An excellent point from Richard Chappell at Philosophy, et cetera (2007-09-02):

One often hears that the ideal government would be a “benevolent dictatorship” – the wise ruler would make the right decision every time, and implement it with a minimum of fuss. But if we are going to engage in such wishful thinking, why stop at one perfect person? Why not have an ideal democracy, where the populace would make the right decision every time, and implement it with a minimum of fuss? How is the perfect autocrat any more ideal than the perfectly united demos? Or how about a perfect anarchy, where everyone simply does what they ought, without need for legal coercion? So long as we’re guaranteed our perfect outcomes in any case, why favour the most repulsive (dictatorial) process? (Is it because the wish is really to be the dictator oneself?)

— Richard Chappell, Philosophy, et cetera (2007-09-02): Ideal Rulers

Today is the first Monday of September, which in the United States and Canada (and only in the United States and Canada) is recognized as Labor Day. In this secessionist republic of one, Labor Relations Day is marked as a day of mourning. It is a bogus holiday, celebrated by the establishmentarian union bosses and originally fabricated by the federal government in 1894. The declaration was signed into law by President Grover Cleveland, as an election-year sop to the working class, six days after he had deployed the Army and the U.S. Marshals to break the Pullman Strike. It is celebrated today at the behest of state and federal governments, and the business unionists at the AF of L and Change to Win (sic), who, after all, have always been happy to suck up to State power in the name of a juicy private-public partnership. The real labor holiday in the United States is, of course, International Worker’s Day, celebrated each year on May Day, a wildcat holiday declared by labor radicals and celebrated not by edicts handed down from on high but by common consent of workers who just refused to show up for work on their holiday.

As much as I enjoy celebrating labor radicalism, today is not the day for it; today belongs to the establishmentarian unionists and the government labor bureaucracy and the bosses who use union patronage as a means of control over workers. They made it and they can have it. In honor of this Gilded Age bait-and-switch, I offer the following thought, reprinted in Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book, and now available online at the Fair Use Repository:

The recent strike at Carmaux, France, was followed by an agitation for compulsory arbitration of disputes between capital and labor. There was a lively fight over it in the French Chamber, which fortunately had the good sense to vote the measure down. Of all the demands made upon government in the interest of labor this is perhaps the most foolish. I wonder if it has ever occurred to the laborers who make it that to grant their desire would be to deny that cherished right to strike upon which they have insisted so strenuously and for so many years. Suppose, for instance, a body of operatives decide to strike in defence of an interest which they deem vital and to maintain which they are prepared and determined to struggle to the end. Immediately comes along the board of arbitration, which compels strikers and employers to present their case and then renders a decision. Suppose the decision is adverse to the strikers. They are bound to accept it, the arbitration being compulsory, or suffer the penalty,—for there is no law without a penalty. What then has become of their right to strike? It has been destroyed. They can ask for what they want; a higher power immediately decides whether they can have it; and from this decision there is no appeal. Labor thus would be prohibited by law from struggling for its rights. And yet labor is so short-sighted that it asks for this very prohibition!

— Benjamin R. Tucker, Liberty, November 19, 1892.

Elsewhere, at Hit and Run, BTS wonders:

I never quite understood why most mainline libertarians despise unions so. Don’t workers have as much a right to free association as the next guy?

In reply, Franklin Harris informs us us that:

In theory, yes, but I really doubt unions in anything like their current form could exist without the legal protections given them by the government — laws that force businesses to recognize and deal with unions once they have organized.

Kevin Carson has an excellent reply, which you should read in its entirety. For myself, I’d just like to say that I also doubt unions in anything like their current form could exist without the legal protections given them by the government. That’s one of the chief reasons labor unionists should want those legal protections abolished. Without that legal patronage, it’s much more likely that unions would exist in something more like the form they existed in for the sixty-odd years that they existed from the beginnings of the American labor movement until the establishment of government-regulated unionism in 1935. Which would be quite a step forward, not backward, for organized labor.

Are you cold, forelorn, and hungry?
Are there lots of things you lack?
Is your life made up of misery?
Then dump the bosses off your back!

–John Brill (1916)

The Letters in this month’s Liberty lead off with Gerald P. Trygstad responding to an article by Gary Jason. Jason defended a flat income tax instead of the current progressive income tax. Trygstad responded by suggesting a so-called Fair Tax, i.e., eliminating income taxes entirely and replacing them with a flat federal sales tax. (It’s usually estimated to be somewhere around 20–30%, but Trygstad doesn’t get into the details.) Here’s one of the arguments that Trygstad uses to defend his proposal (emphasis mine):

A national sales tax on corporate products could tax all income (including a huge amount of underground income) at the point of sale and do so in an impersonal and equitable manner.

Jason replied that Trygstad’s suggestion was appealing, but that caution was needed because the economic effects of flat (or flatter) income taxes were better known than the economic effects of imposing high sales taxes in place of income taxes. Along the way he has this to say (emphasis mine):

His suggestion that the best solution is to move to a fair tax, i.e., to replace the current income tax with some kind of national sales tax, is something I am sympathetic to, for the very reason he points to: we need to be increasing, not decreasing, the number of taxpayers.

It’s sometimes said that one man’s reductio is another man’s reason. Maybe so. But one might be a bit surprised to see this exchange went on in the pages of a professedly libertarian publication. The fact that a tax scheme would increase the government’s ability to pry money out of off-the-books income streams, and the fact that it would result in having more taxpayers rather than fewer, seems obviously to be a reason against adopting that scheme, not for it.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, when the federal government has money in its hands it uses that money for programs that are, on the whole, wasteful, stupid, and often insidious or actively destructive. Government revenue pays for pork-barrel projects, inane subsidies, sclerotic bureaucracies, meddlesome regulation, finding harmless drug users and locking them in cages, finding harmless immigrants and exiling them from the country, domestic surveillance, extraordinary rendition, torture, and blood-soaked imperial wars and occupations. Expanding the government’s ability to get that money and diminishing people’s ability to hide their money from the government should not be a libertarian policy goal. And neither should making sure that everybody gets robbed at about the same rate–you know, just to be fair.

One of the things I’ve been working on while I’ve been away from blogging is transcribing public domain texts for the Fair Use Repository. I have a few different projects on tap there; right now, what’s worth mentioning are the following two online editions:

1. Benjamin R. Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One is a classic of individualist anarchism. It’s also a classic of miscellaneous writing; the title (as well as the subtitle, A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism) refers to the fact that it’s composed of fragments from Tucker’s writing, mainly from Liberty. Bloggers may, thus, feel an odd sense of familiarity in the reading; but for its being arranged topically instead of in reverse chronological order, the way in which Instead of a Book reads — heavily based on dialog and critical engagement, focused on short points, sometimes organizing itself into extended discussion threads between Tucker and other writers — will seem almost indistinguishable from the way that blogs are written today. In any case, Fair Use now has the introductory essays and the entirety of Part I (on The Individual, Society, and the State) available online, including Tucker’s masterful essay on State Socialism and Anarchism, an extended discussion with John Beverly Robinson over non-resistance (i.e., the permissibility of defensive violence) (1, 2, 3, 4), and an excellent long essay by Clara Dixon Davidson on Relations Between Parents and Children. Now it’s on to Part II, on Money and Interest. Stay tuned!

2. Readers may remember that I mentioned quite a while ago that I’d started on a transcription of Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics (1903). Well, after working on it off and on (mostly off) for the last year and a half, the online edition now includes the entirety Part I of Russell’s book (on The Indefinables of Mathematics, which, along with the two appendices, contains most of the work’s sustained discussion of philosophical logic). Notably, it concludes with Russell’s first sustained discussion of Russell’s paradox. From here it’s on to Part II, on the theory of Number.

There’s more to come soon, both for these works and in some other projects I’ve got coming down the pipeline. Read, cite, and enjoy!

Posting should be picking up again soon. It’s been slow because there has been a lot going on offline: moving back from my summer job in upstate New York to my old home in Michigan, and then moving from my old home in Michigan to my new home in Las Vegas, where my wife L. is starting a graduate program and my brother-in-law G. is looking for post-college work. Besides driving more than I would like and setting up housekeeping, I’ve also been working over an essay on vegetarianism and the Argument from Marginal Cases to present at this year’s Alabama Philosophical Society — soon to be online, hopefully — and impatiently waiting on my home Internet connection to get set up. (It’ll be another week. This is being posted from the public library near my house.)

Anyway, the good news is that I have a paper to talk about, some projects to announce, and the usual grousing to do. So, watch this space. There should be more coming soon.