Aggression

Poor Joan Baez. In her autobiography "Daybreak," an antagonist asks her, the pacifist, some tough "What would you do if?" questions: What would you do if someone were, say, attacking your grandmother? Say you're driving a truck. You're on a narrow road with a sheer cliff on your side. There's a little girl standing in the middle of the road. You're going too fast to stop. What would you do? After some verbal arm-wrestling, she eventually rebuts, "I'm really trying to say a couple of things. One is that no one knows what he'll do in a moment of crisis. And that hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers. I'm also hinting that you have made it impossible for me to come out of the situation without having killed one or more people."i Perhaps one should, similarly, pity oneself when reading academic literature. Authors of scholarly books are constantly pressuring us to advocate coercion. For example, Mancur Olson in "The Logic of Collective Action" claims that forced payments are "indispensable": The state is very important economically. Almost any government is economically beneficial to its citizens, in that the law and order it provides is a prerequisite of all civilized economic activity. But despite the force of patriotism, the appeal of the national ideology, the bond of common culture, and the indispensability of the system of law and order, no major state in modern history has been able to support itself through voluntary dues or contributions. Philanthropic contributions are not even a significant source of revenue for most countries. Taxes, compulsory payments by definition, are needed. (emphasis his)ii To sum it up: "Law and order" is indispensable. "Law and order" won't be provided if there is no coercion. Therefore, we must have coercion. Got it? You may have thought that if people needed something that they would pay for it but Mr. Olson insists that this is just not so. Common sense tells us one thing. The scholars tell us another. Someone is wrong. Resolving this issue is one of the tasks that this essay is attempting to do. Digression on Collective Action A "common, collective or public good" is defined by Mancur Olson as "any good such that, if any person Xi in a group X1, , Xi, , Xn consumes it, it cannot feasibly be withheld from the others in that group. In other words, those who do not purchase or pay for any of the public or collective good cannot be excluded or kept from sharing in the consumption of the good, as they can where noncollective goods are concerned."iii The people who do not pay but still benefit from the provision of the collective good are often called "free riders." Any individual member of a "typical large organization" can potentially become a "free rider." He "is in a position analogous to that of the firm in a perfectly competitive market, or the taxpayer in the state: his own efforts will not have a noticaeable effect on

the situation of his organization, and he can enjoy any improvement brought about by others whether or not he has worked in support of his organization."iv Organizations have peculiar characteristics. As Olson explained Any group or organization, large or small, works for some collective benefit that by its very nature will benefit all of the members of the group in question. Though all of the members of the group therefore have a common interest in obtaining this collective benefit, they have no common interest in paying the cost of providing that collective good. Each would prefer that others pay the entire cost, and ordinarily would get any benefit provided whether he had borne part of the cost or not If, in a reasonably small organization, a particular person stops paying for the collective good he enjoys, the costs will rise noticeably for each of the others in the group; accordingly, they may then refuse to continue making their contributions, and the collective good may be provided. However, the first person could realize that this might be the result of his refusal to pay anything for the collective good, and that he would be worse off when the collective good is not provided than when it was provided and he met part of the cost In a large group in which no single individual's contribution makes a perceptible difference to the group as a whole, or the burden or benefit of any single member of the group, it is certain that a collective good will not be provided unless there is coercion or some outside inducements that will lead the members of the large group to act in their common interest.v Because coercion is used to get people to participate in collective action (and not "free-ride"), this digression is necessary. Most people are aware of the commandments "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not kill," etc. In many economics books, getting something for free while minding your own business is treated as a sin or crime that merits retaliation: The "latent" group is distinguished by the fact that, if one member does or does not help provide the collective good, no other one member will be significantly affected and therefore none has any reason to react. Thus an individual in a "latent" group, by definition, cannot make a noticeable contribution to any group effort, and since no one in the group will react if he makes no contribution, he has no incentive to contribute Only a separate and "selective" incentive will stimulate a rational individual in a latent group to act in a group-oriented way. In such circumstances group action can be obtained only through an incentive that operates, not indiscriminately, like the collective good, upon the group as a whole, but rather selectively toward the individuals in the group. The incentive must be "selective" so that those who do not join the organization working for the group's interest, or in other ways contribute to the attainment of the group's interest, can be treated differently from those who do. These "selective incentives" can be either negative or positive, in that they can either coerce by punishing those who fail to bear an allocated share of the costs of the group action, or they can be positive inducements offered to those who act in the group interest. (latter emphasis added)vi Before proceeding to a discussion of collective or public goods, let's take an unconventional (and optional) detour and get acquainted with some non-fictional examples of punishment. First example: It was April and the ground was still too wet for plowing, so farmer Valentine Byler decided to haul rocks to fill a mudhole in his lane. He hitched his two bay mares to an old flatboat. Then he hitched the colt

with them to help get it broken in. A short time later two strangers approached. "This isn't going to be pleasant," said one of them. They took the reins. Byler was Amish and his religious beliefs forbade him to resist. The two men unhitched the team. "I couldn't watch," said Byler, "I went into the woods." The men led the horses away. The men were agents of the Internal Revenue Service. For reasons of religious conviction Byler had refused to pay his Social Security taxes and the horses were seized to satisfy the government claim. On May 1, 1961, the IRS sold the two mares and the colt at auction for $460. The IRS took $308.96 for back taxes and $133.15 for "expenses." Byler got back $37.89.vii Second example: Billy hitchhiked to Carmel on a twenty-day AWOL from Fort Gordon, Georgia I met Billy at a little outdoor restaurant on a warm, sunny day - the last day of his AWOL He looked no older than seventeen, about five-nine, with a grown-out crewcut and bad complexion He was cheerful, undiscouraged, and only half aware that he was about to go war against the entire United States Army I watched Billy's face as he talked, and thought of the letters he'd been writing to me over the past four months. They were teletyped on big yellow sheets of paper. The first one had simply announced that he's walked into the office of the head of command on base and said, "Christ wouldn't kill. I won't either." He had listened to the inspector general deliver a string of patronizing lectures on God and Country, and realizing that they made no sense, had saluted and walked out of the room "What's the best thing that could happen to you, Billy?" "What's the best thing that could happen to me? Well, I could be put in alternative service That'd be the best. Believe me, I'd prefer that." "To what?" "Hard labor." "What does hard labor mean, exactly?" "Means you break rocks and dump them in ditches and then take them out again and get beatings for it."viii Public Goods Nobel prize-winning economist James Buchanan explained public goods by telling a story. At first, two men, Tizio and Caio, are on an island in the tropics. On this island, the public good is mosquitorepelling. This good "is purely public or purely collective" because "the death of one mosquito benefits each man simultaneously, and is thus equally available to each man."ix Whether a good is private or public does not depend on whether it is supplied by the government or not. It depends, instead, on the good's physical characteristics. As Buchanan explains, With privately divisible goods the unit that is produced or supplied is dimensionally equivalent to the unit that is consumed by some ultimate buyer. A single unit of production implies the availability of a single unit for consumption, by some one person. And this person's ultimate act in consuming the unit removes all possibility of others' like consumption of the same unit. It is the absence of this one-to-one relationship that is the basis of the public-goods distinction. With a pure public good, a unit that is produced or supplied is, by definition, simultaneously available for the consumption of all members of the relevant group. Hence, a unit that is supplied is wholly different in dimension from a unit that is

consumed. The consumption of a unit by one person does not reduce or remove the possibility of consumption by another person. This may be put in terms of our simple illustration. A single unit of public-goods supply, mosquito repellent, amounts to two units of consumption, one for Tizio and one for Caio By the orthodox definition a pure public good or service is equally available to all members of the relevant community. A single unit of the good, as produced, provides a multiplicity of consumption units, all of which are somehow identical. Once produced, it will not be efficient to exclude any person from the enjoyment (positive or negative) of its availability [T]he principle of exclusion characteristic of goods produced in the market breaks down here. Nonexclusion applies in the extreme or polar sense. Additional consumers may be added at zero marginal cost. The definition of a pure public good is "highly restrictive Strictly speaking, no good or service fits the extreme or polar definition in any genuinely descriptive sense. In real-world fiscal systems, those goods and services that are financed publicly always exhibit less than such pure publicness. The standard examples such as national defense come reasonably close to descriptive purity, but even here careful consideration normally dictates some relaxation of the strict polar assumption."x Returning now to our island-dwellers: [L]et us add Sempronio to the Tizio-Caio illustration. Suppose that Sempronio desires to migrate to the island, and that he, like the others, will share equally in the benefits of any mosquito repelling activity. Tizio and Caio will not be willing to allow Sempronio to join them unless he contributes some share in the costs of this public good, either through direct production on his own account or indirectly through transfers to them of private goods. Tizio and Caio cannot exclude Sempronio from the benefits that their mosquito repelling provides. If he doesn't help provide the good, he gets a free ride. Tizio and Caio do not like this and therefore they give Sempronio an ultimatum: Help up us or leave. In this illustration, Sempronio agrees to help them. As the size of the group becomes larger, it becomes necessary to give more and more people the ultimatum: Pay for the public good or else. The reason for this is because it is in every individual's interest to let his neighbor(s) provide the good while he "secures the benefits without contributing toward the costs." Each individual finds himself in a potential free-rider position: "Even if an individual should enter into a cost-sharing agreement, he will have a strong incentive to break his own contract, to chisel on the agreed terms."xi Everyone has an incentive to get a free-ride. This creates a dilemma: "When everyone tries to be a free rider there are no rides for anyone."xii "Coercive arrangements, governmental in nature" are advanced as a way of solving this dilemma. The government eliminates "the alternative of remaining outside the agreement, or remaining a free rider." Coercion is necessary because "in the large-number case, the individual will not contribute voluntarily to the costs of public goods, at least not in an amount sufficiently large to generate optimal levels of provision."xiii As long ago as 1776 Adam Smith wrote about "certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number

of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society." According to Smith, "the sovereign has only three duties to attend to" and erecting and maintaining these "goods" was one of them.xiv More recently, in their classic textbook, Armen Alchian and William Allen claimed that "[g]overnments do some things that the market exchange of private-property rights cannot do adequately." For example, "[t]he use of roads under a market system would require a forbiddingly complex system of planning, collection, and enforcement devices." It is argued that some will benefit if the government provides certain goods and services by levying general taxes. According to Alchian and Allen, "[s]ome government actions are designed to enable some people to pay for services they could not otherwise obtain so cheaply through private contractual arrangements - for example, nearby public parks, better roads, sewers, police protection, sanitation, and protection from disease, insect pests, and fire."xv Addressing the argument that "some essential services simply cannot be supplied by the private sphere, and that therefore government supply of these services is necessary", Murray Rothbard countered that "every single one of the services supplied by government has been, in the past, successfully furnished by private enterprise."xvi To the question "Are there some tasks that must be done, but that, by their nature, cannot conceivably be done privately and must therefore continue to be done by government?" David Friedman answered, "I believe not." He added, "I believe that, although there are certain important tasks which for special reasons are difficult to do under institutions of total private property, these difficulties are in principle, and may be in practice, soluble." However, he conceded that "there might be circumstances in which voluntary institutions could not defend themselves against a foreign state." Friedman was humble. He acknowledged that "[h]uman beings and human societies are far too complicated for us to have confidence in a priori predictions about how institutions that have never been tried would work."xvii What would be necessary then is an "experiment" - an "experiment" in the direction of liberty. "Why," Rothbard asked, "must political experiments always be in the direction of more government? Why not give the free market a county or even a state or two, and see what it can accomplish?"xviii Sometimes you have to cross the line to find out where it is.

Joan Baez, Daybreak (The Dial Press, 1968), 131 - 134 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press, 1971), 13 iii Ibid, 14 & 15 iv Ibid, 16 v Ibid, 21, 43 & 44 vi Ibid, 50 & 51 vii The Incredible Bread Machine (World Research, Inc., 1974), 1 & 2 viii Baez, Daybreak, 84 - 89 ix James Buchanan, The Demand and Supply of Public Goods (Liberty Fund, 1999), 12 x Ibid, 32, 33, 48 & 49 xi Ibid, 80 & 83 xii Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan (Oxford University Press, 1987), 40 xiii Buchanan, The Demand and Supply of Public Goods, 84
ii

xiv xv

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Bantam Classic, 2003), 874 Armen Alchian & William R. Allen, Exchange and Production: Competition, Coordination, & Control Third Edition (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1983), 392, 393 & 397 xvi Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Controversies (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), 426 xvii David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (Arlington House, 1978) 24, 25 & 200 xviii Rothbard, Economic Controversies, 426