Back from the beach with a fresh DJ tomorrow. Meanwhile, please enjoy this 2007 meditation on the use of force.
RALEIGH – The details of public-policy debate are complicated. Thank goodness – how could one justify the existence of a public-policy think tank if policy details were easy to find and analyze?
But the fundamental question in public policy is pretty simple. When is force justified?
We’re used to hearing the phrase “justify the use of force” in the context of, say, the war in Iraq or the conduct of a local police department. But these are merely explicit applications of the idea, not the only ones. At its root, all government action is forceful. Governments do not request, they demand. Governments do not beg, they tax.
To the question of when force is justified, only an anarchist says “never.” I have had a few friends over the years who were anarchists, though usually of the anarcho-capitalist rather than anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-collectivist varieties, and I have often found them to be intelligent, well-meaning people. But their ideology bears no relationship to reality. It has nothing to do with how actual human beings have always (and will always) live in the real world. It tells us nothing about how governments came to exist among early human beings, and thus which services citizens came to expect from a government they could tolerate or even actively welcome.
To advocate limited government, as I do, is neither to advocate anarchism nor to denigrate the critical role of effective government in building and sustaining a healthy and productive society. However, and this is important, government and society are not synonymous terms. Societies are networks of social institutions ranging from families and faith communities to businesses, markets, charities, clubs, legal norms, communications media, and governmental agencies. We don’t elect presidents, governors, and lawmakers to run our society. We elect them to lead governments – to decide when and how to use coercion to accomplish a necessary task, and then to employ people to carry such policies out.
So when is force justified? Keeping things simple, it is justifiable for governments to initiate the use of force to protect individual rights and to ensure the production of true public goods that cannot efficiently be produced through voluntary transaction. I’ve discussed both issues at some length in previous Daily Journal columns, which I commend to your attention. What I want to emphasize today is that it is not justifiable for governments to initiate the use of force because one group would like to have the resources of another but refuses to trade for those resources.
Most of the time, when an individual or interest group comes to Raleigh or to their local governments lobbying for a new spending program, they are trying to use government to pick someone else’s pocket. Obviously, they don’t express it in such stark terms. But in all but a few cases, that’s what they want. They want someone else to pay the bill for their medical care, their home, their food, their children, their elderly parents, their preferred Saturday night entertainment, or some other good or service they find valuable. Some of these would-be pickpockets earn modest incomes and are committing the sin of envy. Many others, however, are actually pretty well off. They work for institutions, public or private, that derive income from coerced taxpayers rather than willing, paying customers and patrons. Or they work for politically connected corporations and nonprofits that gain revenue when government grows, contracts for services, or doles out largesse marked with “economic development” in big red letters.
Most wouldn’t dream of stopping someone in the street, pulling a gun, and demanding money. But by using governmental power to take resources from those who possess them justly, through voluntary transaction, these spending lobbies are merely using a middleman. The act is still larcenous. And it is predicated on the ability to use force.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.