In Response to Mr. Root
Daniel Root published his second article in a series of four Tuesday. I have decided to provide some ideological diversity and attempt to show the dangers of placing faith in the power of government instead of ourselves. To begin with, I must say that advocating for government regulation necessarily means being in support of denying certain decisions to the citizenry so that the government may then make those decisions on their behalf. I hope to explain why freedom is more valuable than regulation.
Root seems to misuse the term “laissez-faire capitalism.” In a capitalist system, all exchanges are mutually beneficial, excluding exchanges such as theft, coercion and other violent crimes. He claims that laissez-faire capitalism is not possible because it requires all citizens to be informed on the products they are purchasing at all times. This is a valid argument when critiquing the heavily flawed “perfectly competitive model,” but it does not hold its merit against the concepts of rational human action and mutually beneficial exchanges championed by the Austrian School of Economics.
I had written an entire article dedicated to the subject, but for the sake of brevity, I will shorten my praxeological explanation. Because it is impossible to know why any person commits an act or why any person may want something, it must also be impossible for an observer to accurately prescribe to said person what is or ought to be valued by them. Essentially, you are the only person who can decide what is valuable to you. Therefore, if this holds true for all persons, the only people who can decide if an exchange is mutually beneficial are the people directly involved in the exchange at the time of its occurrence. Additionally, Ludwig von Mises’ theory of human action defines action as purposeful behavior and also defines a rational action as that which is taken in the earnest belief that it will obtain the desired results even if it does not. These two theories facilitate the concept of rational people freely engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges. This means people, free from coercion, will behave in ways which they believe will maximize their value/utility and will most likely seek out information to become more effective at increasing their value in each exchange, such as learning “where their steak was processed,” to put one of Root’s concerns to rest.
I ask, then, if only you can know what is valuable to you, what right does government have to artificially inflate the prices of foreign goods so as to prevent you from purchasing them, or to dictate the value of your labor or to take a percentage of every dollar you earn and spend it for you?
Furthermore, the entire argument of needing government to protect property rights is self-contradictory. This point is made abundantly clear in “Power and Market” by Murray N. Rothbard. Government must take your property from you in order to fund itself. If a de jure monopoly on coercive property confiscation is the best way to protect property rights, private ownership might as well be forfeited altogether. Have we forgotten so soon that it was government regulation which majorly violated self-ownership rights for so many years by prohibiting gay marriage?
As for the tragedy of the commons described by Root, the shepherds should have realized, unless they were incompetent, that the situation wasn’t sustainable. Splitting up the land evenly (or however they wanted) and maintaining their newly acquired property would have solved the problem by making them each personally responsible for a piece of the once-communal property. If anything, the tragedy of the commons is a condemnation of communism, seeing as private ownership of the land could have made the situation far more sustainable.
Lastly, to state that the government answers to the people is completely incorrect. Voting someone into office does not force him or her to pass only laws which the majority of the citizenry finds favorable. Furthermore, we can’t “fire” or stop using the government if we disapprove of its performance. We are forced to continue paying for its “services” under threat of imprisonment. The market caters to consumers. Government does not.
