Seems like socialists aren’t the only ones who use “the same technique of talking down to people”, going by that sentence. But I won’t dwell on that, because your point about socialisation through education is essentially correct. As is the reminder about the nature of the origin of government.

However, those of us who have given a tad more than a minute considering government and its consequences and yet still decide that it is a useful tool when used properly, have no excuse of indoctrination and passive submission to the coercion/compulsion zeitgeist and therefore must just be stupid, right?

Government is an ongoing social experiment. It started out shithouse and is gradually getting less shithouse. The process is slow because people don’t deal with abrupt change well, and governments have been too powerful.

Good government is worth having. Your definition of ‘good government’ is one a fifth the size of the incumbent. Fine. We might get to that point. Somewhere will try it eventually, if it’s any good.

“Hrrmph”

Grumpy-pants

Nevertheless, the efficiency argument cuts both ways. Imagine if business argued that the paperwork government imposes on it should be done under threat of penalty by the rest of the population, or by government employees in their own time, on a rationale that, as there are many more of them than of businesses, ‘many hands make light work’, so it would be more ‘efficient’. It’s a nonsense argument that attempts to justify the injustice of effectively coercing labour from people, all the while assuming that there can be no question of the legitimacy of government’s designs in making the imposition in the first place.

Flapple:
Yes I personally would categorise Hobshouse as a socialist.

I’m afraid I have become a bit like P.J. O’Rourke, who in ‘All the Trouble in the World – the lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death’, visits his alma mater for the president’s dinner:
‘We were served an excellent dinner. And the next think I knew I was on my third bottle of wine expressing my disagreement with a dean over her support for the Clinton administration health-care reform plan by yelling that she was a political criminal ‘Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind, goddamit!’ LOL. (And that was in 1994.)

When it all boils down to it, either you’re in favour of using coercion to restrict other people’s liberty even though, left to themselves, they’re hurting no-one, or you’re not. I’m agin it. Although conservatives and traditionalists also do it, by far the most damage to liberty in modern times has come from the socialist camp, defined in the broad sense.

Marx was writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, whereas Hobshouse was writing a hundred years later. So although there is a fair bit of water under the bridge, and I don’t know enough about the influences on Hobshouse or the other democratic socialists, I wouldn’t be surprised if you followed upstream you would find Marx looming large in the theoretical basis of most varieties of modern socialism.

Marxism’s history has been one of meeting disproof after disproof both in theory and practice. The earliest disproof was probably by Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school. Since Menger had already shown the impossibility of the socialist project by the 1890s, it is all the more regrettable that socialists still went right ahead and showed us the disproofs in practice – at a cost of literally tens of millions of lives destroyed. But an even greater tragedy is that the socialists still have not learnt the lesson! They persist with the same mistaken doctrines, and the same technique of talking down to people and presuming to speak from a privileged position about concern for the less fortunate.

Marx’s influence has been enormous in the western arts and humanities. As more and more disproofs came in, socialist theory shifted ground by asserting more and more diluted forms. (For example, the Frankfurt school of verbose, hypocritical, parasitical wankers: your Adornos, Horkheimers, Marcuses, and so on.)

These guys were enormously influential in western academia, serving to preserve the flame of radical hatred of capitalism that the left wing had inherited from Marx. So Marx’s indirect influence continued enormous. The core remains: the socialist belief that socialists have seen through the veil that deludes the common folk, that capitalism is just about the worst thing that has happened to the world, it is exploitative, it is ‘dog eat dog’, it is ‘survival of the fittest’, it rips off workers, and it threatens the existence of society. This has morphed into all the modern forms of human-hating, like the morons of animal liberation, and the more trendy ‘the sky is a-falling’ school of hating human freedom and its economic manifestation – capitalism.

And this from the belief system that, quite apart from killing over a hundred million human beings, has consistently forcibly opposed freedom as a way of social co-ordination, which actively promotes the legal use of weaponry or threats of weaponry to enforce conformity on every kind of social issue whatsoever, and even believes the governmental bureaucracies somehow provide a better service and are good for society!

You are right however in observing that the libertarian, on condemning this or that governmental activity on principle, then has to distinguish the principle justifying such governmental activity as he approves. Hence the rise of the anarcho-capitalists, who frankly reasoned that government is no better than the market in providing defence or judicial services, than it is in providing other services. Interestingly enough, there was an article on this just yesterday at: http://www.mises.org/story/2538

In fairness to these anarcho-capitalist arguments, the whole population has at least 10 years of compulsory state schooling. And should we expect government to inform its subjects that it is all actually rather destructive, ineffectual, unnecessary and similar to criminal activity on a vast scale? Of course not! As a result, most people have never even turned their minds for so much as one minute to considering whether government’s provision of protection services is because it really is the best arrangement for society, rather than because of the historical tendency for the most successful criminals to become governments.

Thus the libertarian argument must be to concede that the use of coercion is approved for certain reasons. But the starting point must be a presumption against coercion and in favour of liberty, not just a blanket acceptance of the use of coercion, nor an assertion of the legitimate arbitrariness of any and every recourse to compulsion. And coercion must be justified by the need to put down a greater evil than the original evil of using violence or threats of violence to achieve social co-ordination in the first place. This would rule out most governmental activity today. Lop off eighty percent and I’ll be happy. Hrrmph.

Of course, if you define anyone who seeks to control some aspect of the free market as a democratic socialist then that will be the case, but I think that that is a bit of a circular argument and does not take into account these different political views.

As wikipedia says about Hobhouse (as an example), he “…theorized that property was acquired not only by individual effort but by societal organization (meaning, those who had property owed some of their success and thus had some obligation to society), providing theoretical justification for a level of redistribution provided by the new state pensions.”

Now you may not agree with this, but it is a different arguement than a marxist one that all markets are oppressive.

(by the way I agree with you that the labour theory of value did not really hold water, but it was an interesting attempt to explain some of the exploitation of workers that was present during the industrial revolution).

Your post made me think of another point. You argue that “only a socialist would talk of the government using force or threats to take people’s property against their will”. But don’t libertarians argue for it as well, in specialised cases? For example, national defence is considered a reasonable case for taxation. In that case it is not the confiscation that is the problem, but rather the purpose of the confiscation. If that is the case, then it just happens to bee that some politcal philosophies have a broader range of reasons for confiscation, such as social liberalism.

That’s almost a tautology.

You were taking tax as a given:

“The income tax is a tax on the employee’s income. So why should the employer have the liability of paying and administering it?”

So I did too.

Revolutionary communism and democratic socialism differ in that communism looked to abolish market relations, and socialism looked to treat business as the goose that lays the golden eggs, which the socialists would then use government to take and distribute according to their ideas of social justice. These ideas of social justice in turn depended on the idea that there was something exploitative about the whole capitalist thing in the first place: ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ is one of their favourite false nostrums.

The point is, the democratic socialists like Hobshouse, or like the Australian Labor Party, are only rejecting Marxism in the sense that they are rejecting the idea that the working class will rise up in the inspiration of their class consciousness, and by inexorable laws of history, the state will wither away and the resulting society will enjoy all the material benefits of modernity with none of the inequalities of capitalism. No wonder they reject it: it is clearly rubbish. But they hold fast to all the other relevant errors of Marxism, which depend on the labour theory of value, and are wrong. For example, only a socialist would talk of the government using force or threats to take people’s property against their will, or systematically favouring one party in a transaction to the detriment of the other, as a ‘positive liberty’. To talk of someone who is in favour of governmental confiscations of property, to be redistributed on a rationale of social justice, as being a ‘social liberal’ is a confusion and a contradiction of terms. Socialists are against liberty, otherwise they’d be in favour of people being free to choose, and they’d be capitalists.

The irony of it is that, because of their fundamental economic ignorance, the movement that professed to be most concerned about the poor, has done most over the past hundred years to retard the process by which the poor could, would and should have bettered their condition. (Now, having spent the last hundred years moaning about how the standard of living of the poor is too low, the socialists have taken to moaning about how everybody’s living standard under capitalism is too high.)

I am well aware that the democratic socialists think there is some fundamental difference between communism and democratic socialism. The fact is, they are wrong, or rather, the difference derives from limitations on government which owe nothing to socialism. For example, the restraints on government in the democracies, such as we have inherited through Magna Carta, the common law, trial by jury, equity, parliamentary supremacy, independence of the judiciary, etc. owe nothing to the socialist belief system, which has in practice only a tendency to extend the reach of government.

This is for logical reason. The project of displacing or ‘correcting’ the market, requires the aspiration of power equal to the task. Since the market is not a thing in itself, but is just a reflection of the variability of the human action and human genius, the power needed to try to displace it or reach it is enormous. In fact, you need totalitarian power, and even then it doesn’t work. Notice that the ALP has done nothing but add forcible restrictions on the market, ie on the freedom of human behaviour, for the last hundred years. But they’re still not satisfied! In fact, the coercion-backed meddling that they have in mind is without end.

Intrinsic to the project of displacing or carrying out their views, both communists and socialists cannot help but use the coercive power of the state to threaten people into submitting to have their labour or the fruits of their labour confiscated. Thus they cannot help but treat other people’s lives, liberty and property as being the property of the state. Socialists always have the persistent and characteristic tendency of treating people as the cattle of the animal farm. Socialism is intrinsically abusive for that reason, and none the less so for being ‘democratic’.

Of course not. The article was clearly talking about total costs to society.

“it’s a pure impost, a pure loss.”

As it would be for the individual income taxpayers to do the paperwork. But it’s not true anyway – any business costs are reflected in higher product/service prices. Any higher cost of living for individuals as a result of paperwork duties would see wages rise.

The tax collection can’t be skipped. Ideally, the Tax Office would be able to do it automatically. Since we can’t do that yet, we have to aim for the cheapest method of tax collection possible to minimise waste of taxpayers’ money.

But you don’t want that. So you ARE arguing for a higher cost of government, and there’s no misrepresentation, head cold or otherwise.

Case in point I would suggest is the social liberalism of thinkers such as LT Hobhouse, who rejected marxism, but saw a role for the state in providing “positive liberties” (which I accept you would probably reject) such as a minimum wage and welfare.

As such there is a rich intellectual tradition that has maybe developed alongside marxism, but really depends not at all on it.

The socialists of any stripe share with Marx the view that the relation of capitalist to employee is fundamentally one of the capitalist expropriating the labour value of the employee; and that profit is therefore an unearned and immoral quantity. Hence the justification of all and any restrictions on it that they can dream up.

To talk of it being more ‘efficient’ in some general or abstract sense for businesses to be forced to do the government’s paperwork for free, is nonsense. Obviously it’s more ‘efficient’ to do something by forcing someone else to do it free of charge! But it’s not more efficient from the businesses point of view: it’s a pure impost, a pure loss.

Fatfingers snivelling misrepresentation is what we have come to expect from him.