Chapter 2—Fundamentals of Intervention
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FUNDAMENTALS OF
INTERVENTION
1.
Types of Intervention
We
have so far contemplated a free society and a free market,
where any needed defense against violent invasion of person and
property is supplied, not by the State, but by freely competitive,
marketable defense agencies. Our major task in this volume is to
analyze the effects of various types of violent intervention in society
and, especially, in the market. Most of our examples will deal with the
State, since the State is uniquely the agency engaged in regularized
violence on a large scale. However, our analysis applies to the extent
that any individual or group commits violent invasion. Whether the
invasion is “legal” or not does not concern us,
since we are engaged in praxeological, not legal, analysis.
One of the most lucid analyses of the distinction between State and
market was set forth by Franz Oppenheimer. He pointed out that there
are fundamentally two ways of satisfying a person’s wants:
(1) by production and voluntary exchange with others on the market and
(2) by violent expropriation of the wealth of others.
The first method
Oppenheimer termed “the economic means” for the
satisfaction of wants; the second method, “the political
means.” The State is trenchantly defined as the
“organization of the political means.”
A generic term is needed to designate an individual or group that
commits invasive violence in society. We may call intervener,
or invader, one who intervenes violently in free
social or market relations. The term applies to any individual or group
that initiates violent intervention in the free actions of persons and
property owners.
What
types of intervention can the invader commit? Broadly, we may
distinguish three categories. In the first place, the intervener may
command an individual subject to do or not to do certain things when
these actions directly involve the individual’s person or
property alone. In short, he restricts the
subject’s use of his property when exchange is not involved.
This may be called an autistic intervention, for
any specific command directly involves only the subject himself.
Secondly, the intervener may enforce a coerced exchange
between the individual subject and himself, or a coerced
“gift” to himself from the subject. Thirdly, the
invader may either compel or prohibit an exchange between a pair
of subjects. The former may be called a binary intervention,
since a hegemonic relation is established between two people (the
intervener and the subject); the latter may be called a triangular
intervention, since a hegemonic relation is created between
the invader and a pair of exchangers or would-be
exchangers. The market, complex though it may be, consists of a series
of exchanges between pairs of individuals. However extensive the
interventions, then, they may be resolved into unit impacts on either
individual subjects or pairs of individual subjects.
All these types of intervention, of course, are subdivisions of the hegemonic
relation—the relation of command and obedience—as
contrasted with the contractual relation of voluntary mutual benefit.
Autistic intervention occurs when the invader coerces a subject without
receiving any good or service in return. Widely disparate types of
autistic intervention are: homicide, assault, and compulsory
enforcement or prohibition of any salute, speech, or religious
observance. Even if the intervener is the State, which issues the edict
to all individuals in the society, the edict is still in
itself an autistic intervention, since the lines of force, so
to speak, radiate from the State to each individual alone. Binary
intervention occurs when the invader forces the subject to make an
exchange or a unilateral “gift” of some good or
service to the invader. Highway robbery and taxes are examples of
binary intervention, as are conscription and compulsory jury service.
Whether the binary hegemonic relation is a coerced
“gift” or a coerced exchange does not really matter
a great deal. The only difference is in the type of coercion involved.
Slavery, of course, is usually a coerced exchange,
since the slaveowner must supply his slaves with subsistence.
Curiously enough, writers on political economy have recognized only the
third category as intervention.
It is understandable that
preoccupation with catallactic problems has led economists to overlook
the broader praxeological category of actions that lie outside the
monetary exchange nexus. Nevertheless, they are part of the subject
matter of praxeology—and should be subjected to analysis.
There is far less excuse for economists to neglect the binary
category of intervention. Yet many economists who profess to be
champions of the “free market” and opponents of
interference with it have a peculiarly narrow view of freedom and
intervention. Acts of binary intervention, such as conscription and the
imposition of income taxes, are not considered intervention at all nor
as interferences with the free market. Only instances of triangular
intervention, such as price control, are conceded to be intervention.
Curious schemata are developed in which the market is considered
absolutely “free” and unhampered despite a regular
system of imposed taxation. Yet taxes (and conscripts) are paid in
money and thus enter the catallactic, as well as the wider
praxeological, nexus.
In tracing the effects of intervention, one must take care to analyze
all its consequences, direct and indirect. It is impossible in the
space of this volume to trace all the effects of every one of the
almost infinite number of possible varieties of intervention, but
sufficient analysis can be made of the important categories of
intervention and the consequences of each. Thus, it must be remembered
that acts of binary intervention have definite triangular
repercussions: an income tax will shift the pattern of exchanges
between subjects from what it otherwise would have been. Furthermore,
all the consequences of an act must be considered; it is not sufficient
to engage in a “partial-equilibrium” analysis of
taxation, for example, and to consider a tax completely apart from the
fact that the State subsequently spends the tax money.
2.
Direct Effects of Intervention on Utility
A.
Intervention and Conflict
The first step in analyzing intervention is to contrast the direct
effect on the utilities of the participants, with the effect of a free
society. When people are free to act, they will always act in a way
that they believe will maximize their utility, i.e., will raise them to
the highest possible position on their value scale. Their utility ex
ante will be maximized, provided we take care to interpret
“utility” in an ordinal rather than a cardinal
manner. Any action, any exchange that takes place on the free market or
more broadly in the free society, occurs because of the expected
benefit to each party concerned. If we allow ourselves to use the term
“society” to depict the pattern of all
individual exchanges, then we may say that the free market
“maximizes” social utility, since everyone gains in
utility. We must be careful, however, not to hypostatize
“society” into a real entity that means something
else than an array of all individuals.
Coercive intervention, on the other hand, signifies per se
that the individual or individuals coerced would not have done what
they are now doing were it not for the intervention. The individual who
is coerced into saying or not saying something or into making or not
making an exchange with the intervener or with someone else is having
his actions changed by a threat of violence. The coerced individual
loses in utility as a result of the intervention, for his action has
been changed by its impact. Any intervention, whether it be autistic,
binary, or triangular, causes the subjects to lose in utility. In
autistic and binary intervention, each individual loses in utility; in
triangular intervention, at least one, and sometimes both, of the pair
of would-be exchangers lose in utility.
Who, in contrast, gains in utility ex ante?
Clearly, the intervener; otherwise he would not have intervened. Either
he gains in exchangeable goods at the expense of his subject, as in
binary intervention, or, as in autistic and triangular intervention, he
gains in a sense of well-being from enforcing regulations upon others.
All instances of intervention, then, in contrast to the free market,
are cases in which one set of men gains at the expense
of other men. In binary intervention, the gains and losses are
“tangible” in the form of exchangeable goods and
services; in other types of intervention, the gains are nonexchangeable
satisfactions, and the loss consists in being coerced into less
satisfying types of activity (if not positively painful ones).
Before the development of economic science, people thought of exchange
and the market as always benefiting one party at the expense of the
other. This was the root of the mercantilist view of the market.
Economics has shown that this is a fallacy, for on the market both
parties to any exchange benefit. On the market, therefore, there can be
no such thing as exploitation. But the thesis of a
conflict of interest is true whenever the State or
any other agency intervenes on the market. For then the intervener
gains only at the expense of subjects who lose in utility. On the
market all is harmony. But as soon as intervention appears and is
established, conflict is created, for each may participate in a
scramble to be a net gainer rather than a net loser—to be
part of the invading team, instead of one of the victims.
It has become fashionable to assert that
“Conservatives” like John C. Calhoun
“anticipated” the Marxian doctrine of class
exploitation. But the Marxian doctrine holds, erroneously, that there
are “classes” on the free market whose interests
clash and conflict. Calhoun’s insight was almost the reverse.
Calhoun saw that it was the intervention of the State that in
itself created the “classes” and the
conflict.
He particularly perceived
this in the case of the binary intervention of taxes.
For he saw that the proceeds of taxes are used and spent, and that some
people in the community must be net payers of tax funds, while the
others are net recipients. Calhoun defined the latter as the
“ruling class” of the exploiters, and the former as
the “ruled” or exploited, and the distinction is
quite a cogent one. Calhoun set forth his analysis brilliantly:
Few,
comparatively, as they are, the agents and employees of the government
constitute that portion of the community who are the exclusive
recipients of the proceeds of the taxes. Whatever amount is taken from
the community in the form of taxes, if not lost, goes to them in the
shape of expenditures or disbursements. The two—disbursement
and taxation—constitute the fiscal action of the government.
They are correlatives. What the one takes from the community under the
name of taxes is transferred to the portion of the community who are
the recipients under that of disbursements. But as the recipients
constitute only a portion of the community, it follows, taking the two
parts of the fiscal process together, that its action must be unequal
between the payers of the taxes and the recipients of their proceeds.
Nor can it be otherwise; unless what is collected from each individual
in the shape of taxes shall be returned to him in that of
disbursements, which would make the process nugatory and absurd. . . .
Such
being the case, it must necessarily follow that some one portion of the
community must pay in taxes more than it receives back in
disbursements, while another receives in disbursements more than it
pays in taxes. It is, then, manifest, taking the whole process
together, that taxes must be, in effect, bounties to that portion of
the community which receives more in disbursements than it pays in
taxes, while to the other which pays in taxes more than it receives in
disbursements they are taxes in reality—burdens instead of
bounties. This consequence is unavoidable. It results from the nature
of the process, be the taxes ever so equally laid. . . .
The
necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government
is to divide the community into two great classes: one consisting of
those who, in reality, pay the taxes and, of course, bear exclusively
the burden of supporting the government; and the other, of those who
are the recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who
are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to
divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.
But
the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in
reference to the fiscal action of the government and the entire course
of policy therewith connected. For the greater the taxes and
disbursements, the greater the gain of the one and the loss of the
other, and vice versa. . . .
“Ruling” and “ruled” apply also
to the forms of government intervention, but Calhoun was quite right in
focusing on taxes and fiscal policy as the keystone, for it is taxes
that supply the resources and payment for the State in performing its
myriad other acts of intervention.
All State intervention rests on the binary intervention of taxes at its
base; even if the State intervened nowhere else, its taxation would
remain. Since the term “social” can be applied only
to every single individual concerned, it is clear that, while the free
market maximizes social utility, no act of the State can ever increase
social utility. Indeed, the picture of the free market is necessarily
one of harmony and mutual benefit; the picture of State intervention is
one of caste conflict, coercion, and exploitation.
B.
Democracy and the Voluntary
It might be objected that all these forms of intervention are really
not coercive but “voluntary,” for in a democracy
they are supported by the majority of the people. But this support is
usually passive, resigned, and apathetic, rather than
eager—whether the State is a democracy or not.
In a democracy, the nonvoters can hardly be said to support the rulers,
and neither can the voters for the losing side. But even those who
voted for the winners may well have voted merely for the
“lesser of the two evils.” The interesting question
is: Why do they have to vote for any evil at all?
Such terms are never used by people when they act freely for
themselves, or when they purchase goods on the free market. No one
thinks of his new suit or refrigerator as an
“evil”—lesser or greater. In such cases,
people think of themselves as buying positive
“goods,” not as resignedly supporting a lesser bad.
The point is that the public never has the opportunity of voting on the
State system itself; they are caught up in a system in which coercion
over them is inevitable.
Be that as it may, as we have said, all States are
supported by a majority—whether a voting democracy or not;
otherwise, they could not long continue to wield force against the
determined resistance of the majority. However, the support may simply
reflect apathy—perhaps from the resigned belief that the
State is a permanent if unwelcome fixture of nature. Witness the motto:
“Nothing is as permanent as death and taxes.”
Setting all these matters aside, however, and even granting that a
State might be enthusiastically supported by a majority, we still do
not establish its voluntary nature. For the majority is not society, is
not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.
Since States exist, and they are accepted for generations and
centuries, we must conclude that a majority are at least passive
supporters of all States—for no minority can for long rule an
actively hostile majority. In a certain sense, therefore, all
tyranny is majority tyranny, regardless of the formalities of the
government structure.
But this does not change
our analytic conclusion of conflict and coercion as a corollary of the
State. The conflict and coercion exist no matter how many people coerce
how many others.
C.
Utility and Resistance to Invasion
To our comparative “welfare-economic” analysis of
the free market and the State, it might be objected that when defense
agencies restrain an invader from attacking someone’s
property, they are benefiting the property owner at the expense of a loss
of utility by the would-be invader. Since defense agencies
enforce rights on the free market, does not the free market also
involve a gain by some at the expense of the utility of others (even if
these others are invaders)?
In answer, we may state first that the free market is a society in
which all exchange voluntarily. It may most easily be conceived as a
situation in which no one aggresses against person or property. In that
case, it is obvious that the utility of all is maximized on the free
market. Defense agencies become necessary only as a defense against
invasions of that market. It is the invader, not
the existence of the defense agency, that inflicts losses on his
fellowmen. A defense agency existing without an invader would simply be
a voluntarily established insurance against attack. The existence of a
defense agency does not violate the principle of
maximum utility, and it still reflects mutual benefit to all concerned.
Conflict enters only with the invader. The invader, let us say, is in
the process of committing an aggressive act against Smith, thereby
injuring Smith for his gain. The defense agency, rushing to the aid of
Smith, of course, injures the invader’s utility; but it does
so only to counteract the injury to Smith. It does help to maximize the
utility of the noncriminals. The principle of
conflict and loss of utility was introduced, not by
the existence of the defense agency, but by the existence of the
invader. It is still true, therefore, that utility is maximized for all
on the free market; whereas to the extent that there is invasive
interference in society, it is infected with conflict and exploitation
of man by man.
D.
The Argument from Envy
Another objection holds that the free market does not really increase
the utility of all individuals, because some may be so smitten with
envy at the success of others that they really lose in utility as a
result. We cannot, however, deal with hypothetical utilities divorced
from concrete action. We may, as praxeologists,
deal only with utilities that we can deduce from the concrete behavior
of human beings.
A person’s
“envy,” unembodied in action, becomes pure
moonshine from the praxeological point of view. All that we know is
that he has participated in the free market and to that extent benefits
by it. How he feels about the exchanges made by others
cannot be demonstrated to us unless he commits an invasive act. Even if
he publishes a pamphlet denouncing these exchanges, we have no ironclad
proof that this is not a joke or a deliberate lie.
E.
Utility Ex Post
We have thus seen that individuals maximize their utility ex
ante on the free market and that the direct result of an
invasion is that the invader’s utility gains at the expense
of a loss in utility by his victim. But what about utilities ex
post? People may expect to benefit when
they make a decision, but do they actually benefit from its results?
The remainder of this volume will largely consist of analysis of what
we may call the “indirect” consequences of the
market or of intervention, supplementing the above direct analysis. It
will deal with chains of consequences that can be grasped only by study
and are not immediately visible to the naked eye.
Error can always occur in the path from ante to post,
but the free market is so constructed that this error is reduced to a
minimum. In the first place, there is a fast-working, easily
understandable test that tells the entrepreneur, as well as the
income-receiver, whether he is succeeding or failing at the task of
satisfying the desires of the consumer. For the entrepreneur, who
carries the main burden of adjustment to uncertain consumer desires,
the test is swift and sure—profits or losses. Large profits
are a signal that he has been on the right track; losses, that he has
been on a wrong one. Profits and losses thus spur rapid adjustments to
consumer demands; at the same time, they perform the function of
getting money out of the hands of the bad entrepreneurs and into the
hands of the good ones. The fact that good entrepreneurs prosper and
add to their capital, and poor ones are driven out, insures an ever
smoother market adjustment to changes in conditions. Similarly, to a
lesser extent, land and labor factors move in accordance with the
desire of their owners for higher incomes, and more value-productive
factors are rewarded accordingly.
Consumers also take entrepreneurial risks on the market. Many critics
of the market, while willing to concede the expertise
of the capitalist-entrepreneurs, bewail the prevailing ignorance of
consumers, which prevents them from gaining the utility ex
post that they expected to have ex ante.
Typically, Wesley C. Mitchell entitled one of his famous essays:
“The Backward Art of Spending Money.” Professor
Ludwig von Mises has keenly pointed out the paradoxical position of so
many “progressives” who insist that consumers are
too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the
same time touting the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote
for politicians whom they do not know and for policies that they hardly
understand.
In fact, the truth is precisely the reverse of the popular ideology.
Consumers are not omniscient, but they do have direct tests by which to
acquire their knowledge. They buy a certain brand of breakfast food and
they don’t like it; so they don’t buy it again.
They buy a certain type of automobile and they do like its performance;
so they buy another one. In both cases, they tell their friends of this
newly won knowledge. Other consumers patronize consumers’
research organizations, which can warn or advise them in advance. But,
in all cases, the consumers have the direct test of results to guide
them. And the firm that satisfies the consumers expands and prospers,
while the firm that fails to satisfy them goes out of business.
On the other hand, voting for politicians and public policies is a
completely different matter. Here there are no direct tests of success
or failure whatever, neither profits and losses nor enjoyable or
unsatisfying consumption. In order to grasp consequences, especially
the indirect consequences of governmental decisions, it is necessary to
comprehend a complex chain of praxeological reasoning, such as will be
developed in this volume. Very few voters have the ability or the
interest to follow such reasoning, particularly, as Schumpeter points
out, in political situations. For in political situations, the minute
influence that any one person has on the results, as well as the
seeming remoteness of the actions, induces people to lose interest in
political problems or argumentation.
Lacking the direct test of
success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians
whose measures have the best chance of success, but to those with the
ability to “sell” their propaganda. Without
grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be
able to discover the error that the ruler makes. Thus, suppose that the
government inflates the money supply, thereby causing an inevitable
rise in prices. The government can blame the price rise on wicked
speculators or alien black marketeers, and, unless the public knows
economics, it will not be able to see the fallacies in the
ruler’s arguments.
It is ironic that those writers who complain of the wiles and lures of
advertising do not direct their criticism at the advertising of
political campaigns, where their charges would be relevant. As
Schumpeter states:
The
picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run
prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette. There is no
equally effective safeguard in the case of political decisions. Many
decisions of fateful importance are of a nature that makes it
impossible for the public to experiment with them at its leisure and at
moderate cost. Even if that is possible, however, judgment is as a rule
not so easy to arrive at as it is in the case of the cigarette, because
effects are less easy to interpret.
It might be objected that, while the average voter may not be competent
to decide on policies that require for his decision chains of
praxeological reasoning, he is competent to pick
the experts—the politicians and bureaucrats—who
will decide on the issues, just as the individual may select his own
private expert adviser in any one of numerous fields. But the point is
precisely that in government the individual does not have the direct,
personal test of success or failure for his hired expert that he does
on the market. On the market, individuals tend to patronize those
experts whose advice proves most successful. Good doctors or lawyers
reap rewards on the free market, while the poor ones fail; the
privately hired expert tends to flourish in proportion to his
demonstrated ability. In government, on the other hand, there is no
concrete test of the expert’s success. In the absence of such
a test, there is no way by which the voter can gauge the true expertise
of the man he must vote for. This difficulty is aggravated in
modern-style elections, where the candidates agree on all the
fundamental issues. For issues, after all, are
susceptible to reasoning; the voter can, if he so
wishes and he has the ability, learn about and decide on the issues.
But what can any voter, even the most intelligent, know about the true expertise
or competence of individual candidates, especially when elections are
shorn of virtually all important issues? The voter can then fall back
only on the purely external, packaged
“personalities” or images of the candidates. The
result is that voting purely on candidates makes the result even less
rational than mass voting on the issues themselves.
Furthermore, the government itself contains inherent mechanisms that
lead to poor choices of experts and officials. For one thing, the
politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from
service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy
on the populace. These officials, therefore, wholly lack the pecuniary
incentive to care about serving the public properly
and competently. And, what is more, the vital criterion of
“fitness” is very different in the government and
on the market. In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve
the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at
wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals
to the voting public.
Another critical divergence between market action and democratic voting
is this: the voter has, for example, only a 1/50
millionth power to choose among his would-be rulers, who in turn will
make vital decisions affecting him, unchecked and unhampered until the
next election. In the market, on the other hand, the individual has the
absolute sovereign power to make the decisions concerning his person
and property, not merely a distant, 1/50
millionth power. On the market the individual is continually
demonstrating his choice of buying or not buying, selling or not
selling, in the course of making absolute decisions regarding his
property. The voter, by voting for some particular candidate, is
demonstrating only a relative preference over one or two other
potential rulers; he must do this within the framework of the coercive
rule that, whether or not he votes at all, one of
these men will rule over him for the next several years.
Thus, we see that the free market contains a smooth, efficient
mechanism for bringing anticipated, ex ante utility
into the realization of ex post. The free market
always maximizes ex ante social utility as well. In
political action, on the contrary, there is no such mechanism; indeed,
the political process inherently tends to delay and thwart the
realization of any expected gains. Furthermore, the divergence between ex
post gains through government and through the market is even
greater than this; for we shall find that in every instance of
government intervention, the indirect consequences
will be such as to make the intervention appear worse in the eyes of
many of its original supporters.
In sum, the free market always benefits every participant, and it
maximizes social utility ex ante; it also tends to
do so ex post, since it works for the rapid
conversion of anticipations into realizations. With intervention, one
group gains directly at the expense of another, and therefore social
utility cannot be increased; the attainment of goals is blocked rather
than facilitated; and, as we shall see, the indirect consequences are
such that many interveners themselves will lose utility ex
post. The remainder of this work is largely devoted to
tracing the indirect consequences of various forms of governmental
intervention.
A person may receive gifts, but
this is a unitary act of the giver, not involving an act of the
receiver himself.
See Franz Oppenheimer, The
State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1914):
There
are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance,
is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires.
These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible
appropriation of the labor of others. . . . I propose . . . to call
one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of
one’s own labor for the labor of others “the
economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the
unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the
“political means. . . . The state is an organization of the
political means. (pp. 24–27)
See
also Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State
(Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1946), pp. 59–62; Frank
Chodorov, The Economics of Society, Government, and the State
(mimeographed MS., New York, 1946), pp. 64ff. On the State as engaging
in permanent conquest, see ibid., pp.
13–16, 111–17, 136–40.
This is to be inferred
from, rather than discovered in explicit form in, their
writings. As far as we know, no one has systematically categorized or
analyzed types of intervention.
A narrow view of
“freedom” is characteristic in the present day. In
the political lexicon of modern America,
“left-wingers” often advocate freedom in the sense
of opposition to autistic intervention, but look benignly on triangular
intervention. “Right-wingers,” on the other hand,
severely oppose triangular intervention, but tend to favor, or remain
indifferent to, autistic intervention. Both groups are ambivalent
toward binary intervention.
“Castes” would
be a better term than “classes” here. Classes are
any collection of units with a certain property in common. There is no
reason for them to conflict. Does the class of men named Jones
necessarily conflict with the class of men named Smith? On the other
hand, castes are State-made groups, each with its
own set of violence-established privileges and tasks. Castes
necessarily conflict because some are instituted to rule over the
others.
John C. Calhoun, A
Disquisition on Government (New York: Liberal Arts Press,
1953), pp. 16–18. Calhoun, however, did not understand the
harmony of interests on the free market.
As Professor Lindsay Rogers has
trenchantly written on the subject of public opinion:
Before
Great Britain adopted conscription in 1939, only thirty-nine percent of
the voters were for it; a week after the conscription bill became law,
a poll showed that fifty-eight percent approved. Many polls in the
United States have shown a similar inflation of support for a policy as
soon as it is translated to the statute books or into a Presidential
order. (Lindsay Rogers, “‘The Mind of
America’ to the Fourth Decimal Place,” The
Reporter, June 30, 1955, p. 44)
This coercion would exist even in
the most direct democracies. It is doubly
compounded in representative republics, where the
people never have a chance of voting on issues, but only on the men who
rule them. They can only reject men—and this at very long
intervals—and if the candidates have the same views on
issues, the public cannot effect any sort of fundamental change.
It is often stated that under
“modern” conditions of destructive weapons, etc., a
minority can tyrannize permanently over a majority.
But this ignores the fact that these weapons can be held by the
majority, or that agents of the minority can mutiny. The sheer
absurdity, for example, of the current belief that a few million could
really tyrannize over a few hundred million active
resistants is not often realized. As David Hume profoundly stated:
Nothing appears more surprising .
. . than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and
the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and
passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this
wonder is effected, we shall find that because Force is always on the
side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but
opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion that government is founded; and
this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments.
(David Hume, Essays, Literary, Moral and Political
[London, n.d.], p. 23)
See
also Etienne de La Boétie, Anti-Dictator
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), pp. 8–9. For an
analysis of the types of opinion fostered by the State in order to
obtain public support, see Bertrand de Jouvenel, On
Power (New York: Viking Press, 1949).
This analysis of majority support
applies to any intervention of rather long standing, carried on frankly
and openly, whether or not the groups are labeled
“States.”
See Calhoun,
Disquisition on Government, pp. 14, 18–19,
23–33.
Elsewhere, we
have named this concept “demonstrated preference,”
have traced its history, and have directed a critique against competing
concepts. See Murray N. Rothbard, “Toward
a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics” in Mary
Sennholz, ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise
(Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), pp. 224ff.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros.,
1942), pp. 258–60. See also Anthony
Downs, “An Economic Theory of Political Action in a
Democracy,” Journal of Political Economy,
April, 1957, pp. 135–50.
Schumpeter, Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy, p. 263.
For a further discussion of these
points, see Man, Economy, and State,
pp. 886–91.
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