whether we’ll be born to rich parents or poor ones, and the like.

So then they find that “we” would agree to…Progressivism. Social egalitarianism. The modern social-welfare beamtenstaat (with a superficial level of democracy; note these people all claim to be very pro-democracy, but the logical output of their beliefs is that technocrats – technical experts in scientific public policy, in social welfare economics, in diversity multiculturalism, &tc, will decide all matters of import and the elective bodies are like the toy parliaments in the Soviet world, existing only to ratify what the apparatchiks with technical knowledge claim will produce the most just result – “be of the greatest benefit to the least-well-off in society”).

Anyhow, in the modern world, when the person-on-the-street with a undergraduate degree starts talking about “the underlaying social contract,” it is a vulgar version of this they are all referring too (consciously or unconsciously). It started (more or less) with Dewey and was formalized by Rawls and various philosophical second-hand dealers in ideas (various people influenced by Rawls and/or Dewey &tc).

So they all believe that really you would agree with them and if you don’t see that you’re ignorant and/or unjust, and in any case their job is to force you to be free and to educate (“The Uplift!”) you or at least your kids.

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“I know I’m channeling a little Lysander Spooner, but I’m genuinely curious what the arguments are by the statists that I AM subject to their unilateral, arbitrary and typically destructive laws.”

It boils down to force. You may not have agreed, but they outnumber & outforce you (us). Might doesn’t make right, but it does make might. I mean, I’m as happy to sound off in forums like this as anyone, and pat myself on the back for being bold, but I didn’t scrawl a Spoonerish statement on my tax form and send that in instead of a faithfully-filled out form.

My guess is most of the people here did that as well including the faculty. My guess is Rothbard obeyed all the tax & other laws all his life, not because he agreed with them but because he had to and because he did not want to give them an excuse to toss him into prison.

Of course none of that makes this whole edifice legitimate, but it does make it a brute fact of life: as a matter of fact (not as a matter of right) they have power over our lives and we need to persuade enough people and/or the right people that this is wrong.

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Short-term QQ: Evidently there aren’t any (or nobody knows of them if there are).

Long-term Huzzah!: A(nother) potential research project. Someone can do for this case what has already been done for most of the other high-profile labour conflicts of the era.

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Their intellectual imperialism invades every field and pervades everything and, as their forebearers (such as Walter Rauchenbush, author of “Christianizing the Social Order,”) they would create the most comprehensive theocracy ever. And yet they think their dogma is nothing but the product of pure reason and disinterested social science.

Understanding the underlaying premises that lead many of these to assert & believe that “social justice” is arrived at through sound “social science” will be a good step for boulstering your own arguments. I.E. Rawls (which not all of these people cite explicitly as an underlaying source, but almost all of them are influenced by it) based his “Theory of Justice” essentially on Welfare Economics as derived from Neoclassical assumptions.

So reading or listening to Austrian Critiques & explainations of the differences and what is wrong with this approach is helpful (here is a great video by Bob Murphy doing that).

Also knowing the roots & origins of social justice and the uplift generally and how, rather than being an “optimistic view of human nature,” it is one that believes in manipulation of people by a cadre of experts will be helpful. While many social scientists, deep in their heart, want to be manipulators (that’s what The [Social] Uplift is all about), not many of their targets (which include their student-audiences) want to be the manipulated.

Understanding that all of this implies not egalitarian equality in the least, but rather a permanent caste structure between the technocratic manipulators and the mass which is molded will help as well.

Mostly, knowing and showing just how much all the things they advocate ruin rather than help lives, kill rather than save lives, produce rather than reduce inequality, and the like will be very helpful. For better or worse, you do also have to appeal to people’s emotions and the fact that if you want to help people, you certainly don’t ruin their lives for them. (Much of Progressivism is based on people wanting to feel better about themselves and then displacing blame for the bads their policies produce).

Also, and a lot of free-marketeers get this wrong when they speak only of incentives and perverse incentives, and fail to explicitly connect why people react the way they do when incentives are distorted: because of the injustice that is being done. Progressive egalitarian “social justice” schemes fail (in part) because they inflict injustice in the name of justice.

Hitting people with the Mises arguments about calculation problems and the dynamics of interventionism is important, but to that really does need to be added one’s sense of justice, and how these schemes are peverse not simply because they won’t produce what the activists want, but they are unjust in-and-of-themselves.

Also I’ll add something: don’t expect to win over everyone and certainly you won’t have the amount of time professors have. Sometimes the best thing to do is an incisive polite-but-puncturing comment, correctly time, that doesn’t attempt to rebut an entire lecture but will cause students – at least ones who want to think more – to realize that there is more to things than they are being presented with, and indeed what they are being presented with are caracatures and tendentiously mendacious distortions. Until you’re outside of class (whether talking to these very same fellow students at the student union or whether discussing things with random other people by some other means), you’re up against a machine too strong.

But the more knowlegable you are yourself across as wide a variety of subjects as possible and thus can speak intelligently and from a position of superior information, the easier it will be to plant these seeds of doubt. Which is about all you can do as a student in a class; plant seeds of doubt in the mind of fellow students, and show that the opposition to The Narrative is not the side that is misinformed or ignorant; rather, it is “The Cathedral” (the social-justice-progressive-education-media-statist-complex) that is a font of ignorant misinformation.

Read all their stuff, and all the stuff by the professors here and the scholars at the Mises Institute that you can, watch all the videos, follow as many footnotes as you can. Intellectually arm yourself.

Basically there is no shortcut: one has to be an autodidact and a polymath.

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I think one of the things JNJ is getting at is among the reasons “Americans save little and consume lots” are the policy distortions created by the things he’s talking about, and as illustrated in Roger Garrison’s power-point here: Credit expansion creates not only malinvestment, but by artificially lowering interest rates, dis-incentivizes savings and incentivizes a high-time preference and thus overconsumption (higher present consumption than there would naturally be under a truly free market).

It creates a tug-of-war that contributes to all the “structural deficits.”

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I recommended he add a “Resources” link on the page (either one) some time ago, too, but he mentioned the same problem; the layout already has a lot of links and there wasn’t an obvious good place to add it.

Which is too bad because there are probably even some I don’t know about (which was a secret reason why I recommended adding a page collecting links to them all in one spot :p).

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